Arctic blast brings record cold to the US

Ouch! The ‘rapidly warming’ Arctic, as climate alarmists like to claim, can still pack a hefty punch. Weren’t such days supposed to be over, in theory at least?
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Weather authorities say an “epic, generational Arctic outbreak” caused record cold temperatures and life-threatening conditions in the northeastern United States on Saturday, reports DW.com.

The summit of Mount Washington in New Hampshire reported a low of minus 78 Celsius (minus 108 Fahrenheit) — the coldest temperature ever recorded in the United States.

Meanwhile, the National Weather Service (NWS) in Caribou, Maine, said it received reports of “frostquakes.”

Climate change fan New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern resigns

Headlines like Ardern says climate crisis is ‘life or death’ tell their own story. New Zealand farmers are unlikely to be disappointed by the decision.
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Shocking the world, New Zealand’s far-left prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, today announced her intention to resign from the nation’s top political position, reports LifeSiteNews.

At the New Zealand Labour Party’s annual caucus on Thursday, Ardern surprised the island nation when she announced she “no longer had enough in the tank” to continue on as prime minister.

“I am human, politicians are human. We give all that we can for as long as we can. And then it’s time. And for me, it’s time,” stated Ardern, who clarified that her tenure as prime minister will officially come to an end on February 7 at the latest.

Safety and air pollution concerns over UK hydrogen village

Eco house with hydrogen heating technology. [Image credit: emergingrisks.co.uk]

Not what the promoters of ‘clean’ energy wanted to hear. Reports of unwelcome emissions have been noted. The guinea pigs are getting nervous, not without reason.
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Residents in Redcar on Teesside have raised concerns over the safety of a pilot project designed to replace home gas supplies with hydrogen, says Energy Live News.

Gas distributor for the North East and parts of Cumbria and Yorkshire, Northern Gas Networks had previously submitted a proposal to the government and Ofgem for a hydrogen-powered area.

If the proposal is given the go-ahead, the gas company would need to replace all home and business gas appliances, including boilers, fires and cookers with new hydrogen systems.

According to the BBC, Steve Rudd, a resident in Redcar, said hydrogen was “inherently unsafe” – it has also been reported that other residents are worried about hydrogen’s more harmful emissions.

Britishvolt: UK battery start-up collapses in blow to ‘net zero’ policy

This calls into question the whole economics of the UK’s climate-obsessive push for a ‘net zero’ economy. A general lack of enthusiasm for such a project is apparent, maybe due to weak EV sales. Where was the cash supposed to come from?
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UK battery start-up Britishvolt has collapsed into administration, with the majority of its 300 staff made redundant with immediate effect, reports BBC News.

Employees were told the news at an all-staff meeting on Tuesday morning.

The firm had planned to build a giant factory to make electric car batteries in Northumberland and was part of a long-term vision to boost UK manufacturing.

But its board is believed to have decided on Monday that there were no viable bids to keep the company afloat.

Sunspot Counts Hit a 7-Year High

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What happens next?

Spaceweather.com

Jan. 2, 2022: December was a busy month on the sun. How busy? Senol Sanli of Bursa, Turkey, answered the question by stacking 26 days of sun photos (Dec. 2nd – 27th) from NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory:

“There were more than 24 sunspot groups, some of them quite large, congested in two bands on opposite sides of the sun’s equator,” says Sanli.

The congestion of dark cores catapulted the monthly sunspot number to its highest value in 7 years:

This plot from NOAA shows the ascending progression of Solar Cycle 25. It has outperformed the official forecast for 35 months in a row. If the trend continues, Solar Maximum will either happen sooner or be stronger than originally expected–possibly both. Stay tuned for lots more sunspots.

This story was brought to you by Spaceweather.com

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Extinction Rebellion ‘to temporarily shift away from public disruption’

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

In this case at least, crime doesn’t pay. The look-at-us climate botherers have had enough of arrests and bad publicity, for now.
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Sky News:
The climate activists are aiming to attract more people to their cause through a less confrontational approach, admitting “very little has changed”.
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Enough said.

US winter storm: ‘Historic’ weather event hits US as temperatures plunge as low as -45C

Credit: Sky News [click on image to enlarge]

A tough lead-up to Christmas for the US and Canada thanks to this Arctic blast, as the media are calling it. Colourful claims about the ‘rapidly warming Arctic’ may have been overdone.
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Tens of millions of Americans endured bone-chilling temperatures, blizzard conditions, power outages and cancelled Christmas plans as an extreme winter storm gripped much of the country, reports Sky News.

More than 200 million people – about 60% of the US population – were under some form of winter weather advisory or warning on Friday, the National Weather Service said, calling it a “historic winter storm”.

Temperatures across central states have plunged, with the mercury dipping to -50F (-45.6C) in Montana.

