Month: February 2020

Daily News

There’s Only One Planet B: Mongo

The science fiction writer William Gibson has an interview in the Financial Times February 13th (paywalled) in which “the prophet of cyberspace talks AI and climate collapse.”

It’s a long time since I read sci-fi. My taste goes back to the Golden Age, when he-men wearing goldfish bowls and long underwear battled with aliens, armed with nothing but an atomic raygun and a delectable lightly-clad sidekick called Doris.

…his latest novel Agency is partly set in a post-apocalyptic London a century in the future. It is also about the intertwined fates of a group of characters in San Francisco in 2017 living in a reimagined past in which Hillary Clinton became president and Brexit never happened.

Normal middle class Londoners and San Franciscans, in other words. Where’s the sci-fi in that?

Concerned though he is by some aspects of technology, Gibson is far more alarmed by the dangers of pandemics and irreversible, destructive climate collapse, which he speculates may become the biggest driver of change in human history. He fears that the world’s FQ — or F***edness Quotient, as he calls it — is rising to a worrying degree. He laments the fact that the Trump administration has gone “deliberately and horrifically backward” on climate policy. “Denial of impending climate collapse has become an extra leg on the rightwing stool and I suspect it will stay that way,” he says.

Whereas belief in impending climate collapse is limited mainly to those living in a reimagined past in which Hillary Clinton became president and Brexit never happened.

Gibson continues:

Rightwing nationalists will always resist the “optimal solution” to climate change, which would be to form an effective and benign world government, as imagined in the backdrop to the original Star Trek series.

This is the man hailed as a prophet for having invented the word “cyberspace.” And where does he look for the solution to impending climate collapse? Star Trek (with the abolition of democracy as an unmentioned corollary.)

Without wishing to go “full Greta”, he argues that the science on climate change is black-and-white and absolutely grim.

Well of course, no expert on science at the forefront of the technological revolution would want to go the full Greta. So he makes do with a half Greta, reasoning like a child of eight and a half.

He envisages a world in which “the entire equator becomes unliveable without a space suit” and millions of people will be driven towards the poles. “That would play into ethno-nationalism and xenophobia, fear of immigrants in increasingly ugly ways.”

Call me old-fashioned, but I prefer Flash Gordon. His sufferings at the hands of Ming the Merciless and the possessive (though captivating) Queen Azura on the planet Mongo have a Flaubertian profundity lacking in the dreams of a San Francisco Democrat praying for the return of Hillary. More realistic too.

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February 21, 2020 at 02:46PM

Daily News

Brutal Arctic Cold set to Engulf North America over the next 10 Days

It’s already been an anomalously frigid Feb for much of the United States (600 new all-time cold records).

19 Feb 2020 – Now, two more waves of anomalous Polar cold look set to sweep the continent in the final 10 days of February, 2020.

Over the past 7 days alone, the U.S. (CONUS) set a total of 600 new all-time cold records vs just the 239 for heat, according to the official data from filthy warm-mongers NOAA.

https://electroverse.net/wave-after-wave-of-brutal-arctic-cold-set-to-engulf-north-america-over-the-next-10-days/

Thanks to Bill Sellers for this link

The post Brutal Arctic Cold set to Engulf North America over the next 10 Days appeared first on Ice Age Now.

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February 21, 2020 at 01:37PM

Daily News

No Airports, No Imports–Welcome To Year Zero!

By Paul Homewood

 

 

I took a quick look at this story the other day, but have now had time to read the report it was based on:

 image

https://climatenewsnetwork.net/uk-airports-must-shut-to-reach-2050-climate-target/

 

To many people, “saving the planet” means little more than building wind farms, planting trees and using less plastic. However it is gradually beginning to dawn on the public that the impact on their lives will be substantial.

Even then though, things like scrapping gas boilers and moving to electric cars have been something that “won’t happen for decades, so why worry now?”

However a new study, sponsored by the UK Government, has warned that huge changes to our lifestyles will be necessary, and much sooner than we think, if zero emission targets are to be met.

