No ‘Comparison’ Between Part-time Wind Power & Full-time Fossil Fuel

.
.
Promoting public awareness of the high cost and lack of reliability of weather-dependent power generation is important. Once fortunes have been spent and national grid systems are creaking under the strain of on-off power, it’s much harder to change course.

STOP THESE THINGS

Renewables rent seekers keep telling us how cheap wind and solar are, compared to those ‘evil’ fossil fuels, coal and gas.

But ‘price’ and ‘value’ are not the same animals. What we pay for something, and what it’s worth depends entirely upon what we get. And, in relation to the consumption of electricity, whether or not we get it, at all.

Wind power might be ‘free’, but try purchasing it, at any price, when the wind stops blowing.

Comparing weather dependent wind generation with sources available, around-the-clock, irrespective of the weather, is a game played by intellectual pygmies. There is, of course, no comparison.

So when you’re faced with a pile of numbers said to show how wind stacks up against the big boys, the obvious retort is, ‘when’? When I need it, or when the wind is just right?

Donn Dears picks up that thread quite neatly in this…

View original post 592 more words

Climate-industrial complex wasting £100 billion and shutting down debate – warns Lilley

Credit: Fenbeagle

H/T The GWPF

Former Trade and Industry Minister, Peter Lilley warns that vested interests in the renewables industry, politicians of all parties, the bureaucracy and academia have together largely suppressed debate about their reckless waste of public money exposed by the government’s own Review of the Cost of Energy by Dieter Helm.

In a paper published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Peter Lilley highlights Professor Dieter Helm’s devastating critique, outlined in the Cost of Energy Review which was commissioned by the government.

“Helm shows that the Climate Change Act objective of cutting emissions of carbon dioxide could have been met for a fraction of the £100 billion so far committed, which has already raised the cost of energy by 20%.”

Britain’s energy market is under the spotlight – for all the wrong reasons

Carrington gas power station, Greater Manchester

Britain badly needs new power stations but current national policy is working against that, argues an industry insider. Instead we have a ‘sticking plaster’ strategy.

Great Britain’s energy market, once the envy of free-marketeers after Margaret Thatcher ended decades of nationalisation in the 1980s, is once again under the spotlight – for all the wrong reasons, says businessman Peter Hughes at PEI.

The current Prime Minister Theresa May is fond of referring to the UK’s “broken energy market”. While she may use the phrase to justify a cap on consumer energy bills, she could just as easily apply it to the failure of successive governments to encourage the building of new power plants.

As old coal and aged gas and nuclear power plants head towards decommissioning, the UK faces the possibility of a shortfall in its future electricity supply that cannot be plugged by intermittent renewables alone.

Nils-Axel Mörner: These researchers have a political agenda

Fiji beach [image credit: travelonline.com]

H/T The GWPF

The oceanographer Nils-Axel Mörner challenges the IPCC and warnings about sinking islands, in a recent interview.

Mr. Mörner, you have recently visited the Fiji islands in South Pacific several times in order to research changes on the coasts and sea levels. Why Fiji?

Nils-Axel Mörner: I knew there would be a science conference in New York in June 2017 that focused on sea level changes in Fiji. In addition, it was known that the island nation would chair the 23rd World Climate Conference, which took place last November in Bonn. Thus, Fiji moved into the focus of interest. It was said that the rising sea level had done a lot of damage there. I wanted to check with my own eyes if that is true.

Matt Ridley: Britain needs to embrace the shale revolution

Shale gas drilling site [image credit: BBC]

Current forecasts say gas will be providing 7 times more energy worldwide than all renewables by 2040. Why import it when it’s in the ground?
H/T The GWPF

Horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing are the biggest energy breakthrough of the century, writes Matt Ridley in The Times.

Gas will start flowing from Cuadrilla’s two shale exploration wells in Lancashire this year. Preliminary analysis of the site is “very encouraging”, bearing out the British Geological Survey’s analysis that the Bowland Shale beneath northern England holds one of the richest gas resources known: a huge store of energy at a cost well below that of renewables and nuclear.

Matt Ridley: The mysterious cycles of ice ages

US winter storm 2018 [image credit: NASA]

A sort of review of leading ice age theories. A paper by Ralph Ellis that was featured at the Talkshop gets a mention. A point not mentioned: the carbon cycle dictates that cooling leads to the oceans absorbing more CO2, while warming leads to more outgassing of it to the atmosphere.

Record cold in America has brought temperatures as low as minus 44C in North Dakota, frozen sharks in Massachusetts and iguanas falling from trees in Florida, writes Matt Ridley.

Al Gore blames global warming, citing one scientist to the effect that this is “exactly what we should expect from the climate crisis”. Others beg to differ: Kevin Trenberth, of America’s National Centre for Atmospheric Research, insists that “winter storms are a manifestation of winter, not climate change”.

Forty-five years ago a run of cold winters caused a “global cooling” scare.

Benny Peiser and Matt Ridley: Bad weather is no reason for climate alarm

Credit: planetsave.com

H/T The GWPF

Trump was more likely winding up the over-zealous climate alarmists, rather than being confused about anything.