NASA cancels climate change satellite to monitor greenhouse gases

Lift-off [image credit: NASA]

Collecting mountains of data on so-called greenhouse gases was not going to be cost-effective, says NASA. ‘Technical concerns’ played a part in the decision.
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All good things must come to an end, and in the case of NASA’s GeoCarb mission, some good things must end before they really begin, says Space.com.

NASA has canceled the GeoCarb mission, which was a collaboration with the University of Oklahoma and Lockheed Martin that intended to put a greenhouse gas–monitoring satellite into geostationary orbit.

GeoCarb would have measured levels of carbon dioxide, carbon monoxide and methane in the atmosphere about 4 million times per day. The mission was selected by NASA in 2016.

Major Cryovolcanic Eruption on a Comet

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One of an average 7.3 outbursts a year according to Wikipedia.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/29P/Schwassmann%E2%80%93Wachmann

Spaceweather.com

Nov. 25, 2022: The British Astronomical Association (BAA) is reporting a new outburst of cryovolcanic comet 29P/Schwassmann-Wachmann. On Nov. 22nd, the comet’s nucleus suddenly brightened by more than 4 magnitudes–a sign that a major eruption was underway. Cryomagmatic debris is now expanding in a shell shaped like Pac-Man:

Cai Stoddard-Jones took the picture on Nov. 23rd using the Faulkes Telescope North in Hawaii. At the time, the shell was already more than 100,000 km in diameter.

The Pac-Man shape of the ejecta shows that this is not a uniform global eruption. Instead, it is coming from one or more discrete sources on the comet’s surface.

This fits a leading model of the comet developed by Dr. Richard Miles of the British Astronomical Association. Miles believes that 29P is festooned with ice volcanoes. There is no lava. The “magma” is a cold mixture of liquid hydrocarbons (e.g., CH4, C2H4, C2H6 and…

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COP27 – UK lead negotiator: “I’m incredibly disappointed”

Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide

Still claiming a minor trace gas essential to nature causes ‘huge climate impacts’. Unbelievable.
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A historic deal has been struck at the UN’s COP27 summit that will see rich nations pay poorer countries for damage and economic losses caused by climate change, claims BBC News.

It ends almost 30 years of waiting by nations facing huge climate impacts.

But developed nations left dissatisfied over progress on cutting fossil fuels.

“A clear commitment to phase-out all fossil fuels? Not in this text,” said the UK’s Alok Sharma, who was president of the previous COP summit in Glasgow.

UK start-up battery firm Britishvolt near collapse as it seeks funding

The UK’s supposedly marvellous ‘net zero’ electric future hits a bump in the road.
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UK battery start-up Britishvolt could run out of money and go into administration after the government rejected a £30m advance in funding, reports BBC News.

The firm wants to build a factory in Blyth in Northumberland which would build batteries for electric vehicles.

The government, which had championed the development, had committed a total £100m to Britishvolt for the project.

It is understood the firm wanted to draw down nearly a third of the funding early but the government refused.

UK starts new licensing round for oil and gas exploration ‘despite climate fears’, says ITV News

North Sea gas rig [image credit: safety4sea.com]

Climate obsessives think importing energy from anywhere and everywhere is somehow better than producing it at home. Economics and geo-politics don’t get considered. They expect to wake up one day and find fuel power is history, despite it providing about 80% of the world’s energy. Time to abandon the dismal mythology.
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The UK has started a new licencing round for oil and gas exploration despite the government’s pledge to achieving its net zero target, says ITV News.

Business and Energy Secretary Jacob Rees-Mogg has insisted the move will boost both the UK’s economy and energy security.

The North Sea Transition Authority (NSTA) has now begun the 33rd round of offshore licences, which are being made available for sectors of the North Sea – known as blocks – with the NSTA estimating that over 100 may be granted.

Electric vehicles are exploding from water damage after Hurricane Ian, top Florida official warns

Typical electric car set-up

Water and electricity don’t mix too well. A headache for owners but also for insurers.
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A top Florida state official warned Thursday that firefighters have battled a number of fires caused by electric vehicle (EV) batteries waterlogged from Hurricane Ian, reports Fox News.

EV batteries that have been waterlogged in the wake of the hurricane are at risk of corrosion, which could lead to unexpected fires, according to Jimmy Patronis, the state’s top financial officer and fire marshal.

“There’s a ton of EVs disabled from Ian. As those batteries corrode, fires start,” Patronis tweeted Thursday. “That’s a new challenge that our firefighters haven’t faced before. At least on this kind of scale.”

Virginia judge dismisses youth climate change lawsuit

Case dismissed

Out of order. Next!
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RICHMOND, Va. (AP via the Daily Mail.) – A Virginia judge on Friday dismissed a lawsuit filed on behalf of 13 young people who claim that the state’s permitting of fossil fuel projects is exacerbating climate change and violating their constitutional rights.