The report by UK FIRES, called Absolute Zero, calls for all UK airports to be shut by 2050, because there are no practical alternatives for zero emission flight. But as part of this timetable, all airports other than Heathrow, Glasgow and Belfast must shut by 2030.

In a stroke, air travel will be effectively banned for most of the country, as Heathrow simply would not have the capacity to handle more than a small proportion of demand. (Heathrow currently carries a quarter of UK passengers).

 

But that is just one item on a long list of changes to be forced on the British public. The report concludes that we cannot bank on technological innovations coming to our rescue.

If you thought that we could simply rely on renewable energy, forget it. As UK FIRES points out, even with rapid growth of renewables, we will still need to cut our energy use by 40%, even before air travel and shipping are factored in. And all of this without accounting for the projected population increase.

So forget about electric cars being the solution, because we will not have enough electricity to power them. The recommendation from UK FIRES – have 40% less cars on the road. Their suggestion – use the train more, ignoring the sky high prices, the fact that railways offer very limited routes and how you are supposed to travel around when you get to your destination. The idea that we will all willingly give up our cars to travel by rail or bus is utterly naive.

The report also conveniently ignores the high carbon dioxide footprint in building electric cars in the first place.

Heating is another area where we must cut emissions. UK FIRES expect us to buy heat pumps, seemingly oblivious to the fact they will cost each household a good £10k more than our conventional boilers. They also don’t appear to realise that heat pumps are incapable of supplying the heat we need in the middle of winter, or that the power grid simply could not cope with that sort of spike in demand even if they could.

Or maybe they do! Their guidance includes using heating for less time, in fewer rooms and wearing warm clothes in winter.

Our diet does not escape either, as we will have to give up eating beef and lamb, not to mention frozen ready meals. While we are expected to rely on arable farming instead, they also want fertiliser use to be drastically reduced.

Meanwhile the construction industry is likely to grind to a halt, as cement is phased out. Unfortunately the actual making of cement releases emissions, regardless of the source of the energy used.

Forget about housebuilding, new hospitals and infrastructure, they want us to concentrate on retrofit and adaptation of existing buildings.

Ironically, as even the report admits, we don’t know how to install new renewables or make new energy efficient buildings without cement.

If all of this was not bad enough, they want to ban all imports by 2050, unless they can come via rail, which might be a problem given that we are an island! Of course, we don’t have zero emission freight ships at the moment, and are unlikely to in the foreseeable future.

Quite how we are expected to feed ourselves without importing food is a mystery, unless we return to 1940s style rationing. And you can forget about all of those other things get from abroad now.

What about, for instance, computers and electronics? We will quickly become an international backwater, without access to the latest technology. It would be like the country returning to 1990s style Nokia phones, VHS and floppy discs!

Some may be substituted by UK made goods, but it is hard to see how industrial capacity could be built back up with the restrictions planned on construction, energy use and industrial emissions.

But it is not only the emissions from shipping which concerns the authors. They also say we must be responsible for all emissions from the production of imported goods.

So how, you might ask, are we supposed to live in this glorious, emission free future?

UK FIRES says we must not worry! We can apparently carry on doing the things we enjoy most, totally emission free. Things like sports, social life, eating, hobbies, games,computing, reading, TV, radio, volunteering and sleeping! According to the report, “we can all do more of these without any impact on emissions.”

Indeed, with the economy and industry destroyed, most of us will have much more time on our hands for these pursuits! (Climate scientists and bureaucrats excluded, naturally).

Nowhere in this dismal little report is there any acknowledgement of the fact that the UK only generates 1% of global emissions. The report starts by stating:

We have to cut our greenhouse gas emissions to zero by 2050: that’s what climate scientists tell us, it’s what social protesters are asking for and it’s now the law in the UK.

Wrecking the economy is not something we should do, just because a few eco-loon protestors are asking for it. And laws can, of course, be changed.

