Archives mensuelles : octobre 2021

energy and fields

Asia Building Hundreds Of Coal Power Plants

by P. Homewood, Oct 29, 2021 in NotaLotofPeopleKnowThat

UDANGUDI, India/TOKYO, Oct 29 (Reuters) – On the coastline near India’s southern tip, workers toil on a pier carrying a conveyor belt that cuts a mile into the Indian Ocean where the azure waters are deep enough for ships to berth and unload huge cargoes of coal.

The belt will carry millions of tonnes of coal each year to a giant power plant several kilometres inland that will burn the fuel for at least 30 years to generate power for the more than 70 million people that live in India’s Tamil Nadu state.

The Udangudi plant is one of nearly 200 coal-fired power stations under construction in Asia, including 95 in China, 28 in India and 23 in Indonesia, according to data from U.S. nonprofit Global Energy Monitor (GEM).

This new fleet will produce planet-warming emissions for decades and is a measure of the challenge world leaders face when they meet for climate talks in Glasgow, where they hope to sound the death knell for coal as a source of power.

Coal use is one of the many issues dividing industrialised and developing countries as they seek to tackle climate change.

Many industrialised countries have been shutting down coal plants for years to reduce emissions. The United States alone has retired 301 plants since 2000.

But in Asia, home to 60% of the world’s population and about half of global manufacturing, coal’s use is growing rather than shrinking as rapidly developing countries seek to meet booming demand for power.

More than 90% of the 195 coal plants being built around the world are in Asia, according to data from GEM.

Tamil Nadu is India’s second-most industrialised state and is one of the country’s top renewable energy producers. But it is also building the most coal-fired plants in the country. read more

“We cannot depend on just solar and wind,” a senior official at Tamil Nadu Generation and Distribution Corp told Reuters.

“You can have the cake of coal and an icing of solar,” he said, declining to be named as he was not authorised to speak to media.

Full story here.

 

climate-debate

Skeptics to attend UN summit in Scotland – Will praise Greta’s ‘Blah Blah Blah’ view of UN’s futile climate summits

by Marc Morano, Oct 28, 2021 in ClimateDepot

Climate Depot’s Marc Morano and a contingent of climate skeptics will descend upon the UN climate summit in Glasgow Scotland next week. The climate skeptics will be joining a growing coalition of climate activists who realize that UN summits are meaningless and will support the accurate claims of Schwarzenegger, Greta, Kerry, Hansen and others.

’30 years of blah blah blah’: Thunberg (correctly) questions value of climate talks – Greta: “There is no Planet Blah. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.” … “Net zero, blah, blah, blah. Climate neutral, blah, blah, blah. This is all we hear from our so-called leaders — words, words that sound great but so far, has led to no action or hopes and dreams. Empty words and promises.”

Watch: Greta is right! Climate Summits are “blah blah blah.” – Morano Minute E19

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John Kerry again admits climate futility: If U.S. & China ‘could go to zero (CO2 emissions) tomorrow… the world would still have a problem’

Flashback: Kerry admits zero emissions in US wouldn’t make difference in climate change

Flashback 2015: Then Sec. of State John Kerry explains climate futility: If U.S. zeroed out CO2 emissions, it ‘still wouldn’t be enough to offset the carbon pollution coming from the rest of the world’

‘Fraud, Fake…Worthless Words’: NASA’s James Hansen on UN Paris Pact – “[The Paris agreement] is a fraud really, a fake…It’s just worthless words. There is no action, just promises. As long as fossil fuels appear to be the cheapest fuels out there, they will be continued to be burned.” 

2019: UN Paris Climate Accord debunked by former UN IPCC chair Bob Watson – ‘Insufficient to address climate change’

Climate movement grandpa James Hansen declares the Green New Deal is ‘nonsense’ – ‘We need a real deal which understands how economics works’

2019: Progressive feminist Naomi Wolf rips the Green New Deal as ‘fascism’ – ‘I WANT a Green New Deal’ but ‘this one is a straight up power grab’

2021: MIT climate scientist Dr. Richard Lindzen: “Increasing emissions from China, India, and the rest of the developing world swamp the small reductions in the Anglosphere and the European Union. Indeed, if emissions from the Anglosphere and the EU were to cease (which is, of course, an impossibility), it would make little difference.“

Saving the Earth — again?! 

The United Nations admitted that the much-hailed 2015 “historic” UN Paris climate pact did not “save” the planet and is instead “not enough” to prevent a climate change catastrophe! Despite being praised by former Vice President Al Gore, former Sec. of State John Kerry and many others, it appears the UN is demanding even more climate “action” to address what it claims is a climate problem.

