Hywind, low economics: the cost of floating offshore wind power

Image credit: Equinor, Via GWPF

Guest reblog of a post written by Andrew Montford at the GWPF

Yesterday, I wrote about the financial travails of the Kincardine Floating Windfarm and the eye watering bill that is going to have to be paid for its construction. The cost of floating offshore wind power is, it seems, going to be high.

National Grid Forecasting Tight Margins This Week

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Something else for the usual miserablists to claim will be even worse after Brexit.

NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT

By Paul Homewood

h/t Joe Public

https://twitter.com/ng_eso/status/1316398489363001344?s=20

This is astonishing for a number of reasons:

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La Niña underway in the tropical Pacific, says Australia’s BoM

Source: Bureau of Meteorology — ENSO Outlook [updated every 2 weeks]
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La Niña is a coupled ocean-atmosphere phenomenon that is the colder counterpart of El Niño, as part of the broader El Niño–Southern Oscillation (ENSO) climate pattern. – Wikipedia

Brits brace for possible ‘coldest Bank holiday on record’

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Gloves and woolly hats at the ready – you have been warned!

Dude – where’s our global warming?

California’s Blackout Warning

Solar power complex in California [USA. Gov – BLM – Bureau of Land Management]

How does it feel to be the canaries in the coal mine of the renewables stampede now being promoted far and wide by climate obsessives with a failing atmospheric theory?

H/T The GWPF
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Anti-fossil fuel mandates are leading to electricity shortages.

Electricity blackouts are awful at any time, but especially during an extreme heat wave and for reasons that are man-made, says The Wall Street Journal.

That’s what millions in California have been enduring in recent days, and their plight is a warning to the rest of America about the risks of Green New Deal policies.

The California Independent System Operator (Caiso), which manages the state’s power grid, declared a high-level emergency Friday and Saturday evenings and ordered utilities to reduce power usage.

California and most of the southwestern U.S. are experiencing a severe heat wave. But other states are managing to keep power flowing. Why can’t California?

BBC promotes its climate agenda on the back of recent train crash

Credit: BBC

Another round of the usual ‘scientists agree’ assertions without saying which scientists, what exactly they supposedly agree on, and where the evidence – if it exists – can be found.
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It’s already clear that torrential rain played a significant part in the first fatal derailment in the UK since 2007.

Scotland’s Transport Minister Michael Matheson has confirmed the conditions were a factor and Network Rail footage shows there were landslides in the area.

The climate is changing and scientists agree it’s very different to when the railways were built by our Victorian ancestors, claims BBC News.

Though landslips are not uncommon, particularly in that area around Stonehaven, climate change means they are happening much more frequently as the land struggles to cope with the volume of water.

Hottest August day for 17 years in UK – or south-east England at least

Fine summer weather [image credit: BBC]

So there was at least one higher temperature recorded in England in August 2003. Seventeen more years of increasing ’emissions’, which are supposed to be so dire according to a popular climate theory, haven’t made any difference to the peak figure so far. In fact July 2020 was noticeably cooler than average, but now a southerly wind has blown in some Saharan heat for a few days, most strongly to the near-continent regions. Not before time!
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The UK has seen its hottest day in August for 17 years, as temperatures reached more than 36C (96.8F) in south-east England, reports BBC News.

Crowds headed to the coast to enjoy the weather, but people have been urged to adhere to social distancing.

Warm weather will continue over the weekend for much of the UK, according to the Met Office.

The highest temperatures are expected in England and Wales, with fresher weather forecast for Scotland and NI.

A cool July ends with notable heat

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We learn that ‘The UK as a whole was -0.8°C below the long-term (1981-2010) average for the month.’ This is described as ‘a fairly unremarkable month’ until a warm last day. Would it also have been unremarkable if it was 0.8C *above* the long-term average?

Official blog of the Met Office news team

July 2020 was looking to be a fairly unremarkable month in terms of climate statistics for the UK, until hot conditions closed the month on the 31^st.

Overall it was a cool month, with most days having temperatures below average. Successive low pressure systems brought cloud, rain and predominantly westerly winds across parts of the UK, keeping temperatures down. The UK as a whole was -0.8°C below the long-term (1981-2010) average for the month. As the anomaly map indicates, the south-east of the UK was the only region to get close to average temperatures for July.

