Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The observed incapacity for southern elephant seals (SES) to withstand late 20th and early 21st century extreme cold and expanding sea ice conditions suggest coastal Antarctica (Victoria Land Coast, VLC) climate is colder and icier today than any time since the last glacial. A new study even suggests the last glacial (CO2 ~190 ppm) may have been warmer with less ice than today in this region.
Southern elephant seals (SES) require extended sea ice-free sea waters to breed, forage, and provide nourishment for their pups.
Throughout the Holocene (Medieval Warm Period, Roman Warm Period, and earlier) and until a few hundred years ago (from ~7100 to 500 years before present), coastal Antarctica’s Victoria Land (VLC) was substantially warmer than today. The Ross Sea was also sufficiently ice-free to allow for elephant seal populations (as large as ~200,000 individuals) to thrive at 73-78°S.
Today, however, elephant seal populations can no longer subsist anywhere even remotely close to the coasts of the Antarctic continent. It is now too cold and the sea ice is too extensive.
The substantially reduced number of remaining SES today can only survive on subantarctic islands (South Georgia, Macquarie) at southern South American latitudes (~54.5°S) situated 2400 kilometers north of VLC (Koch et al., 2019).
The “genetically distinct” VLC elephant seal populations that endured throughout the Holocene and even through Medieval times have tragically died off in the last few centuries due to the modern-era cooling gradient and subsequent ice cover expansion (Hall et al., 2023).
And with the modern sea surface temperatures cooling and southern hemisphere sea ice expansion in recent decades, even the subantarctic islands in the South Pacific that SES are limited to occupying today may not be sufficiently warm and ice-free to accommodate remaining populations. Today’s southern elephant seals are thus threatened by modern cooling.
“[P]ack-ice expansion (both duration and extent) in the Ross Sea over the last several decades has been linked to reduced female foraging in this region, consequent low weaning weights and survival of pups, and ultimately the decline of the Macquarie Island population.” – Hall et al., 2023
Perhaps if these mammals were polar bears the existential threat of polar cooling might receive some media attention.
Interestingly, Hall et al. also report that not only have the last few centuries (including the present) been “the coldest, iciest conditions in the post-glacial period” (see the blue sea ice and red temperature trend lines on the Holocene timeline), but even the last glacial period had periods (~50,000 to 25,000 years ago) with less sea ice than today, allowing SES to occupy the VLC coast.
The last glacial period had CO2 levels under 200 ppm.
Block a sacred weather-changing EV from a charging point and you may have to sell your car
Feel the fear. The whole EV fantasy is coming undone as people miss planes, get stuck in cars, or ruin holidays because their battery is flat. There aren’t enough chargers, and charging is slow. In abject desperation, some Australian states are slapping monster fines on to make inadequate infrastructure stretch further, or because they realize how vulnerable they are to a protest campaign. Either that or they are actually trying to finance the transition to NetZero through parking fines. Call it a secret subsidy…
Victorians may be hit with a $370 fine if they drive a normal car and accidentally park it in an EV charging spot, thus depriving a sacred EV user of the chance to top up. You might think that’s wildly out of proportion — it’s only $100 less than if you recklessly run a red light. But it’s nothing compared to what NSW, Queensland and the ACT are doing. Drivers in these states who make the same mistake could end up paying, respectively, a blistering $2,200, $2,875, or $3,200.
It’s just climate maths at work isn’t it? Take any normal number and extrapolate to bankruptcy.
How long would I have to spend in jail for non-payment, I wonder?
Drivers face steep fines for parking non-electric vehicles in electric vehicle charging stations
by Someone at The ABC
So it’s written in the road rules but “little known”?
The fines, some of them added to road rules late last year, range from $3,200 in the Australian Capital Territory to $369 in Victoria.
Drivers could be fined as much as $3,200 for parking in spaces for electric vehicles as part of little-known penalties introduced in four states and territories.
Remember when they said EV charging would be fast and convenient, and it would be easy to build a network of chargers? Then they found out the lack of EV charging spaces is threatening their whole fantasy transition…
But experts say the heavy penalties are important to encourage electric vehicle adoption and prevent drivers doing the equivalent of parking “in front of a fuel bowser”.
Yes, because lots of people accidentally park in front of fuel bowsers and go shopping, right? Lots, as in — absolutely no one, ever. Maybe because fuel bowsers aren’t sometimes placed in what used to be normal parking spots.
Photo by Mariordo of a charging station in Costa Rica.
You might be ICE-ing a climate warrior…
Apply a malignant acronym, and suddenly these car drivers who park in a spot with a charger sound like terrorists or a drug gang:
The fines apply to drivers who leave petrol or diesel vehicles in spaces designated for electric cars, in an act known as “ICE-ing” for its use of internal combustion engine cars.
So EV drivers need another subsidy then?
NSW Metropolitan Roads Minister Natalie Ward said the government added the offence to “support the transition to electric vehicles on our roads”.
“To make sure we keep the community moving forward, we want electric vehicle drivers to have access to charging stations when they are on offer,” she said.
