New Study Finds Biomass Harms The Climate

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAThttps://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com

By Paul Homewood

 

h/t Joe Public/Philip Bratby

 

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From The Times:

 

Britain is wasting hundreds of millions of pounds subsidising power stations to burn American wood pellets that do more harm to the climate than the coal they replaced, a study has found.

Chopping down trees and transporting wood across the Atlantic Ocean to feed power stations produces more greenhouse gases than much cheaper coal, according to the report. It blames the rush to meet EU renewable energy targets, which resulted in ministers making the false assumption that burning trees was carbon-neutral.

Green subsidies for wood pellets and other biomass were championed by Chris Huhne when he was Liberal Democrat energy and climate change secretary in the coalition government. Mr Huhne, 62, who was jailed in 2013 for perverting the course of justice, is now European chairman of Zilkha Biomass, a US supplier of wood pellets.

The report was written by Duncan Brack, a former special adviser to Mr Huhne, for Chatham House, the respected international affairs think tank. Britain is by far the biggest importer of wood pellets for heat and power in the EU, shipping in 7.5 million tonnes last year, mostly from the US and Canada.

Drax, Britain’s biggest power station, received more than £450 million in subsidies in 2015 for burning biomass, which was mostly American wood pellets. The report says that the government’s assessment of the impact on the climate of switching from coal to wood pellets is flawed because it ignores emissions from burning pellets in power stations. The assessment counts only emissions from harvesting, processing and transporting wood pellets.

Wood pellets are claimed to be carbon-neutral partly because the forests from which they come are replanted. New trees would eventually absorb as much carbon as was emitted when mature trees were harvested and burnt. However, the report says that this process could take centuries — too late to contribute to preventing climate change over coming decades.

Mr Brack said: “It is ridiculous for the same kind of subsidies that go to genuine zero-carbon technologies, like solar and wind, to go to biomass use that might be increasing carbon emissions. It’s not a good use of money.

“For any biomass facility that is burning wood for energy, unless they are only burning stuff like saw-mill residues or post-consumer waste, their activities will be increasing carbon emissions in the atmosphere for decades or centuries. We shouldn’t be subsidising that.”

Pellet companies and power stations using them tended to claim that most of their wood was residues, Mr Brack said. In fact, about three quarters of the pellets from the southern US came from whole trees and residues accounted for only a quarter. “Whole trees can sometimes be misclassified as residues,” the report said. Mr Brack called on the EU to use its present review of energy policies to restrict subsidies to biomass that actually reduced emissions.

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Readers will know I have been banging on about this for ages. The significant point here though is that the report is written by Duncan Brack, the former special advisor to Chris Huhne. Far from being a sceptic, he clearly believes in doing the utmost to promote renewable energy.

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February 22, 2017 at 09:57PM

Tech Workers Protest Trump?

via Defeat Climate Alarmismhttps://defyccc.com

The fake news networks (FNN) widely reported demonstration of about 150 supposed tech workers against President Trump in connection to the immigration order.  I do not know how many of the protesters were real tech workers.  The photos from the demonstration show massive presence of UNITE HERE! – an extremist union, whose captive membership mostly consists of unqualified workers.

I appreciate self sacrifice of these tech workers (if any; compare to the fake scientists in another anti-Trump demonstration) for the sake of profits of their employers, who advocate unrestricted immigration from low wages countries to replace their tech workers.

via Defeat Climate Alarmism https://defyccc.com

February 22, 2017 at 09:29PM

Antarctic Sea Ice Claims Don’t Stand Up To Scrutiny

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAThttps://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com

By Paul Homewood

 

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From Yahoo:

 

A few days ago, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center announced that the Antarctic sea ice contracted to just 883,015 sq. miles, which is the smallest on record.

Experts assert that, if changes are not made to pollution and our fossil fuel industry, a number of species will be threatened as sea levels (and temperatures) continue to rise.

The Antarctic ice sheet goes through a cycle of expansion and contraction every year. Ultimately, the ice that exists around the continent melts during the southern hemisphere’s summer, which occurs towards the end of February, and expands again when autumn sets in.

