UK National Grid avoids emergency blackout measures in supply scramble

Winter isn’t even here yet. But with a colder weather spell plus low wind speeds around the corner, trouble is already brewing for renewables-infested electricity supplies. Somehow it’s linked to problems in France and/or Ukraine, according to this report.
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National Grid opted against implementing emergency measures to stave off blackouts tomorrow, escalating fears of supply shortages this winter, reports City A.M.

The company’s electricity system operator (NGESO) revealed this morning that it was considering activating its Demand Flexibility Service (DFS) for the first time to help reduce the risk of blackouts on Tuesday.

This follows power outages in France and a decline in renewable energy generation over the past week.

Scientists discovered a river longer than Thames beneath the Antarctic ice sheet

Antarctica’s George VI Ice Shelf [image credit: CIRES Colorado Univ.]

Interesting, but too many uncertainties at this time to reach any firm conclusions. The river system is ‘beneath kilometers of thick ice’.
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Scientists at Imperial College London, the University of Waterloo, Canada, Universiti Malaysia Terengganu, and Newcastle University have discovered an unexpected river under the Antarctic ice sheet, says Tech Explorist.

The discovery of this 460km-long river shows the ice sheet’s base has more active water flow than previously thought, which could make it more susceptible to changes in climate.

The river is believed to affect the flow and melting of ice, contributing to the acceleration of ice loss during climate warming.

Sea-level rise in the Mediterranean Sea branded ‘staggering’, due to scientists ‘using a vital new method’

Credit: OH 237 @ Wikipedia

Vastly higher? Enormous? Staggering? – should we be shocked? No, because none of these words from the article below appear in the study itself, which notes: ‘We find that, between 1960 and 1989, sea level in the Mediterranean fell’. It then ‘started accelerating rapidly’. The study also admits: ‘The relative contributions from sterodynamic changes (i.e., changes in ocean density and circulation) and land-ice melting to this recent increase in the rate of Mediterranean sea-level rise remain unclear.’ Looks like the press release resorted to colourful language.
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Scientists from the National Oceanography Centre (NOC) have discovered a substantial rise in sea-levels in the Mediterranean Sea, using a vital new method to measure changes in sea-level, says the NOC.

The study, published in Journal of Geophysical Research: Oceans, demonstrated that sea levels in the Mediterranean Sea have risen at vastly higher rates over the past 20 years compared to the entirety of the 20th century.

The study revealed that sea level in the Mediterranean Sea increased by about 7cm in the period 2000–2018.

Previous changes in sea-level rise in the Mediterranean Sea have been highly unpredictable due to limited observational data but using this latest method, scientists analysed sea-level data from tide gauges and satellites to reveal an enormous increase as a result of ocean warming and land ice-melt.

Miyake event radiation deluges still unexplained as solar flare theory questioned

When they say ‘sudden’ they don’t mean short-lived. The report notes that ‘some of the events, unlike the brief flashes we recognize as solar flares, lasted for one or two years’. Only a handful of these so-called ‘cosmic barrages’ have occurred in the last 9000 years or so, according to the data.
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One of the events was 80 times more powerful than the strongest solar flare ever recorded, says LiveScience.

A series of sudden and colossal spikes in radiation levels across Earth’s history could have come from a series of unknown, unpredictable and potentially catastrophic cosmic events, a new study has revealed.

Named Miyake events after the lead author of the first study to describe them, the spikes occur roughly once every 1,000 years or so and are recorded as sudden increases in the radiocarbon levels of ancient tree rings.

The exact cause of the sudden deluges of radiation, which periodically transform an extra chunk of the atmosphere’s nitrogen into carbon sucked up by trees, remains unknown.

Vapour buoyancy flaw leads to inaccurate simulations of cloud distributions in climate models, study finds

Tropical scene

The researchers say ‘climate models often differ on the precise degree of future warming, largely due to their representation of clouds.’ For decades we’ve been told to believe variations in carbon dioxide are the key to any future warming, but climate model forecasts have been unable to deliver the hoped-for precision. Predicting future cloud variations looks like a tall order.
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Quick Summary

— Study adds a missing piece to the climate science puzzle of simulating clouds.
— Lightness of water vapor influences the amount of low clouds.
— Some leading climate models don’t include this effect.
— Including vapor buoyancy into climate models helps improve climate forecasting.