It’s the sense of entitlement that shines like leaders of a weather cult:
Australian Electric Vehicle Association national president Chris Jones said while the penalties for blocking infrastructure were high, they were necessary to educate members of the public who may not have considered the repercussions.
People who aren’t driving EV’s must be really really stupid, yeah? In Chris Jones’ vision, the sort of fine that stops dumb punters running a red light needs to be five or ten times bigger so they understand how they are threatening the planet, or at least, threatening his plans to sell more EV’s.
Imagine if EV cars were a personal luxury, doing almost nothing of benefit to society, and everyone was expected to learn new rules, avoid their parking spaces, and practically go to jail if they made a mistake?
Electric Vehicle Council policy head Jake Whitehead said the fines sent “a very clear and strong signal”.
But he said greater education may be needed for petrol car drivers who encountered chargers added to existing car parks, as well as new electric vehicle drivers who did not recognise the need to vacate charging locations for other drivers as soon as practical.
At least they recognise that some EV drivers also haven’t read and memorized Labor’s Powering Australia Plan either. Nor, after being sold sunshine on stilts, have they figured out that the rushed EV-transition is doomed to run up hard against the brutal reality of charging times and access to kilowatts.
Imagine how inconvenient it would be as an electric car owner to have to return to your car from shopping or a business lunch because the car’s finished charging and you need to park it somewhere else or face a $3,000 fine? Don’t worry, there will be a phone App for that soon, so your car can call you.
The cult confuses “want” with “need”:
“Every charger available is critical and valuable to the fleet of 80,000-odd EVs in the country, and we need to make sure they’re not blocked, either intentionally or accidentally,” he said.
“There are genuine mistakes made by some people, but we need to have a broad recognition across society that these chargers need to be available to EVs so we can have more on our roads.”
Every charger is critical to keep their fantasy alive…
Moreover, the “climate crisis” is based on computer models that predict hurricane, tornado, flood, drought, sea level rise and other disasters vastly greater than the world is actually experiencing.
Bill Gates and climatist collaborators are taking taxpayers and consumers on trillion-dollar rides
Paul Driessen
Grifters have long fascinated us. Operating outside accepted moral standards, they excel at persuading their “marks” to hand valuables over willingly. If they ever represented a “distinctly American ethos,” they’ve been supplanted by con artists seeking bank accounts for funds abandoned by Nigerian princes.
Their artful dodging is epitomized by Frank Abagnale daring the FBI to “catch me if you can,” Anna Delvey inventing Anna Sorokin, Redford and Newman masterminding their famous Sting, and dirty, rotten scoundrels like Steve Martin, Michael Caine and Glenn Headly.
However, they were all pikers compared to the billion-dollar stratagems being carried off by Climate Armageddon grifters like Bill Gates, Al Gore, Elon Musk and Biden Climate Envoy John Kerry.
(You have to wonder how Mark Twain would update his suggestion that “there is no distinctly native American criminal class except Congress.”)
They and their politician, activist, scientist, corporate and media allies profit mightily, but legally, if not unethically, from foundation grants, government payouts and subsidies, and taxpayer and consumer payments based on claims that Earth faces manmade climate cataclysms. That most of us are willingly giving money to mandated “renewable energy” schemes and other corrupt practices is questionable.
Microsoft co-founder Gates’ estimated 2022 post-divorce net worth of some $130 billion enables him to donate hundreds of millions to social, health, environmental and corporate media causes. That usually shields him from tough questions.
But BBC media editor Amol Rajan recently asked Mr. Gates to answer charges that he’s “a hypocrite,” for claiming to be “a climate change campaigner” while traveling the world on his luxurious private jets – often to confabs where global elites discuss how we commoners can enjoy simpler, fossil-fuel-free lives: what size our homes can be, how and how much we can heat them, what foods we can eat and how we can cook them, what cars we can drive, whether we can fly anywhere on vacation, what our kids will learn in school, and more.
Caught flatfooted, Gates defended his use of fuel-guzzling, carbon-spewing jetliners by claiming he purchases “carbon credits” to offset his profligate energy consumption. He also said he visits Africa and Asia to learn about farming and malaria, and spends billions on “climate innovations.”
Indeed, Gates’ book “How to Avoid a Climate Disaster: The solutions we have and the breakthroughs we need” calls for replacing beef with synthetic meat. Cattle emit methane, a greenhouse gas (00.00019% of Earth’s atmosphere) – so people should eat fake meat processed from vegetable oil, veggies and insects.
You may say, That’s disgusting. But Mr. Gates will profit mightily if his “recommendation” is adopted. He’s a major investor in farmland and the imitation meat company Impossible Foods, as is Mr. Gore.
How cool! Wealthy elites can save the world and get richer at the same time!
Beyond Meat’s stock may be down more than 75% from its one-time high, but investors will likely bring in lots more cash via new “climate-saving” diktats, while consumers are left holding bags of rotting bug and lab-grown burgers.
Carbon offsets? In the real world they’re part of the problem, not the solution. They don’t help Main Street; they too help rich Climate Armageddon Club members become wealthier.
Gates Foundation grants could prevent extensive African misery, brain damage and death from malaria, by spotting disease outbreaks and eradicating Anopheles mosquito infestations – today. But it’s spending millions trying to engineer plasmodium-resistant mosquitoes, which may pay off a decade from now.
