Russell Cook: BBC ( sort of … ) Corrects Radio 4’s “How They Made Us Doubt Everything”

Guest post by Russell Cook, who for a long time has been setting the record straight on the lies propagated by climate alarmists about the oil and gas industry. Check out his website at http://gelbspanfiles.com/

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And in doing so, they inadvertently dug a deeper hole for themselves.

The longer backstory to this situation is in my July 31, 2020 “BBC Radio 4 vs Rush Limbaugh” blog post, and in my August 5 followup, concerning unsupportable claims in a BBC podcast report about Limbaugh’s alleged involvement with a fossil fuel industry-orchestrated disinformation campaign that supposedly targeted a specific ethnic group, and Limbaugh’s outrage over the false accusation and the silliness of the ‘targeted people’ line.

Reducing the root problem to one paragraph: back in the late 1990s, the otherwise long-forgotten environmentalist group Ozone Action gained fame for its ‘bombshell report’ about a so-called leaked memo set which were alleged guidelines for an industry conspiracy to “reposition global warming as theory rather than fact” through an informational campaign targeting “older, less-educated males” and “younger, lower-income women.” Kert Davies, formerly at Ozone Action and Greenpeace who’s currently heading Climate Investigations Center / Climate Files, has been telling and retelling the narrative of how that memo set proves the fossil fuel industry ran disinformation campaigns. He did so in an obscure podcast back in late 2018, and he did so again in this two month-old BBC podcast report.

Fuel cell-electric double-decker bus debuts in Aberdeen: The start of the ‘hydrogen economy’?

Fuel cell bus from Wrightbus

The obvious problem for the imagined ‘hydrogen economy’ is that there isn’t any natural source of hydrogen gas. The viability of using electricity generated only from renewables to convert water into industrial-scale hydrogen supplies is questionable, to put it mildly. Brace for the usual ‘green jobs’ claims having a tendency to be wildly over-optimistic.
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The first zero-emission hydrogen fuel cell-electric double-decker bus has arrived in Aberdeen, reports Route One.

Aberdeen City Council (ACC) says the delivery, part of an £8.3m project funded by ACC, the Scottish Government and the European Union Joint Initiative for Hydrogen Vehicles across Europe (JIVE) project, underlines the city’s role as the ‘energy capital of Europe’ and its commitment to the transition of green energy in a net zero vision.

Hydrogen offers greater range and faster refuelling while maintaining the efficiency of battery-electric equivalents, the council says.

At solar minimum, the largest ozone hole over Antarctica in years

Credit: earthhow.com

As Accuweather explains here, research has shown that a combination of conditions at solar minimum can create this effect.
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The European Union’s Earth observation program said Tuesday that the ozone hole over Antarctica has swelled to its largest size and deepest level in years, reports Phys.org.

Experts at the Copernicus Atmospheric Monitoring Service said a strong, stable and cold polar vortex has driven the expansion, and called for greater international efforts to ensure countries abide by an international accord to phase out use of ozone-depleting chemicals.

Vincent-Henri Peuch, who heads the service, said in a statement that the ozone hole was “definitely” among the largest in the last 15 years.

New 3-D model could explain the formation of a hexagon storm on Saturn

Another round of the enduring hexagon mystery.
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With its dazzling system of icy rings, Saturn has been a subject of fascination since ancient times, says Phys.org.

Even now the sixth planet from the sun holds many mysteries, partly because its distance away makes direct observation difficult and partly because this gas giant (which is multiple times the size of our planet) has a composition and atmosphere, mostly hydrogen and helium, so unlike that of Earth.

Learning more about it could yield some insights into the creation of the solar system itself.

One of Saturn’s mysteries involves the massive storm in the shape of a hexagon at its north pole.

UK will be ‘the world leader’ in offshore wind – forgetting wind power is not continuous

Time for another airing of the usual tedious waffle about wind powering x number of homes, ignoring its chronic intermittency and tendency to almost disappear for hours, or even days, at a time. The greater the dependency on it, the greater the potential disruption to electricity supply. Fantasies of ‘slowing climate change’ are just that: fantasies.
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Boris Johnson will promise to “build back greener” in his conference speech on Tuesday, announcing new investment in offshore wind energy, reports BBC News.

