Month: June 2018

Daily News 12 Jun 2018

Coal Use To Explode By 43% Worldwide! …German Energy Expert: “Foundation Of The Paris Accord Has Collapsed”

Yesterday German energy expert and scientist Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt commented at his monthly column at Die kalte Sonne site here on solar activity, CO2 and coal power in Germany.

Photo: Fritz Vahrenholt, source: Die kalte Sonne

Sun factor grossly underestimated

Lately the sun’s activity has been very quiet as the star at the center of our solar system transitions over to a new solar cycle. April sunspot activity was very low in May. Vahrenholt then cites a recent study by Lewis and Curry showing that climate sensitivity to CO2 is in fact “up to 45% less than what the IPCC and the mainstream of climate science would like to have us believe.” Vahrenholt comments:

What was interesting however was the reaction of the mainstream: the methods used by Curry and Lewis in the study were not doubted. However, it could mean – according to the mainstream – that the earth will react very differently to CO2 in the future, i.e. get warmer. That’s what we can call speculative science, namely trust in the models which in the past have failed and have not been able to depict ocean circulation and clouds.”

So with CO2 not being at the factor it was made out to be, and because the Paris Accord is based on the spectacle of a rapidly warming planet, Vahrenholt writes that the “foundation of the Paris Accord has collapsed.”

Only Europe and Canada exiting coal

Another reason the Paris Accord is collapsing is because it’s not going to do anything we were promised it would.

When it comes to coal, Vahrenholt notes, so far only Europe and Canada have expressed some sort of a commitment to exit coal, and then he reminds us China, India and all developing countries will still be permitted to continue “massively” expanding their use of coal. He writes:

In China 280,000 MW and in India 174,000 MW are going to be added. By comparison: the entire brown coal fleet in Germany has a capacity of 22,700 MW. 1600 coal-fired power plants will be built in 62 countries across the world, most of them, by the way, will be built by Chinese power plant builders with the help of credits from China. Approximately 15,300 MW in Pakistan, 16,000 in Bangladesh, and even Myanmar with 5100 MW. (Source: South China Morning Post).

In other words, Angela Merkel and her green punch drinkers think the climate is going to be saved if Germany shuts down 1/20 of what China and India are going to add. No wonder Trump dumped the idiotic Accord.

Coal to expand 43% worldwide

And to illustrate what a farce the Paris Accord has become, the German energy expert adds: “In total, coal power plant capacity will expand by 43% worldwide.”

Germany to lay out the blueprint for its own demise

Currently Germany is gradually growing obsessed with the idea of a coal exit, and is setting up a Coal Commission to launch the endeavor. The Commission “however will not be made up of energy, power grid and technology experts, but rather with Greenpeace, BUND and local citizens initiatives who are against brown coal,” writes Vahrenholt.

“The idea of including critics of alternative energy, which has become the largest destroyer of nature since WWII, never dawned on any politician.”

Green state fundamentalism

The Coal Commission of course should include Prof. Hans-Joachim Schellnhuber, fiormer director of the ultra-alarmist Potsdam Institute and architect of the Great Transformation masterplan, which calls for an immediate end to the economic model that is based on “fossil industrial metabolism”, making climate protection the “fundamental target of the state by which the legislative, executive and judicial branches are to align themselves.”

Paris absurdity

According to Vahrenholt, the phase-out of coal will mean the decarbonization of Germany, which in turn will mean its deindustrialization. This, according to Vahrenholt, all coming to the great delight of the Chinese

A dismayed Vahrenholt sums up:

“Trump was clever enough, to exit the Paris absurdity early enough.”

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June 12, 2018 at 06:38AM

Daily News 12 Jun 2018

Germany pours cold water over EU’s green energy ambitions

‘The donkey goes on to the ice until it breaks’ – German proverb [image credit: evwind.es]

A few political home truths get attacked by climate obsessives, but will voters see to it that some semblance of reality takes over from unrealistic ideologically motivated targets?
H/T The GWPF

Voters across Europe have lost faith in politics partly because of “unachievable targets” on renewable energy, said German Energy Minister Peter Altmaier, rejecting calls from a group of other EU countries to boost the share of renewables to 33-35% of the bloc’s energy mix by 2030.

Altmaier made the comments during an on-the-record exchange between the 28 EU energy ministers, who are gathered in Luxembourg today (11 June) for a meeting of the Energy Council.

Energy ministers are expected to thrash out a joint position on three clean energy laws which are currently being negotiated in the EU institutions – the Renewable Energy Directive, the Energy Efficiency Directive and a regulation on the Governance of the Energy Union.

“Germany supports responsible but achievable targets,” Altmaier said from the outset, underlining Berlin’s efforts to boost renewables to 15% of the country’s overall energy mix.

But he said those efforts also carried a cost for the German taxpayer, which he put at €25 billion per year. “And if we are setting targets that are definitely above 30%, that means that within a decade, our share has to be more than doubled – clearly more than doubled,” Altmaier pointed out.