Meanwhile, Elon Musk’s Tesla Inc. continues pocketing billions selling and trading carbon credits. In fact, between 2015 and 2020, the company received $1.3 billion from selling credits to other companies – more than twice what it earned from automotive sales. Times sure have changed since manufacturing tycoons got rich selling products, instead of hawking climate indulgences.
Musk also loves flying in private jets. Last summer, he even took a 9-minute, 55-mile flight from San Francisco to San Jose, instead of driving a Tesla. Wags might say that goes well with the way he and others have made a science of lobbying government agencies to subsidize fire-prone electric cars.
It’s all to protect the environment, of course – which is why Gore, Gates, Musk and Kerry think they’re entitled to travel by private jet and limousine. We’re also supposed to ignore how their cars and lifestyles are based on metals extracted and processed with African child labor and lakes of toxic chemicals.
Since Al Gore left the vice president’s office, he’s hauled in some $330 million railing about “rain bombs” and “boiling oceans,” and shilling for government and corporate “investments” in “green energy” that’s also reliant on supply chains running through Africa and China.
Never forget this fundamental rule: Wind and sunshine are clean, renewable and sustainable. However, harnessing these unreliable, weather-dependent energy sources to power modern economies requires millions of tons of metals and minerals extracted from billions of tons of ores, mostly using dirty, polluting processes in countries that are conveniently out of sight and mind.
In short, nothing about “renewable energy” is clean, renewable, sustainable, fair or equitable.
Moreover, the “climate crisis” is based on computer models that predict hurricane, tornado, flood, drought, sea level rise and other disasters vastly greater than the world is actually experiencing. The models also ignore five great ice ages and interglacial periods, the Medieval Warm Period and Little Ice Age, the Anasazi and Mayan droughts, and other inconvenient climate truths.
Topping it off, China, Russia and India are burning cheap coal to industrialize, lift people out of poverty, and leave climate-obsessed Western nations in the economic and military dust. Even if the West went totally Net Zero, it wouldn’t reduce atmospheric greenhouse gases even one part per million.
The climate change movement’s deceptions and contradictions seem to have no bounds – and know no apparent limits to how much loot they can rake in by lobbying federal, state and local governments, banks and financial institutions; waging media warfare; and engaging in political science with similarly minded legislators and regulators who control climate and energy laws, mandates, grants and subsidies.
How can the general public be so oblivious to all of this?
FTX founder and alleged fraudster Sam Bankman-Fried revealed the secret. He avoided media and regulator scrutiny by donating to influential media outlets, the way Bill Gates does. That garners favorable press and social media – which also ignore, cancel and deplatform critics and skeptics.
Fortunately, gutsy interrogators like Rajan are discovering and publicizing what most of the bought-and-paid-for “journalist classes” still won’t. This helps more people see behind the curtain and find the self-interest, self-dealing and pseudo-science that create the scary climate crisis monsters.
Climate Armageddon Club games are costing us trillions of dollars, in the name of saving people and planet. Hopefully, more real journalists, troves of Twitter emails (this time kudos to Mr. Musk!) and congressional investigations will save taxpayers and families from additional costly, destructive policies.
Paul Driessen is senior policy advisor for the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (www.CFACT.org) and author of books and articles on energy, climate change, environmental policy and human rights.
Data refutes claims that extreme weather events are increasing in number, intensity, or frequency. Also, coffee production is increasing amid modest warming.
Roast Magazine’s Daily Coffee News rans a story claiming climate change was causing “ongoing systemic shocks,” harming coffee production by creating more simultaneous extreme weather events across different growing regions. This is false. Data refutes claims that extreme weather events are increasing in number, intensity, or frequency. Also, coffee production is increasing amid modest warming.
The global coffee industry can expect increasing and “ongoing systemic shocks” to coffee production due to climate change, according to new research published this month in the journal PLOS Climate.
The research, which was funded by the Australia’s national Climate Service agency, says that there has been a been a notable increase in “synchronous climate hazards” among the world’s 12 largest coffee-growing countries over the 40 years ending in 2020. In other words, more coffee-producing areas are being negatively affected by climate change at the same time.
The study takes particular note of the El Niño, the La Niña and the Madden–Julian oscillation (MJO) climate phenomena effecting global tropical regions throughout the coffee-growing world.
There are so many false or mistaken claims packed into these three introductory paragraphs its hard to know where to begin to refute them. Starting with the last paragraph first. El Niño, the La Niña and the Madden–Julian oscillation are large scale natural oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns and they do effect climate on regional and trans- and multicontinental scales. However, contrary to the implication of the paragraph and evidently the study it references, those patterns drive weather events. Climate models are unable to account for the impacts of these patterns on climate change.
Data neither show, nor does the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report, any significant changes in these large-scale natural circulation patterns that can be linked to climate change. There is no evidence whatsoever that climate change is altering these natural patterns; either making their impacts more severe or the circulation patterns themselves more persistent or erratic. Whatever effect El Niño, the La Niña and the Madden–Julian oscillation, or other large scale short- and long-term natural oceanic and atmospheric patterns, might be having on coffee production, they have always had such effects—there is no evidence this has changed.
