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 mentality of the doomsday crowd is something to behold. Why would one go zombie on the coming end of modern civilization rather than soberly examine the (failed) track record of alarmism and the (non-alarming) data of weather extremes, temperature, and climate-related deaths?
“Last chance travel …. From melting glaciers to unbearable summer heat, climate change will make some holiday destinations unrecognizable.”
The mentality of the doomsday crowd is something to behold. Why would one go zombie on the coming end of modern civilization rather than soberly examine the (failed) track record of alarmism and the (non-alarming) data of weather extremes, temperature, and climate-related deaths?
I am reminded of two authors of the 1972 Club of Rome study who were so confident of doomism (here):
Dennis and Donella Meadows retreated to a New Hampshire farm after completing the book “to learn about homesteading and wait for the coming collapse.” “We definitely felt like Cassandras,” Donella Meadows added, “especially as we watched the world react to our work.”
But maybe Kenneth Boulding got it right when he said:
Is there any more single-minded, simple pleasure than viewing with alarm? At times it is even better than sex.
Maybe “fear porn” is how to describe those who peddle fear and doom and want to recreate society along the lines that they think is “sustainable,” what F. A. Hayek would call “the fatal conceit.”
Is that what we really want as (privileged) human beings in 2023? To fly somewhere to ‘see it before it’s gone’? (or more accurately before it’s destroyed by our extractive colonial system that benefits a small proportion of humanity and f**ks everyone else, human and non-human)
Or to find out the places we can fly to that aren’t yet so destroyed that they still look ‘nice’ and we can go there without feeling too guilty? Really? Aren’t we better than that?
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The article follows:
“#Travel planning has always involved a gamble with the weather. Sometimes it’s a dead cert — the Canaries in December, for example. At others it’s a long shot, Brittany being rain-free in August, & occasionally it’s a no-hope outsider, as anyone who has been tempted by a bargain package to Thailand in September will know
The weather, however, is no longer a safe bet. The #climate is changing, and last year offered the most dramatic and convincing evidence yet of its effects. Wildfires destroyed tens of thousands of square miles of forest in the US, South America & Europe
Devastating floods hit Australia, South Africa, the Sahel and Pakistan, and Europe endured the hottest summer since measurements began, with the UK reaching a new high of 40.3C at on July 19th
African rivers are dry. Alpine resorts are warm and muddy. Beaches in the south of France recorded June-like temperatures at Christmas and, last week, Los Angelenos built snowmen. India issued heatwave alerts in February, Adelaide issued a “code red” heatstroke warning last week, and in Mauritius holidaymakers sought shelter as Cyclone Freddy battered the island. It will come as no surprise that there’s more of the same to come, exacerbated this year and next as a new El Niño event takes over from the outgoing La Niña….
Last-chance #tourism seems not only in bad taste but also to be a driver of #climatechange by adding to overall emissions. But it’s not that simple. In 2019 the global travel industry supported 333 million jobs. If each of those jobs feeds just four mouths — and in sub-Saharan Africa it’s eight — then one sixth of the global population depends on tourism’s transfer of wealth. (***Bullsh*t – people are dependent on tourism ‘Transfer of wealth’, because of the obscene actual transfer of wealth from the global south to the global north through extraction and debt! A global debt cancellation could surely resolve much of that overnight***)
And there’s the need, too, to bear witness. (!!!!?) I always thought the Antarctic cruise industry’s insistence that “every tourist who sees the ice returns as an ambassador” was self-serving — especially when you saw those ambassadors heading for the biz-class lounges at Buenos Aires airports. But if we travel in a sustainable way to inspect the damage we have done, perhaps we’ll fight harder to protect what’s left”
Before 2035: escape the heat
We’ll have crossed the 1.5C of warming threshold by 2035 and, according to the Met Office, summers like the last will be the norm. Much of the Med, from southern Spain to Turkey, will be too hot to handle between June and September.
Before 2050: dodge storms, flooding and more heat
Sea levels are forecast to rise by between 29cm and 1.1m by 2100. It doesn’t sound like much, but a New Zealand study says it’s enough to put “one billion people at risk of coastal inundation or high-tide flooding” by 2050.
Forecasters did not see this one coming. On March 23-24, auroras spread into the United States as far south as New Mexico (+32.8N) during a severe (category G4) geomagnetic storm–the most intense in nearly 6 years.
March 24, 2023: Forecasters did not see this one coming. On March 23-24, auroras spread into the United States as far south as New Mexico (+32.8N) during a severe (category G4) geomagnetic storm–the most intense in nearly 6 years. The cause of the storm is still unclear; it may have been the ripple effect of a near-miss CME on March 23rd.
