Temperatures dropped to -7 ° C, reports a reader in France.
“About the frosts in different places around Europe in the last days, there have been severe frosts in France in fruit and vine too,” writes Philippe in Alsace.
“Severe losses in vine in Champagne and Chablis (despite fighting with burning fuel or paraffine in the fields ), Alsace and even in south of France in Languedoc and Provence.
“The crops had 2 weeks advance and the clear sky in the last days allowed these spring frosts. Main frost in Alsace on the early morning of 20th of april, and then on the 21st too. 5°C to 7 °C under zero on the 20th depending on the places.
Here are words from an article that Philippe sent.
Frost and negative (below-zero) temperatures have caused great damage in the vineyards of Alsace, France.
“In many places, there are 95 to 100% loss of buds,” says Gérard Schaffar, president of the Turckheim cellar in Haut-Rhin.
EN ALSACE, LES VIGNES FORTEMENT TOUCHÉES PAR LE RETOUR DU FROID GEL MORTEL – Après quelques jours de chaleur estivale, le gel et les températures négatives ont provoqué de gros dégâts dans les vignobles d’Alsace. Il faut dire que les températures sont descendues jusqu’à -6°C dans la nuit de mercredi à jeudi. “On frise dans beaucoup d’endroits les 95 à 100% de pertes” de bourgeons, explique Gérard Schaffar, président de la cave de Turckheim, dans le Haut-Rhin.
DMI have now apparently found evidence that Greenland has not been putting on quite as much ice as their original figures showed.
Their data so far this year has been a huge embarrassment to mythical claims of Greenland meltdown, as it has showed the Greenland ice cap growing at record rates.
Following a succession of similar stories of temperature tampering, extreme weather lies and changing historical Arctic sea ice data, the reputation of climate science has now hit a new low.
It is now obvious we can no longer rely on anything we are told.
Blood Falls is a famous iron-rich outflow of water that scientists suspected was connected to a water source that may have been trapped under an Antarctic glacier for more than a million years. CREDIT Photo by Erin Pettit
From the UNIVERSITY OF ALASKA FAIRBANKS, and the “at least they didn’t blame climate change” department:
A research team led by the University of Alaska Fairbanks and Colorado College has solved a century-old mystery involving a famous red waterfall in Antarctica. New evidence links Blood Falls to a large source of salty water that may have been trapped under Taylor Glacier for more than 1 million years.
The team’s study, published in the Journal of Glaciology, describes the brine’s 300-foot path from beneath Taylor Glacier to the waterfall. This path has been a mystery since geoscientist Griffith Taylor discovered Blood Falls in 1911.
Lead author Jessica Badgeley, then an undergraduate student at Colorado College, worked with University of Alaska Fairbanks glaciologist Erin Pettit and her research team to understand this unique feature. They used a type of radar to detect the brine feeding Blood Falls.
“The salts in the brine made this discovery possible by amplifying contrast with the fresh glacier ice,” Badgeley said.
Blood Falls is famous for its sporadic releases of iron-rich salty water. The brine turns red when the iron contacts air.
The team tracked the brine with radio-echo sounding, a radar method that uses two antenna — one to transmit electrical pulses and one to receive the signals.
“We moved the antennae around the glacier in grid-like patterns so that we could ‘see’ what was underneath us inside the ice, kind of like a bat uses echolocation to ‘see’ things around it,” said co-author Christina Carr, a doctoral student at UAF.
Pettit said the researchers made another significant discovery – that liquid water can persist inside an extremely cold glacier. Scientists previously thought this was nearly impossible, but Pettit said the freezing process explains how water can flow in a cold glacier.
“While it sounds counterintuitive, water releases heat as it freezes, and that heat warms the surrounding colder ice,” she said. The heat and the lower freezing temperature of salty water make liquid movement possible. “Taylor Glacier is now the coldest known glacier to have persistently flowing water.”
Pettit said she enlisted Badgeley as an undergraduate student to help with the overall mission of understanding the hydrological plumbing of cold-based glaciers.
“Jessica’s work is a perfect example of the high level of work undergraduate students can do when you give them a challenge and set the expectations high,” she said.
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The National Science Foundation sponsored the research.
The push to save U.S. nuclear plants for the sake of fighting climate change is threatening support for the bread and butter of clean power: wind and solar.
New York and Illinois have already approved as much as $10 billion in subsidies to keep struggling reactors open for the next decade as part of a plan to limit fossil fuel consumption. Lawmakers in Ohio, Connecticut and New Jersey are debatingwhether to do the same.
The reactors, which are being squeezed by low natural gas prices, offer a singular advantage in the fight against global warming because they produce round-the-clock electricity without emitting greenhouse gases. Yet renewable energy operators including NRG Energy Inc. and Invenergy LLC say keeping nuclear plants open will leave grids awash with excess power, leaving little demand for new wind and solar farms.