Just as there has been no detectable change in various periodic oceanic and atmospheric patterns that are drivers of weather, there has also been no increase in the number or severity of various extreme weather events which effect coffee growing regions, as well as the rest of the world. As discussed at Climate at a Glance, data does not show droughts, floods, hurricanes, or other classifications of extreme weather events that might negatively effect coffee production are increasing in number or severity globally. And higher carbon dioxide concentrations and the decline in unseasonable cold spells have benefited coffee production, as they have almost every other crop.
Which leads us to the most important claim made in the paper. Because oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns aren’t changing, and weather isn’t becoming more extreme in any way that has been measured, is it impossible for these factors to be causing a decline in coffee production. Indeed, data from the U.N. Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) shows that it is not.
“The occurrence of these spatially compounding events has become particularly acute over the past decade, with five of the six most hazardous years occurring since 2010,” say the authors of the study cited as evidence of a pending coffee apocalypse in Roast Magazine. Such struggles are not evident in the production data recorded by the FAO.
FAO data show that coffee yields set new production records seven times since 2010, most recently in 2020. And at no time after 2010 did coffee yields fall below yields recorded before 2010. Indeed, from 1990 to 2021, the last year for which data is currently available, during the recent period of climate change, coffee yields increased by nearly 56 percent.
What’s true of coffee yields is also true of coffee production. Even as a growing number of coffee producers have begun growing boutique coffee varieties using only organic methods, which have reduced yields on those plantations, coffee production overall has grown substantially. Once again, the data show that rather than the period since 2010 being one of hard times for coffee producers, production has set records regularly. Between 2010 and 2021, coffee set records for production five times, and coffee production has grown by nearly 17 percent during that period. Over the term which climate change is measured, 30 years, coffee production has increased approximately 64 percent. (See the figure, below)
To sum up: Roast Magazine claimed climate change was altering large scale oceanic and atmospheric circulation patterns, which was causing an increase in the number and severity of simultaneous extreme weather events, allegedly threatening coffee production worldwide. Each of these claims is refuted by hard evidence. Perhaps going forward, rather than uncritically parroting the alarming findings from the most recent, but untested, study asserting climate change threatens a serious coffee decline, the reporters at Roast Magazine will look into the data and ask some hard questions to determine whether setting off the climate alarm is justified. If they do so, they will likely find they can sit back, relax, and enjoy their next cup of Joe, unburdened by fears that this enjoyable daily ritual will soon pass.
H. Sterling Burnett, Ph.D., is the Director of the Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy and the managing editor of Environment & Climate News.
In addition to directing The Heartland Institute’s Arthur B. Robinson Center on Climate and Environmental Policy, Burett puts Environment & Climate News together, is the editor of Heartland’s Climate Change Weekly email, and the host of the Environment & Climate News Podcast.
How many times can a rational person watch the UN and other alleged authority figures get it dead wrong, and still give unquestioning acceptance to their latest wild predictions of imminent disaster?
UN climate warnings are like the village communist predicting the imminent demise of capitalism every week – and about as likely to happen.
Scientists deliver ‘final warning’ on climate crisis: act now or it’s too late
IPCC report says only swift and drastic action can avert irrevocable damage to world
Scientists have delivered a “final warning” on the climate crisis, as rising greenhouse gas emissions push the world to the brink of irrevocable damage that only swift and drastic action can avert.
The comprehensive review of human knowledge of the climate crisis took hundreds of scientists eight years to compile and runs to thousands of pages, but boiled down to one message: act now, or it will be too late.
The UN secretary general, António Guterres, said: “This report is a clarion call to massively fast-track climate efforts by every country and every sector and on every timeframe. Our world needs climate action on all fronts: everything, everywhere, all at once.”
Climate change is widespread, rapid, and intensifying, and some trends are now irreversible, at least during the present time frame, according to the latest much-anticipated Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report, released on Monday.
Human-induced climate change is already affecting many weather and climate extremes in every region across the globe. Scientists are also observing changes across the whole of Earth’s climate system; in the atmosphere, in the oceans, ice floes, and on land.
Many of these changes are unprecedented, and some of the shifts are in motion now, while some – such as continued sea level rise – are already ‘irreversible’ for centuries to millennia, ahead, the report warns.
But there is still time to limit climate change, IPCC experts say. Strong and sustained reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gases, could quickly make air quality better, and in 20 to 30 years global temperatures could stabilize.
Global warming first became personal for me in 2010. I was backpacking in the incomparable Wind Rivers in western Wyoming. I can’t tell you how much, over many years, I have loved those mountains, the wildest great range of the Lower 48; my tent was the only human thing on the shores of a lake a mile long.
But the human imprint had arrived. Hillsides had turned brown with dying pines, acres were littered with gray dead tree trunks. This was the work of bark beetles no longer controlled by cold winters, and you can see it now all over the American West.
