Carbon dioxide to help cut train delays caused by leaves on tracks

Image credit: Rail Technology Magazine

The BBC headline says ‘dry ice’ [etc.], which is the solid form of carbon dioxide. When deployed ‘The dry ice then quickly turns back into gas’. Surely that won’t do for climate obsessives?
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The new method of removing leaves from tracks will be trialled across northern England in the coming weeks, reports BBC News.

The technique, developed by University of Sheffield engineers, involves blasting tracks with dry ice from a passenger train.

It will be trialled by operator Northern in the coming weeks.

Rats! Tesla won’t pay for rodent damage to cars

Any Teslas round here? [image credit: Edal Anton Lefterov @ Wikipedia]

A bit of light relief perhaps, unless you’re already one of the victims or could soon become one. Are electric cars more appealing than combustion-engined types to hungry rodents? Check those brake cables.
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Elon Musk may have a rat problem, says The New York Post.

Fans of the South African billionaire’s electric cars say rats, mice and rodents are chomping down on their Teslas.

And despite having dropped tens of thousands of dollars to buy the pricey vehicles, Tesla refuses to cover the damage.

BBC removes Bitesize page on climate change ‘benefits’ after backlash

UK summer 2018 [image credit: BBC]

Hilarious.
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The BBC has removed an educational page laying out the “benefits” of climate change after a furious online reaction, reports The Guardian.

BBC Bitesize, its website for schoolchildren, claimed warmer temperatures “could lead to healthier outdoor lifestyles” and that a benefit of climate change could mean easier access to oil in Alaska and Siberia.

Environmentally unfriendly as Formula E race runs out of juice

Not the latest model

That sinking feeling when your EV wheels stop turning…
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PARIS: Electrically-powered Formula E racing fell flat on Saturday (Apr 24) when 12 of 24 cars taking part in the Valencia Grand Prix ran out of energy and failed to finish, reports Channel News Asia.

On a wet track where collisions were frequent, the safety car was called upon five times.

However, the regulations provide that the level of energy available to the single-seaters is recalculated downwards during such pauses in racing.

Andy Shaw: A Guide to the Green Industrial Revolution

Guest post from our good friend Andy Shaw; taking a light hearted look at some pretty serious issues around Boris Johnson’s version of the Green New Deal. Andy is also the powerhouse behind London based Comedy Unleashed who are still running, despite the batflu restrictions. Book early and get along there to enjoy a pint, pizza and pisstake if you’re in the area. Give Andy a follow on twitter to keep up with the latest.

A Guide to the Green Industrial Revolution

The government has announced their Plan for a Green Industrial Revolution. It will bring electricity to light homes, gas for cooking and cars to drive! You may think that we already have these things, but this is a Green revolution, everything that we have got used to will be re-invented. Boris Johnson’s 10 point plan includes heat pumps, hydrogen gas and batteries, but what is really going on? This is your 6 point guide.

1. Green is popular!

Boris Johnson’s dad and his current girlfriend have a favourite colour and it is .. green! This shows that green policies are popular across generations and that the government is right to revolutionise our entire economy.

It’s #ShowYourStripes day folks; climate realist style.

Exeter university warmist Ed Hawkins came up with an idea for a beach towel a couple of years back. It’s the (alleged) temperature history of Earth’s annual average surface temperatures since the 1850s. It acts as global warming propaganda for the uninformed and is pushed and touted by the usual alarmist outfits.

Ed Hawkins ‘Climate Stripes’

Friday Fibonacci Fun

Someone make this with cheese and tortilla chips so I can have a fibonacho pic.twitter.com/FyAir9GUgJ

— jayynecobb (@JayyneCobb) April 10, 2020

Such a cleverly made 12 second clip. Fullscreen it and enjoy

Researchers use stop-light cameras to reduce fuel consumption of less-efficient vehicles via traffic management

The less efficient the vehicle, the shorter the wait at the traffic lights, and vice versa – electric cars and newer vehicles must wait longer. So the incentive lies with inefficiency – genius!

Approximately 6 billion gallons of fuel are wasted in the US each year as vehicles wait at stop lights or sit in dense traffic with engines idling, according to US Department of Energy estimates.

The least efficient of these vehicles are the large, heavy trucks used for hauling goods—they burn much more fuel than passenger cars consume when not moving, reports Green Car Congress.

