US coal train [credit: Wikipedia]

In the real world, concerted attempts to instil fear of a supposed man-made climate ’emergency’ seem to be having little effect on the popularity of large-scale fuel-burning.

Energy demand worldwide grew by 2.3 per cent last year – its fastest pace this decade, reports PEI.

And nearly 70 per cent of that demand growth came from, China, the US and India.

In fact, according to the International Energy Agency, the US saw its gas consumption jump 10 per cent from the previous year – the fastest increase since the beginning of IEA records in 1971.

“We have seen an extraordinary increase in global energy demand in 2018,” said Dr Fatih Birol, the IEA’s executive director. “Last year can also be considered another golden year for gas, which accounted for almost half the growth in global energy demand.”

Data released yesterday by the IEA revealed that natural gas was 2018’s fuel of choice, posting the biggest gains and accounting for 45 per cent of the rise in energy consumption.

Demand for all fuels increased, with fossil fuels meeting nearly 70 per cent of the growth for the second year running. Solar and wind generation grew at double-digit pace, with solar alone increasing by 31 per cent – but that was not fast enough to meet higher electricity demand around the world that also drove up coal use.

The IEA notes that electricity continues to position itself as the fuel of the future, with global electricity demand growing by 4 per cent in 2018. This rapid growth is pushing electricity towards a 20 per cent share in total final consumption of energy.

Increasing power generation was responsible for half of the growth in primary energy demand.

Full report here.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

https://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2019/03/27/extraordinary-increase-in-global-energy-demand/

March 27, 2019 at 05:06AM

National Institute for Environmental Studies These are sample satellite data maps providing a data overview. Credit: NIES The World Data Centre for Greenhouse Gases (WDCGG; a World Data Centre (WDC) of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)) has been operated since 1990 by the Japan Meteorological Agency (JMA). As the only WDC specializing greenhouse gases, it…

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March 27, 2019 at 05:02AM

What do Arctic residents do if there are actually as many as 58,000?

It’s long past time for polar bear specialists to stop holding out for a scientifically accurate global estimate that will never be achieved and determine a reasonable and credible ‘best guess’. Since they have so far refused to do this, I have done it for them. My extrapolated estimate of 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible.

In 2014, the chairman of the IUCN Polar Bear Specialist Group (PBSG) emailed me to say that their global population size number ‘has never been an estimate of total abundance in a scientific sense, but simply a qualified guess given to satisfy public demand.’

In my new book, The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened, I contend that this situation will probably never change, so it’s time to stop holding out for a scientifically accurate global estimate and generate a reasonable and credible ‘best guess’. Recent surveys from several critical polar bear subpopulations have given us the information necessary to do this.

These new numbers make it possible to extrapolate from ‘known’ to ‘unknown’ subpopulations within so-called ‘sea ice ecoregions’ (defined in 2007 by polar bear scientists at the US Geological Survey, see Amstrup et al. 2007), as shown below, to update old estimates and generate new ones for never-studied areas.

Since the PBSG has so far refused to take this step, I took on the challenge. I contend that an estimate of about 39,000 (range 26,000-58,000) at 2018 is not only plausible but scientifically defensible. See the graph below from my new book:

Global polar bear population size estimates to 2018. From Chapter 10 of The Polar Bear Catastrophe That Never Happened (Crockford 2019).

This new estimate for 2018 is a modest 4-6 fold increase over the 10,000 or so bears that existed in the 1960s and after 25 years, a credible increase over the estimate of 25,000 that the PBSG offered in 1993 (Wiig et al. 1995).

However, my new estimate is much larger than the improbable figure of about 26,000 (range 22,000-31,000) offered by PGSG biologists in 2015 (Regehr et al. 2016; Wiig et al. 2015). The scary question is this: what do Arctic residents do if there are actually as many as 58,000?

See my new book (Crockford 2019) for the full rationale and references used to arrive at this figure.

Full post

The post New Book: Global Polar Bear Population Estimated At Close To 40.000 appeared first on The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF).

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March 27, 2019 at 04:27AM

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March 27, 2019 at 02:30AM