You can find final warnings and last chances stretching all the way back to 1989 if you can find them using one of our woke search engines;
U.N. Predicts Disaster if Global Warming Not Checked PETER JAMES SPIELMANN June 30, 1989
UNITED NATIONS (AP) _ A senior U.N. environmental official says entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.
Coastal flooding and crop failures would create an exodus of ″eco- refugees,′ ′ threatening political chaos, said Noel Brown, director of the New York office of the U.N. Environment Program, or UNEP.
He said governments have a 10-year window of opportunity to solve the greenhouse effect before it goes beyond human control.
As the warming melts polar icecaps, ocean levels will rise by up to three feet, enough to cover the Maldives and other flat island nations, Brown told The Associated Press in an interview on Wednesday.
Coastal regions will be inundated; one-sixth of Bangladesh could be flooded, displacing a fourth of its 90 million people. A fifth of Egypt’s arable land in the Nile Delta would be flooded, cutting off its food supply, according to a joint UNEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency study.
″Ecological refugees will become a major concern, and what’s worse is you may find that people can move to drier ground, but the soils and the natural resources may not support life. Africa doesn’t have to worry about land, but would you want to live in the Sahara?″ he said.
Claim: In 1989, a senior U.N. environmental official said, “Entire nations could be wiped off the face of the Earth by rising sea levels if the global warming trend is not reversed by the year 2000.”
The year 2000 passed, and no great nations got wiped off the face of the Earth by global warming. Just as nothing bad will happen in the face of the latest UN warnings.
My only concern in this ridiculous charade, is for the naive younger people who take these warnings seriously, and feel distressed that older people are not acting, are not showing any sense of urgency about preventing the imminent end of the world.
But for some people at least, that distress doesn’t last forever. As you get older, you get wiser, at least in terms of learning how to judge the credibility of others. How many times can a rational person watch the UN and other alleged authority figures get it dead wrong, and still give unquestioning acceptance to their latest wild predictions of imminent disaster?
After you’ve lived through thirty years of failed climate crisis predictions, end of world scares, and imminent catastrophes which fail to materialise, most people learn not to take such pronouncements too seriously, whether they admit it or not. My evidence for this assertion is the failure of various Green Parties to sweep the world’s parliaments and congresses.
This crazy situation highlights one more myth – that surplus wind power in summer can be used to produce hydrogen, for use in winter. As we can see, in a typical summer month there is not enough power on the grid to meet demand, never mind store.
When we look at lulls in wind power, we usually focus on winter when demand is at its highest. But what about summer when wind power really does drop off for long periods? There is an assumption that this is not a problem because demand for electricity is much lower then and there will be plenty of solar power on hand.
But this might not be the case.
If we look back to last August, for instance, wind power for the month as a whole had an average load factor of 17.4%. From other sources, such as Renewable Obligations, we can estimate the split between offshore and onshore as 18.0% and 14.5% respectively. This is supported by data for the London Array, which suggests that load factors often drop below 18% in spring and summer.
Of course, the real situation is much worse than the monthly averages suggest. During the month of August as a whole, there were long spells when wind power ran at 2 GW, and often much less. For example, between the 10th and 15th power dipped to an average of just 1.6 GW.
Total wind capacity at the time was 28.4 GW, so 2 GW would represent a load factor of just 7%.
So now let us fast forward to 2030, when we are targeting 40 GW of offshore wind, 30 GW of onshore and 40 GW of solar.
Total power demand averaged 26 GW last August, and based on the average monthly load factors we get this projection for 2030:
GW
Offshore
7.2
Onshore
4.3
Solar
6.0
. .
Solar, by the way, is based on a load factor of 15.5%, the average in Q3 last year.
So we have a total of 17.5 GW from wind and solar, which as we have seen could easily dip to 10 GW and below during those wind droughts. Nuclear and biomass should provide another 8 GW, so even on the average load factors, supply will be very tight. But last August there were 20 days when wind output was below average:
What are we supposed to do then, even assuming we have enough battery storage to meet demand at night.
The situation will of course be exacerbated with the extra demand from EVs, which the government wants us to charge at night, when there is no sunshine!
The chart below gives the profile of demand for August 1st:
Demand is at its lowest from midnight to 7.00 am, and peaks between 4.00 pm and 11.00 pm, hitting its highest at 7.30 pm.
Bearing in mind that nuclear and biomass might provide 8 GW, whilst wind power might drop to 4 GW or less, where will the electricity come from to charge our cars up? Or anything else for that matter?
This crazy situation highlights one more myth – that surplus wind power in summer can be used to produce hydrogen, for use in winter. As we can see, in a typical summer month there is not enough power on the grid to meet demand, never mind store.
They plan to bring a portable wind turbine to charge the vehicle when sunlight is unavailable.
Climate change: Couple set for Pole-to-Pole electric car challenge
Ben Philip – BBC Scotland Mon, 20 March 2023 at 10:07 am AEST·
A husband and wife from Aberdeen aim to drive from the Arctic to Antarctica in an electric car.
Chris and Julie Ramsey will set off to travel 17,000 miles (27,000km) from the Magnetic North to South Pole this week.
Their vehicle will be powered for much of the trip by solar and wind energy.
The couple will navigate into Canada, then head south through the United States and into warmer temperatures in South America over the space of 10 challenging months.