Now, researchers at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) have designed a computer vision system—using the preexisting stop-light cameras of GRIDSMART, a Tennessee-based company that specializes in traffic-management services—that can visually identify vehicles at intersections, determine their gas mileage estimates, and then direct traffic lights to keep less-efficient vehicles moving to reduce their fuel consumption.

‘Melting Greenland’ likely to add up to half an inch to global sea levels by 2098

image credit https://visitgreenland.com/

Mike Waite left the following comment over at Paul Homewood’s excellent not a lot of people know that blog yesterday:

There is an interesting paper by MacGuth et al (2013) which supports you :

From their summary:

-“We calculate the future sea-level rise contribution from the surface mass balance of all of

Greenland’s glaciers and ice caps (GICs, ca. 90 000 km2) using a simplified energy balance

model which is driven by three future climate scenarios from the regional climate models

HIRHAM5, RACMO2 and MAR. Glacier extent and surface elevation are modified during the

mass balance model runs according to a glacier retreat parameterization. Mass balance and glacier surface change are both calculated on a 250 m resolution digital elevation model yielding a high level of detail and ensuring that important feedback mechanisms are

considered. The mass loss of all GICs by 2098 is calculated to be

2016 +/- 129 Gt (HIRHAM5 forcing),

2584 +/-109 Gt (RACMO2)

and 3907+/- 108 Gt (MAR). This corresponds to a total contribution to sea-level rise of

5:8 +/- 0:4,

7:4 +/- 0:3

and 11:2 +/- 0:3 mm, respectively. “-

The future sea-level rise contribution of Greenland’s glaciers and ice caps

H Machguth1,2, P Rastner1, T Bolch1,3, N M¨olg1, L Sandberg Sørensen4,

G Aðalgeirsdottir5, J H van Angelen6, M R van den Broeke6 and

X Fettweis7

Online at stacks.iop.org/ERL/8/025005

Even if subsequent calculations modified these figures they are unlikely to be an order of magnitude higher and the sea level rise to 2098 calculated here is at most 11mm (not cm or feet or metres).

Can’t someone take these activists, sit them in a quet room and just read the literature to them since they seem incapable of such study themselves.

MET-Office wants your money for a new supercomputer, but has given up decadal forecasting

Well this is a disappointment.

After the fiasco in 2018 when I revealed the data-shifting technique the MET-Office were using to never be wrong about their ‘decadal’ forecast, and the late update in 2019 , the MET-O have now disappeared the ‘decadal’ forecast altogether. This after they promised to update it in January 2020.

EDIT: The forecast has been found! See comments below.

Update Dec. 2019 Yes PM Pokes Fun at Climatism

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No chance of the BBC repeating these episodes making light of climate nonsense.
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Link to third video: “A Tsar is Born”

Science Matters

GWPF published today a letter from the late Sir Antony Jay, co-creator of Yes, Minister and Yes, Prime Minster, attacking the BBC for its blatant bias on climate change 8 years ago.  It seems timely to repost the final episode from the last season addressing the topic of global warming/climate change.  As you see, climate politics have not changed very much.

Part 1 of the program is here:

Part 2

Previously I posted this:

A humorous look at why the global warming campaign and the triumphal Paris COP make sense.

Yes Minister explains it all in an episode from 2013.

h/t to Peter S.

This is an all-too-realistic portrayal of political climatism today.

Then I realized that BBC had blocked the viewing of the video.  So I sought and found the subtitles for Yes Prime Minister 2013, Episode 6, “A Tsar is Born”.  That final episode for the series began with…

View original post 820 more words

COP 25: Funny Stuff Behind The Curtain In Madrid

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Notes from the Madrid climate pantomime, sorry…conference.

PA Pundits - International

By David Wojick, Ph.D. ~

If you hold your nose and look closely there is some pretty funny stuff going on at the UN climate summit in Madrid. It is hard to hold your nose and laugh at the same time, but if you want to be UN watcher it is a necessary skill. I have been doing it for a long time, but then I have a big nose to hold on to while rolling with laughter.

First off there are the national delegations. International travel is expensive so you would figure the richest countries would send the biggest delegations, right? You would be wrong.

By far the biggest delegation is from tiny Côte d’Ivoire, with a whopping 348 delegates. Only a handful of these could possibly attend the negotiating sessions. Second biggest is from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, with 293, still a staggering figure. The other…

View original post 791 more words

Our handy ‘green’ tip for potential power blackout victims!