Flashback 2019: UN admits ‘historic’ Paris climate pact did not save Earth after-all! Now says: Cutting CO2 ‘not enough’

UN in 2019: We must change food production to save the world, says leaked report – Cutting carbon from transport and energy ‘not enough’ IPCC finds

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climate-debate

New Data Suggest Greenland’s Relative Sea Levels Were 6 Meters Higher 1,500-2,000 Years Ago

by K. Richard, Oct 28, 2021 in NoTricksZone

The discovery of whale bones and marine shells at ancient beach sites 32 to 36 meters above today’s shorelines have been dated to the Early to Middle Holocene. Beach ridges were still several meters higher than today during Roman and Medieval times.

The relative sea levels of the ancient past can be discerned by identifying the span of years marine shells were deposited on ancient beaches. Also, whales were as likely to wash up on shore thousands of years ago as they do today.

A new study (Souza et al., 2021) uses an alternative dating method to identify when beach ridge systems were still collection sites for sea shells along the west coast of Greenland (Disko Island). The authors find it “particularly interesting” that beach ridges were still elevated ~6 meters above modern sea levels less than 2,000 years ago, as previous studies have suggested the Disko Bay region’s sea levels should have fallen to below present sea level by this time.

The authors also determined the marine shells located 32 meters above present Disko Island shorelines can be dated to about 5,300 years ago. Whale carcasses collected at sites elevated 36 meters above modern have been dated to the Early Holocene.

The highest sea levels of the Holocene, or the Holocene Marine Limit, has been dated to ~9000 years ago. At that time deposits of sea shells on the southwest coast of Disko were as much as “~70 to 80 m above present sea level.”

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Cooked Up Consensus: Lynas et al “Should Rather Be Classified As Propaganda, Bad Science”…”Truly Brazen”

by P. Gosselin, Oct 26, 2021 in NoTricksZone

Martin Landvoigt writes on truth and consensus, climate models, the “fundamental and methodological difficulties” in climate science and how “hard, robust evidence is largely lacking” and so it’s “a matter of weakly substantiated opinions”.

Climate consensus and the climate

By Martin Landvoigt at Philosophieren für alle), Die kalte Sonne
(Text excerpt translated, subtitles added by P. Gosselin)

On this basis, the argument of the supposed consensus in climate science has been presented several times and repeatedly.

Numerous studies are supposed to prove this. In particular, the study: Quantifying the consensus on anthropogenic global warming in the scientific literature – John Cook, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs and Andrew Skuce – Published 15 May 2013.

Cook et al 2013 refuted

Arguably the most influential study used by U.S. presidents and other top-level decision makers as evidence for climate policy. Nevertheless, it can be considered refuted:

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climate-debate

Dr Roger Pielke, Jr -What does IPCC AR6 say on Scenarios and Extreme Weather?

by C. Rotter, Oct 29, 2021 in WUWT

An ICSF & Clintel Zoom presentation held on 27th October, 2021

Roger Pielke, Jr. describes himself as an “undisciplined professor” of science, policy and politics. He holds degrees in mathematics, public policy and political science, all from the University of Colorado. In 2006, Roger received the Eduard Brückner Prize in Munich, Germany, for outstanding achievement in interdisciplinary climate research. Formerly a Scientist at the National Centre for Atmospheric Research, in 2012 Roger was awarded an honorary doctorate from Linköping University in Sweden and was also awarded the Public Service Award of the Geological Society of America. He is also author, co‐author or co‐editor of seven books, including The Honest Broker: Making Sense of Science in Policy and Politics, The Climate Fix: What Scientists and Politicians Won’t Tell you About Global Warming and The Rightful Place of Science: Disasters and Climate Change. His most recent book is The Edge: The War against Cheating and Corruption in the Cutthroat World of Elite Sports.

Abstract: In his lecture, Roger will give valuable insights on the recently‐released IPCC WG1 AR6 Report; describing it as a “code red for humanity” was not only wrong, it was irresponsible. Instead of apocalyptic warnings about “immediate risk” a top line message of this report should be: The Extreme Scenario that IPCC Saw as Most Likely in 2013 is Now Judged Low Likelihood, an incredible change in such a short time since the AR5 Report, which has not been highlighted by the media. Roger will also show that the IPCC has systematically and very helpfully gone through a large list of extreme‐weather phenomena in the detailed AR6 Report. Their results are quite surprising: floods, hurricanes, tropical cyclones, meteorological and hydrological droughts are not more frequent. Nor are tornadoes, hail, lightning or strong winds more frequent. However heatwaves are more frequent, as is extreme precipitation, and there are two other types of drought, namely agricultural and ecological drought, which have increased. It is very appealing, even seductive, for activists and the media to latch on to extreme events (as inaccurately summarized in the SPM), but at some point we have to say that objective science and its communication matters on this issue. This is a lecture and discussion of wide interest and is highly relevant in the lead‐up to COP26.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

