UK RENEWABLE ENERGY IN DECLINE

This article explains how the loss of subsidies is threatening the viability of projects, Investment in UK renewables fell 56 per cent last year, to $10.3bn from £23.4bn in 2016. 

GREENLAND ICE SHEET AFFECTED BY GEOTHERMAL HOTSPOT

There has been strong disagreement among some researchers if the Greenland Ice Sheet is losing mass due to carbon dioxide-caused global warming or due to other means. Researchers from the Artic Research Centre of Aarhus University in Denmark and the Greenland Institute of Natural Resources in Nuuk, Greenland, have discovered a large geothermal “hot spot” area in Northeast Greenland. "’North-East Greenland has several hot springs where the water becomes up to 60 degrees warm and, like Iceland, the area has abundant underground geothermal activity,’ explains Professor Soren Rysgaard, who headed the investigations.”

This discovery creates further issues with climate models describing accelerating sea level rise, such as those with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and its followers with NOAA and NASA. The IPCC Fifth Assessment Report (AR-5) describes a strong relationship between carbon dioxide (CO2) and ice melt, with greater sea level rise based on increased atmospheric CO2.

TRUMP PUTS TAX ON SOLAR IMPORTS

This piece looks at the range of measures taken by the President to put these renewables on a more even footing with conventional forms of energy.

AT LAST FRACKING GOES AHEAD IN THE UK

This article gives the details. Horizontal drilling is already underway and fracking will begin after that. Who knows we soo have our own successful UK shale industry earning billions of pounds for the country and giving us security of supply at lower prices. And yet I am sure there are a small minority of green activists who are very unhappy. Well I hope they don't take advantage of it, or else they are hypocrites.

CHINA'S EMISSIONS UP BY 4% LAST YEAR

This article gives the details. So much for the Chinese leading the way on renewables. The truth was bound to come out. It makes our efforts seem pretty hopeless by comparison.

BBC PROPAGANDISING FOR GW AGAIN

This complaint letter from the GWPF explains how the BBC has yet again made false claims on air to exaggerate the degree of warming. The letter asks for the false claim to be retracted on air, but we will have to see if they do it. They try to ignore criticism and hope it will go away. 

WHAT LED TO THE CLIMATE CHANGE HYSTERIA?

Here is an excellent summary of a new book on the origins of the climate scare. It begins with a look at other scientific scares such as fears about pesticides, like DDT. Next there was the ozone problem. Of course both these issues are of concern and could have been really serious, but equally they may in fact have been greatly exaggerated, which is what the writer of the book implies.

What is clear is that the public can quite easily be led to believe in these scares using the backing of science, however tenuous. The climate scare is much more about belief than about science.  

ARE SEA SURFACE TEMPERATURES DRIVING THE CLIMATE?

This article suggests they are. There a number of interesting graphs in the article that show clearly the rise in seas surface temperatures (SST's) of about 0.8 degrees C over the past century. This is in agreement with the global temperature data. It looks as though SST's are now coming down, so will this lead to a drop in global temperatures?

MORE PROPAGANDA TO PROP UP THE FLAGGING CLIMATE CHANGE HYPOTHESIS

This post shows what is going on. Alarmists are desperate to keep the cash cow rolling along and so are resorting to more and more ways of keeping the public concerned.

DONALD TRUMP PUTS THE CLIMATE INTO PERSPECTIVE AS A SECURITY RISK

Francis Menton: U.S. Regains The Ability To Identify Real National Security Threats
Manhattan Contrarian, 19 December 2017

If the U.S. had shut down fracking over concerns about climate change it would have been dependent on OPEC and Russia like Europe and the UK are now.

Maybe Donald Trump is just not your type of guy, and certainly not the guy you would want to be President; but keep in mind who was the alternative.  Before these things fade into the memory hole, bring back to mind a few of the wildly incompetent policies of the previous administration.  Looking around today for a candidate as the policy of the previous administration that could be the very most wildly incompetent of all, with a very real potential to put the security of the country in serious jeopardy, my leading contender is the decision to declare “climate change” to be a top-priority national security risk.

Do you remember Obama doing that?  It wasn’t that long ago.  In his second inaugural address in January 2013, Obama declared that “no challenge – no challenge – poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change.”  Then, over the next couple of years, he ramped up the claimed “challenge” of climate change from mere “greatest threat to future generations” to an “immediate threat to national security.”  Think about that for a minute — how would it even work?  Suppose the temperature goes up a few degrees over the next few decades.  Does it mean that we don’t have an army any more?  Does it mean that our weapons won’t work?  