One outlier of the July statistics is the maximum temperatures recorded on Friday 31^st July. Tim Legg from the Met Office’s National Climate Information Centre, said: “An area of low pressure in the Atlantic acted to draw warm air up from the continent, bringing a day of heat to much of…

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IPCC and Sceptics Agree: Climate Change Is Not Causing Extreme Weather

Climate theory used to hold that there was a link between the amount of extreme weather and the equator-pole temperature gradient, meaning that warming poles should mean less of it, not more. But nowadays almost anything unusual can be labelled extreme weather by alarmists, creating headlines but no understanding of the climate.
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A new Global Warming Policy Foundation report from retired physicist Ralph Alexander, Ph.D. (Oxford University) supports the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s conclusion there is limited scientific evidence linking human-caused climate change to increases in extreme weather, says H.Sterling Burnett.

Alexander’s conclusions are also confirmed by recent documents produced by Heartland Institute Senior Fellow and meteorologist Anthony Watts on the Climate at a Glance website.

Alexander’s paper begins by remarking, “The purported link between extreme weather and global warming has captured the public imagination and attention of the mainstream media far more than any of the other claims made by the narrative of human-caused climate change.”

This is odd because data and analyses from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the U.N. body that climate alarmists in academic, political, and media circles continually cite as the authoritative source of information on climate change, confirm that “if there is any trend at all in extreme weather, it’s downward rather than upward.

Our most extreme weather, be it heat wave, drought, flood, hurricane or tornado, occurred many years ago, long before the carbon dioxide level in the atmosphere began to climb at its present rate,” writes Alexander.

“Recent atmospheric heat waves in western Europe,” writes Alexander, “pale in comparison with the soaring temperatures of the 1930s, a period when three of the seven continents and 32 of the 50 US states set all-time high temperature records, which still stand today.”

Nor has the IPCC discerned or identified any long-term trend in drought patterns, either in the United States or globally.

And even though rainfall has modestly increased in recent years, there is no evidence floods are becoming more frequent or severe.

Many recent flood events can be traced almost entirely to land-use changes such as channelization, deforestation, the destruction of wetlands, and the building of dams, Alexander notes.

Continued here.

Beast from the East blamed for Scotland missing climate change target

Closed due to snow
Image credit: BBC

You couldn’t make this stuff up. An artificial so-called climate target was defeated by one of nature’s cold snaps. The mind boggles at the idiotic pretentiousness of their climate obsession, helpless in the face of weather.
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The Beast from the East, which shut down much of the country in 2018, has been blamed for Scotland missing a climate target, says The Scotsman.

Unseasonably cold temperatures and heavy snowfall brought transport to a halt and closed schools in late February and early March two years ago.

High snow levels indicate very weak Nordic power prices this summer

Was it like this?

This story may not make headline news, so let’s give it an airing here. Nordic countries are well used to winter snow, so when they talk of a ‘snow-rich’ winter they mean exactly that.
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Electricity prices in the Nordic countries are likely to be unusually low this summer amid high inflows to hydropower plants, caused by a combination of a very snow-rich winter and late snowmelt, says Phys.org.

Electricity prices in the Nordic countries are likely to be unusually low this summer amid high inflows to hydropower plants, caused by a combination of a very snow-rich winter and late snowmelt.

“May was cooler than normal in Scandinavia and June has also started on the cool side. This has led to snowpack melting a bit later than it usually does,” Nathalie Schaller, a senior researcher at CICERO Center for International Climate Research, said during a webinar organised on 8 June as part of the S2S4E project.

BBC: Can computers solve UK weird weather puzzle?

Credit: BBC

What weird weather puzzle? Static high or low pressure systems (blocking patterns) are not that uncommon or unusual, but are likely to be pounced on by headline-seeking climate alarmists. And statistics for calendar months (‘wettest February’) are to some extent just arbitrary period selection. Better theories might be at least as useful as fancier computers.
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A top climate scientist has called for more investment in climate computing to explain the UK’s recent topsy turvy weather, reports BBC News.

Prof Tim Palmer from Oxford University said there were still too many unknowns in climate forecasting.

And in the month the SpaceX launch grabbed headlines, he said just one of the firm’s billions could transform climate modelling.

Calls to add ‘climate change’ to Australian death certificates

Tasmanian bush fire, 2013 [image credit: Chuq @ Wikipedia]

Climate alarmists yet again strain credulity to the limit, no doubt hoping to stir up guilt in the populace about energy use.
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Heat-related deaths have been “substantially underreported” on Australia’s national records, according to experts from The Australian National University (ANU).  

Researchers say the amount of deaths attributed to excessive natural heat is at least 50 times more than recorded on death certificates.  

Published in The Lancet Planetary Health, figures show over the past 11 years 340 deaths in Australia were recorded as being due to excessive heat but statistical analysis found 36,765 deaths could have been attributed to heat.