They will travel through Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, Costa Rica, Panama, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, Chile and Argentina.
…
“There will be a wind turbine and full double solar on this device which will be towed along, harnessing the renewable energy sources – the wind and the sun – to power the car.
Recharging time might be an issue. They used a Nissan Leaf on at least one previous drive. A portable wind turbine produces maybe a few hundred watts, maybe a kilowatt for a larger device, but a Nissan Leaf with the big battery has around 59KWh capacity. Even a partial charge would take a long time.
Apparently this isn’t their first long distance EV drive, so they probably know what kind of route they need to map, and have a fair idea of charge times. Perhaps taking their time is not a problem – it’s not like a daily commute or business trip. In any case, as EV owners they are probably already used to taking long breaks while their vehicle re-charges.
. As emissions are much higher for building an EV, as opposed to a petrol car, the fact that EVs may be scrapped prematurely is a double whammy, both in terms of the emissions involved in battery production as well as the car as a whole.
LONDON/DETROIT, March 20 (Reuters) – For many electric vehicles, there is no way to repair or assess even slightly damaged battery packs after accidents, forcing insurance companies to write off cars with few miles – leading to higher premiums and undercutting gains from going electric.
And now those battery packs are piling up in scrapyards in some countries, a previously unreported and expensive gap in what was supposed to be a “circular economy.”
“We’re buying electric cars for sustainability reasons,” said Matthew Avery, research director at automotive risk intelligence company Thatcham Research. “But an EV isn’t very sustainable if you’ve got to throw the battery away after a minor collision.”
Battery packs can cost tens of thousands of dollars and represent up to 50% of an EV’s price tag, often making it uneconomical to replace them.
While some automakers like Ford Motor Co (F.N) and General Motors Co (GM.N) said they have made battery packs easier to repair, Tesla Inc (TSLA.O) has taken the opposite tack with its Texas-built Model Y, whose new structural battery pack has been described by experts as having “zero repairability.”
Tesla did not respond to a request for comment.
A Reuters search of EV salvage sales in the U.S. and Europe shows a large portion of low-mileage Teslas, but also models from Nissan Motor Co (7201.T), Hyundai Motor Co (005380.KS), Stellantis (STLAM.MI), BMW (BMWG.DE), Renault (RENA.PA) and others.
Unless Tesla and other carmakers produce more easily repairable battery packs and provide third-party access to battery cell data, already-high insurance premiums will keep rising as EV sales grow and more low-mileage cars get scrapped after collisions, insurers and industry experts said.
“The number of cases is going to increase, so the handling of batteries is a crucial point,” said Christoph Lauterwasser, managing director of the Allianz Center for Technology, a research institute owned by Allianz (ALVG.DE).
Lauterwasser noted EV battery production emits far more CO2 than fossil-fuel models, meaning EVs must be driven for thousands of miles before they offset those extra emissions.
“If you throw away the vehicle at an early stage, you’ve lost pretty much all advantage in terms of CO2 emissions,” he said.
EV battery problems also expose a hole in the green “circular economy” touted by carmakers.
At Synetiq, the UK’s largest salvage company, head of operations Michael Hill said over the last 12 months the number of EVs in the isolation bay – where they must be checked to avoid fire risk – at the firm’s Doncaster yard has soared, from perhaps a dozen every three days to up to 20 per day.
“We’ve seen a really big shift and it’s across all manufacturers,” Hill said.
The UK currently has no EV battery recycling facilities, so Synetiq has to remove the batteries from written-off cars and store them in containers. Hill estimated at least 95% of the cells in the hundreds of EV battery packs – and thousands of hybrid battery packs – Synetiq has stored at Doncaster are undamaged and should be reused.
It already costs more to insure most EVs than traditional cars.
According to online brokerage Policygenius, the average U.S. monthly EV insurance payment in 2023 is $206, 27% more than for a combustion-engine model.
Quite apart from the extra cost of insurance, the issue of CO2 emissions rears its head. As emissions are much higher for building an EV, as opposed to a petrol car, the fact that EVs may be scrapped prematurely is a double whammy, both in terms of the emissions involved in battery production as well as the car as a whole.
Personally I don’t think I’d fancy driving an EV with a “repaired” battery anyway!
‘Electrify everything’ is a mantra of the crowd that sees a hydrocarbon-free future on the horizon. You know the ones; we’ll be net-zero by 2050 because we ‘have to’ and the government mandated it. What could go wrong?
Standing on the train platform the other day, after work, a chilling event happened, and I’m not just referring to the weather, although there was that. It was one of those dull but frigid days when standing still, waiting, on concrete, leaves a person daydreaming not of mansions and fast cars and alluring holidays but of crawling under a pile of blankets.
The cheerful Calgary Transit voice comes over the speaker system to tell us the temperature, and that it’s cloudy. Shut up. We know. We’re waiting outside. For YOUR train.
The next message emanating from the loudspeaker shed the cheerfulness for slightly nervous solemnity. Northbound trains were not operating because of an electrical outage. Not ‘running late’ – not running at all. A few hundred red-cheeked and startled faces crammed on the platform turned to each other in search of guidance, of which there was none, then began moving in tiny circles as they weighed the absence of good alternatives with the prospect of freezing their feet to blackened stumps by standing still out there for too long.