No signs of a climate emergency for W. Hudson Bay polar bears this year ahead of UN climate meeting

by  S. Crockford’s Polar Bear Science, Oct 17, 2021 in WUWT

Reposted from Dr. Susan Crockford’s Polar Bear Science

By Susan Crockford,

Posted on October 15, 2021 | Comments Offon No signs of a climate emergency for W. Hudson Bay polar bears this year ahead of UN climate meeting

I’ve been told that another complete aerial survey of the Western Hudson Bay polar bear subpopulation (from the Nunavut to Ontario boundaries) was conducted in August this year and that the bears have been hanging out further south than usual. It will be years before the results of the population count are published, of course (especially if it’s good news) but my contacts also say virtually all of the bears are in great condition again this year.

This is significant because W. Hudson Bay bears are one of the most southern subpopulations in the Arctic (only Southern HB bears live further south) and older data from this region is being used to predict the future for the entire global population based on implausible model projections (Molnar et al. 2020). And scary predictions of future polar bear survival are often taken to be proxies for future human disasters (see ‘Polar bears live on the edge of the climate change crisis‘), a point that some activists will no doubt make in the coming weeks, as the long-awaited UN climate change bash #26 (COP26) gets underway in Glasgow, Scotland on October 31.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

September Mean Temps In Northern Europe See Little Change Over Past Decades…Snow, Frost Arrive

by P. Gosselin, Oct 17, 2021 in NoTricksZone

Today we look at September mean temperatures at the stations across northern Europe for which the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA) have enough data. We find fall is not being pushed back as we should expect in a warming world.

The JMA has published the data for September and again we see a continuing warming hiatus.

First we look at the September trends from 6 stations in Ireland since 1991:

 

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climate-debate

How good have climate models been at truly predicting the future?

by Gavin, Dec 4, 2019 in RealClimate

A new paper from Hausfather and colleagues (incl. me) has just been published with the most comprehensive assessment of climate model projections since the 1970s. Bottom line? Once you correct for small errors in the projected forcings, they did remarkably well.

Climate models are a core part of our understanding of our future climate. They also have been frequently attacked by those dismissive of climate change, who argue that since climate models are inevitably approximations they have no predictive power, or indeed, that they aren’t even scientific.

In an upcoming paper in Geophysical Research Letters, Zeke Hausfather, Henri Drake, Tristan Abbott and I took a look at how well climate models have actually been able to accurately project warming in the years after they were published. This is an extension of the comparisons we have been making on RealClimate for many years, but with a broader scope and a deeper analysis. We gathered all the climate models published between 1970 and the mid-2000s that gave projections of both future warming and future concentrations of CO2 and other climate forcings – from Manabe (1970) and Mitchell (1970) through to CMIP3 in IPCC 2007.

We found that climate models – even those published back in the 1970s – did remarkably well, with 14 out of the 17 projections statistically indistinguishable from what actually occurred.

We evaluated these models both on how well modeled warming compared with observed warming after models were published, and how well the relationship between warming and CO2 (and other climate forcings) in models compares to observations (the implied transient climate response) (see Figure). The second approach is important because even if an old model had gotten all the physics right, the future projected warming would be off if they assumed we would have 450 ppm CO2 in 2020 (which some did!). Future emissions depend on human societal behavior, not physical systems, and we can usefully distinguish evaluation of climate models physics from paths of future concentrations.

Figure 2 from Hausfather et al (2019) showing the comparisons between model predictions and observations for a) the temperature trends (above) and b) the implied Transient Climate Response (TCR) which is the trend divided by the forcing and scaled to an equivalent 2xCO2 forcing.

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better to know...?

Urban areas more likely to have precipitation-triggered landslides, exposing growing populations to slide hazards

by American Geophysical Union, Oct 12, 2021 in ScienceDaily

Urban areas may be at greater risk for precipitation-triggered landslides than rural areas, according to a new study that could help improve landslide predictions and hazard and risk assessments.

Landslides cause thousands of deaths and billions of dollars of damage annually. With over half of the world’s population in urban areas, and both urbanization and precipitation extremes expected to increase in the future, understanding how urban landscapes are affected by precipitation-triggered landslides is a pressing need.

The new study used a large database of precipitation-triggered landslides across the Pacific coast of the U.S. and isolated the influence of precipitation changes using a specific type of computer model. When the researchers controlled for other factors, like slope steepness, rock type, and wildfire, they found that urban landslide hazard was up to 10 times more sensitive to variations in precipitation than in rural areas. That means that the same increase in rainfall in rural and urban areas could be 10 times more likely to cause a landslide in a city.

