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energy and fields

China approves biggest expansion in new coal power plants since 2015

by P. Homewood, Feb 27, 2023 in NotaLotofpeopleKnowThat

When will Western leaders realise they have been hoodwinked by China?

China approved the construction of another 106 gigawatts of coal-fired power capacity last year, four times higher than a year earlier and the highest since 2015, research shows.

Over the year, 50GW of coal power capacity went into construction across the country – up by more than half compared with the previous year – driven by energy security considerations, the Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air (CREA) and Global Energy Monitor (GEM) said on Monday.

“The speed at which projects progressed through permitting to construction in 2022 was extraordinary, with many projects sprouting up, gaining permits, obtaining financing and breaking ground apparently in a matter of months,” said GEM analyst Flora Champenois.

The amount of new capacity connected to the grid had slowed in recent years after a decline in new approvals over the 2017-2020 period, but it is set to rebound over the next few years, driven by concerns about power shortages.

Many of the newly approved projects were identified as “supporting” baseload capacity designed to ensure the stability of the power grid and minimise blackout risks, the CREA-GEM report said.

However, many were being built in regions that already had a clear capacity surplus, and power supply problems would be better addressed by improving grid reliability and efficiency, the authors said.

China suffered a wave of blackouts in September 2021 as a result of coal supply shortages, cutting off thousands of homes and factories. A long drought last year also saw a dramatic drop in hydropower generation and the rationing of electricity.

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climate-debate

The test that exonerates CO2

by J. Vinos, Feb 26, 2023

Most people don’t have a clear understanding of the greenhouse effect (GHE). It is not complicated to understand, but it is usually not well explained. It is often described as “heat-trapping,” but that is incorrect. Greenhouse gases (GHG) do not trap heat, even if more heat resides within the climate system due to their presence in the atmosphere. The truth is that after adjusting to a change in GHG levels, the planet still returns all the energy it receives from the Sun. Otherwise, it would continue warming indefinitely. So, there is no change in the energy returned. How do GHGs produce GHE?

GHGs cause the atmosphere to be more opaque to infrared radiation. As solar radiation heats mainly the ocean and land surface of the planet, GHGs absorb thermal emission from the surface at the lower troposphere and immediately pass that energy along to other molecules (typically N2 and O2) through collisions that occur much faster than the time it would take to re-emit the radiation. This warms the lower troposphere. The density and temperature decrease rapidly through the troposphere, so molecules are colder and more separated at the upper troposphere. Now GHGs have a chance to emit IR radiation so when they finally collide with another molecule, they are colder so GHGs have a cooling effect in the upper troposphere and stratosphere.

Because GHGs make the atmosphere more opaque to IR radiation, when they are present the emission to space from the planet normally does not take place from the surface (as happens in the Moon). Part of it still takes place from the surface through the atmospheric window, but most of it takes place from higher in the atmosphere. We can define a theoretical effective emission height as the average height at which the Earth’s outgoing longwave radiation (OLR) is being emitted. The temperature at which the Earth emits is the temperature at the effective emission height in the atmosphere. That temperature, when measured from space is 250 K (-23°C), not 255 which is the calculated temperature for a theoretical blackbody Earth. That temperature corresponds to a height of about 5 km, which we call the effective emission height.

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climate-debate

Greenland Temperatures Rose 1°C In 1994 … Since Then They Have Been ‘Relatively Constant’

by K. Richard, Feb 27, 2023 in NoTricksZone

A warming event that spans only one year, with decades of stable temperatures before and after, would not appear to align with rapidly rising human CO2 emissions or a gradually rising atmospheric CO2 concentration.

From 1958 to 2020, as CO2 rose from 320 ppm to 410 ppm, Greenland had a warming period of 1°C that lasted one year – 1994. Over the next 26 years (1994-2020) and spanning the years 1958 to 1993, there have been “relatively constant” temperatures across Greenland (Zhang et al., 2022).

These temperature trends appear to align much better with phases of the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), Greenland blocking indexes (GBI), and volcanism better than they do with any anthropogenic causal agents.

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