Nevertheless, in a National Security Strategy document in February 2015, the Obama administration declared climate change to be “an urgent and growing threat to our national security,”  Then in May 2015, Obama gave a commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy in Connecticut.  Excerpt:

I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country.  And so we need to act, and we need to act now.

Supposedly, something like sea level, or maybe wildfires, or maybe floods — all completely speculative — would somehow make the country harder to defend.  Meanwhile, when Obama talked about “acting now,” what he meant was restricting production fossil fuels in the United States.  What did he think was the fuel that powers the planes and ships and missiles, let alone powering the economy that provides all the logistical support to keep the military functioning?  

As far as I could tell, he had no idea.  In the name of “national security” he would hobble and ultimately shut down our own oil and coal and gas industries, leaving us to go begging for the necessary fuel to — where?  OPEC?  Russia?  Venezuela?  You really need to be delusional not to be able to distinguish the real national security threat here from the imaginary one.

As you probably know, in a new National Security Strategy document released yesterdayPresident Trump reversed this ridiculous policy of President Obama.  The new document does not contain any section explicitly dealing with “climate,” but it does have a section titled “Embrace Energy Dominance.”  Key quote:

Access to domestic sources of clean, affordable, and reliable energy underpins a prosperous, secure, and powerful America for decades to come.  Unleashing these abundant energy resources—coal, natural gas, petroleum, renewables, and nuclear—stimulates the economy and builds a foundation for future growth. Our Nation must take advantage of our wealth in domestic resources and energy efficiency to promote competitiveness across our industries. . . .  

Climate policies will continue to shape the global energy system. U.S. leadership is indispensable to countering an anti-growth energy agenda that is detrimental to U.S. economic and energy secu- rity interests. Given future global energy demand, much of the developing world will require fossil fuels, as well as other forms of energy, to power their economies and lift their people out of poverty.  The United States will continue to advance an approach that balances energy security, economic development, and environmental protection.

Bullet dodged, at least for the moment.

Now, perhaps on reading this, you remain skeptical that hobbling U.S. fossil fuel energy production could jeopardize national security by making the U.S. dependent on the likes of OPEC or Russia for fuel needed to run the military or the economy.  If so, I would urge you to pay attention to what has just been occurring in the UK.  The UK is thought to have substantial natural gas-bearing shale formations (full extent unknown due to lack of exploration) that could be tapped to supply fuel for the country.  However, during the whole time of the shale gas revolution in the United States, the process of horizontal drilling and “fracking” for gas has been essentially shut down by regulators over concerns of environmentalists.  The first exploratory well after the moratorium finally got going just this August.  From the Financial Times, August 17:

Drilling has started on the first UK shale well for six years even as debate intensifies among geologists over how much gas is available for fracking. Cuadrilla, the company leading the push to bring US-style shale gas production to the UK, said on Thursday it had begun drilling a vertical well expected to reach 3.5km beneath its site near Blackpool, Lancashire. . . .   

Fracking has been on hold in the UK since 2011 when two small earth tremors were blamed on exploratory operations by Cuadrilla at another site near Blackpool. Cuadrilla was given the go-ahead by the government last year to resume drilling, reflecting ministers’ hopes of replicating the shale revolution that has cut US gas prices and bolstered American energy security.

Lacking a home-grown, land-based gas supply from fracking, the UK has been relying on gas from the aging North Sea fields, as well as gas that comes from the Middle East and also Norway via pipelines across Europe.  Both of those sources then suddenly experienced supply disruptions in the past couple of weeks.  From the Telegraph, December 13:
Around 40pc of the UK’s domestic [natural gas] supplies have been wiped out until the new year due to the emergency shutdown of the North Sea’s Forties pipeline, operated by Ineos. Supply from Europe has also been constrained by the explosion at a hub in Austria and technical problems in the Norwegian North Sea.    

Time to crank up the vast reserves of solar panels?  No, dummy, those don’t work in the winter.  Wind turbines also have zero ability to step up in an emergency.

NEW STUDY SHOWS CLIMATE LESS SENSITIVE TO CO2 THAN MODELS SAY

The Climate-Change Doomsday Just Got Cancelled
Editorial, Investor's Business Daily, 19 January 2018

A new study published in the prestigious journal Nature finds that all those global warming doomsday scenarios aren’t credible. Not that you would ever know based on how little coverage this study is getting.