Randomly selected wind-up or hand-crank radio

The Talkshop doesn’t normally do product promotions, but bearing in mind the recent traumatic (for some) power failures in England, and just for fun – don’t call it a wind-up – let’s take a look at this from Best Radios UK:
Best Wind-Up Hand Crank Radios (UK 2019)

Surely it’s good to know these subsidy-free items are, among their many virtues, described as ‘a good way to reduce your carbon footprint’? ‘Climate emergency’ miserablists would approve anyway.
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Roundup of the Best Wind-Up Radios in the UK in 2019. See the top AM/FM hand crank radios with additional features such as torches, solar and phone charging.

A wind-up radio is a handy gadget to have when you’re a long way from a power socket.

Climate change activists ‘target wrong building’ in London protest

Biomass on the move [image credit: Drax]

Classic 😂

Climate change activists brought traffic to a standstill in the City of London today after mistakenly targeting a building which contains the offices of a leading renewable energy company, reports London’s Evening Standard.

Members of protest group Reclaim the Power dressed in white boiler suits and swarmed Moorgate during rush hour, unfurling a banner reading: “No Borders, No Nations, No Gas Power stations.”

The group was protesting against energy company Drax over plans to build a new power station in north Yorkshire.

However, although formerly based in Moorgate, Drax has had its London headquarters in nearby Noble Street since last year.

We only have three and a half days to stop climate change

H/T The GWPF

Sometimes you just have to laugh at some of the wild claims of climate alarmists.
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Mock me if you wish—I’m used to it. But mark my words; the end is nigh, says David Marcus.

If we don’t surrender our rights and hand control of the economy over to the state, the world will pretty much be over by Tuesday morning.

Climate change is in the news again.

Dominic Lawson: Is Extinction Rebellion a Big Oil conspiracy?

Oxford Circus climate demo [image credit: London Evening Standard]

H/T The GWPF
The actors in the eco-farce playing out on our streets beggar belief, writes Dominic Lawson in The Sunday Times.
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Revealed: the contents of a WhatsApp exchange over the past few days between Brett, the Texas-based head of Huge Oil Inc, and his Mr Fixit in London, Sebastian.

“Howdy, Seb. What’s the latest about the demos we’ve planned to discredit those eco-freaks trying to wreck our business?”

“Hi, Brett. All systems go for Operation Piss-take. You wouldn’t believe there are so many out-of-work actors anxious to make a few bucks pretending to be members of something called Extinction Rebellion.”

“Well, that’s the market working in all its divine beauty, Seb.”

#Parody Canada’s Climate Refugee Plan

Tired of being harangued by insistent climate doomsters with their wildly over-hyped scaremongering and dubious ‘science’? Read on for some well-earned light relief.

Gavin Schmidt tweeted that he liked a #ClimateStrike poster that read “Soon even moving to Canada isn’t going to solve our problems.” 

That reminded us that we had a parody submission on the Canadian government’s tiered climate refugee program, that would at least be worth a laugh, if not serious consideration for some!!

See what you think, say Friends of Science Calgary.

James Bond going electric in next film with Aston Martin Rapide E

Not the 2019 model [image credit: camaro5.com]

A short post from our Hollywood reporter, or something – amidst reports of ‘007 going green’ (is he ill?) and ‘Dr No…petrol’ – and we’re not making any of this up. You’d need to be on a big budget to afford his ride though – the price is shocking.

Silent EV in Her Majesty’s secret service will have all the gadgets, reports Autoblog.

England’s The Sun newspaper, in a piece fabulously titled “The Spy Who Plugged Me … In,” reports that James Bond will drive an Aston Martin Rapide E in the next franchise installment.

Quoting “an insider,” it’s said director Cary Joji Fukunaga is a “total tree-hugger” and pushed to include a more environmentally friendly set of wheels.

2019: Already a vintage year for climate claptrap

From The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)

It has been an encouraging start to the contest for the year’s loopiest climate story.

First out of the blocks is a cracker from the geography department at University College London with the suggestion that Spanish colonisation in the Americas contributed to global cooling.

MET-Office update: There is no update.

In the meantime, here’s how the 2016-2021 forecast (in blue) is doing compared to the latest data (red trace).

Last year, I wrote a short post entitled Met-Office invents infallible climate prediction method, in which I showed how the MET-Office would always update their ‘decadal’ (actually semi-decadal) climate prediction before the data caught up with them.

At the time, they were promising to update their prediction in January of this year. But they haven’t, despite describing themselves as “WMO Lead Centre for Annual-to-Decadal Climate Prediction“. So instead, I’ve done a retrospective update of the data on their 2016 to 2021″decadal” prediction.