You think I’m exaggerating, you try it.
Luckily my train was heading in the other direction and it did show up. I gratefully scampered aboard and nestled amongst the sleeping street people that tour the city in warmth until asked not to. Safe for another journey (street people notwithstanding).
The episode is a (literally) bone-chilling reminder of the horror that is the ‘electrify everything’ movement.
‘Electrify everything’ is a mantra of the crowd that sees a hydrocarbon-free future on the horizon. You know the ones; we’ll be net-zero by 2050 because we ‘have to’ and the government mandated it. What could go wrong?
A quick DuckDuckGo query (Google can go to hell) delivers a seemingly infinite selection of writing on the topic: “How to Electrify Everything, and Why” from progressive.org. Vox throws in: “The key to tackling climate change: electrify everything.”
A website called marketplace.org has a story with the lead in: “The most recent and pressing instance in which electrifying everything could have saved lives is Hurricane Ida.”
An article from Grist sums up the EE thinking. “With global energy demand expected to increase by as much as 58 percent in the next three decades, the urgency to transition away from fossil fuels to power buildings and vehicles is growing. A director from the Sierra Club explains, ‘In order to make buildings carbon neutral by 2050, we need to phase out the sale of gas appliances by 2030…It’s really exciting to watch.’ “
The article goes on to chart the progress in electrifying transport – public, auto, and truck. The article intones, “The changes can’t come soon enough.”
Oh really.
On August 9, 2019, in Britain, at about 4:52 pm, a number of electricity generators tripped off the grid from what is believed to be a lightning strike hitting a high-voltage line. A report by Britain’s Office of Rail and Road indicated that the lightning strike and subsequent generator trips forced the grid’s frequency to drop from 50 HZ to 48.8 HZ for “approximately 33 seconds.”
I can see you yawning already. How many of you would read a story with the headline “British power grid frequency falls by 1.2 HZ for 33 seconds”? I have a good idea how many – zero.
But the repercussions of those 33 seconds…now that was interesting. “Outside Kings Cross Station is absolute mayhem”, said one report. The reason? Electric trains and traffic signals powered down immediately. A BBC story described people stranded on trains in the middle of nowhere for hours and hours, with nowhere to go, no exit from the train, no water, toilets best left to the imagination. “By hour seven things were starting to get pretty tense. We were being held in the middle of nowhere. Food ran out about five hours ago… We quite simply had to sit.”
Away from the stranded trains, with traffic lights out, widespread traffic pandemonium and gridlock were the inevitable result particularly at rush hour.
That was in central Britain, in the middle of summer, when it got kind of stuffy on those trains I am sure but…what if that happened at sub-zero temperatures? Ok, it wouldn’t have been a lightning strike in those conditions, but if we ‘electrify everything’ we can be sure that power outages will only increase. How can they not? Many bad things can happen to power lines, at any time, with widespread consequences.
Ask anyone that lives in a region that gets ice storms – first thing down is power lines. Major transmission lines are, well, you couldn’t build a better target for lightning across the flat bald prairies.
‘Electrify everything’ is far worse than these train stoppages though, because, by definition, everything would rely on electricity. Including heat.
What would electrify everything mean in harsh weather conditions? Well, the pandemonium on the train platform is but a tiny glimpse of the chaos that could unfold. Imagine if everything were electrified, and there was a power outage.
What would work? Virtually nothing. Everything would grind to a halt, and buildings would begin to cool rapidly. Any vehicles that had battery life – because no more internal combustion engines, remember, not in an electrified world – would be a refuge, until those batteries ran out, which would not take very long at all.
Electrify everything means that even rural people are being encouraged to install heat pumps. Some solution, that – those devices are only effective down to a certain not-very-cold temperature anyway, about -5 degrees C. What happens to all the heat pumps if the power goes out?29dk2902lhttps://boereport.com/29dk2902l.html
Now, one would think the Deciding Class would be considering all this, and buttressing the electrical grid/system accordingly. But no, they are going the other way.
The same ‘electrify everything’ crowd wants us to, or rather demands that we, abandon hydrocarbons in favour of intermittent power sources. Their goals are to introduce less reliability into the system.
That same crowd thinks it understands the issue and therefore is pressing for the pairing of batteries with wind and solar. Oh lord save us all. Think about that for a second, in the context of how the world actually works.
First off, the danger from weather is when it is most extreme – either too hot or too cold. Those extremes are when the electrical grid is taxed the most and when power demand is highest. The risk is also most extreme – at -35 degrees C, people will die rapidly without heat. At plus 35 degrees C, people will expire rapidly without air conditioning.
Guess what. At weather extremes, all three – wind, solar, and batteries – perform the absolute worst.
During heat waves, wind speeds tend to be low, and solar panels lose their efficiency. So counting on those two in a heat wave is a non-starter. ‘Electrify everything’ would like to see batteries paired with wind/solar, but the same issue affects lithium-ion (and all batteries) – they don’t like high heat.