“Climate change is a killer, but we don’t acknowledge it on death certificates,” co-author Dr Arnagretta Hunter, from the ANU Medical School, said.

Patagonian dust streamers resemble those on Mars

Image credit: NASA-ISS

Dust storms are common in the region, and sometimes bear resemblance to weather events on Mars, according to NASA.
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A surging dust storm and trailing dust cloud captured an astronaut’s attention as the International Space Station (ISS) was passing over South America, says NASA’s Earth Observatory.

Dust storms are common in Patagonia and familiar for people in Comodoro Rivadavia, a coastal city in southern Argentina.

The primary source of dust is Lago Colhué Huapí, a shallow lake adjacent to the much deeper Lago Musters.

Cold air rises—what that means for Earth’s climate

Tropical beach

Are these researchers proposing a kind of reverse greenhouse effect in the tropics?

Conventional knowledge has it that warm air rises while cold air sinks, says Phys.org.

But a study from the University of California, Davis, found that in the tropical atmosphere, cold air rises due to an overlooked effect—the lightness of water vapor.

This effect helps to stabilize tropical climates and buffer some of the impacts of a warming climate.

The study, published today in the journal Science Advances, is among the first to show the profound implications water vapor buoyancy has on Earth’s climate and energy balance.

Solar power plants get help from satellites to predict cloud cover

Image credit: MIT

At least they don’t need any help predicting hours of darkness.
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The output of solar energy systems is highly dependent on cloud cover, says Science Daily.

While weather forecasting can be used to predict the amount of sunlight reaching ground-based solar collectors, cloud cover is often characterized in simple terms, such as cloudy, partly cloudy or clear.

This does not provide accurate information for estimating the amount of sunlight available for solar power plants.

In this week’s Journal of Renewable and Sustainable Energy, from AIP Publishing, a new method is reported for estimating cloud optical properties using data from recently launched satellites.

Self-isolation proves a boon to rainfall project

OCR software isn’t up to the job apparently. Let’s hope they don’t resort to data ‘adjustments’ after all the public’s efforts. Rain is a popular topic in the UK.

Scientists have been amazed at the public’s response to help digitise the UK’s old rainfall records, reports BBC News.

Handwritten numbers on documents dating back 200 years are being transferred to a spreadsheet format so that computers can analyse past weather patterns.

The volunteers blitzed their way through rain gauge data from the 1950s, 40s and 30s in just four days.

Project leader Prof Ed Hawkins had suggested the work might be a good way for people to use self-isolation time.

“It’s been incredible. I thought we might get this far after three or four weeks, not three or four days,” he told BBC News.

England’s water resource muddle

Mixed messages ahead. Can anyone explain the apparent discrepancies?

The UK Department of Environment, Food & Rural Affairs has issued a warning: large areas of England will face significant risk of drought due to climate change, and water companies need to find billions of extra liters per day by 2050 to keep up, reports New Atlas.

But days earlier we had this from the Met Office Press Office:
Climate change to bring heavier rainfall events.

Flashback to 2009: Researchers Say Sun Cycle Alters Earth’s Climate

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

This seems worth another airing in the face of today’s insistent, but evidence-light, claims from climate obsessives that the world’s present and future weather is going to be largely determined by human activities.

If the energy from the sun varies by only 0.1 percent during the 11-year solar cycle, could such a small variation drive major changes in weather patterns on Earth? – asks Universe Today.

Yes, say researchers from the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) who used more than a century of weather observations and three powerful computer models in their study.

They found subtle connections between solar cycle, the stratosphere, and the tropical Pacific Ocean that work in sync to generate periodic weather patterns that affect much of the globe.

Scientists say this will help in predicting the intensity of certain climate phenomena, such as the Indian monsoon and tropical Pacific rainfall, years in advance.

Germany’s weather service starts ten-year forecast ‘to improve climate adaptation’

Credit: geologycafe.com [click on image to enlarge]

That’s the idea anyway. They expect warmer weather to lead to drier conditions upto 2025. Perhaps a bit odd on the face of it, as the steamy tropics have rainforests whereas icy Antarctica is the driest continent on Earth.
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A new decade-long weather forecast made by Germany’s Meteorological Service (DWD) is supposed to improve the country’s climate change adaptation capabilities, says Clean Energy Wire.

“Our new forecast for the next ten years fills the gap between existing climate forecasts for the next months and long-term climate projections until the end of the century,” said DWD climatology head Tobias Fuchs.

The forecast project, supported by Germany’s research ministry, could be used by policymakers, business leaders and others to adapt their investment decisions to climate change, he added.