Claim: the James Webb telescope ‘threatens to break cosmology as we know it’

Ye Olde Universe
[image credit: Hubble / Wikipedia]

Or did it just confirm the unhappy status of the ‘dark energy’ seekers, long after Nobel prizes were handed out for its ‘discovery’? Quote: ‘despite much searching, astronomers have no clue what dark matter or dark energy are.’ A Nobel for having no clue – where’s the physics?
– – –
For decades, measurements of the universe’s expansion have suggested a disparity known as the Hubble tension, which threatens to break cosmology as we know it. Can it be fixed? asks Live Science.

Now, on the eve of its second anniversary, a new finding by the James Webb Space Telescope has only entrenched the mystery.

Something is awry in our expanding cosmos.

Geminids mystery

The Geminids are Still a Mystery

– – – “Our work has upended years of belief about 3200 Phaethon, the source of the Geminids,” says co-author Karl Battams of the Naval Research Lab. “It’s not what we thought it was.”

Climate confusion: Differing Net Zero definitions must ‘mesh’ say Met Office scientists

[image credit: latinoamericarenovable.com]

Another trip to cloud cuckoo land. How do they plan to accurately measure all the so-called emissions and get all parties to agree with the results anyway? Time to return to reality and stop wasting time and effort on non-existent supposed remedies.
– – –
A new paper published in Nature has highlighted a fundamental mismatch in the way greenhouse gas emissions are measured which could mean that Net Zero could be met in one definition up to five years ahead of the other, says the Met Office .

The IPCC report shows that global temperature will stop increasing when we reach ‘net zero’ emissions of CO2. [Talkshop comment -*claims*, not shows].

To achieve this, human activity cannot put more CO2 into the atmosphere than it removes – we need to massively reduce our emissions, with some removal of CO2 to help areas which are really hard to decarbonise.

This sits behind the principle of Net Zero, which countries including the UK hope will be reached by 2050.

More cloud uncertainties: researching the effect of aerosol particles on clouds and the climate

Again it turns out that climate modellers don’t understand cloud effects too well. As this article bluntly puts it: ‘The interactions of atmospheric aerosols with solar radiation and clouds continue to be inadequately understood and are among the greatest uncertainties in the model description and forecasting of changes to the climate. One reason for this is the many unanswered questions about the hygroscopicity of aerosol particles.’ — Other reasons aren’t discussed here. Why do we keep reading about ‘state-of-the-art’ climate models when they clearly have a long way to go to merit such a description? Any forecasts they produce should be treated with great caution, to say the least.
– – –
The extent to which aerosol particles affect the climate depends on how much water the particles can hold in the atmosphere, says Phys.org.

The capacity to hold water is referred to as hygroscopicity (K) and, in turn, depends on further factors—particularly the size and chemical composition of the particles, which can be extremely variable and complex.

Through extensive investigations, an international research team under the leadership of the Max Planck Institute for Chemistry (MPIC) and the Leibniz Institute for Tropospheric Research (TROPOS) was able to reduce the relationship between the chemical composition and the hygroscopicity of aerosol particles to a simple linear formula.

US Watchdog Has Grim Winter Warning: There May Be Blackouts

If it’s climate obsession versus reality in US power supplies, there can only be one winner. Strong opposition to new gas pipelines plus increasing reliance on intermittent renewables can only end badly for consumers of power.
– – –
As much as two-thirds of the United States could experience blackouts in peak winter weather this and next year, the North American Reliability Corp has warned.

These warnings have become something of a routine for the regulatory agency lately, says OilPrice.com.

Earlier this year, NERC issued a blackout warning for some parts of the U.S. over the summer, citing extreme temperatures.

Drought saps the Panama Canal, disrupting global trade – can El Niño already be a factor?

Ship passing through the new Agua Clara Locks, Panama Canal [image credit: Mariordo @ Wikipedia]

Having stated water levels in the canal have been a problem for a number of years, blaming the recently arrived El Niño seems a bit strange, and the last significant one ended in 2016. One expert is quoted saying it could be a source of drought, which implies some uncertainty. Using seawater to top up the canal isn’t an option for ecological reasons. Every vessel passage uses a lot of water (200 million litres per ship as an average), and capacity was doubled in 2016.
– – –
For over a century, the Panama Canal has provided a convenient way for ships to move between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, helping to speed up international trade, says the Houston Herald.

