Month: April 2017

Britain’s Drivers Count The Cost Of Labour’s Diesel Folly

Britain’s Drivers Count The Cost Of Labour’s Diesel Folly

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

It’s less than 20 years since the Labour government – backed by the vociferous green lobby and most of the scientific community – urged motorists to abandon their nasty, carbon-emitting, petrol-engine cars and convert to diesel.

With hindsight, looking at the names of the politicians who pushed this revolution – John Prescott, Neil Kinnock (then EU Transport Commissioner), Gordon Brown – we should have known it would end in tears. But at the time we were assured that driving a diesel was good for the planet and buying one was doing a public service.

With the help of generous tax incentives, the number of diesel vehicles on our roads rocketed from just over 6 per cent of the total in 1990 to around 40 per cent.

Diesel cars have increased in number on British roads from six per cent in 1990 to around 40 per cent today as a result of favourable tax policies introduced by Labour politicians.

But how dramatically things have changed. In what seems like no time, diesel drivers have gone from being public-spirited citizens to demons.

They are now told their cars are a menace, spewing out nitrous oxides and toxic particles and contributing to the deaths of thousands of people every year. One pressure group describes the rise of diesel as ‘the biggest health catastrophe since the Black Death’.

And to complete their misery, there are plans to penalise diesel motorists by charging them up to £20 a day to drive in 35 towns and cities across England.

They have a perfect right to be furious. Through no fault of their own they are being fleeced and of course the poorest, who don’t have the option of changing to a car with lower emissions, will be hardest hit.

Full editorial

 

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

April 2, 2017 at 11:27PM

Westinghouse’s Bankruptcy Could Be the End of Nuclear Hopes in US

Westinghouse’s Bankruptcy Could Be the End of Nuclear Hopes in US

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

Westinghouse Electric Company, which helped drive the development of nuclear energy and the electric grid itself, filed for bankruptcy protection on Wednesday, casting a shadow over the global nuclear industry.

The filing comes as the company’s corporate parent, Toshiba of Japan, scrambles to stanch huge losses stemming from Westinghouse’s troubled nuclear construction projects in the American South. Now, the future of those projects, which once seemed to be on the leading edge of a renaissance for nuclear energy, is in doubt.

“This is a fairly big and consequential deal,” said Richard Nephew, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University. “You’ve had some power companies and big utilities run into financial trouble, but this kind of thing hasn’t happened.”

Westinghouse, a once-proud name that in years past symbolized America’s supremacy in nuclear power, now illustrates its problems.

Many of the company’s injuries are self-inflicted, such as a disastrous deal for a construction business that was intended to control costs and instead precipitated the events that led to the filing on Wednesday. Over all, Toshiba has been widely criticized for overpaying for Westinghouse.

But some of what went wrong was beyond either company’s control. Slowing demand for electricity and tumbling prices for natural gas have eroded the economic rationale for nuclear power, which is extremely costly and technically challenging to develop. Alternative-energy sources like wind and solar power are rapidly maturing and coming down in price. The 2011 earthquake in Japan that led to the nuclear disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi plant renewed worries about safety.

Westinghouse’s problems are already reducing Japan’s footprint in nuclear power, an industry it has nurtured for decades in the name of energy security. Even before the filing, Toshiba had essentially retired Westinghouse from the business of building nuclear power plants. Executives said they would instead focus on maintaining existing reactors — a more stable and reliably profitable business — and developing reactor designs.

That has made the already small club of companies that take on the giant, expensive and complex task of nuclear-reactor building even smaller. General Electric, a pioneer in the field, has scaled back its nuclear operations, expressing doubt about their economic viability. Areva, the French builder, is mired in losses and undergoing a large-scale restructuring.

Among the winners could be China, which has ambitions to turn its growing nuclear technical abilities into a major export. That has raised security concerns in some countries.

Full story

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

April 2, 2017 at 10:50PM

Growing Skepticism: Already 150 New (2017) Scientific Papers Support A Skeptical Position On Climate Alarm

Growing Skepticism: Already 150 New (2017) Scientific Papers Support A Skeptical Position On Climate Alarm

via NoTricksZone
http://notrickszone.com

650 Climate ‘Skeptic’ Papers

Published In Last 15 Months


During the first 3 months of 2017, over 150 papers have already been published in scientific  journals that cast doubt on the position that anthropogenic CO2 emissions function as the climate’s fundamental control knob.

The 2017 publication rate is slightly ahead of last year’s pace.

Because in 2016 alone, there were 500 peer-reviewed scientific papers published in scholarly journals (Part 1, Part 2, Part 3) challenging the “consensus” claim that weather and climate changes are significantly determined by changes in atmospheric CO2 concentrations.

These 150 new papers (as well as the 500 papers from 2016) support the position that there are significant limitations and uncertainties inherent in climate modeling, and that natural factors (the Sun, multi-decadal oceanic oscillations [NAO, AMO/PDO, ENSO], cloud and aerosol albedo variations, etc.) have both in the past and present exerted a significant or dominant influence on weather and climate changes.  Papers questioning (and undermining) the “consensus” view on paleoclimate (Medieval) warmth, sea level rise, extreme weather events, etc., are also included in this collection.


The list of 150 scientific papers with links and summaries and graphs has been divided into 3 parts on 2 pages.  Click on any link below to access to the 2017 “Skeptic Papers”.

Part 1. Natural Mechanisms Of Weather, Climate Change  

Solar Influence On Climate (37)
Natural Oscillation (ENSO, NAO, AMO, PDO) Climate Influence (20)
Modern Climate In Phase With Natural Variability (8)
Cloud/Aerosol Climate Influence (3)
Volcanic/Tectonic Climate Influence (1)

Part 2. Unsettled Science, Failed Climate Modeling (same page)

Climate Model Unreliability/Biases/Errors and the Pause (12)
Failing Renewable Energy, Climate Policies (2)
Warming Beneficial, Does Not Harm Humans, Wildlife (3)
No Trends In Extreme, Unstable Weather In Recent Decades (3)
Natural CO2 Sources Out-Emit Humans (2)
Fires, Anthropogenic Climate Change Disconnect (1)
Miscellaneous (5)

Part 3. Natural Climate Change Observation, Reconstruction

Lack Of Anthropogenic/CO2 Signal In Sea Level Rise (9)
No Net Warming During 20th (21st) Century (10)
A Warmer Past: Non-Hockey Stick Reconstructions (22)
Abrupt, Degrees-Per-Decade Natural Global Warming (D-O Events) (1)
A Model-Defying Cryosphere, Polar Ice (10)

via NoTricksZone http://notrickszone.com

April 2, 2017 at 09:21PM

Renewable Industry’s Giant Battery Claims Unplugged

Renewable Industry’s Giant Battery Claims Unplugged

via STOP THESE THINGS
http://ift.tt/2kE7k62

*** With Californian carpet-bagger, Elon Musk swooping on South Australia to scoop up as much as he can of the $550 million its hapless Labor government is about to squander on non-fixes for its self-inflicted wind power disaster, it’s time to put pen to paper to work out just how risible is SA’s plan to […]

via STOP THESE THINGS http://ift.tt/2kE7k62

April 2, 2017 at 07:31PM