“We’re not going to manage that,” Altmaier said referring to an objective of putting 1 million electric vehicles on the road by 2020 in Germany. “Nowhere in Europe is going to manage that,” he claimed. “And even if we did manage to get enough electric cars, we wouldn’t have enough renewable electricity to keep them on the road,” he stressed.

What’s needed, he said, is “a compromise that prevents us from having an unachievable target” at European level. “Citizens across Europe are losing faith in politics. When they see that we are setting very ambitious targets and that a few years later we’re deferring this, we are way off their expectations.”

Continued here.

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June 12, 2018 at 04:28AM

Daily News 12 Jun 2018

New Study: The Sun And Volcanoes Cause The Pause

Last week a team of researchers from the UK Met Office, the University of East Anglia, the University of Gothenburg, the University of Southern Queensland and the Sorbonne published in the journal Science Advances an interesting paper showing that the recent much debated and researched 21st century “slowdown” in global surface temperatures was real and could be explained by reduced solar activity and increased volcanic counteracting climate forcing from greenhouse gasses. It achieved almost no media coverage despite being published in a high profile journal.

Its stated aim was to “place the slowdown in a longer term context.” It chose not to use the words “pause” or “hiatus” because it says warming did not entirely cease on decadal timescales.

That’s where I disagree. It depends upon when you start the decade. All the global databases clearly show that warming did cease between 2001 – 2013 (before the recent very strong El Nino), though I would advise the reader to experiment with trends by altering start and end dates to get a better picture of what is going on.

Over this period HadCRUT4 for example has a trend of -0.005 +/- 0.167 degrees per decade which is statistically equivalent to no trend in any researchers notebook. The krigged HadCRUT4 has 0.051 +/- 0.185 degrees per decade, GISTEMP 0.038 =/- 0.175 degrees per decade, Berkeley 0.050 +/- 0.176, NOAA 0.044 +/- 0.185. The satellites also show the same effect RSSv4.0 TLT 0.001 +/- 0.301, RSSv4.0 TTT -0.069 +/- 0.294, UAH v5.6 TLT 0.044 +/- 0.292 and UAH v5.6 TTT -0.070 +/- 0.291. (click on image to enlarge).

From 2001 to 2013 it is flat and after that period the El Nino takes over. Because of this the post-2001 period contains no information that can be extrapolated backwards to see if it is a continuance of previous warming statistics. It is a true break with the warming before it. Some maintain that you can take the data starting in 1980 (the start of the most recent warming period) and fit a linear trend to it and maintain there is no slowdown whatsoever. They should take up their position with these scientists who say there was a slowdown.

Perhaps it would be interesting to read this paper alongside the famous Karl et al paper in 2015 that removed the slowdown by upgrading an ocean temperature database. It hasn’t stood the test of time, has it?

The science looks different today than it did a decade ago. Back then it was said that greenhouse gas forcing was strong and would in the next decade overwhelm natural climatic variations. It hasn’t. Remember the time when experts told us that all the changes happening to the Earth’s climate were happening faster than the IPCC had predicted! Climate change is still vitally important but the past decade has shown us that the science was not settled then and isn’t now. The BBC said the science was settled in 2005 and led the cry that there was no sun link to climate change. A decade later it seems it does. A decade in science, as any competent reporter who covers science should know, can be humbling.

Feedback: david.whitehouse@thegwpf.com

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June 12, 2018 at 04:02AM

Daily News 12 Jun 2018

Gay Alcor: Peter Ridd’s Sacking Pushes The Limit Of Academic Freedom

James Cook University may have damaged its reputation with a heavy-handed approach to the academic with minority views on climate change and the reef

‘The massive coral bleaching in recent years was no cause for concern, because coral grew back, [Ridd] claimed.’ Bleached coral on the Great Barrier Reef near Port Douglas, February 2017. Photograph: HANDOUT/Reuters

Ihate to say it, but the sacking of professor Peter Ridd by James Cook University does raise issues of academic freedom. Not simple issues, and ones that can be refuted as the university is doing, but ones that matter nonetheless.

I hate to say it because we know what this is really about. The cause of Ridd has been championed by those parts of the media and certain institutes – well, the Institute of Public Affairs – that have done all they humanly can to stop serious action in this country against climate change.

They have no interest in fair-minded coverage of the weight of scientific evidence, now overwhelming, that human action is causing global warming, and that urgent action is required globally to limit its dangerous impacts. Their interest is ideological, with an endearing lack of self-awareness in their charge that the “warmists” are the ideologues. They leap on the 3% or so of scientists who argue their colleagues have got it all wrong, and would risk everything on those odds.

So, it is not that these Ridd champions – Andrew Bolt, Terry McCrann, the Australian, which now reports as fact that Ridd is a “marine science whistle blower”– have any inherent concern about academic freedom.

That’s the context, and we shouldn’t forget it. Yet for those who try for some consistency, this is a messy case, and Ridd has an argument that it is his views, at least in part, that got him sacked.

James Cook University, for all its worries about its reputation, seems to have diminished its own. As the national tertiary education union’s Queensland secretary, Michael McNally put it a few days ago: “All management have done is to feed a right-wing media narrative that universities are conformist and actively suppress heterodox views on topics such as climate change.”