But a drought has left the canal without enough water, which is used to raise and lower ships, forcing officials to slash the number of vessels they allow through.

That has created expensive headaches for shipping companies and raised difficult questions about water use in Panama. The passage of one ship is estimated to consume as much water as half a million Panamanians use in one day.

Earth’s Ring Current System Just Sprang a Leak

Earth’s Ring Current System Just Sprang a Leak

Worth a look just for the pictures, plus interesting commentary re. what is or isn’t auroral activity.
– – –

This year ‘virtually certain’ to be warmest in 125,000 years, EU scientists say — ignoring contradictory evidence?

Thermometer with Fahrenheit and Celsius units [image credit: Stilfehler at Wikipedia]

The ‘virtual’ in virtually certain is from a computer model result: ‘we combine our data with the IPCC’. Two things to bear in mind: satellite data only started in the 1970s, with other less accurate (due to shortage of data) records being kept from the 1880s onwards, and ‘the mid-Holocene … mean annual temperature reached 2.5°C above that of today’ (source: Encyclopaedia Britannica).
– – –
This year is “virtually certain” to be the warmest in 125,000 years, European Union scientists said on Wednesday (8 November), after data showed last month was the world’s hottest October in that period, says Euractiv.

Last month smashed through the previous October temperature record, from 2019, by a massive margin, the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) said.

“The record was broken by 0.4 degrees Celsius, which is a huge margin,” said C3S Deputy Director Samantha Burgess, who described the October temperature anomaly as “very extreme”.

How wind turbines are blinding the RAF’s vital North Sea radars

Hornsea Offshore Wind Project, Yorkshire, England
[image credit: nsenergybusiness.com]

Is the Government scoring a major own goal in pursuit of its fantasy climate goals? Hoped-for ‘energy security’ from wind power is looking further away than ever.
– – –
Britain’s race to net zero risks blinding crucial radars protecting the UK from incursions over the North Sea amid fears that Russia will launch a campaign of sabotage.

Offshore wind farms blades interfere with radar signals and there are concerns that plans for a significant expansion of turbines in the North Sea by the end of the decade will cause problems for the Royal Air Force (RAF).

The Ministry of Defence has spent £18m over the past three years trying to stop wind farm blades from scrambling radar readings, the Telegraph can reveal.

However, none of this public spending has, so far, yielded a concrete solution to the problem.

Electric cars risk becoming uninsurable

BMW i3 electric car plus battery pack [image credit: carmagazine.co.uk]

Over-sensitive and unpredictable lithium-based batteries continue to be a headache, for various reasons. Is the EV industry really ready for prime time, as government ‘net zero’ mandates take hold?
– – –
Electric cars risk becoming effectively uninsurable as analysts struggle to put a price on battery repairs, the researcher for the car insurance industry has said. — The Telegraph reporting.

Jonathan Hewett, chief executive of Thatcham Research, the motor insurers’ automotive research centre, said a lack of “insight and understanding” about the cost of repairing damaged electric car batteries was pushing up premiums and resulting in some providers declining to provide cover altogether.

Electric cars can be particularly expensive to repair, costing around a quarter more to fix on average than a petrol or diesel vehicle.

Experts have previously warned electric vehicles are being written off after minor bumps because of the cost and complexity of fixing their batteries.

Powering AI could use as much electricity as a small country

Image credit: technologyhill.com

The definition of a ‘small’ country could change to ‘not so small’ quite quickly. When so-called net zero climate policies are threatening to make electricity supplies more restricted and unreliable, the added effect of AI demand could become significant. This is on top of the issue with data centres – the BBC recently reported that Data centres use almost a fifth of Irish electricity.
– – –
Artificial intelligence (AI) comes with promises of helping coders code faster, drivers drive safer, and making daily tasks less time-consuming, says TechXplore.