According to this research paper, the optimal range for lithium-ion batteries is 15-35 degrees Celsius. Remember too that that is optimal battery temperature and not ambient temperature; batteries can get far warmer than ambient if sitting in the sun, or from operation. Per the paper, operating outside this comfort zone, batteries “will degrade fast with increased risk of facing safety problems that include fire and explosion.”
During extreme cold, solar is obviously not much help, and wind speeds tend to be low as well. And then there’s poor old fair-weather batteries – they hate cold more than heat.
In extreme heat, air-conditioning is essential, particularly in hospitals, seniors centres, office buildings, schools you name it. It is life or death in hospitals and for seniors.
In extreme cold, well, don’t really have to spell that out for you do I.
An all-electric heating and transportation system is a recipe for disaster, and the worse the weather the worse the problems will be.
This isn’t to say natural gas and the rest of our existing system is perfect; however, humanity has developed along with it, and can’t live without it. There is no Edmonton or Winnipeg or Detroit as we know and love them without natural gas.
Furthermore, a truly great thing about the natural gas system, one that reaches a staggering number of places with incredible safety and reliability, is that it operates largely independently of the electrical system. A power outage does not impact gas supplies in the short term, and thus any of us subjected to below-zero temperatures can remain unfrozen thanks to that gas supply. We might not have power, but with natural gas, we can have fire. And heat.
‘Electrify everything’ is a barbaric and stupid concept that, if even partially adopted, will outright kill large swathes of humanity when harsh weather strikes. Imagine being stranded in the dead of winter, unable to travel anywhere except on foot, and even if you could, where would you go?
Buildings would have no heat. Water pipes would freeze. If the harsh weather lasts more than a few days, even mega-banks of batteries could not be recharged in any meaningful way, should they ever rise in prominence as advocates hope.
The move to ‘Electrify everything’ perfectly encapsulates the lazy thinking that is doing so much damage to energy systems. They’re the goofballs that think Net Zero 2050 is happening just because governments said it would. The loudest quackery tends to come from advocates in moderate climates, the zones where climate policy is developed, who think ideas like ‘electrify everything’ are noble targets. They have no clue how quickly -20 closes in on you, with no power, and no heat.
The rest of us, who face challenging weather as a matter of routine, are expected to do our part by just dropping dead in extreme weather, I guess. Hell of a way to run a country.
Energy dialogue should be exciting and positive! Get started by deconstructing the current mess. Pick up “The End of Fossil Fuel Insanity” at Amazon.ca, Indigo.ca, or Amazon.com.
Thanks!
Read more insightful analysis from Terry Etam here, or email Terry here.
The world only has one temperature, which must somehow be restrained by human efforts — and lots of money. Or so the endless IPCC reports would have us believe. Keep paying up so the self-styled weather controllers can ‘save the planet’. – – – The United Nations was poised to release a capstone report Monday distilling nearly a decade of published science on the impacts and trajectory of global warming, and the tools available to prevent climate catastrophe, says Phys.org.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 30-odd page “summary for policymakers”—compressing 10,500 pages authored by more than 1,000 scientists—is as dense as a black hole and will deliver a stark warning.
“We are nearing a point of no return,” UN chief Antonio Guterres said last week as diplomats from 195 nations gathered in Interlaken, Switzerland, to hammer out the final wording, finalized on Sunday night by exhausted and sleep-deprived delegates two days behind schedule.
“For decades, the IPCC has put forward evidence on how people and planet are being rocked by climate destruction.”
Since the last IPCC synthesis report in 2014, science has determined that devastating impacts are happening more quickly and at lower levels of warming than previously understood.
With Earth’s average surface temperature 1.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels so far, the planet has seen a steady crescendo of extreme weather, including tropical storms made worse by rising seas.
On current trends, the world is on track to warm by an additional 1.6 degrees.
In 2022, climate change quantifiably amplified deadly heatwaves in South America and South Asia, massive flooding in Nigeria and Pakistan, and record-breaking drought in Western Europe and the Unites States, according the World Weather Attribution consortium, which includes many IPCC authors.
Science in the last decade has also elevated the danger posed by so-called tipping points in Earth’s climate system that could—beyond certain temperature thresholds—see tropical forests in the Amazon morph into savannah, and ice sheets in Greenland and West Antarctica shed enough water to lift oceans by meters.
Global stocktake
But most of the wrangling at the week-long IPCC meeting centered on potential solutions, especially on how to decarbonise the global economy quickly enough to avoid crippling impacts, according to participants.
Under the 2015 Paris Agreement, nations vowed to collectively cap warming at “well below” 2C, and at 1.5C if possible.
A 2018 IPCC special report made it alarmingly clear that the more ambitious aspirational goal—since adopted by governments and business as a hard target—was a better guarantee for a climate-safe world.
Full article here. – – – Related: ROGER PIELKE JR.: A Primer On The IPCC’s Implausible Climate Scenarios (MAR 17, 2023) Quote: I have written a lot in recent years about the out-of-date scenarios of the IPCC and I thought it would be useful to prepare this short primer for those wanting to better understand the issues or simply to be reminded of the key findings.
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