„Aurora pillars were visible from Shenandoah National Park in Central Virginia,“ says Peter Forister, who photographed the light show at latitude +38.7 degrees:
„Beautiful red and green colors were visible to the naked eye around 11 pm local time,“ he says. Other notable low-latitude sightings were made in Colorado (+38.7N), Missouri (+40.2N), Colorado again (+38.3N), Nebraska (+41N) and North Carolina (+36.2N). More than half of all US states were in range of the display.
Not every light in the sky was the aurora borealis, however. There was also STEVE:
STEVE (Strong Thermal Emission Velocity Enhancement) looks like an aurora, but it is not. The phenomenon is caused by hot (3000°C) ribbons of gas flowing through Earth’s magnetosphere at speeds exceeding 6 km/s (13,000 mph). These ribbons appear during strong geomagnetic storms, revealing themselves by their soft purple glow.
This remarkable and surprising storm began on March 23rd when magnetic fields in the space around Earth suddenly shifted. In the jargon of space weather forecasting „BsubZ tipped south.“ South-pointing magnetic fields can open a crack in Earth’s magnetosphere and, indeed, that’s what happened. Earth’s „shields were down“ for almost 24 hours, allowing solar wind to penetrate and the storm to build to category G4.
These developments may have been caused the close passage of an unexpected CME. The storm cloud could have left the sun on March 20-21 when SOHO coronagraph data were unusually sparse. We didn’t know it was coming. For aurora watchers, it was a welcome surprise. Aurora alerts:SMS Text.
Something rare and strange happened last month. On Feb. 23rd, growing sunspot AR3234 produced an M-class solar flare. It was nearly midnight in Florida when the explosion occurred, so you’d expect no one there to notice. On the contrary, in the community of High Springs, FL, amateur radio astronomer Dave Typinski recorded a strong shortwave radio burst.
“You CAN see the sun at midnight in Florida… sometimes,” says Typinski. This is what his instruments recorded while the flare was underway:
A double wave of static washed over Florida, filling the radio spectrum with noise at all frequencies below 25 MHz. “The Sun was 69° below the horizon when this happened,” he marvels.
How is this possible? The entire body of our planet was blocking the event from Typinski’s antenna. It’s called “antipodal focusing.” First postulated by Marconi more than 100 years ago, antipodal focusing is a mode of radio propagation in which a signal starts out on one side of the planet, gets trapped between Earth’s surface and the ionosphere, and travels to the opposite hemisphere. Waves converging at the antipode can create a surprisingly strong signal.
“This is the second or maybe third midnight solar radio burst I’ve seen in ten years, but it’s by far the strongest,” says Typinski. “The previous events happened at the height of Solar Cycle 24. They’re quite rare.”
Pause: Yes, solar flares can produce radio signals. Typinski’s midnight burst was a “Type V,” caused by streams of electrons shooting through the sun’s atmosphere in the aftermath of the flare. Plasma waves rippling away from the streams emited intense bursts of natural radio static. The burst was first observed in broad daylight at the Learmonth Solar Observatory in Australia, then it curved around Earth to reach Typinski.
Above: An example of antipodal focusing of seismic waves caused by the Chicxulub asteroid impact. The geometry is the same as for radio waves. [more].
“This propagation mode was used during the Cold War,” notes Typinski. “The U.S. would park a SIGINT ship in the south Pacific to grab signals from the Eastern Bloc. The Soviets probably did the same thing, parking in the southern Indian ocean.”
Turns out, this method of spying works for radio astronomers, too. Would you like to record an event like this? NASA’s Radio JOVE program makes it easy. Off-the-shelf radio telescope kits allow even novices to monitor radio outbursts from the sun, which are becoming more frequent as Solar Cycle 25 intensifies.
I often ask renewables enthusiasts to explain what we are supposed to do when the wind isn’t blowing if we can’t fall back on fossil fuels. The other day, I pressed James Murray, the editor of Business Green magazine, what forms of storage he thought we could use, and this is what he said:
… a portfolio of nuclear, demand response, grid scale batteries, other emerging forms of energy storage technologies, hydrogen, and gas, ultimately in conjunction with CCS.
Clearly, we were talking somewhat at cross purposes; my question was specifically about storage, but even if we broaden the scope to cover the general question of “what do we do when the wind isn’t blowing”, his answer suggests that he hasn’t grasped the fundamental economic problem.