Two weeks ago, President Donald Trump greeted the cold snap that was gripping much of the U.S. by tweeting, “Perhaps we could use a little bit of that good old Global Warming.” He was criticized for confusing weather with climate.

But he’s hardly alone in making this mistake say Peiser and Ridley, as we have seen in coverage of the most destructive weather-related events of 2017.

The past year was filled with bad weather news, much of it tragic, with whole communities even now still struggling to recover.

England’s soggy historical place names could predict the climate…

What’s in a place name?

Anglo-Saxon England was unusually warm and stormy. Place names coined then could hold clues to how the weather will get wetter and wilder as the climate changes, says Sott.net. Assuming the weather does do that, of course. The author asks: “Is it a surprise that places with watery names are more prone to flooding?”

It’s blowy on the B4380 to Buildwas, writes Richard Webb in the New Scientist. A keen wind whipping across the floodplain from Shrewsbury flaps a misarranged saddle bag strap against my back wheel.

As I cross the river Severn at Atcham, and bend right down the back road past Wroxeter, a black cloud delivers the first dribbles of rain.

England’s place names are a treasure trove of hidden history – if only we could find the key.

The Sun is cooling faster than anyone suspected

Quiet sun [image credit: NASA]

This is an opinion piece, a sort of alarmism-in-reverse, and no-one can be sure that any given weather or climate forecast will prove to be accurate or even on the right lines, but the arguments are here to consider. Numerous climate researchers do expect the solar slowdown to push average temperatures lower for at least a decade or two. Others think 0.04% carbon dioxide in the atmosphere will counter all that.

The danger from the Global Warming crowd is that they are misleading the entire world and preventing us from what is dangerously unfolding that sparks the rapid decline in civilization – GLOBAL COOLING, says Martin Armstrong at Armstrong Economics.

I previously warned that this is not my opinion, but simply our computer. If it were really conscious it would be running to store to buy heating pads. This year will be much colder  for Europe than the last three. It will also be cold in the USA.

We are in a global cooling period and all the data we have in our computer system warns that the earth is turning cold not warm.

Delingpole: Christmas is here, everyone! EPA officials are ‘Leaving in droves’

JD has started celebrating already.

EPA officials are “leaving in droves”, reports the New York Times. Marvellous news to ease us into the festive Christmas spirit, eh readers?

Why, it’s like the final scene in A Christmas Carol where Scrooge repents of all his miserliness, his nephew Fred gets a big fat turkey, Bob Cratchit gets a pay rise and Tiny Tim declares “God bless us, every one!”

Not, of course, that this is quite the way the New York Times sees it.

Considering the sun in climate change

Credit: BBC

The fact is we live in a *solar* system. As the author concludes: ‘It is time … to focus on understanding the sun-climate connection. We need to see the sun in climate change.’

There is a lot of debate about the sun’s role in global warming and climate change says David Wojick, Ph.D.. Some scientists argue that the sun plays the dominant role, making human activity insignificant.

Much of this argument is based on statistical analysis of very long proxy records. One can see a very good example of this thinking, as well as the debate surrounding it, in a recent article on Judith Curry’s Outstanding “Climate, Etc.” science blog.

The article is titled “Nature Unbound VI Centennial to millennial solar cycles.”

Alan Carlin: None of the climate alarmist apocalypses have occurred or are even possible

Earth and climate – an ongoing controversy

Lack of predictive success is a strong warning sign that something is amiss in the world of climate science in general and its modelling in particular.

The climate alarmists have long tried to sell their apocalyptic scam by claiming that their policies will avoid catastrophic increases in global temperatures, writes Alan Carlin.

The Daily Caller has recently inventoried some of the widely publicized such climate apocalypses predicted over the last 30 years by examining 12 of them.

The alarmists’ 12 apocalyptic predictions have proved uniformly wrong. That’s zero percent correct.

Delingpole: Exposed – the Liberal astroturfers behind the global warming scare

A look behind the curtain shows climate-related campaigning is sometimes just a front for the machinations of American party politics, the goal being to undermine the Trump agenda.

In order to drain the swamp, President Trump must first destroy the global warming Green Blob, says James Delingpole at Breitbart News.

This is the only logical conclusion to be drawn from a series of data leaks and Freedom of Information (FOI) revelations exposing the relationship between left wing campaigners and the great climate change scam.

Global warming, it becomes clear, is primarily a left-wing political issue, not a scientific one. Green is the new red.

These leaks show how rich liberal backers—left-wing institutions like the Rockefeller Foundation, eco hedge-fund billionaires like Tom Steyer, and the various socialistic Geek Emperors of Silicon Valley—are funneling millions of dollars into sock-puppet environmental organizations both to undermine Trump’s economic agenda and to finance his political opponents both in the Democratic Party and the GOP.

Electricity is “the new oil” says IEA

Credit: Entek Corp.

This overlooks the fact that ‘the majority of petroleum is converted to petroleum products, which includes several classes of fuels’. It also includes ‘conventional fertilizers [which] are commonly derived from petroleum. In fact, a single 40-pound bag contains the equivalent of 2.5 gallons of gasoline.’ Electricity is only a manufactured power source, as far as national networks are concerned.