However, that melting is increasing dramatically.

This week, the US National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC) announced that the sea ice contracted to just 883,015 sq. miles (2.28m sq. km). The announcement came on February 13, and these numbers mean that the ice is now at the smallest extent on record, reaching just a little smaller than the previous low of 884,173 sq. miles, which was recorded February 27, 1997.

NSIDC director Mark Serreze asserts that we will need to wait for measurements in the coming days before officially confirming this new all-time low; however, he is not optimistic. “Unless something funny happens, we’re looking at a record minimum in Antarctica,” Serreze told Reuters.

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http://ift.tt/QNmUn7

 

Antarctic sea ice extent has been running below average for the last few months, and unsurprisingly the usual suspects have been jumping up and down and blaming it on global warming.

This despite the fact that Antarctic sea ice extent has been expanding in recent years, something that junk scientists, like Jim Hansen,  have been trying to blame on, yes you’ve guessed it, global warming.

 

http://ift.tt/QNmUn7 

 

NSIDC’s propagandist in chief, Mark Serreze, is quite clear:

 

Climate change skeptics have often pointed to the tendency of the Antarctic ice sheet to expand as evidence against global warming. But with world average temperatures hitting an all time high in 2016, the impact of climate change on planet Earth is getting more pronounced and harder to deny. “We’ve always thought of the Antarctic as the sleeping elephant starting to stir,” Serreze stated; “Well, maybe it’s starting to stir now.”

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He should know, since NSIDC, the organisation he is in charge of, has already reported, the sharp drop in sea ice since September has been due to changing wind wind patterns. This is linked to the Southern Annular Mode turning negative, allowing winds to penetrate from the north, both lifting temperatures and at the same time pushing sea ice towards the coast. (See here)

This is a perfectly natural phenomenon. We also know that sea ice in the Antarctic has fluctuated wildly, both up and down during the 20thC, and there is no reason to suppose that this time is any different.

 

However, there is another side to this story. Just how accurate are the numbers we are being fed with by NSIDC?

According to them, they have been using a new satellite instrument since April 2016.

Cryosphere Today, who usually provide sea ice data as well, also report that the satellite data they have received since last April is spurious, so there is no cross check with NSIDC.

 

http://ift.tt/1Evzr6Q

 

NSIDC have become so politicised over the years that only a fool would trust the numbers they are putting out. And with something like sea ice , it is very easy to fudge the figures.

Which brings us onto the next point – margins of error.

As the Yahoo report points out, the extent this year is only 1158 sq miles less than recorded in 1997, just 0.1% less.

NSIDC do not publish error margins in their data archive, but even they admit that they can be huge, particularly in summer when ice concentration is low:

 

6.1 Accuracy and Precision

The accuracy of Arctic sea ice concentration at a grid cell in the source data is usually cited as within +/- 5 percent of the actual sea ice concentration in winter, and +/- 15 percent during the summer when melt ponds are present on the sea ice (GSFC Confidence Level), but some comparisons with operational charts report much larger differences (Agnew 2003, Partington et al 2003). Accuracy tends to be best within the consolidated ice pack where the sea ice is relatively thick (greater than 20 cm) and ice concentration is high. Accuracy decreases as the proportion of thin ice increases (Cavalieri 1995).

The accuracy of the median sea ice extent edge position for Sea Ice Index products has not been rigorously assessed. It would be difficult to do so, because ice edge is not a well-defined parameter. For our purposes, it is where source data grid cells transition from greater than 15 percent to less than 15 percent concentration. Operational services usually speak of a marginal ice zone of varying width over which concentration transitions from more than 90 percent to 0 percent. Spot checks of the sea ice edge position using a 15 percent concentration cutoff against NIC ice charts show that when there is a broad, diffuse ice edge, the NRTSI and GSFC products sometimes do not detect sea ice where the concentration can be as high as 60 percent (Fetterer 2003 poster). When the sea ice edge is more compact, the 15 percent concentration cutoff reflects its location fairly well (Fetterer 2002).