Clouds are notoriously hard to pin down, especially in climate science, says UC Davis.

A study from the University of California, Davis, and published in the journal Nature Geoscience shows that air temperature and cloud cover are strongly influenced by the buoyancy effect of water vapor, an effect currently neglected in some leading global climate models.

Megadroughts are part of Australia’s past and may return soon, warn alarmists

A dried up Lake Hume, 2007 [image credit: suburbanbloke @ Wikipedia]

Attribution of events, known to have happened many times before, to human causes by invoking ‘the role of climate change’ in the modern era is speculation at best, as is any vague claim that humans could ‘increase the risk’ of such events. As usual, climate alarmists want people to feel guilty and nervous.
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Most Australians have known drought in their lifetimes, and have memories of cracked earth and empty streams, paddocks of dust and stories of city reservoirs with only a few weeks’ storage, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

But our new research finds over the last 1,000 years, Australia has suffered longer, larger and more severe droughts than those recorded over the last century.

These are called “megadroughts,” and they’re likely to occur again in coming decades.

Satellite Temperature Data Show Almost All Climate Model Forecasts Over the Last 40 Years Were Wrong

Image credit: livescience.com

Maybe a climate model with no ‘ECS’ factor could do better? But anything that smacks of natural variation inevitably faces resistance from climate alarm promoters.
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A major survey into the accuracy of climate models has found that almost all the past temperature forecasts between 1980-2021 were excessive compared with accurate satellite measurements, says the Daily Sceptic.

The findings were recently published by Professor Nicola Scafetta, a physicist from the University of Naples. He attributes the inaccuracies to a limited understanding of Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity (ECS), the number of degrees centigrade the Earth’s temperature will rise with a doubling of carbon dioxide.

Scientists have spent decades trying to find an accurate ECS number, to no avail.

Torches not candles: How to prepare for a blackout – Sky News

Image credit: thecount.com

The appearance in the media of articles like this is a warning sign in itself. The old days of plentiful coal stockpiles next to power stations are almost over, thanks to futile climate obsessions leading to bad energy policy.
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The National Grid’s warning that three-hour planned blackouts may have to be implemented this winter has left many feeling anxious, says Sky News.

People use more energy to keep warm in winter.

And while Britain has a considerable gas supply in the North Sea, we lack space to store it, which means we have to import around 30% from Europe during periods of increased demand.

Seasonal change in Antarctic ice sheet movement observed for first time – but what does it mean?

Antarctica’s George VI Ice Shelf [image credit: CIRES Colorado Univ.]

Assumptions challenged by new data. Talk of “potentially important implications for global sea-level rise estimates”.
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Some estimates of Antarctica’s total contribution to sea-level rise may be over- or underestimated, after researchers detected a previously unknown source of ice loss variability, says Phys.org.

The researchers, from the University of Cambridge and Austrian engineering company ENVEO, identified distinct, seasonal movements in the flow of land-based ice draining into George VI Ice Shelf—a floating platform of ice roughly the size of Wales—on the Antarctic Peninsula.

Using imagery from the Copernicus/European Space Agency Sentinel-1 satellites, the researchers found that the glaciers feeding the ice shelf speed up by approximately 15% during the Antarctic summer.

Study suggests La Niña winters could keep on coming, but climate models are out of step with observations

The conclusions of a recent study are quite blunt: ‘We show that the spatial pattern of observed surface temperature changes since 1979 is highly unusual, and many aspects of it cannot be reproduced in current climate models, even when accounting for the influence of natural variability.’ Hardly inspiring, when such models are being relied upon by governments for radical so-called climate policies.
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Forecasters are predicting a “three-peat La Niña” this year, says Phys.org.

This will be the third winter in a row that the Pacific Ocean has been in a La Niña cycle, something that’s happened only twice before in records going back to 1950.

New research led by the University of Washington offers a possible explanation. The study, recently published in Geophysical Research Letters, suggests that climate change is, in the short term, favoring La Niñas.