But in a commentary published October 10 in the journal Joule, the founder of Digiconomist demonstrates that the tool, when adopted widely, could have a large energy footprint, which in the future may exceed the power demands of some countries.

“Looking at the growing demand for AI service, it’s very likely that energy consumption related to AI will significantly increase in the coming years,” says author Alex de Vries, a Ph.D. candidate at Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam.

Energy leaflet: ‘Preparing for a power cut’

The UK electricity network is clearly not what it used to be. Can it be any coincidence that as coal power disappears thanks to ‘net zero’ type climate obsessions, leaflets like this start arriving on the domestic mat like this one today?

SP Energy (aka Scottish Power) covers parts of southern Scotland, North West England and North Wales. If other energy providers are doing the same type of leafletting or similar (emails etc.), let us know.

One section is about ‘Storms and Severe Weather’ but the one about ‘Preparing you for extreme events’ gets to the heart of the matter: ‘the possible but unlikely scenario of an energy shortage due to the current energy landscape’. They can’t even bring themselves to say electricity (see leaflet title)!

Motorway service stations hiring staff to police surging levels of EV ‘charge rage’

Image credit: motorwayservices.uk

Net zero chaos: the UK grid just can’t meet current(!) EV requirements at busy travel times. Good luck if such a time happens to be a windless day. Electricity can’t easily be stored at the service station, like liquid fuels – who knew?
– – –
Britain’s biggest motorway service station provider has brought in marshals to police “charge rage” among electric vehicle drivers battling for access to plug-in points, reports The Telegraph.

Moto chief executive Ken McMeikan warned the UK’s motorway service stations are facing growing “public disorder” due to a lack of grid connections preventing him from installing enough car chargers to meet the surge in demand.

It means many motorists are facing long waits, with angry drivers confronting staff and each other over the lack of charging facilities.

Subsea cable failures could derail offshore wind ambitions – insurance costs ‘becoming prohibitive’

Image credit: nawindpower.com

Another blow for net-zero dogmatists. More evidence that cheap offshore wind power doesn’t exist and nobody can control its costs, or be sure of a good level of reliability.
– – –
Global Underwater Hub (GUH) is leading the charge to tackle failures in underwater cables which could derail global offshore wind ambitions, says AGCC.

The trade body, which champions the UK’s £8billion underwater industry, says that reliability of subsea cables is “paramount” to the success of offshore wind and the energy transition.

But failure of these cables is all too common, to the point that the cost of insuring them is becoming prohibitive.

Walker Circulation study is a damp squib for climate worriers, contradicts models

Walker Circulation – El Niño conditions [image credit: NOAA]

The paper this article is based on informs us that ‘The Pacific Walker circulation (PWC) has an outsized influence on weather and climate worldwide. Yet the PWC response to external forcings is unclear’. Under a headline saying: ‘Greenhouse gases are changing air flow over the Pacific Ocean, raising Australia’s risks of extreme weather’, the article here offers almost nothing to support an argument for any human-caused climate effects ‘in the industrial era’. The paper is somewhat embarrassing for climate models: ‘Most climate models predict that the PWC will ultimately weaken in response to global warming. However, the PWC strengthened from 1992 to 2011, suggesting a significant role for anthropogenic and/or volcanic aerosol forcing, or internal variability’. So that role could be anything or nothing, but the models trended the wrong way anyway. The search for ‘anthropogenic fingerprints’ continues.
– – –
After a rare three-year La Niña event brought heavy rain and flooding to eastern Australia in 2020-22, we’re now bracing for the heat and drought of El Niño at the opposite end of the spectrum, says The Conversation (via Phys.org).

But while the World Meteorological Organization has declared an El Niño event is underway, Australia’s Bureau of Meteorology is yet to make a similar declaration. Instead, the Bureau remains on “El Niño alert.”

The reason for this discrepancy is what’s called the Pacific Walker Circulation. The pattern and strength of air flows over the Pacific Ocean, combined with sea surface temperatures, determines whether Australia experiences El Niño or La Niña events.