We must however thank the authors of this report for bringing home the very real and damaging effect that the mad rush to decarbonise will have on peoples’ lives.

And, as they have rightly stated, these changes will have to start being put into practice very soon, certainly during this decade.

For too long, the impact and cost of the Climate Change Act has been deliberately hidden from the public. Partly this has been the result of a political conspiracy between all of the major political parties and establishment in general. It has also been aided and abetted by all of the media, with a handful of notable exceptions.

But their dirty little secret cannot be covered up for much longer.

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February 21, 2020 at 01:27PM

Daily News

Republicans are buying into carbon capture foolishness

This column is also at WashingtonExaminer.com.

Few Republican politicians are interested in wrecking the economy with pointless climate regulations. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be pressured into less harmful but equally pointless regulations, like carbon capture and storage.

House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy recently unveiled a series of bills aimed at spending taxpayer money on carbon capture and storage research, subsidizing ongoing capture and storage, and promoting the so-called “Trillion Trees Initiative.”

The bills are the Republican response to polls reporting that young GOP voters favor some sort of climate action. But none of these bills and no form of carbon capture will accomplish anything — including appeasing climate activists.

First, the U.S. could stop emitting carbon dioxide today and for the remainder of the century, and there would only be about a two percent difference in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels. This will not discernibly alter the Earth’s climate.

Next, although tree-planting might seem like a perfectly eco-friendly and non-partisan way to capture carbon dioxide, it just isn’t so. Trees and reforestation actually contribute to climate warming, according to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. The IPCC, which climate alarmists rely on as representing the consensus on climate, released a report last August stating that because trees darken the Earth’s surface and therefore decrease the reflection of solar radiation back into space, the planting of trees in the Northern Hemisphere actually contributes to the greenhouse warming effect.

So apparently, rather than legislating a Trillion Tree Initiative, the GOP would have been better off offering a Paul Bunyan Initiative.

For decades now, oil drillers have used carbon dioxide captured from power plant smokestacks to produce otherwise-hard-to-get-at oil. The process, called enhanced oil recovery, makes perfect economic sense on its own without any climate consideration. But the $35 per ton subsidy that drillers get certainly sweetens that deal. Leader McCarthy’s new legislation would sweeten the subsidy to $43.75.

And here’s the rub: when the oil produced by enhanced recovery is burny, the carbon emitted is greater than the amount of carbon used and stored underground to produce the oil. So carbon capture and storage via enhanced recovery actually increases carbon dioxide emissions — and taxpayers are subsidizing this under the guise of fighting climate change.

The Bush and Obama administrations have already wasted billions of dollars on projects to capture carbon dioxide from power plant smokestacks in hopes of pipelining the captured gas underground for perhaps hundreds of miles in order to inject the carbon dioxide underground and store it in saline formations. The projects either never got off the ground or captured very little carbon dioxide at extremely high cost.

The new Republican legislation would also fund research and development of something called “direct air capture” of carbon dioxide. Think giant vacuum cleaners that suck in outdoor air and chemically remove the compound from the air. Occidental Petroleum is spending hundreds of millions of dollars to build a direct air capture facility. It hopes to be able to capture 500,000 tons of carbon dioxide per year by 2022.

Even if this projected succeeded, the reality is that humans emitted 55.3 billion tons of carbon dioxide in 2018 — and that figure is only going up, according to the United Nations. It would take about 22,000 plants of the sort that Occidental is building — each costing hundreds of millions of dollars — to offset human emissions in order to reach “carbon neutrality.”

Carbon capture and storage is essentially physically, financially and politically impossible. But climate activists and renewable energy rent-seekers would never accept it anyway, since their goals are political power and getting rid of fossil fuels, respectively. That is a reality Republican politicians should capture and store for future use.

Steve Milloy publishes JunkScience.com, served on the Trump EPA transition team and is the author of “Scare Pollution: Why and How to Fix the EPA” (Bench Press, 2016).

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February 21, 2020 at 01:02PM