Truss told to increase earthquake limits to kickstart fracking revolution

UK test drilling site for shale gas

Surely the time has to come to break the energy policy stranglehold of climate-obsessed ‘net zero’ propagandists. Everyone knows limits on drilling have been set far below earthquake level. Replacing at least some imports with local gas must make sense, if feasible.
– – –
Liz Truss is being urged to relax the limits on earthquakes caused by fracking as part of plans to kickstart an energy revolution, says The Telegraph.

The Prime Minister is already poised to end the moratorium on fracking within days in a bid to make Britain energy independent by 2040.

But companies say this alone will not be enough to unlock Britain’s potentially vast shale gas reserves. The Telegraph understands fracking businesses are lobbying for the limits on seismic activity to be substantially increased to help kickstart the industry.

How the tide turned on data centres in Europe

A computer-generated image of Apple’s first Irish data centre [credit: Apple]

Internet rationing ahead? If renewables were so great and so cheap the data centres could provide their own electricity.
– – –
Every time we make a call on Zoom, upload a document to the cloud or stream a video, our computers connect to vast warehouses filled with servers to store or access data, says TechXplore.

Not so long ago, European countries were falling over each other to welcome the firms that run these warehouses, known as data centers or bit barns.

Wide-eyed politicians trumpeted investments and dreamt of creating global tech hubs.

But then the dream went sour.

Earth Could Be Even More Habitable. We’d Just Need to Shift Jupiter’s Orbit

Jupiter [image credit: NASA]

Even less feasible than permanently changing Earth’s climate with tiny amounts of trace gases, but theorists have ideas to test.
– – –
We have exactly one world, in all the Universe, that we know for a fact to be hospitable to life: ours, says Science Alert.

So when we’re looking for habitable planets in other planetary systems, beyond our own corner of the galaxy, we often use Earth as the perfect template.

But a new study has revealed Earth isn’t as habitable as it could be. In fact, it could be even more livable, if Jupiter’s orbit shifted slightly.

Artificial ocean cooling to weaken hurricanes is futile, study finds

Image credit: sanibelrealestateguide.com

What a surprise, said no-one.
– – –
A new study found that even if we did have the infinite power to artificially cool enough of the oceans to weaken a hurricane, the benefits would be minimal, says Phys.org.

The study led by scientists at the University of Miami (UM) Rosenstiel School of Marine, Atmospheric and Earth Science showed that the energy alone that is needed to use intervention technology to weaken a hurricane before landfall makes it a highly inefficient solution to mitigate disasters.

“The main result from our study is that massive amounts of artificially cooled water would be needed for only a modest weakening in hurricane intensity before landfall,” said the study’s lead author James Hlywiak, a graduate of the UM Rosenstiel School.

Climate change tsar hauled over the coals after warning Liz Truss against lifting fracking ban amid energy crisis

Fracking: note the deep shaft

The battle of the crises – energy and climate. One real, one…not so much. Silence continues on the renewables intermittency question.
– – –
The Government’s climate change tsar was told he needs to ‘live in the real world’ after he warned Liz Truss against lifting the fracking moratorium despite the energy crisis, reports the Daily Mail.

Lord Deben said approving fracking would have no impact on energy prices – and urged her to focus on renewables instead.

The Prime Minister is set to end the ban on the gas extraction method today, after pledging to take action during the leadership campaign.

Faster in the Past: New seafloor images of West Antarctic Ice Sheet upend understanding of Thwaites Glacier retreat

Some like to call it the Doomsday Glacier. The research results are probably open to a variety of interpretations, in terms of predictions. But we’re told that whatever is being observed at present is by no means exceptional, making attempts at attribution of its ever-changing condition to human activity even more problematic. Volcanic activity is an obvious confounding factor here.
– – –
The Thwaites Glacier in West Antarctica — about the size of Florida — has been an elephant in the room for scientists trying to make global sea level rise predictions, says Science Daily.

This massive ice stream is already in a phase of fast retreat (a “collapse” when viewed on geological timescales) leading to widespread concern about exactly how much, or how fast, it may give up its ice to the ocean.

The potential impact of Thwaites’ retreat is spine-chilling: a total loss of the glacier and surrounding icy basins could raise sea level from three to 10 feet.

Chile rejects “green” constitution

Chilean lithium deposits [image credit: travelandleisure.com]

By a big majority, the people said no – that’s it. Ideology overload?
– – –
Chile rejected a new constitution on Sunday which, if accepted, would have significantly expanded environmental rights and recognised the urgency of climate action, says Climate Home News.

