Green Suicide: EU Climate Policy Threatens To Destroy What Is Left Of Europe’s Steel Industry

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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Steelmakers in Europe have written to EU leaders urging them not to burden the industry with extra carbon emissions costs they say would make them uncompetitive against foreign rivals and raise the risk of job losses and plant closures.

Draft reforms to the EU Emissions Trading System (ETS) post-2020, agreed in outline by the European Parliament in February, aimed to balance greater cuts in greenhouse gases with protection for energy-intensive industries.

Since then, negotiations between representatives of the European Parliament, governments and the European Commission have made the proposals tougher, the steel industry says.

Environmentalists say the law should not be watered down.

The CEOs of 76 steel makers, including Arcelor-Mittal , Germany’s Thyssenkrupp and Austria’s Voestalpine, say the reforms as they stand would add unmanageable costs and mean pollutants were produced by manufacturers in other regions.

“You can avoid burdening the sector with high costs that will constrict investment, or that will increase the risk of job losses and plant closures in the EU,” the CEOs say in an open letter, dated May 28, to EU heads of state and government.

Writing before more closed-door talks on Tuesday on the carbon market reforms, the CEOs say the higher costs for emitting carbon dioxide would favour imports.

“In its current form, the EU ETS favours steel imports from third country competitors that do not have such costs and which have a far higher carbon footprint than steel made in the EU,” the letter says.

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

May 29, 2017 at 03:19AM

British Airways Blames ‘Power Surge’, Denies Cyber Attack, For IT Meltdown & Travel Chaos

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British Airways’ chief executive has apologised “profusely” to passengers caught up in travel chaos at the weekend which grounded flights at Heathrow and Gatwick, but denied the disruption had anything to do with cost-cutting in the business.

Giving his first media interview since a major outage on Saturday caused the airline’s IT system to collapse, Alex Cruz refused to resign and said the problem was not a result of outsourcing jobs to other countries.

“I can confirm that all the parties involved around this particular event have not been involved in any type of outsourcing in any foreign country,” he told Sky News.

“They have all been local issues around a local data centre.”

He added that no BA passengers’ data had been compromised in the IT meltdown and said there was no evidence it was the result of a cyber attack, promising not to allow such an outage to happen again.

The IT failure was caused by a short but catastrophic power surge at 9.30am on Saturday that affected the company’s messaging system, he said, and the backup system failed to work properly.

“We will have completed an exhaustive investigation on exactly the reasons of why this happened,” Mr Cruz said. “We will, of course, share those conclusions once we have actually finished them.

“We have no evidence whatsoever that there was any cyber attack of any sort.”

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May 29, 2017 at 03:04AM

COSMIC RAYS ON THE RISE AS SOLAR MINIMUM APPROACHES

via The Next Grand Minimum
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Meteorologist Paul Dorian, Vencore, Inc. vencoreweather.com Reports: A recent study published in the Aug. 19th issue of Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics supports the idea of an important connection between cosmic rays and clouds. According to spaceweather.com, a team … Continue reading →

via The Next Grand Minimum http://ift.tt/1Ym5yjO

May 29, 2017 at 01:48AM

Reality Check: Africa Has Become Much Greener In The Last 20 Years

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)
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Scientists have quantified for the first time how vegetation across the African continent has changed in the past 20 years. Thirty six per cent of the continent has become greener, while 11 per cent is becoming less green.

In Africa, a fight is happening. On one side natural forces are making the continent greener, and on the other, people are removing trees and bushes from the continent.

In densely populated regions, people are cutting down trees and forests, but elsewhere, where human populations are more thinly spread, bushes and scrub vegetation are thriving.

Now, scientists have quantified for the first time how vegetation across the continent has changed in the past 20 years.

Thirty six per cent of the continent has become greener, while 11 per cent is becoming less green.

The results show that not all is lost for Africa’s nature, say the scientists behind the new research.

“Our results are both positive and negative. Of course it’s not good that humans have had a negative influence on the distribution of trees and bushes in 11 per cent of Africa in the last 20 years, but it doesn’t come as a complete surprise,” says co-author Martin Brandt from the Department of Geosciences and Natural Resource Management at the University of Copenhagen, Denmark.

“On the other hand it’s not all negative as an area—three times larger than the area where trees and bushes are disappearing—is becoming greener, which is positive, at least from a climate point of view,” he says.

The new study is published in the scientific journal Nature Ecology and Evolution. 

Challenges the general view of Africa

The study challenges the view that Africa is undergoing a sustained loss of trees and bushes, says Professor Henrik Balslev from the Department of Bioscience at Aarhus University, Denmark. Balslev was not involved in the study.

The new study offers a nuanced picture of how population growth in Africa influences vegetation in different ways.

“The study gives a much more nuanced picture of people’s influence on vegetation in Africa, south of the Sahara, than we had before. The study will have significant impacts on how we evaluate people’s influence on African nature in the future, as the expected population grows dramatically,” he says. 

Namibia and South Africa are getting greener

In the new study, scientists have used satellite data to study how climate change and people have affected the distribution of trees and bushes in Africa over the past 20 years.

Deforestation makes way for farming, cities and infrastructure, and the felled trees provide fuel as firewood. At the same time, more CO2 in the atmosphere together with a wetter, warmer planet, provides conditions that help trees and bushes to grow.

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May 29, 2017 at 01:32AM