Electricity is “the new oil” and the effect of increasing global electrification is having a “very deep rippling effect for the power sector”.

That was one of the highlights this morning at the launch of the International Energy Agency’s annual World Energy Outlook, reports PEI.

Laura Cozzi, head of the IEA’s Energy Demand Outlook Division, said: “We are seeing growing electrification happening throughout the energy sector – electricity going into sectors that were confined to other fuels before: most notably, cars, but also heating and cooling.”

Skeptics cheer U.S. exit from Paris pact at UN climate summit in Germany

From left to right: Craig Rucker, Lord Christopher Monckton and Marc Morano

This alternative to man-made climate doom and gloom has been held to counter the contrived scares of much of the media and the IPCC propaganda machine, which likes to claim the CO2 tail is somehow wagging the climate dog.

Dusseldorf, Germany — Global warming skeptics have descended upon the UN climate summit in Germany this week, hosting a summit of their own to highlight the errors of the UN’s climate change claims, writes Marc Morano.

On the final day of the skeptics’ climate summit, the group gathered for a champagne toast to the U.S. climate exit or “clexit” from the UN Paris pact.

Trump’s State Dept spokesman blasts Syria’s Paris deal in epic fashion

Something for the latest festival of climate obsessives to ponder as Syria gets called out in no uncertain terms.

The Department of State issued a withering and blunt critique Wednesday of Syria’s decision to join the Paris agreement more than a year after its initial draft, reports the Daily Caller.

“If the government of Syria cared so much about what was put in the air, then it wouldn’t be gassing its own people,” State spokeswoman Heather Nauert said about allegations that the war-torn country used sarin gas to put down rebel uprisings.

Rupert Darwall’s Green Tyranny

.
.
Darwall takes an in-depth look at some of the political machinations behind so-called ‘climate change’.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

https://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/B06Y3LR2JV/ref=oh_aui_d_detailpage_o00_?ie=UTF8&psc=1

Rupert Darwall’s new book is now out on Amazon. Here is the summary:

Climate change was political long before Al Gore first started talking about it. In the 1970s, the Swedish Social Democrats used global warming to get political support for building a string of nuclear power stations. It was the second phase of their war on coal, which began with the acid rain scare and the first big UN environment conference in Stockholm in 1969.
Acid rain swept all before it. America held out for as long as Ronald Reagan was in the White House, but capitulated under his successor. Like global warming, acid rain had the vocal support of the scientific establishment, but the consensus science collapsed just as Congress was passing acid rain cap-and-trade legislation. Rather than tell legislators and the nation the truth, the EPA attacked a lead scientist and suppressed the…

View original post 239 more words

Is La Niña on the way?

.
.
The latest assessment from the UK Met Office.

Official blog of the Met Office news team

During 2015 and 2016, the planet experienced one of the largest El Niño events in a century.  El Niño (Spanish for the boy) is actually the warm phase of the El Niño-Southern Oscillation and climate scientists are now suggesting that this oscillation in tropical Pacific temperature is likely tipping towards its opposite cool phase, La Niña.

Ensemble members show an increasing likelihood of La Niña conditions developing during October and November. La Niña conditions are said to develop when the sea surface temperature anomaly goes below –0.5°C.

Perhaps less well known than its larger brother, La Niña (Spanish for ‘the girl’) is an event that can trigger significant impacts.  Professor Adam Scaife, head of monthly to decadal prediction at the Met Office, said: “During El Niño, temperatures in the equatorial Pacific can warm by as much as 3°C. La Niña tends to be smaller and rarely exceeds 2°C, but…

View original post 263 more words

Alan Carlin: Climate Alarmism Is a Typical Scientific Scam but with Much More Serious Consequences

Credit: planetsave.com

Alan Carlin argues here that ‘the main justifications offered for climate alarmism are expensive general circulation models, which cost taxpayers many billions of dollars but prove nothing except that garbage in results in garbage out.’ Meanwhile even more fortunes in public money are being spent chasing unattainable ‘climate’ goals.

Climate alarmism is an all too typical scientific scam replete with failure to follow the scientific method and many of the common illogical fallacies going back to Aristotle.

The difference is that its proponents have had almost infinite resources to sell their scam, especially taking into account the “free” media support supplied by the mainstream media.

But scam it nevertheless is since the scammers are benefitting from their efforts.

This Year’s Atlantic Hurricanes In Perspective

.
.
A rational look at recent severe weather events, which have been seized on by disaster-starved climate alarmists to push their pre-conceived agendas.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

The recent spate of hurricanes has inevitably attracted attention and spawned wildly inaccurate headlines, such as “a 1000 year event”, “the most powerful Atlantic storm on record”, “storm of the century”, and even “most deadly storm in history”.

Many climate scientists have also jumped on the bandwagon, to claim that these storms have been exacerbated by climate change.

With Hurricane Maria now weakening and heading north into cooler waters, it is perhaps time to take a rational look at what has actually been happening.

First, let’s look at the two most notable storms:

View original post 1,364 more words