Energy Masterminds Announce Latest Folly: Shutdown Of Modern Coal Power Plant Commissioned Just 5 Yrs Ago!

by P. Gosselin, Dec 11, 2020 in NoTricksZone


Pressured by climate activism, power genherator Vattenfall announced it will shut down its recently commissioned 1.65 GW modern Moorburg coal power plant in Hamburg, Germany. It will take the equivalent of over 1600 wind turbines to take up the slack. 

Just days ago, I reported here how Big Wind and crony politicians are pushing to clear 2000 hectares of 1000-year old forests to make way for 60 giant 5-MW wind turbines. Now imagine this being done 25 times because one ultra-modern coal plant will be decommissioned after being in service just 5 years.

One folly leads to another. The race in Germany to build up wind parks everywhere possible (environment be damned) stems from the political folly of shutting down baseload-providing modern coal power plants. Swedish power giant Vattenfall just announced )hat it will be decommissioning its new 1.65 GW combined heat and power (CHP) coal Hamburg-Moorburg power plant.

Britain’s Wild Weather–1940 Style

by P. Homewood, Dec 12, 2020 in NotaLotoPeopleKnowThat


The Winter of 1939/40

https://visitmarple.co.uk/photos/displayimage.php?album=123&pid=6858

 

According to the BBC/Met Office, Britain’s weather has been wild this year, and it is getting wilder. And their evidence?

A wet February, dry May and a couple of hot days in August. Statistically of course, you are likely to get one of two of these sort of events every year, with records going back 150 years or so.

So let’s go back and compare 2020 with some earlier years on record. Far from cherry picking years, I am only going to look at years ending in a zero, starting with 1940. The years 1950 and 1960 will follow later.

The year started with what was the coldest January on record at the time, a record which has only been beaten since by the infamous winter of 1962/63.

Sea surface skin temperature

by A. May, Dec 9, 2020 in WUWT


In previous posts, see here and here, I’ve tried to show that because the oceans cover 71% of Earth and they contain 99% of the thermal energy stored on the Earth’s surface, they dominate the speed and magnitude of climate changes. In all my posts the Earth’s surface is defined as everything from the ocean floor to the top of the atmosphere. The details of the calculation of ocean and atmospheric heat content is detailed in this spreadsheet. The ocean’s huge heat capacity prevents large temperature swings and dampens and delays those that do occur.

Attempting to show the direction, speed, and magnitude of climate change by measuring and averaging atmospheric surface temperatures is pointless, in my opinion. The record we have of atmospheric and ocean surface temperatures is too short and far too inaccurate to provide us with useful trends on a climatic (30 years +) time scale. Further, these records are sporadic measurements in a chaotic surface zone that has large temperature swings. In Montana, United States, for example, recent minimum/maximum temperatures have been as low as -70°F (-57°C) and as high as 117°F (47°C). These enormous swings make measuring year-to-year global average differences of 0.1°C exceedingly difficult. Yet, this is the precision demanded if we are to properly characterize a climate that is only warming at a rate of roughly 1.4°C/century, which is 0.014°C per year and 0.14°C/decade.

New sunspot cycle could be one of the strongest on record, new research predicts

by National Center for Atmospheric Research/University Corporation for Atmospheric Research, Dec 7, 2020 in ScienceDaily


In direct contradiction to the official forecast, a team of scientists led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) is predicting that the Sunspot Cycle that started this fall could be one of the strongest since record-keeping began.

In a new article published in Solar Physics, the research team predicts that Sunspot Cycle 25 will peak with a maximum sunspot number somewhere between approximately 210 and 260, which would put the new cycle in the company of the top few ever observed.

The cycle that just ended, Sunspot Cycle 24, peaked with a sunspot number of 116, and the consensus forecast from a panel of experts convened by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is predicting that Sunspot Cycle 25 will be similarly weak. The panel predicts a peak sunspot number of 115.

Newly discovered Greenland plume drives thermal activities in the Arctic

by Tohoku University, Dec 7, 2020 in ScienceDaily


A team of researchers understands more about the melting of the Greenland ice sheet. They discovered a flow of hot rocks, known as a mantle plume, rising from the core-mantle boundary beneath central Greenland that melts the ice from below.

The results of their two-part study were published in the Journal of Geophysical Research.

“Knowledge about the Greenland plume will bolster our understanding of volcanic activities in these regions and the problematic issue of global sea-level rising caused by the melting of the Greenland ice sheet,” said Dr. Genti Toyokuni, co-author of the studies.

The North Atlantic region is awash with geothermal activity. Iceland and Jan Mayen contain active volcanoes with their own distinct mantle plumes, whilst Svalbard — a Norwegian archipelago in the Arctic Ocean — is a geothermal area. However, the origin of these activities and their interconnectedness has largely been unexplored