In a referendum, the South American nation rejected the proposed constitution by 62% to 38% in favour. Voting was mandatory.

As home to the world’s largest reserves of lithium, a key component of batteries for electric vehicles, Chile is of strategic importance in the global clean energy transition. This comes with social and environmental tradeoffs.

More droughts and flooding predicted as La Niña weather pattern goes into third consecutive winter

A media campaign to point the finger at the ‘greed of rich countries’ for local weather conditions is already underway in Pakistan. But NASA gave the game away after the last time this happened, in 2010: ‘The rainfall anomaly map published by NASA showed unusually intense monsoon rains attributed to La Niña’ – Wikipedia. Of course it’s now standard practice to try to blame humans in the more industrialised countries for any seriously bad weather.
– – –
More droughts and flooding are being predicted as the La Nina weather pattern goes into its third consecutive winter – something known as a “triple dip”, says Sky News.

The UN’s World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) predicts it will last until at least the end of the year.

That means it will have spanned three consecutive northern winters for the first time this century.

La Nina is the cooling of ocean surface temperatures coupled with winds and rainfall.

Norway’s future CO2 cemetery takes shape – but what’s the point?

Credit: klimatetochskogen.nu

An expensive exercise in futility. As noted below, ‘the scheme will be able to process 1.5 million tonnes of CO2 per year, then later between five and six million tonnes. But that is just a tiny fraction of annual carbon emissions across Europe.’ Even Greenpeace opposes it. It’s for show, not for any useful purpose.
– – –
On the shores of an island off Norway’s North Sea coast, engineers are building a burial ground for unwanted greenhouse gas, reports Phys.org.

The future terminal is to pump tonnes of liquefied carbon dioxide captured from the top of factory chimneys across Europe into cavities deep below the seabed.

The project in the western municipality of Oygarden aims to prevent the gas from entering the atmosphere and contributing to global warming.

Collapse of G20 climate talks in Bali : ‘nothing happened’

A lot of ‘carbon emissions’ to get there, followed by much fruitless arguing. Sounds shambolic.
– – –
Climate and energy ministers clashed over Ukraine, climate finance, methane, shipping, carbon levies and whether 1.5C or 2C should be the world’s warming limit, summarises Climate Home News.

Energy and climate ministers from some of the world’s largest economies have failed to agree on joint texts at G20 meetings in Bali, Indonesia.

With two months to the Cop27 summit, host Egypt has warned against “backtracking” on climate commitments.

Government’s green energy policy is a “national disaster” – Net Zero Watch

[image credit: beforeitsnews.com]

This has been the case since the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008 with minimal political debate, even without ‘perverse loopholes’ in contracts. Renewable energy is in effect a licence to print money.
– – –
London, 1 September: Net Zero Watch has condemned the Government’s green energy policies as “a national disaster.”

This follows the announcement that a major offshore windfarm will not activate an agreement to sell power at a much lower cost to the grid.

The Times has reported that the Hornsea 2 windfarm, which had a contract to sell power at £73 per megawatt hour, will instead sell in the open market, where prices have averaged £200 per megawatt hour this year, and reached £508 last week.

Net-Zero Is The Real Climate Catastrophe

.
.
Putin’s antics have led to at least a temporary reality check on the net-zero obsession in the EU, UK etc. Whether their energy policies are affected long-term remains to be seen.

PA Pundits - International

By Duggan Flanakin ~

Maybe Vladimir Putin SHOULD get the Nobel Peace Prize after all.

To be sure, Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine is an affront to humanity, given his targeting of civilians. Russia even fired upon medical and humanitarian aid convoys and is using a nuclear power plant as a shield for his military operations.

But Putin’s invasion may be saving Europe – and other nations – from their blind devotion to the “climate catastrophe” movement and the worldwide push to “Net Zero by 2050.” Even before Putin’s war disrupted European energy supplies vastly increased energy costs, Europeans were suffering from senseless “green” energy policies imposed in the name of “saving the planet.”

The radical Net Zero plan, crafted by the United Nations and endorsed by such entities as the World Economic Forum, would press nations to abdicate reliance on fossil fuels, nuclear energy, and even hydroelectric dams in…

View original post 1,031 more words

A Plague Of Green Elephants Is Stampeding Across Australia

Adelaide desalination plant [image credit: Acciona]

Monuments to green stupidity on the rampage.
– – –
Legend says that if you displeased the King of Siam, he would give you a white elephant, writes Viv Forbes (via Climate Change Dispatch).