The study, published on Thursday, finds that if CO2 in the atmosphere doubled, global temperatures would climb at most by 3.4 degrees Celsius. That’s far below what the UN has been saying for decades, namely that temperatures would rise as much as 4.5 degrees, and possibly up to 6 degrees.

Basically, the scientists involved in the Nature study found that the planet is less sensitive to changes in CO2 levels than had been previously believed. That means projected temperature increases are too high.

Of course this is just one study, but it supports the contention climate skeptics have been making for years — that the computer models used to predict future warming were exaggerating the impact of CO2, evidenced in part by the fact that the planet hasn’t been warming as much as those models say it should.

Why is this important? Because all those horror stories told over the past decades are based on predictions of  temperature increases that are much higher than 3.4 degrees.

A 2008 National Geographic series, to cite just one example, contended that scientists are warning that the global average temperature could increase by as much as 6 degrees Celsius over the next century, “which would cause our world to change radically.” Oceans, it said, would become marine wastelands, deserts would expand, catastrophic events would be more common.

The Obama administration’s EPA put out a report in 2015 claiming that climate change would triple the number of extremely hot days in the U.S. by 2100, increase air and water pollution, cause $5 trillion in damages for coastal property, and result in tens of thousands of premature deaths.

The EPA assumed a global temperature increase of 5 degrees.

The Nature study blows a hole in these and other doomsday scenarios that have been peddled for decades by everyone from Al Gore to Prince Charles.

In other words, it’s big news.

And don’t be surprised if scientists end up revising peak warming down even further. That’s been the trend up until now, after all. Back in 1977, the National Academy of Sciences said temperatures would shoot up 6 degrees C by 2050 because of CO2 emissions. In 1985, James Hansen claimed that doubling CO2 levels would boost temperatures up to 5 degrees, and other computer models at the time put the upper bound at 5.5 degrees.

As it happens, though, on the same day the Nature study was published, NASA released its latest report on global temperatures, declaring that 2017 was the second hottest year on record, with 2016 the hottest.

Guess which story made front page news?

The New York Times put the NASA story on its main webpage, and ignored the Nature study entirely.

NEW REPORT SAYS BAN ON FOSSIL FUELS WILL DEVASTATE THE POOR

This report says that a ban on new fossil-fuelled power stations will be devastating for human health in developing nations. "A reliable electricity grid can only come from fossil fuels. Clean air depends on centralised power generation in large power stations.”

BURNING BIO MASS IS A KILLER

This article gives the details. The government is so fixated on reducing CO2 emissions that it overlooks the real pollution from wood-burning that is actually making people ill and killing them.

NEW YORK LAW SUIT AGAINST BIG OIL IS RIDDLED WITH ERRORS SAYS EXPERT

New York City is suing  number of oil companies for compensation for damage which they allege was caused by global warming. They claim the oil companies knew that burning fossil fuels was harmful and that they tried to suppress the "truth" by paying for "false" scientific evidence to be made public. This is surely the ultimate conspiracy theory. Read the details here.

BIRTH OF BRITAIN

This is a three part series documentary presented by Tony Robinson. The links to each part are on this blog's right hand side list, under "links". The first part deals with volcanoes and moving tectonic plates, explaining how Britain was formed. In part two it shows the effect of ice ages on the landscape with the effect of glaciers. Part three looks at minerals, in particular gold. All in all this is very well worth watching.

NEW STUDY CLAIMS ACCURATE OCEAN TEMPERATURES FROM NOBLE GAS MEASUREMENTS

This article explains how a new method of reconstructing past temperatures has shown that the oceans have remained remarkably stable, only changing by 0.1 degrees C over the past 50 years. More on this here at WUWT.

TRUMP REBUFFED BY MACRON IN CLIMATE RENEGOTIATION SUGGESTION

This article alludes to recent comments from President Trump that he would be willing to re-negotiate the Paris Agreement on climate change. President Macron says this is a non-starter, but I suspect that Trump knows this and so it is really an empty suggestion. Without USA money I suspect the whole thing is going nowhere. Most people now agree that even if implemented in full the Paris Agreement would do nothing to change the climate.

IS SEA LEVEL RISE BEING MASKED BY DEFORMATION OF THE OCEAN BOTTOM?

This piece looks at the research that appears to support the headline. If true then it seems to mitigate one of the problems that was of concern. It is quite plausible that the weight of water could deform the bottom of the ocean, we know that the weight of ice-sheets on land can depress it down, hence Scotland rebounding upwards since the ice sheets melted some 12,000 years ago.

NOW THE USA HAS STOPPED FUNDING THE IPCC, WILL IT HAVE A ROLE IN THE REPORTS?