Defining the ice edge in SSM/I data using the 15 percent concentration contour has been common practice since the publication, in 1991, of a study that compared SSM/I ice concentration data from the NASA Team algorithm with coincident data from higher resolution airborne imagery. That study used remote sensing data acquired in March 1988 and found that aircraft-determined ice-edge positions matched the SSM/I 15 percent ice concentration contour (Cavalieri et al. 1991).

Ice concentration from low-resolution passive microwave data is not highly accurate; and for this reason, it is best not to use Sea Ice Index ice concentration images alone, out of temporal context, especially those from a single day. Ice extent images are more reliable, because the difference in emissivity between open water and sea ice, even at low concentrations, is great (Comiso and Kwok 1996). Still, the instrument’s low resolution (see Table 5) means that the ice edge, whether it is a compact or diffuse marginal ice zone, will not be represented well. For example, the daily 25 km SII extent product for 08 September 2011 is shown in Figure 21 along with the 4 km Multisensor Analyzed Sea Ice Extent (MASIE) product from the same day. MASIE resolves the ice edge with greater precision and accuracy, but it is not a long and consistently processed record. The Sea Ice Index daily product does a reasonable job, but it is evident why we place higher confidence in monthly than in daily products. Many errors due to missing data and transient weather effects are averaged out when we average daily data over a month.

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To claim a record low based on a difference of 0.1% is clearly statistically nonsense. Worse than that, it is dishonest.

No serious scientist would dream of making such a claim, but this is NSIDC we are talking about.

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February 22, 2017 at 08:57PM

The Impacts of the Demand for Woody Biomass for Power and Heat on Climate and Forests

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com

Although most renewable energy policy frameworks treat biomass as carbon-neutral at the point of combustion, biomass emits more carbon per unit of energy than most fossil fuels.

Although most renewable energy policy frameworks treat biomass as carbon-neutral at the point of combustion, biomass emits more carbon per unit of energy than most fossil fuels.

Fuel composed of wood chips to be used for the UEM (Usine d’Electricité de Metz) biomass plant in Metz, eastern France. Photo: Getty Images.

Summary

• The use of wood for electricity generation and heat in modern (non-traditional) technologies has grown rapidly in recent years, and has the potential to continue to do so.
• The EU has been, and remains, the main global source of demand, as a result of its targets for renewable energy. This demand is largely met by its own forest resources and supplemented by imports from the US, Canada and Russia.
• Countries outside the EU, including the US, China, Japan and South Korea, have the potential to increase the use of biomass (including agricultural residues as well as wood), but so far this has not taken place at scale, partly because of the falling costs of competing renewables such as solar PV and wind. However, the role of biomass as a system balancer, and its supposed ability, in combination with carbon capture and storage technology, to generate negative emissions, seem likely to keep it in contention in the future.
• Although most renewable energy policy frameworks treat biomass as though it is carbon-neutral at the point of combustion, in reality this cannot be assumed, as biomass emits more carbon per unit of energy than most fossil fuels. Only residues that would otherwise have been burnt as waste or would have been left in the forest and decayed rapidly can be considered to be carbon-neutral over the short to medium term.
• One reason for the perception of biomass as carbon-neutral is the fact that, under IPCC greenhouse gas accounting rules, its associated emissions are recorded in the land use rather than the energy sector. However, the different ways in which land use emissions are accounted for means that a proportion of the emissions from biomass may never be accounted for.
• In principle, sustainability criteria can ensure that only biomass with the lowest impact on the climate are used; the current criteria in use in some EU member states and under development in the EU, however, do not achieve this as they do not account for changes in forest carbon stock.

Also see Woody Biomass for Power and Heat: Impacts on the Global Climate, which assesses the impact of the use of biomass for energy on greenhouse gas emissions, how these are accounted for under international climate accounting rules, and analyses the sustainability criteria currently in use and under development to minimise negative impacts.

Research Paper: The Impacts of the Demand for Woody Biomass for Power and Heat on Climate and Forests – PDF | 343.3 KB

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

February 22, 2017 at 08:33PM