That problem is that, with wind dominating the grid, for anyone looking to make money in the lulls, the economics look grim. There are two major kinds of lull that need to be filled. The first is a dunkelflaute, a lull in the winter, when solar is generating little or nothing. We get a dunkelflaute most years, and sometimes more than one. They can last from 1-3 weeks. The second is the long summer lull, with low wind generation right through the summer month, although perhaps with occasional windy interruptions. This happens every year of course, and a large amount of energy needs to be stored to cover the gap: perhaps as much as 50 days’ demand.
If we are talking about storage then, most of it will barely be used; it’s required just once a year to deal with the summer wind lull. Most of it will be filled in autumn, and will then sit there waiting for the summer, when it will be emptied to meet demand, before sitting empty again until the winds pick up again as the nights draw in.
Making money on this basis is impossible. A kilowatt hour of lithium ion battery storage might cost £350. If, optimistically, it gets perform two charge-discharge cycles per year, it will complete just 20 cycles over its lifetime. That means it needs to charge £17.50 per kilowatt hour, just to cover its capital costs; the electricity is extra! That is perhaps thirty times the level seen at the peak of the crisis last year, and 300 times the prices we used to enjoy before the advent of “cheap renewables”.
Of course, cheaper storage systems may be on the horizon, so it’s worth looking at these. The best bet on the horizon seems to be liquid air storage, which has a 25-year lifespan, so might be expected to complete 50 recharging cycles. Its capital costs are also much lower, but it will still need £1.68 to cover its capital costs. That’s three times the peak price last year, and thirty times what they were in the good old days.
Needing a large amount of electricity just a couple of times a year makes the economics impossible. It’s not just storage technologies that are affected – James’ idea that we could use nuclear to plug the gap therefore doesn’t stack up. Who is going to build a nuclear power station that only gets to run for 50 days a year? The idea is preposterous. In essence, the intermittency problem can’t be solved. The costs of doing so make it impossible, for any technology, even on the most optimistic assumptions about cost trajectories.
As a coda, it’s interesting to note that the Committee on Climate Change’s model for a net zero energy system has a vast fleet of gas turbines (122 GW of them!) burning hydrogen to deal with the intermittency of its vast fleets of wind and solar. But the power stations get run very rarely – they deliver just 2% of their capacity each year. By my calculations this means they will deliver power at around £1/kWh, or 40 times the prices from the good old days. However, the CCC, perhaps wisely, has accidentally missed the bill for these units out of the final reckoning of the cost of net zero.
They studied molecules from certain algae that are only produced when there is sea ice. Natural climate variation alone was all it took to reach the required temperature level.
They studied molecules from certain algae that are only produced when there is sea ice. Natural climate variation alone was all it took to reach the required temperature level. – – –
The „Last Ice Area“ north of Greenland and Canada is the last sanctuary of all-year sea ice in this time of rising temperatures caused by climate change.
A new study now suggests that this may soon be over, says Phys.org.
Icebreaker Oden in the sea ice north of Greenland. Credit: Martin Jakobsson, Stockholm University
Researchers from Aarhus University, in collaboration with Stockholm University and the United States Geological Survey, analyzed samples from the previously inaccessible region north of Greenland.
The sediment samples were collected from the seabed in the Lincoln Sea, part of the „Last Ice Area“. They showed that the sea ice in this region melted away during summer months around 10,000 years ago.
The research team concluded that summer sea ice melted at a time when temperatures were at a level that we are rapidly approaching again today.
„Climate models have suggested that summer sea ice in this region will melt in the coming decades, but it’s uncertain if it will happen in 20, 30, 40 years, or more. This project has demonstrated that we’re very close to this scenario, and that temperatures only have to increase a little before the ice will melt,“ says Christof Pearce, Assistant Professor at the Department of Geoscience, Aarhus University.
The researchers have used data from the Early Holocene period to predict when the sea ice will melt today. During this time period, summer temperatures in the Arctic were higher than today. Although this was caused by natural climate variability opposed to the human-induced warming, it still is a natural laboratory for studying the fate of this region in the immediate future.
In Aarhus the marine samples have been analyzed in collaboration with Associate Professor Marianne Glasius and academic technical staff Mads Mørk Jensen from the Department of Chemistry.
Among other things, they studied molecules from certain algae that are only produced when there is sea ice. The researchers can thereby determine when summer sea ice was present in the area.
Read the new Together Declaration & Climate Debate UK report by Ben Pile demonstrating that neither the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) nor the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) find evidence of a causal link between air pollution and mortality.
The alarmist foundation for ULEZ expansion has disintegrated.
Read the new Together Declaration & Climate Debate UK report by Ben Pile demonstrating that neither the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) nor the Committee on the Medical Effects of Air Pollutants (COMEAP) find evidence of a causal link between air pollution and mortality.