Climate models unreliable in predicting wave damage to coral reefs

Australian coral [image credit: heraldsun.com.au]

Probably not much of a shock. One researcher said: “The models are accurate in projecting at a global scale that cyclones in the future are highly likely to be more intense because of climate change. But they are less accurate in projecting how those cyclones will affect individual coral reefs — that is the result of more localised conditions such as the pounding of waves.” But ‘accurately projecting’ that something is ‘highly likely’ in the future sounds more like an assertion than actual science.
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Climate models are unreliable when it comes to predicting the damage that tropical cyclones will do to sensitive coral reefs, according to a study published in the journal Earth’s Future.

With the expectation that tropical cyclones will increase in intensity with climate change, there has been interest among conservationists to use the models to identify the vulnerability of reef communities to storm damage, and to target conservation and protection efforts at those coral reefs that are less likely to be impacted by climate change, says Science Daily.

But a team of researchers from the University of Leeds in the UK, the Australian Institute for Marine Science and the Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CISRO) is urging caution when using the climate models, arguing they are not yet reliable enough to determine which reefs will be most at risk from cyclone damage.

Updated climate models clouded by scientific biases, researchers find

Southern Ocean surrounds Antarctica [image credit: theozonehole.com]

Another hole in ‘settled’ climate science? Over-sensitivity to changing conditions may sound familiar. Researchers find “The major implication is that, even though the latest CMIP models improve the simulation of their mean states, such as radiation fluxes at the top of the atmosphere, the detailed cloud processes are still of large uncertainty.” Southern Ocean clouds seem to have been ‘improperly simulated’ when compared to data.
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Clouds can cool or warm the planet’s surface, a radiative effect that contributes significantly to the global energy budget and can be altered by human activities, claims Eurekalert.

The world’s southernmost ocean, aptly named the Southern Ocean and far from human pollution but subject to abundant marine gases and aerosols, is about 80% covered by clouds.

How does this body of water and relationship with clouds contribute to the world’s changing climate?

Pakistan’s floods and the climate attribution con – Net Zero Watch

We know what to expect from the climate propaganda machine. Here’s a critique of the ‘nudge’ method.
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Climate alarmism and journalistic bias have reached new heights of misleading hype on the catastrophic flooding in Pakistan which is reported to have received more than three times its annual rainfall in August, says NZW.

The question is, of course, if human-induced climate change has had anything to do with making the floods more dramatic that could reasonably have been expected in the absence of human influences, i.e, as a result of a natural disaster that have been hitting the Indian subcontinent for centuries.

The answer (as given in the small print) by climate scientists at the world weather attribution project is ‘no’ – although it is quite obvious that they, the BBC and much of the news media, don’t like this answer.

Global Financial System at Risk From Flawed Climate Models

An unflattering analysis of climate models. Using mean values from numerous models is questioned. Climate attribution studies don’t fare any better: “these approaches are likely to be flawed”.
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A team of Australian scientists, financiers and economists have issued a stark warning over the use of “flawed” climate models to predict financial risk, says Net Zero Watch.

Writing in the journal Environmental Research they say building future strategies on information that is not understood and potentially misleading is likely to expose the global financial system to systemic risks of its own making.

Politicians and policy-makers are increasingly seeking to assess the potential risks to the financial system associated with climate change.

Scientists evaluate Earth-cooling strategies with geoengineering simulations

Layers of Earth’s atmosphere

Q: What could possibly go wrong? A: Even the sky’s not the limit.
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A group of international scientists led by Cornell University is—more rigorously and systematically than ever before—evaluating if and how the stratosphere could be made just a little bit “brighter,” reflecting more incoming sunlight so that an ever-warming Earth maintains its cool, says Phys.org.

Their work is published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

Solar radiation modification—or solar geoengineering, as it is sometimes called—is a potential climate change mitigation strategy that involves injecting sulfate aerosols into the stratosphere, so more sunlight bounces off the Earth’s atmosphere.