Alarmists trumpet 0.01C increase (since 2016) in ocean surface temperature ‘record’

Credit: sciencedaily.com

One hundredth of one degree in seven years, all due to supposedly naughty humans? Hilarious. An ex-boss of mine used to call such tiny variations ‘spurious accuracy’. What’s the margin of error?
– – –
The world’s oceans set a new temperature record this week, raising concerns about knock-on effects on the planet’s climate, marine life and coastal communities, says AFP (via Euractiv).

The temperature of the oceans’ surface rose to 20.96 degrees Celsius on 30 July, according to European Union climate observatory data.

The previous record was 20.95C in March 2016, a spokeswoman for the EU’s Copernicus Climate Change Service told AFP on Friday.

The samples tested excluded polar regions.

Scientists wrestle with ‘unknown force’ acting on particles

Muon g-2 building (white and orange) at Fermilab [image credit: Z22 @ Wikipedia]

A clash of observation and basic science theory looms. The BBC tries to sound positive about it.
– – –
Scientists near Chicago say they may be getting closer to discovering the existence of a new force of nature, says BBC News.

They have found more evidence that sub-atomic particles, called muons, are not behaving in the way predicted by the current theory of sub-atomic physics.

Scientists believe that an unknown force could be acting on the muons.

More data will be needed to confirm these results, but if they are verified, it could mark the beginning of a revolution in physics.

Understanding the role of the sun in climate change

Variation in solar activity during a recent sunspot cycle [credit: Wikipedia]

Dr. Scafetta offers a new analysis of the sun-climate issue, with fresh research. Clearly a crucially important topic in climate science, where certain pre-conceived ideas have dominated the discussion in recent years, to the point of refusing to even have one.
– – –
Although the sun provides nearly all the energy needed to warm the planet, its contribution to climate change remains widely questioned, says Nicola Scafetta.

Many empirically based studies claim that it has a significant effect on climate, while others (often based on computer global climate simulations) claim that it has a small effect.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) supports the latter view and estimates that almost 100% of the observed warming of the Earth’s surface from 1850–1900 to 2020 was caused by man-made emissions. This is known as the anthropogenic global warming (AGWT) theory.

I addressed this important paradox in a new study published in Geoscience Frontiers.

Dimwits: Biden WH Considers Blotting Out The Sun’s Rays To Slow Global Warming

Heatwave time [image credit: BBC]

Do they finally admit that tinkering with trace gases is a nonsense and the Sun is the real climate issue, supposing that there is an issue? They might want to consider possible adverse effects on weather systems and agriculture, not to mention solar PV output, for starters. Legal actions blaming governments for the weather, or even potential future weather, have already started in various countries.
– – –
The wanton destruction of priceless art and heritage sites across Europe by climate change activists is insane, and one would think we’ve reached peaked insanity with this unhinged community, short of acts of eco-terrorism.

Nope, says Climate Change Dispatch.

Sometimes, even banal actions, like a government study, can exhibit more ludicrousness than smearing paint on a Monet.

The latest Biden White House-endorsed study into curbing global warming is not just a case study in wasteful spending; it’s a Rorschach test on mental health.

Study of Earth’s stratosphere torpedoes another climate change fear

Earth’s atmosphere [image credit – learnweather.com]

Our headline differs slightly from the article below, which glosses over the actual research findings to some extent. Speculation about possible future unwanted climate scenarios is a favourite hobby of climate alarmists, but this one at least has been largely discarded. As a co-author put it “we were able to show that many climate model projections of very large stratospheric water vapour changes are now inconsistent with observational evidence.”
– – –
New research led by the University of East Anglia (UEA) reduces uncertainty in future climate change linked to the stratosphere, with important implications for life on Earth, says Science Daily.

Man-made climate change is one of the greatest challenges facing us today [Talkshop comment – unsupported assertion], but uncertainty in the exact magnitude of global change hampers effective policy responses.

A significant source of uncertainty relates to future changes to water vapour in the stratosphere, an extremely dry region of the atmosphere 15-50 km above the Earth’s surface.