Despite Khan claiming that 4,000 Londoners die each year, both UKHSA and COMEAP explicitly advise against framing the potential mortality risk associated with air pollution exposure in terms of deaths because it is untrue and unscientific.
This sends a lightning bolt through Sadiq Khan’s irresponsible and dishonest claims that ULEZ expansion would ‘save lives’ – seemingly the only argument ‘left in the locker’ given the public, London boroughs, and even London Labour MPs, are against this scheme. When the science and economics of anti-car policies are fully considered, the evidence suggests they are very likely to do far more harm than good.
A growing backlash over climate-friendly policies is now hitting the German Greens, putting wobbles into the country’s three-party ruling coalition.
The conflict is not only affecting the Greens’ popularity — is also seems to be threatening a wider crisis for the coalition | Tobias Schwarz/AFP via Getty Images
BERLIN — Germans want to save the climate. They’re just reluctant to take the potentially painful steps this would require.
A growing backlash over climate-friendly policies is now hitting the German Greens, putting wobbles into the country’s three-party ruling coalition.
Not only has Germany been causing a ruckus at the EU level in recent weeks by mounting a last-minute blockade to a proposed ban on combustion engines, but the country is also facing a domestic political fight over phasing out gas and oil heating systems, as well as pushing forward the coal exit.
ll those disputes are linked to fundamental disagreements between the Greens and their two coalition partners, Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Free Democratic Party (FDP), over how the EU’s climate-protection targets should be implemented and what consequences and costs this will have for industry and citizens.
The conflict is not only affecting the Greens’ popularity — is also seems to be threatening a wider crisis for the coalition. And that crisis seems to be escalating.
EU partners are looking with growing unease at the ruptures emerging in the German ruling coalition.
They’re particularly worried about Berlin’s blockade of an EU ban on sales of polluting cars and vehicles from 2035, which the German government previously agreed to, and was specifically promoted by the Greens. However, at the very last stage of the legislative approval process, the FDP of Porsche-driving Finance Minister Christian Lindner threw a spanner at the works, demanding that the European Commission create a loophole for cars operating with synthetic fuels, or e-fuels.
The FDP sees such e-fuels as a chance to save Germany’s industrial crown jewel: the piston-driven internal combustion engine. Without e-fuels, the EU law would force the car-making industry to shift entirely to electronic vehicles.
The FDP sees itself emboldened by a growing public backlash against the green goals for cars, with 67 percent of Germans recently saying they’re against banning the traditional combustion-engine car as of 2035. Germans are concerned about the hundreds of thousands of jobs that depend on its automotive industry.
For the Greens, however, which had long cheered the EU car legislation, the affair is hugely embarrassing — not to mention a threat to Germany’s reputation at EU level. However, per coalition politics, they are hamstrung, as Scholz has sided with the FDP on the issue.
Green policies are always popular, at least until people find out they have got to pay for them.
The row over the ban on proper cars by 2035 has been brewing for a few weeks now, and Germany has been joined by Italy and five other countries in blocking the EU’s proposed ban. Instead they want the EU to allow cars operating with synthetic e-fuels. But what is e-fuel?
In simple terms, it is hydrogen combined with carbon dioxide. As the latter is captured from the air, its release back into the air after combustion is carbon neutral. The hydrogen of course also has to be carbon neutral, made by electrolysis from renewable electricity.
Sounds good? Well this video explains why it is not really a solution at all:
In short, e-fuel is horribly energy inefficient, with e-fuel containing as little as 7% of the energy used to produce it. As a consequence it is also cripplingly expensive, maybe around $35/gallon.
As the video notes, if you have a Lamborghini, you don’t worry about how much it costs to fill up. But for ordinary passenger cars, it is a non-starter. And you would need so much wind power to produce the hydrogen that it could never work at scale.
So why is Germany so keen to promote it?
I suspect that the real reason is that by keeping combustion engine technology going, they will also be able to keep petrol/diesel going for at least a few more years too.
After all, will Germany’s politicians be any keener to ban ICEs in 2035 than they are now?
By then, they are likely to simply kick the can down the road again. That is if the whole absurdity of Net Zero has not already been consigned to the rubbish bin.
In this week’s episode, we’re applying the spirit of March Madness to the climate change debate.
We ranked the 16 most widespread myths about climate change in a head-to-head bracket-style tournament. Host Anthony Watts and guests H. Sterling Burnett, Linnea Lueken, and Jim Lakely will vote on which myth they believe is the most misleading or harmful.
Viewer votes left during the live broadcast will count too, so make sure to tune in live for this episode!
The myth with the most votes advances to the next round until only one remains.