The PM will pledge £160m to upgrade ports and factories for building turbines, setting a target for wind to produce enough electricity to power the equivalent of every UK home by 2030.

The plan aims to create 2,000 jobs in construction and support 60,000 more.

He will say the UK is to become “the world leader in clean wind energy”.

Dust dampens albedo effect, spurs snowmelt in the heights of the Himalayas

Himalayan region

The researchers say “It’s likely that these results translate to other high mountain chains”. Above 4,500 metres dust is found to be ahead of other forms of pollution.
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Dust blowing onto high mountains in the western Himalayas is a bigger factor than previously thought in hastening the melting of snow there, researchers show in a study published Oct. 5 in Nature Climate Change.

That’s because dust—lots of it in the Himalayas—absorbs sunlight, heating the snow that surrounds it, reports Phys.org.

“It turns out that dust blowing hundreds of miles from parts of Africa and Asia and landing at very high elevations has a broad impact on the snow cycle in a region that is home to one of the largest masses of snow and ice on Earth,” said Yun Qian, atmospheric scientist at the U.S. Department of Energy’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory.

Ecologist journal: The unsustainability of the electric car

The only viable option for carbophobes is significant degrowth (their term) according to this article. With present delusional plans to control global warming the numbers just don’t add up for ‘greenhouse gas’ obsessives, so even greater futile sacrifices are demanded.
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Shifting to electric vehicles while maintaining current travelling habits will not deliver emissions reductions required by the European Green Deal and Paris Agreement.

The European Green Deal sets ambitious targets for decarbonising the European economy.

This includes a European Commission proposal to reduce greenhouse gas emissions by at least 55 percent by 2030, with the European Parliament’s Environment Committee demanding a more ambitious 60 percent cut.

The EGD also calls for the EU to become carbon-neutral by 2050.

Ramifications Of California Governor Newsom’s Ban On Gas-Powered Vehicles

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California dreaming about the climate will run out of road in many ways. Whether it’s electricity supply, voter resistance or something else first, remains to be seen.

PA Pundits - International

By Ronald Stein ~

Before sky diving, you need to plan ahead by having a parachute before you jump. California Governor Newsom’s recent suicidal jump onto the EV train has a minimum of eight (8) lack-of-a-plan ramifications from his recent Executive order to ban the sale of gas-powered vehicles by 2035 that will be devastating to the state’s economy and environment:

1. Vehicle ownership: With 45 percent of the California population – that’s a whopping 18 of the 40 million residents of the state – being Hispanic and African American – having average incomes of less than half of present EV owners, the Governor is incentivizing those least likely being able to afford a new car to continuously re-register their existing vehicles. Additionally, California has the highest homeless population, and the fifth largest percentage of homeless (behind D.C., New York, and Hawaii, and Oregon, and has the second highest poverty rate.

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Hydrogen train runs on UK railway for first time

HydroFLEX tester train [image credit: BBC]

The government minister is talking up ‘the UK’s hydrogen ambitions’ here. Another potentially massive drain on the increasingly threadbare electricity grid system beckons. How much more pseudo-green pie can these deluded carbophobes lob into the sky?
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Supported by a £750,000 grant from the Department for Transport (DfT), the trial of the HydroFLEX train took place in Warwickshire, reports New Civil Engineer.

It follows almost two years’ development work and more than £1M of investment by both Porterbrook and the University of Birmingham. Unlike diesel trains, hydrogen-powered trains do not emit harmful gases, instead using hydrogen and oxygen to produce electricity, water and heat.

New coal mine in west Cumbria given green light

An artist’s impression of Woodhouse Colliery (Credit: West Cumbria Mining)

The usual tedious complaints from climate miserablists ignore the fact that the UK already imports coal from several countries, and steel-making depends on it.
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Cumbria County Council has approved an application to create a new coal mine off the county’s coast, reports ITV News.

Members of the authority’s Development, Control and Regulation Committee considered a revised application from developers West Cumbria Mining today.

Of the councillors in attendance 12 voted in favour of the application, three against and there were two abstentions.

The project, planned for a site near Whitehaven and will be the UK’s first deep coal mine in 30 years.