“It’s the wrong policy — and whether it proliferates or not is going to be a really big factor,” Invenergy Chief Operating Officer Jim Murphy said during a panel discussion at the Bloomberg New Energy Finance conference in New York Monday.
“Renewable energy operators say keeping nuclear plants open will leave grids awash with excess power, leaving little demand for new wind and solar farms.”
Keeping the “grids awash with excess power” is the only way to handle bellwether events without having to rely on brownouts and blackouts. Solar and wind can neither provide base-load nor flexible response to bellwether events. Increasing reliance on renewables makes it imperative that we keep the “grids awash with excess power.”
There appears to be a lot of whining about subsidies for nuclear power… With the renewables crowd doing all of the whining:
[…]
Nuclear’s economic woes comes as wind and solar are starting to show they’re cheap enough to compete with traditional generators, after years of help from subsidies. The push to aid reactors began last year after Exelon Corp. successfully argued in New York and Illinois that since nuclear does not contribute to global warming, its plants should receive a premium to help level the playing field with wind and solar.
“The fossil generators sell electricity with air pollution,” Joseph Dominguez, an Exelon executive vice president, said in an interview. “We sell electricity without air pollution — and that’s a different product.”
There are key differences between wind and solar subsidies and those for nuclear, according to clean-energy developers. Renewable energy credits have spurred an emerging industry, whereas nuclear subsidies are to preserve aging plants. And while wind and solar developers compete against each other for subsidies, those for nuclear benefit a single technology.
Market Rules
“The renewables industry has been playing by competitive market rules that have helped to produce good prices,” Amy Francetic, an Invenergy senior vice president, said in an interview. “This is picking and winners and losers in a way that’s troubling.”
[…]
“The fossil generators sell electricity with air pollution,” Joseph Dominguez, an Exelon executive vice president, said in an interview. “We sell electricity without air pollution — and that’s a different product.”
Nuclear power absolutely is the leader of the pack at reducing so-called “greenhouse” gas emissions:
If reducing greenhouse gas emissions is important, nuclear power is the obvious answer. If reducing greenhouse gas emissions at a reasonable cost is important, natural gas is the obvious answer. If treading water is important, wind is the obvious answer. If failure is important, solar is the obvious answer. So, Mr. Dominguez is generally correct.
“The renewables industry has been playing by competitive market rules that have helped to produce good prices,” Amy Francetic, an Invenergy senior vice president, said in an interview. “This is picking and winners and losers in a way that’s troubling.”
Really? Ms. Francetic, *government* always picks “winners and losers in a way that’s troubling.”
As far as the renewables industry “playing by competitive market rules that have helped to produce good prices”…
Solar and wind power are insignificant sources of energy.
Figure 3a. U.S. Energy production by source 2010 & 2013 (trillion Btu), U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Figure 3b. U.S. primary energy production 1981-2015 (million tonnes of oil equivalent), BP 2016 Statistical Review of World Energy.
Solar and wind power receive massive Federal subsidies.
Figure 4. Federal subsidies by energy source 2010 and 2013 (million 2013 US dollars), U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The solar and wind subsidies are truly massive in $/Btu.
Figure 5. Subsidies per unit of energy by source ($/mmBtu), U.S. Energy Information Administration.
The true folly of solar power is most apparent in subsidies per kilowatt-hour of electricity generation. At 23¢/kWh, the solar subsidies in 2013 were nearly twice the average U.S. residential retail electricity rate.
Figure 6. Subsidies per kilowatt-hour of electricity generation, U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Solar and wind subsidies are weighted toward direct expenditures of tax dollars.
Figure 7. Subsidies by type for wind, solar, nuclear, coal and natural gas & petroleum liquids, U.S. Energy Information Administration. Table ES2.
Federal solar and wind subsidies were 3-4 times that of nuclear power in 2013. Only 2% of the nuclear power subsidies consisted of direct expenditures, compared to 72% and 56% for solar and wind power respectively… And the renewables industry has the gall to complain about New York and Illinois kicking in $500 and $235 million per year in extra subsidies to keep nuclear power plants running in their States. Really?
Most of the Federal subsidies for oil & gas (96%), coal (71%) and nuclear power (67%) consist of tax breaks. The subsidies for oil & gas aren’t really even subsidies. These are standard tax deductions and depreciation of assets.
What About the Externalities?
What about them? The cost of compliance with pollution regulations is built in to the cost of fossil fuels. The mythical Social Cost of Carbon has no net present value at a real world discount rate. What about the externalities of renewables? The costs of backup generation and power failures due to their intermittency are not built into the cost of these energy sources.
Iowa Climate Science Education 