These rare and protected elephants were incredibly expensive to keep.

So a “White Elephant” came to mean a possession that is useless, troublesome, expensive to maintain, and difficult to dispose of – like a Sacred Cow, but much bigger.

Today, the deluded rulers of the Western world are gifting us and future generations with plagues of Green Elephants – useless, expensive, protected green rubbish.

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?
– – –
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.

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”.
– – –
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.

Dutch record highest solar radiation levels since 1970s

Netherlands beach [image credit: dutchreview.com]

Dutch meteorologists expect ‘we will have more cloudy summer weather again’ sometime in the future. For now: more sun = more heat. Who knew?
– – –
The Netherlands this summer has had the highest amount of solar radiation recorded since 1976, the Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute (KMNI) reported.

The “sunny summer fits in with the trend of increasing solar radiation in the Netherlands since the 1990s,” the KMNI added.

The Dutch west coast currently receives 9% more sunshine than the country’s east though solar radiation has increased 3% in summer and 5% in spring, KMNI reported.

How governments and the cult of net zero wrecked the energy market – Telegraph

The headline says it all. Despite claiming ‘The original error was not with the science of climate change’ – well, we disagree there – the article charts the real course of the current energy fiasco quite well. Climate obsession has a lot to answer for.
– – –
Putin may be the proximate cause of this crisis, but the reason we were vulnerable was an intentional policy to crush fossil fuel investment, says The Telegraph.
. . .
And now? Well, now, as “big oil” might say: “We just walked in to find you here with that sad look upon your face.”

Europe needs gas. It is pleading for gas.

Instead of flying media to gas fields to court capital, the oil and gas men are being flown to the capitals of Europe and begged to invest.

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.
– – –
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.

Refreeze the Arctic, says former chief scientific advisor

Sea ice optional? [image credit: BBC]

Sir David King’s plan from last year, now revived: Send in the clouds. The general idea: ‘creating white cloud cover that will come over the Arctic Sea during the three months of the polar summer. They hope this would reflect sunlight away so that the growth of ice over the Arctic sea during the previous winter is retained through the summer.’ Sir David: “And if we could just repeat that every year for the coming 20 or 30 years, then we might manage to create the ice cover that is needed to protect the Arctic Sea.” And then he woke up?
– – –
The heatwaves will kick in even if countries stick to their current climate targets, but refreezing the Arctic could curb dangerous changes, former chief scientific advisor Sir David King says.
. . .
The record-breaking heatwave that scorched swathes of Europe in recent months will become an “average” summer as soon as 2035, even if countries stick to their current climate targets, new research suggests.

The Met Office’s Hadley Centre has forecast an average summer in central Europe will be more than 4°C hotter by 2100 than it was before humans started burning fossil fuels at scale, reports Sky News.

Researchers said they are confident in their analysis because they found a “very satisfactory” alignment between recorded average temperatures since 1850 and the figures that were predicted by computer models.

The Climate Crisis Advisory Group (CCAG), which commissioned the research, called the data an “urgent reminder” of the need for countries to go “well beyond” their climate plans, known as nationally determined contributions (NDCs), which together aim to limit global warming to ideally 1.5°C.

The analysis shows that “even if countries meet their commitments to reduce emissions they have made so far, the situation is still set to get worse, with weather in Europe predicted to become even more extreme than seen this summer,” said former government chief scientific advisor and CCAG chair Sir David King.

Almost two-thirds of Europe and much of England is currently enduring a drought that is hitting food and power production, driven in part by hot weather. The extreme heat in July broke records in England, Scotland and France.

“This data doesn’t fully account for the instability of the Arctic, which we now know is a global tipping point that could have major cascading consequences for the entire planet,” Sir David warned.

He said it was “abundantly clear” that countries need to not only meet their NDCs, but consider increasing them.
. . .
The CCAG argues mitigative action must include three things: reducing emissions, removing existing emissions in vast quantities and repairing “broken parts of the climate system, starting with the Arctic”.

It reiterated its calls from last year to refreeze the Arctic, which is warming much faster than the rest of the world, exacerbating other extreme weather events around the globe.

“It is only through the mitigative measures of Reduce, Remove and Repair, pursued with equal vigour and urgency, that we can hope to move away from the path to disaster we’re currently set on and achieve a manageable future for humanity,” Sir David added.

Full report here.

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.
– – –
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.