The new research is published in the AGU journal Geophysical Research Letters, which publishes high-impact, short-format reports with immediate implications spanning all Earth and space sciences.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Where Have All The Disasters Gone?

by W. Essenbach, Oct 14, 2021 in WUWT

I read today that the EU is using an estimate of US$68 per tonne of CO2 emissions for the purported cost of the damages done by CO2. This is known by a Newspeak term as the “Social Cost Of Carbon”.

It made me wonder—using this estimate, what is the overall total estimated damage done by humans from emitting CO2?

The answer is $97 TRILLION dollars since 1950.

YIKES! That’s about five times the 2020 US Gross Domestic Product (the value of everything produced in the US during that year).

So I thought I’d take a look at the various largest weather-related disasters. I got the big-disaster data from Wikipedia here and arranged it by type of disaster. All values are in 2020 dollars, that is to say, they’re adjusted for inflation. Here is the result.

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better to know...?

Aussie Met Bureau – making up 13 years of missing temperature data

by D. Mason-Jones, Oct 15, 2021 in WUWT

Upon finding a 13-year gap in its data for an important weather station in Queensland, the Australian Bureau of Meteorology homogenised data from 10 other locations to fill-in the missing years. One of these places was more than 400km away and another almost 2.5 degrees of latitude further South.

Is the resulting data credible? No, is the conclusion reached in a research Report by Australian scientist, Dr. Bill Johnston.

When the US Army Air Force (USAAF) closed its heavy bomber transit base at Charleville at the end of the Second World War the aerodrome reverted to civilian status. The base had been a link in the ferry route delivering aircraft from factories in the US to the war zone.

 

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better to know...?, climate-debate

4 More New Reconstructions Affirm The Medieval Warm Period Was ‘Warmer Than Today’

by K. Richard, Oct 14, 2021 in NoTricksZone

From Russia to the Indian Ocean to Antarctica, surface temperatures were much warmer than  they are today during Medieval times.

1. The Eastern Russia region was 1.5°C warmer than now during the Medieval Warm Period. The modern warm-up began centuries ago and temperatures have declined in the last few centuries. Relative sea levels were 1 m higher than now 1,000 years ago.

Nazarova et al., 2021

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2. Scientists use coral fossil evidence to suggest mean sea surface temperatures (SST) during the Medieval Climate Anomaly were “warmer than today”. At the two Indian Ocean study sites, there has been no obvious SST warming since 1982.

Yudawati Cahyarini et al., 2021

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3. The modern (1994-2004) surface temperatures in the South China Sea are colder now than any time in the last 6000 years. Except for a brief interval ~500 years ago, SSTs have been consistently 2-4°C warmer than today since the middle Holocene.

Zhou et al., 2021

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4. Modern sea ice extent for Antarctica’s Ross Sea is more extensive today (and temperatures cooler) than nearly any time in 6000 years.  It was warmer with less sea ice 1.6 to 0.7k years ago. Penguin numbers decline with cooling/increased sea ice.

Xu et al., 2021

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climate-debate

The crafty language of climate alarmism

by D. Wojick, Oct 4, 2021 in CFact

Disinformation word cloud concept. Vector illustration

I am constantly entertained by the artful ways alarmists bend language to their will. This often happens as science stories percolate through the media. Each step is a bit of a stretch, maybe not an obvious lie. But the sequence of stretches takes us so very far from the truth that we wind up in alarmville.

We just had a beauty kicked off by the great green Washington Post. What makes this especially funny is they are reporting their very own research, so there is no question of misunderstanding it. Just stretching it bit by bit, here and there.

The study itself is simple enough. When really bad, damaging weather hits it is normal to declare a federal disaster. This which allows Federal agencies to take certain actions, including loans and tax relief. This is done at the county scale. So WashPo looked at all of the disaster declarations in the last three months and determined the cumulative fraction of the US population that lived in those counties.

Since some disasters, especially from hurricanes, cover more than one entire state, it is no surprise that this added up to about a third of the national population. So far so good. This is science of a crude sort, basically adding stuff up.

The stretching begins when they report their study. First we get the headline, which is all that most people will read. Here is the main headline:

“Nearly 1 in 3 Americans experienced a weather disaster this summer“

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better to know...?, climate-debate

“Climate Emergency” – Nothing But Politics And Propaganda Unsupported By Scientific Data

by  L. Hamlin, Oct 6, 2021 in WUWT

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The “climate emergency” claim hyped by Scientific American and other political climate alarmist entities is based on the completely fallacious statement that “the planet is heating up way to fast” with that flawed claim representing nothing but politics and propaganda that is disproved by actually measured global temperature anomaly temperature measurements between 1988 and 2021 as well as being directly contradicted by the more than 5 year-long declining global temperature anomaly data presented by all 5 major global temperature anomaly measurement systems between 2016 and 2021.

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