Tune in and join the competition as we break down these myths and share the facts about climate change.
Get ready for a thrilling and educational episode!
Don’t forget to like, share, and subscribe to stay updated on future episodes and climate change discussions.
But Lang left so many barn doors open. She repeatedly spoke out in favour of district heating, but it must also be generated, it does not fall from the sky.
The heat transition was the topic at Maybrit Illner on 23.03.2023. Whether it was now particularly wise to invite the chairwoman of the Greens Ricarda Lang and Michael Kretschmer, the Prime Minister of Saxony, as guests, can certainly continue to make a very big question mark after the broadcast. Kretschmer would certainly have been able to parry the expected statements of the Green chairwoman with a little preparation. Instead, the repair of the Nordstream 1 gas pipeline was put on the table. This is called unforced error in tennis.
But Lang left so many barn doors open. She repeatedly spoke out in favour of district heating, but it must also be generated, it does not fall from the sky. She also better not mention that such heat is also obtained from coal. Kretschmer clearly missed to score a point here or did he better not want to, because Saxony is a coal country?
Scandinavia has been mentioned several times as a shining example. After all, Veronika Grimm, who was also invited, made it clear what the state of district heating in northern Europe is. However, she forgot to explicitly mention that our neighbours to the north have a high share of hydropower and that Sweden and Finland rely on nuclear energy. These are reliable low-CO2 electricity productions. Kretschmer could have scored points there as well.
On the subject of new gas-fired power plants, he could have clearly shown Lang where the problem lies. Grimm said quite bashfully that the 30-50 GW that would be needed as a gas-fired power plant from 2030 would have to be built so slowly. That, too, takes time. Not to mention that these power plants then have to be fired with expensive LNG. This then also applies to district heating but heating with electricity as a price factor.
The appearance of Hermann-Josef Tenhagen from the magazine Finanztipps was certainly strange. He tried to calculate the price of a heat pump down, only to be slightly higher than a gas heater. He did not mention that electricity prices will rise in the future, just like gas prices. He better not say that heat pumps only have a certain lifetime. That would have been very interesting, because again and again 20-30 years fell for gas heaters as a value.
The Spiegel journalist Gerald Traufetter, who was also invited, spoke throughout the evening in the “we-form”. It was not entirely clear whether he meant society or the federal government. Fatal, however, were signals like Lang’s that Father State will somehow help in the end. The budget of a state has natural limits, she doesn’t seem to know that? So the broadcast was not really helpful in increasing the knowledge. It can be seen in the ZDF media library until 23.03.2024.
It is also worth taking a look at the fact box on the ZDF website. The statements of experts are in stark contrast to what was said in the program. This applies, for example, to the number of available heat pumps.
“The President of the German Confederation of Skilled Crafts, Jörg Dittrich, was sceptical about the draft bill of the Federal Government. It is not possible to compensate for 600,000 gas heating systems installed during the same period, “simply because the companies do not have this number of heat pumps.”
IG Metall is also concerned about the necessary implementation Fachkräfte.In the restructuring-relevant trades are already missing up to 190,000 employees, said board member Ralf Kutzner of the German Press Agency.
Helmut Bramann, Managing Director of the Central Association of Sanitation, Heating and Air Conditioning, warns that solutions must also be found for buildings where no heat pump can be installed for structural reasons.
The Federal Association of Energy and Water Industries (BDEW) also warns “a great deal of tact” in dealing with the millions of private homeowners and landlords. “Homeowners must neither be unsettled with complex requirements for heat supply and energy-efficient renovation of their buildings, nor must they be overwhelmed financially. There is no off-the-shelf solution for this,” said association chief Kerstin Andreae. It is true that heat pumps and district heating are at the heart of the heat transition. However, affordable practical solutions will also be needed in the future, such as gas-based hybrid systems that could be operated with renewable gases without carbon.
The President of the Federal Association of Free Real Estate and Housing Companies, Dirk Salewski, told the German Press Agency that climate protection must be implemented with a sense of proportion and farsightedness, not with a crowbar and not with projects that lead to social upheavals. “Otherwise, acceptance of climate protection will dwindle and the economy will be permanently weakened.” In addition, according to Salewski, the costs incurred exceed the possibilities of the owners and tenants.
Kai Warnecke, Chairman of the Board of the owners’ association Haus & Grund Deutschland, criticized: “The draft is peppered with numerous obligations and detailed specifications, without it becoming clear how these can be implemented in practice. (…) Chancellor Scholz must now ensure that the energy transition in existing buildings does not overwhelm citizens. Otherwise, Habeck’s plans will end in disaster.”
GBNews
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