19 Feb 2020 – Total reported coronavirus cases: 75,305
Total reported deaths: 2,012
Total reported recovered: 15,126
Source:
https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus/
The post Coronavirus – 137 new deaths, 1866 new cases appeared first on Ice Age Now.
via Ice Age Now
February 19, 2020 at 10:28AM
Bulk carrier
Here comes the latest ‘green’ pipedream that won’t work, as the report almost admits. Another thin excuse to bang the tedious climate change propaganda drum.
Ocean-going ships could be powered by ammonia within the decade as the shipping industry takes action to curb carbon emissions, says BBC News.
The chemical – the key ingredient of fertilisers – can be burned in ships’ engines in place of polluting diesel.
The industry hopes ammonia will help it tackle climate change, because it burns without CO2 emissions.
The creation of the ammonia itself creates substantial CO2, but a report says technology can solve this problem.
The challenge is huge, because shipping produces around 2% of global carbon emissions – about the same as the whole German economy.
Making ammonia is also a major source of carbon. A report by the Royal Society says ammonia production currently creates 1.8% of global CO2 emissions – the most of any chemical industry.
But the authors of the report say new technology can create zero carbon ammonia. One way is by trapping the CO2 emissions created when ammonia is produced, and burying the CO2 in underground rocks.
Another way of making so-called “green” ammonia is to use renewable energy which doesn’t create any CO2.
But the big question is whether enough clean energy will be available to create ammonia at scale in the coming decades.
Full report here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
February 19, 2020 at 09:38AM
By Paul Homewood
This has to go down as one of the most fraudulent climate studies yet!
Want to know how sea level in your area is changing due to global warming and other factors? Our ‘report cards’ can help. Updated by the Virginia Institute of Marine Science each year as annual tide-gauge data become available, they display recent sea-level trends and project sea-level height to the year 2050 for 32 localities along the U.S. East, Gulf, West, and Alaskan coasts.
Our report cards have 3 components: the 2050 projection, recent trends in the rates of sea-level change, and an explanation of processes affecting sea level at each locality.
The annotated chart below, using the latest data from Norfolk, Virginia, briefly explains the data and statistical approaches we use in our 2050 projections. Visit an individual locality for details on all its report-card components. You can also compare sea-level trends, projections and processes among localities and by region. For full technical details, read our report.
https://www.vims.edu/research/products/slrc/index.php
Let me tell you why.
Below is the actual tide gauge record for Norfolk, Virginia (Sewells Point), which is the Anyport example used.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8638610
It is clearly difficult to see any signs of acceleration there. But look closer – the record starts in 1927, so why does the VIMS Report Card begin in 1969?
Indeed, this is not just a one off. As their Abstract states, all of the calculations in their study begin in 1969, despite much longer data records at most US sites:
https://scholarworks.wm.edu/reports/1111/
This is also confirmed in their Press Release, which states:
The team’s web-based report cards project sea level to the year 2050. The analysis now includes 51 years of water-level observations, from January 1969 through December 2019. The interactive charts by locality are available online at www.vims.edu/sealevelreportcards.
But why should this choice of dates matter?
Let’s look at New York, which has one of the longest running gauges:
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8518750
Again, there is no long term acceleration. But NOAA also chart 50-year running trends.
This shows that the rate of sea level rise rose in the first half of the 20thC, peaking at 3.86mm/yr in 1950. (Bear in mind, these are mid point trends, so the peak was 1925 to 1975).
Following that, sea level rise slowed until 1970, before rising again. However, the current rate of 3.38mm/yr is still less than that earlier mid 20thC peak.
In other words, they have cherrypicked their starting point to coincide with the slowdown at a time of global cooling. As sea level rise returned to earlier levels, it is inevitable that this would create an artificial acceleration.
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_station.shtml?id=8518750
If the VIMS study had included all of the available data, it would have been forced to conclude that sea level rise had not accelerated since the early 20thC.
Does any of this matter?
VIMS then goes on to extrapolate from the acceleration since 1969, projecting sea levels to be 370mm higher in 2050 than 1992 – an annual rate of 6.38mm, effectively double the current rate.
https://www.vims.edu/research/products/slrc/localities/nyny/index.php
But from a statistical viewpoint, there is no basis for this assumption. You might just as well chart UK temperatures from January to June, and then claim that they will carry on rising at the same rate.