Solar orbiter’s first science data shows the sun at its quietest

Quiet sun [image credit: NASA]

They picked an interesting time to study the Sun, as it starts to emerge from an unusually deep and long-lasting solar minimum. What effect this might have on Earth’s weather systems of course remains to be seen, but could be hard to quantify. The researchers have a lot of data to work through, and are hoping for ‘unprecedented insights into the sun’.
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Three of the Solar Orbiter spacecraft’s instruments, including Imperial’s magnetometer, have released their first data, reports Phys.org.

The European Space Agency’s Solar Orbiter spacecraft launched in February 2020 on its mission to study the sun and it began collecting science data in June.

Now, three of its ten instruments have released their first tranche of data, revealing the state of the sun in a ‘quiet’ phase.

The sun is known to follow an 11-year cycle of sunspot activity and is currently almost completely free of sunspots.

EPA Warns California: Ban On Gas-Powered Cars Possibly Illegal

Los Angeles, CA

A spot of ‘see you in court’ sabre-rattling seems to be going on here. At some point over-zealous climate ideology will get exposed, as power cuts get ever more unavoidable. California’s rulers want to lead the charge into that elephant trap, although they would put it differently.

H/T Climate Change Dispatch.
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Environmental Protection Agency Administrator Andrew Wheeler on Monday warned in a letter sent to California Gov. Gavin Newsom (D) that his executive order banning gas-powered vehicles may be unlawful, Reuters reports.

Wheeler wrote that Newsom’s plan “raises serious questions regarding its legality and practicality” and argued that it may cause further issues problems plaguing the state’s electrical grid.

“California’s record of rolling blackouts – unprecedented in size and scope – coupled with recent requests to neighboring states for power begs the question of how you expect to run an electric car fleet that will come with significant increases in electricity demand when you can’t even keep the lights on today,” the Trump official stated.

Newsom has yet to reply to the EPA.

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

New study shows converting to electric vehicles alone won’t meet climate targets

Teslas in Norway [image credit: Norsk Elbilforening (Norwegian Electric Vehicle Association)]

Delete ‘alone’. The study is essentially redundant, as a reduction from 0.04% of carbon dioxide’s very small share of the atmosphere won’t do anything noticeable to the climate anyway. However it does highlight some difficulties with the current policies pretending to ‘tackle the climate crisis’, such as the massive increase in electricity generation needed to power hundreds of millions of electric vehicles. Closing down all thermal power plants is not compatible with such a policy, as the researchers admit, but climate obsessives may not want to face up to that.
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Today there are more than 7 million electric vehicles (EVs) in operation around the world, compared with only about 20,000 a decade ago, says Phys.org.

It’s a massive change—but according to a group of University of Toronto Engineering researchers, it won’t be nearly enough to address the global climate crisis.

“A lot of people think that a large-scale shift to EVs will mostly solve our climate problems in the passenger vehicle sector” says Alexandre Milovanoff, lead author of a new paper published today in Nature Climate Change.

“I think a better way to look at it is this: EVs are necessary, but on their own, they are not sufficient.”

Nuclear power: Suffolk’s Sizewell C is too expensive says ex-energy minister Ed Davey

As someone until last month involved with a renewables company, he would say that, wouldn’t he? The green jobs claim may also be over-optimistic, if Scotland’s experience is anything to go by.
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Ed Davey, who approved a nuclear plant in 2013, says the “economic case” is no longer there, reports BBC News.

Instead the new Liberal Democrat leader argues the government should invest more in renewable energy to help boost the economy.

“The economic case for nuclear power is not there any more,” said Mr Davey.

Energy firm EDF, which is behind the £20bn proposals, said the plant on the Suffolk coast would deliver low-carbon electricity.

Film ‘Climate Hustle 2’ Targets Hollywood’s Green Hypocrisy, Double Standards

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How much longer will the climate alarm circus get away with its dodgy propaganda and assertions?

PA Pundits - International

By Kevin Mooney ~

Politicians, media figures, and Hollywood elites who maintain lavish lifestyles while advocating restrictions on carbon dioxide emissions are on full display in a new documentary.