What happened to that hyper-busy 2022 hurricane season? Forecasters say wait

Saharan dust cloud over the Atlantic [image credit: NASA]

For the first time in seven years, no hurricane has formed in the Atlantic Basin by mid-August. An excess of Saharan dust is thought to be a factor.
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After two years of alphabet-exhausting tropical storms, and the disruptive remnants that have soaked the Philly region, the 2022 Atlantic hurricane season is off to a surprisingly benign start, says The Philadelphia Inquirer.

And it may have something to do with all the heat the Philly region and much of the East endured July into August.

All those ominous outlooks notwithstanding, for the first time in seven years, no hurricane has formed in the Atlantic Ocean, Caribbean Sea, or the Gulf of Mexico by Aug. 15. The long-term average for a first hurricane, one with peak winds of at least 74 mph, is Aug. 11.

Demand Control: Wind & Solar ‘Transition’ Means Routine State-Controlled Power Rationing

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‘Energy transition’ means: “Energy availability depends on weather.” You probably knew that, but many who apparently don’t will find out soon enough.

STOP THESE THINGS

Delusional reliance on unreliable wind and solar is a reason that governments are interfering in consumers’ power usage. Pitched under the euphemism “demand management”, state-controlled power rationing is the natural consequence of attempting to run on sunshine and breezes.

When the sun sets and calm weather sets in, wind and solar power can’t be bought at any price. Increase the capacity of the unreliables connected to your grid and get ready for not only rocketing power bills, but routine power rationing.

Once upon a time, electricity was cheap and it flowed like running water. Civil and ordered society demanded it.

These days, smart meters keep an eye on your power usage with the state ready to pull the plug without warning and without notice, notwithstanding that you are ready, willing and able to pay your bill.

The ability to slash your power usage is an altogether insidious exercise of power…

View original post 1,425 more words

NOAA still expects above-normal Atlantic hurricane season

We like a prediction, so we’ll see how this one goes after ‘a relatively slow start to hurricane season, with no major storms developing in the Atlantic’. NOAA’s ENSO blog says ‘La Niña suppresses hurricane activity in the central and eastern Pacific basins, and enhances it in the Atlantic basin’, which influences their thinking. No doubt climate obsessives will be on the lookout for something to wail about.
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Atmospheric and oceanic conditions still favor an above-normal 2022 Atlantic hurricane season, according to NOAA’s annual mid-season update issued today by the Climate Prediction Center, a division of the National Weather Service. — Phys.org reporting.

“I urge everyone to remain vigilant as we enter the peak months of hurricane season,” said Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo.

“The experts at NOAA will continue to provide the science, data and services needed to help communities become hurricane resilient and climate-ready for the remainder of hurricane season and beyond.”

What millions of UK households could be told to do to avoid blackouts this winter

More to come? [image credit: thecount.com]

The fruits of climate-obsessed Government energy policies, including dismantling the power station system in favour of part-time renewables, are becoming ever clearer. Needless to say, it doesn’t look good.
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Households could be asked to turn down their thermostats and switch off their lights under Government plans to avoid winter blackouts.

Emergency contingency plans for a gas or electricity supply shortage include public appeals to use less energy, The Telegraph can reveal.

Climate models: Wildfire-smoke observations may help ‘fill gap’ in estimating soot’s role, researchers hope

California wildfire [image credit: NASA]

Another day, another topic of model uncertainty. ‘Refining’ an admitted high level of uncertainty is an odd concept, but researchers assert the issue will be ‘cleared up’. However, their belief in ‘potent climate-warming agents’ doesn’t inspire confidence.
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New research refining the amount of sunlight absorbed by black carbon in smoke from wildfires will help clear up a long-time weak spot in earth system models, enabling more accurate forecasting of global climate change, says Phys.org.

“Black carbon or soot is the next most potent climate-warming agent after CO2 and methane, despite a short lifetime of weeks, but its impact in climate models is still highly uncertain,” said James Lee, a climate researcher at Los Alamos National Laboratory and corresponding author of the new study in Geophysical Research Letters on light absorption by wildfire smoke. “Our research will clear up that uncertainty.”

The Los Alamos research resolves a long-time disconnect between the observations of the amount of light absorbed by black carbon in smoke and the amount predicted by models, given how black carbon is mixed with other material such as condensed organic aerosols that are present in plumes.