This pattern of a slowdown in sea level rise post 1950 and then a return to earlier levels exists at all US sites, and on all coasts:
https://tidesandcurrents.noaa.gov/sltrends/sltrends_us.html
I don’t have a crystal ball and don’t claim to know what sea levels will be in thirty years time.
But this exercise is plainly not fit for purpose, and was presumably published with the sole intention of creating false alarm.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
February 19, 2020 at 08:26AM
By Christopher Monckton of Brenchley
Much has been made of the alleged standstill in global CO2 emissions, which are asserted to have been about the same in 2019 as in 2018, at 33.3 gigatonnes of CO2:
Obsession over transient phenomena such as this is commonplace among the climate genociders, whose cruel, dangerous and expensive global-warming abatement policies are killing tens of millions annually through the coordinated refusal of most of the world’s leading merchant, central and intergovernmental banks to lend to developing countries to install the one kind of electricity they can afford and can maintain and are desperate for – coal-fired generation.
Nothing lifts a poor nation faster, more surely and more permanently out of poverty, misery, disease and death than the universal availability of universal, affordable, continuous, base-load, coal-fired electricity.
Were it not for the genocidal emissions-abatement policies driven by the totalitarian fanatics and extremists of the far Left in the West, the whole world would by now be electrified, prosperity in the developing countries would have increased no less dramatically than it has in the electrified advanced economies, and the net benefit to the environment in the consequent stabilization of population would have been overwhelming.
Almost two centuries of official demographic statistics have demonstrated that, by a long chalk, the most effective method of stabilizing a previously-burgeoning population is to increase the general prosperity of that population. Frankly, nothing else works. The fastest way to displace poverty with prosperity is to give the people electricity. We should make this moral case against the genociders daily until they are compelled to pay heed.
The genociders’ trumpeting of the supposed standstill in global CO2 emissions is – as usual – misplaced. As the IEA’s graph shows, the imagined level of global emissions remained static for five years from 1990-1995. In Their terms, we were doing “better” then than now, for no increase in our sins of emission was reported over that period.
Their “our policies are at last working” meme is misplaced for a second reason. The emissions data are inaccurate. As with temperature, so with emissions, we are incapable of determining global data to a precision of a tenth of a unit. We know that the emissions data are inaccurate because if they were accurate – and if the link between emissions and concentration were as direct as They tell us it is – then the stabilization of emissions would have been matched by at least some diminution in the rate at which CO2 concentration is accumulating in the atmosphere.
However, the CO2 concentration at Mauna Loa shows a continuing and undiminished rate of increase over the past four or five years:
Since the trend in global temperatures has been generally downward over the past five years, additional outgassing of CO2 from the oceans does not account for the continuing increase in CO2 concentration.
Nor can it legitimately be argued (though some genociders have tried) that the terrestrial CO2 sink is failing. If it were failing, the rapid growth in the total plant biomass on the planet – the net primary productivity of trees and plants – would not have been as spectacular as it has been.
The question arises whether the decades of hot air generated by the climate genociders’ intergovernmental conferences, at vast expense in treasure as well as in common sense, have reduced global CO2 emissions below the business-as-usual prediction made by IPCC in its First Assessment Report in 1990.
The answer is No. The annual, official, peer-reviewed estimate of global CO2 emissions from all sources, Friedlingstein et al. (2019), who used the same wider measure of emissions as IPCC, shows that emissions are above the business-as-usual trajectory predicted by IPCC in 1990:
The 11.5 givatonnes of carbon estimated by Friedlingstein et al. is equivalent to 42.2 gigatonnes of CO2.
In short, the quintupling of electricity prices compared with what they would be without global warming abatement policies, the doubling of gasoline prices, the destruction of heavy industries such as coal, steel, aluminum, coal-fired power generation and motor manufacture throughout the Western world, the trashing of the countryside and the killing of billions of bees, birds and bats by windmills, the slowing of storms and the consequent flooding caused by those same windmills, and all the deaths that the genociders are inflicting upon our less fortunate cousins in the developing world with their refusal to countenance the immediate electrification of the one-sixth of the planet whose population subsists in enforced and involuntary darkness, have achieved precisely nothing.
via Watts Up With That?
February 19, 2020 at 08:10AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 