In a scene from the documentary “Climate Hustle 2,” Marc Morano, left, interviews Alex Epstein, author of “The Moral Case for Fossil Fuels,” on a beach in Southern California. (Photo courtesy of CFACT)

“Climate Hustle 2: Rise of the Climate Monarchy” is a sequel to the 2016 documentary film “Climate Hustle,” which questioned the premise of theories linking human activity with potentially catastrophic climate change.

“Climate Hustle 2” is not in theaters because of the COVID-19 pandemic, but was scheduled to be streamed as of  8 p.m. Thursday and available for replay through Sunday.

The new film builds on the findings of the first one while taking a deeper dive into motivations behind climate change initiatives such as the

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The strange storms on Jupiter

Cyclones in Jupiter’s atmosphere [image credit: NASA]

At the south pole of Jupiter lurks a striking sight—even for a gas giant planet covered in colorful bands that sports a red spot larger than the Earth, says Phys.org.

Down near the south pole of the planet, mostly hidden from the prying eyes of humans, is a collection of swirling storms arranged in an unusually geometric pattern.

Since they were first spotted by NASA’s Juno space probe in 2019, the storms have presented something of a mystery to scientists.

The storms are analogous to hurricanes on Earth. However, on our planet, hurricanes do not gather themselves at the poles and twirl around each other in the shape of a pentagon or hexagon, as do Jupiter’s curious storms.

Global warming hiatus was real, Chinese study finds

Snow-covered UK, January 2010 [image credit: NASA]

The inconvenient ‘pause’ following the strong El Niño of 1997-98 comes back to life in this study. Attempts by climate alarmists to bury it have failed.
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A new analysis of global air temperature by researchers from Tongji University in Shanghai has cast light on the much debated recent hiatus in global temperature, says Dr David Whitehouse @ The GWPF.

Writing in the Journal of Earth Science the Chinese scientists say there was a rapid rise in global mean surface air temperature after the late 1970s but that this stalled and there was a relative stagnation and even slight cooling that lasted for about 15 years (1998–2012).

They add that even though the slowdown was acknowledged by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Fifth Assessment Report (IPCC AR5) and termed as a hiatus (IPCC, 2013) there was a debate in the scientific community about whether there was a hiatus in global warming or not.

The researchers believe that the debate about the global warming hiatus poses a substantial challenge to our understanding of the global climate response to anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions and natural variability.

UK can be ‘Saudi Arabia of wind power’ – PM

Saudi Arabia exports oil. Who does he plan to export electricity to – Ireland perhaps? The green lobby obviously wrote his script, but nobody told him ‘carbon’ theories of climate don’t cut the mustard. And how does his plan work if Scotland leaves the UK? Something’s blustery other than the weather.
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Prime Minister Boris Johnson says he wants to make a “big bet” on renewables, turning the UK into the “Saudi Arabia” of wind power, reports BBC News.

Speaking via video link to a climate roundtable discussion at the UN in New York, Mr Johnson said the country held “extraordinary potential for wind”.

He said the UK should embrace a range of new technologies to achieve its goal of net zero emissions by 2050.

Nicola Scafetta: Jupiter’s orbital eccentricity may drive ~60yr and millennial climate cycles.

Figure 3. The 60‐year eccentricity function (blue) of Jupiter (see Figure 2) against: (a) the HadCRUT global surface temperature record (Morice et al., 2012) detrended of its quadratic polynomial fit f(t) ¼ a(t − 1850)2 + b (cf. Scafetta, 2010, 2016) (correlation coefficient r^2 = 0:5, p < 0.01); (b) the 5‐year running average of the Indian summer monsoon rainfall from 1813 to 1998 (Agnihotri & Dutta, 2003) (correlation coefficient r^2 = 0:5, p < 0.01)

 Plain Language Summary 

The physical origin of the modulation of the cloud system and of many of the Earth’s climate oscillations from the decadal to the millennial timescales is still unclear, despite its importance in climate science. One of the most prominent oscillations has a period of about 60 years and is found in a number of geophysical records such as temperature reconstructions, aurora sights, Indian rainfalls, ocean climatic records, and in many others. These oscillations might emerge from the internal variability of the climate system, but increasing evidence also points toward a solar or astronomical origin.