The lawsuit filed by Our Children’s Trust, an Oregon-based nonprofit public interest law firm, asked the court to declare portions of the Virginia Gas and Oil Act unconstitutional.

It also seeks to find the state’s reliance on and promotion of fossil fuels violates the rights of the plaintiffs, who range in age from 10 to 19.

But Richmond Circuit Court Judge Clarence Jenkins Jr. granted the state’s request to dismiss the lawsuit, finding that the complaint is barred by sovereign immunity.

That’s a legal doctrine that says a state cannot be sued without its consent. The state argued that sovereign immunity prohibited the plaintiffs’ claims because they sought to restrain the state from issuing permits for fossil fuel infrastructure and to interfere with governmental functions.

The judge did not rule on the merits of the plaintiffs’ constitutional claims.

Full report here.

Shetland Island residents must earn £104,000 to avoid fuel poverty next year, warns official

Sullom Voe oil and gas terminal [image credit: shetland.org]

The climate hasn’t got colder, so something else has to take the blame. How did a place on the doorstep of various gas and oil fields, and even touted as ideal for wind power, get itself into such a state?
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Some 96% of residents of the Shetland Islands could find themselves in fuel poverty by next April, according to a local official, who issued a stark warning about the future of the archipelago, reports Sky News.

Despite Scotland supplying much of the UK’s gas, islanders must earn a salary of £104,000 to avoid slipping into fuel poverty, according to the Leader of Shetland Islands Council.

The estimated average energy cost on the Shetland Islands will rise to £10,300 per household by next April, with the vast majority of residents spending 10% of their income on energy bills.

Disappearing glaciers ‘reveal’ 50-year-old plane wreckage in the Swiss Alps – so it became snow-covered after it crashed?

Disappearing glaciers for a century or more – so why wasn’t the crashed plane visible on the surface the whole time? We’re told: ‘The bodies of the three passengers were recovered by authorities at the time, but police say they didn’t have the capabilities to remove the plane from such a remote area.’ A video about the same story says ‘the glaciers have lost half their volume in less than a century’. Did they mean less than half a century? Something seems amiss here.
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In a helicopter high above the Swiss Alps, we see climate change in action, asserts Sky News.

The glacial ice is melting at an unprecedented rate, revealing items frozen long ago.

A scar suddenly appears in the bright white snow. A crumple of silver and red.

“That’s the plane,” says our guide, Dominik Nellen, pointing.

Small company from Cornwall to oversee huge £70 billion Net Zero contract

Money down the drain?
[image credit: thisismoney.co.uk]

The government-backed buy-a-climate fantasy steamrollers on. No expense spared in the war on one of Earth’s most vital trace gases.
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A company based in Cornwall has been given the job of overseeing a £70 billion contract to help deliver the country’s transition to Net Zero – the target of completely negating the amount of greenhouse gases by reducing emissions, says Cornwall Live.

The Place Group – which is based at The Regent, Chapel Street, Penzance – has won the huge framework contract to “control, manage and deliver” the public sector transition to Net Zero.

It will oversee the framework for services, products, solutions and support for Everything Net Zero. The small company is a “specialist consulting, project management and research company with 18 years’ experience in the field of education”.

Wind Turbine Collapses: ‘Leaking Oil Everywhere!’

Example of product type used by the wind industry

So much for ‘keeping it in the ground’, as climate obsessives like to intone to anyone who will listen to their anti-oil rants.
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On Sunday, puzzled Swedish journalist and political commentator Peter Imanuelsen tweeted the news: “A wind power turbine just collapsed in Sweden”, says CNS News.

“People are being warned to keep their distance because…it is now leaking oil everywhere! “Wait, these “green” wind turbines use oil???”

Welsh coal mine expansion facing legal challenge – EV battery production could be impacted

Welsh anthracite [image credit: BL Fuels]

Climate obsessives shooting themselves in the foot here? Interesting that coal is needed to make EV batteries though.
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A legal challenge will go ahead into mine expansion plans after opponents were granted a judicial review, reports BBC News.

In January approval was given for another 40 million tonnes of coal to be dug at Aberpergwm, Neath Port Talbot.

Campaigners said at the time they were considering legal action.

Alarmist dismay as US Supreme Court rules against EPA on climate regulation powers

Verdict [image credit: coindesk.com]

Democracy overseeing the flow of EPA climate edicts? A ‘huge blow’, say alarmists, as over-the-top reactions from some of the usual suspects pour in.
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This means Congress will now have to pass off on any climate regulations, says Energy Live News.

In what’s been considered a blow to climate mitigation in the US, the Supreme Court has ruled against the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).

This means the EPA will now be limited in how it can regulate greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and help stave off global warming in the country.