The Seventh Thing To Know About Climate Change–Nat Geographic

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By Paul Homewood

 

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It is hard to know where to start with this load of garbage!

 

 

 

1) If climate change was not a serious danger, would 195 countries have signed the Paris Agreement, pledging to keep the warming below 2C?

Clearly National Geographic have failed to read what actually was agreed at Paris.

 

For a start, the Agreement itself actually states that, under the “pledges” made, emissions will continue to rise. To meet the 2C scenario, they would need to be cut by at least half.

 

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Secondly, the vast majority of the 195 countries, including China and India, are designated as “developing” countries. As such, the Paris Agreement places no obligation on them at all to cut emissions, as it does on developed nations.

 

 

2) Switch to renewables

 

 

They claim that we can save the planet by switching to renewable energy. Yet even their own graph shows that, although the use of renewable energy will roughly double by 2040, this will be dwarfed by the increasing use of fossil fuels.

The reason for this is very simple – the demand for cheap, reliable energy is growing fast amongst developing countries, as their economies expand and the expectations of their people for a better standard of living grow.

Renewable energy, such as wind and solar, is utterly incapable of meeting this demand.

The sort of emission cuts needed “to do something” would condemn billions of people to grinding poverty.

 

3) In the US, solar now employs more people than coal, oil and gas combined.

 

Given that solar only provides 0.4% of the US’s energy, this fatuous statement shows just how inefficient solar power really is.

 

BP Energy Review 2016

4) We can do something about it!

Who is this WE?

In the last decade or so, emissions have been slowly dropping in the US and EU, and now only account for 27% of global CO2.

Meanwhile, emissions in China and the rest of the world have been rocketing upwards.

 

BP Energy Review 2016

Even if US and EU emissions dropped to zero, it would only take global emissions back to their level in 2002, and make next to no difference to the climate.

 

 

 

 

This whole series from National Geographic has been based on a combination of irrelevant, fake and cherry picked data.

Sadly this seems to sum up the low standards that it has now sunk to.

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April 16, 2017 at 12:36AM

Easily through the night on a fully loaded powerwall

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This is already the third post on the Tesla powerwall series and especially how it is (mis)presented in the mainstream media. This misinformation is not only limited to the mainstream media, it is also strong in social media. The subject of this post is a facebook post by the owners of the Tesla home battery mentioned in previous two posts.

It starts informative with a description of their powerwall (translated from Dutch):

Our home battery is a lithium ion battery with a usable capacity of 6.4 kWh (slightly less than our average daily consumption). We decided NOT to go for the #offgrid option, so when the grid voltage is lost, our battery will also not be able to power us. The battery can deliver 2 kW continuous power, with a peak power of 3.3 kW.

The capacity of their powerwall is indeed somewhat lower than their average consumption. I understood from a previous post that their annual consumption is around 3,200 kWh, meaning around 8.77 kW per day. On average of course, their consumption will be lower in summer (when production is high) and in higher in winter (when production is low).

Not sure whether all this 6.4 kWh is really usable and how long it stays that way (this battery is currently brand new, but lithium ion batteries degrade after a while). But that aside.

It becomes a bit trickier in the next sentence when it comes to the limitations of the powerwall (translated from Dutch):

With a load of 2 kW, the battery is depleted after 3 hours.

Followed by the justification that this is not much of a restriction for them (translated from Dutch, my emphasis):

But our home has a nominal consumption of about 150 watt, so even in winter a fully loaded battery gets us easily through the night (even if we make a kettle of tea in the evening).

They lost me with that sentence. What they basically say is that the powerwall has limitations, but that these don’t apply to them because their home has a low nominal consumption and to prove that, they claim that they get through the night on a fully loaded powerwall, even in winter.

First it was not really clear what they meant with “nominal consumption” (which is much lower than their average consumption). From the context of that last statement, my guess is that they mean “their electricity consumption during the night” and then, yes, they will easily get through the night on a fully loaded 6.4 kWh battery.

Even in winter.

Even after they made a kettle of tea in the evening.

To be honest, I am not really impressed: of course, a fully loaded battery gets you easily through the night. That is not a big deal.

People tend to sleep at night, so electricity consumption is low anyway. Getting through the night starting from a (nearly) fully loaded battery is not something to brag about, it is a rather meaningless feat. If they don’t get through the night on a fully loaded battery, then there would be something seriously wrong with their system…

What does this actually prove anyway? Their example looks like a non sequitur to me. Sure, their powerwall has more than enough juice to come through the night, but this doesn’t prove anything for the performance during the day when consumption is high.

As far as I know, capacity problems during the night were never an issue with the home battery, so the example that was given is meaningless for what they want to prove.

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April 15, 2017 at 11:18PM

Discussion thread: reactions to House Hearing

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April 15, 2017 at 08:39PM

New clean air stickers required for travel to French cities

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A colour-coded badge of honour or shame for every car under new French regulations. UK MoT certificates won’t do for city visitors.

UK drivers planning to go to France in the coming months are going to require new ‘clean air’ stickers or face on-the-spot fines for failing to display them, as CLM reports.

Paris, Lyon and Grenoble introduced the new Crit’Air scheme in January to tackle vehicle pollution in their city centres, with another 22 towns and cities said to be planning to follow suit over the next few years.

The scheme requires all vehicles to clearly display an air quality certificate windscreen sticker, or vignette, according to how much they pollute.

How does the Crit’Air scheme work?

The new Crit’Air system is used on high pollution days to prevent the worst polluting vehicles from driving in the affected cities. In future, however, vehicles may be banned from driving in Crit’Air areas on certain days based on which emissions sticker they have.

Air quality certificate stickers, which cost £3.60 (€4.18) each, including postage, come in six categories and cover the very cleanest electric or hydrogen-powered vehicles, which is designated by a Crit’Air green sticker, to the dirtiest, which is a Crit’Air 5 grey sticker.

These relate to the six European Union emission standards for cars, dating back to 1992 when the Euro 1 emission standard was introduced.

The scheme applies to every road vehicle, including two- or three-wheeled vehicles, quadricycles, private vehicles, commercial vehicles, heavy goods vehicles, buses and coaches.

The penalty for failure to display a sticker is an on-the-spot fine of between €68-135 (£58 to £117).
. . .
Another important point to be aware of is the requirement to upload an image of the vehicle’s V5C [log book]. However, the maximum file size allowed is only 400kb which isn’t very big at all, and drivers should ensure that they don’t save the file in too large a format.

Full report: New clean air stickers required for travel to French cities – CLM

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April 15, 2017 at 08:39PM