This article discusses this question. Who will the US authors be? Given the Trump Administration’s avowed skepticism of climate alarmism, will there be a significant number of skeptical scientists? Or will there be a repeat of the recent Bonn Climate Summit fiasco, when the US team was composed entirely of Obama retreads?

CLIMATE CHANGE PROPAGANDA STEPS UP A GEAR

This piece explains what is going on.  When the data is not going their way they ramp up the propaganda. Let's make no bones about it, this is not about science it is a propaganda war. But the public is caught in the cross-fire not knowing what to believe.

BBC IN NEW BLATANT CLIMATE CHANGE SCARE

This article explains the way the BBC told viewers  that reindeer populations across Northern Russia were “in steep decline because of climate change”. The BBC have now admitted that this claim was false. So why did our state broadcaster make this claim in the first place?

YES, WE ARE GOING BACK TO AN ICE AGE EVENTUALLY - BUT WE CAN SURVIVE IT

That is the message from this article.  It is inevitable that there will be another return to ice age conditions. All of human civilisation happened in an interglacial period, with a relatively stable climate, plentiful rainfall and high enough levels of carbon dioxide to allow the vigorous growth of plants.

GERMAN POLITICIANS AGREE TO SCRAP 2020 CLIMATE TARGET

This article explains the details. Finally some reality is beginning to dawn on European politicians in the face of rising energy costs and increasing volatility in output.

CLIMATE CHANGE - A PERSPECTIVE FROM THE PAST

This video gives a account of our climate in the recent geological past, in the past 15000 years which shows the enormous changes that have occurred. It features a geologist called Randall Carlson who has some very interesting new theories about the reason why the last ice age came to such an abrupt end.

USA COLD SNAP RAISES QUESTIONS OVER ENERGY POLICY

Here's an article which looks at the effect of some state energy policies on the cost to consumers as the recent cold weather demonstrates what life could be like if a predicted Little Ice Age were to return. The weather is far less predictable than climate models make out.

MORE SCARE STORIES TO KEEP US ON MESSAGE WITH GW

This piece looks at the latest scaremongering about increased desert areas if temperatures rise by 2 degrees C. Again Paul Homewood does an excellent rebuttal.

HOORAY FOR THE AUSSIES - THEY'RE SAVING THE PLANET

This article explains the great news that the Australians have exceeded their climate targets, at great personal cost. Some might think they have the wrong priorities (probably the people who live there!) but what the Australians are doing is being copied here in the UK. One difference here is that we are, at least, allowing fracking to be developed, albeit slowly.

SOLAR POWER BUILDS UP PROBLEMS AND COSTS FOR POWER USERS

This article gives us a glimpse of the problems of relying on solar power.  

This is the story of Germany’s Energiewende: install as much capacity of each type renewable energy as possible, and hope that one of them works when the others don’t. Currently Germany has well over 40 gigawatts of installed PV capacity, enough to power half of the country at lunchtime on a sunny day. But it all does nothing at night, or in the wintertime when the sun stays blotted out by Germany’s notoriously cloudy climate and short daylight hours.

This past December in Hanover the sun shone for a mere 10 hours over the entire month. In Lüdenscheid the sun was seen for less than one hour!

Not one piece of baseload capital equipment can be retired, despite the fact that half of it is randomly unprofitable depending on cloud cover. Solar PV eats away the low cost competitive advantage. Capital sits there unused, spinning on standby, while wages, interest, and other costs keep accruing. So hapless baseload suppliers charge more for the hours that they do run, making electricity more expensive.

But never mind we might reduce the average temperature of the planet by 0.0001 degrees - if only it were possible to measure it!

HOW THE ALARMISTS THINK THEY UNDERSTAND CLIMATE SCEPTICS

This piece looks at how the climate alarmists believe they can get a sceptical public on board with their plans to change our behaviour. Personally I don't believe it will work on most of us, but you never know.

COAL TO THE RESCUE AS USA SHIVERS

Coal saves the day For the USA as a bitter cold descends over much of the country. I bet not many queried the source of the power, as global warming would not have been in the forefront of their minds.

COSMIC RAYS - THE MISSING LINK

Here is a link to the latest research into the cosmic ray link to cloud formation and hence to Earth's temperature. It is a very plausible explanation which, if accepted, will lead to a down-playing of the affect of CO2 - so it will no doubt meet with a great deal of hostility and "debunking" by the CO2 alarmists in 2018. Meanwhile a happy new year to all readers!