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via Real Climate Science
January 22, 2022 at 08:45AM
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dave Ward
Ozzie farmer has the answer to Norfolk’s “extreme weather”!!
An Australian farmer who has found green ways to grow crops in extreme heat and droughts has given advice to his Norfolk counterparts.
Grant Sims spoke at a virtual online meeting hosted by the Royal Norfolk Agricultural Association and its Yield (Young, Innovative, Enterprising, Learning and Developing) rural business network.
With extreme weather becoming more common in East Anglia, he explained how he has optimised the health and resilience of his soils to cope with the rigours of an Australian summer.
He farms 8,500 acres in Victoria, including a 300-strong herd of Angus cattle.
He also runs Down Under Covers, a business which sells seasonal multi-species cover crop mixes to farmers across Australia.
And keeping soil covered with plants between commercial crops is one of the key "guiding principles" on his farm, which can receive less than 200mm of rain during the growing season, and often sees 40-degree heat and heavy storms in summer.
He said "cover is king", helping insulate the soil and improve its biology, while a variety of root depths breaks up compaction and increase the water-holding capacity.
"One thing we are really focused on in our soil health is to improve that infiltration and water-holding capacity," he said.
"Most of the time we look at the area we are farming two-dimensionally, but really we are farming a three-dimensional plane.
"So if we can increase the rooting depth and the water-holding capacity, we can make use of this out-of-season rainfall, store it, or grow something over the summer which has traditionally not been done – and that is where we implement our cover crops to get the diversity in."
https://www.edp24.co.uk/news/business/australian-farmer-grant-sims-speaks-to-norfolk-farmers-8628500
Somehow, I don’t quite see Norfolk turning into Victoria anytime soon!
But what about all of this extreme weather and drought, I hear you say!
As far as April to September rainfall is concerned, there is no trend whatsoever in East Anglia. Dry summers were just as common in the past:
https://www.ecad.eu/utils/showindices.php?ajgkeo7oovr2mbo7te9b62mrik
Neither are there any trends in October to March rainfall, nor evidence of unusually dry or wet years:
And with summer daytime temperatures averaging less than 23C, I would suggest Norfolk’s farmers have more things to worry about than the weather!
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
January 22, 2022 at 07:39AM
By Paul Homewood
According to a report in the Times, “ministers have been considering scrapping green levies from energy bills. However officials have concluded that because the government is contractually obliged to pay them they would simply be moved from energy bills to general taxation.”
Direct subsidies for renewable energy investors – via the Renewables Obligation, the Feed-in Tariff and the Contracts for Difference systems – run to £10 billion a year, but there is a further £2 billion from the high system costs renewables bring to the grid.
Net Zero Watch has repeatedly called on ministers to remove these renewable energy subsidies from energy bills to help reduce mounting pressure on the general cost of living.
Cutting green levies from energy bills will also allow the Treasury, in the medium-term, to buy back these subsidy entitlements at a discount, and eventually cease to provide green energy subsidies in any form.
Steve Baker MP said,
Thank goodness we now seem to be making progress towards better energy policy. Setting out to make the public poorer and colder never seemed likely to survive contact with electors. We can only hope ministers now accelerate down the path to a policy which is socially, economically and politically viable.”
Dr Benny Peiser, Net Zero Watch director said:
It would appear that Rishi Sunak and his advisers in the Treasury are realising that billions in subsidies for renewable energy is no longer compatible in its present form, threatening the welfare of millions of households and undermining economic and political stability. Sooner or later, the Government will have to consider terminating all energy subsidies that are increasing costs and pain to consumers and businesses.”
If the Times Report is true, this is a step in the right direction. Going right back to Tony Blair’s government, a deliberate decision was made to force energy users to pay the cost of government climate policy.
Now it appears that government will have to take back the cost. If that means spending cuts elsewhere, so be it. If this had been done before, the Treasury would probably have put the brakes on green subsidies years ago.
But the real solution is to do away with them altogether.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
January 22, 2022 at 06:33AM
Credit: reference.com
Plate tectonics has always been good for a science controversy or two. This one throws some solar-planetary spice into the mix, putting a focus on the Earth-Moon barycentre.
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A study led by geophysicist Anne M. Hofmeister in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis proposes that imbalanced forces and torques in the Earth-moon-sun system drive circulation of the whole mantle, says Phys.org.
The new analysis provides an alternative to the hypothesis that the movement of tectonic plates is related to convection currents in the Earth’s mantle.
Convection involves buoyant rise of heated fluids, which Hofmeister and her colleagues argue does not apply to solid rocks.
They argue that force, not heat, moves large objects.
The new research is published in a special paper of the Geological Society of America, as part of a forthcoming collection assembled in honor of geologist Warren B. Hamilton.
Earth’s internal workings are popularly modeled as dissipating heat generated by internal radioactivity and from leftover energy created during collisions when our planet formed.
But even mantle convection proponents recognize that that amount of internal heat-energy is insufficient to drive large-scale tectonics. And there are other problems with using convection to explain observed plate motions.
Instead, Earth’s plates might be shifting because the sun exerts such a strong gravitational pull on the moon that it has caused the moon’s orbit around Earth to become elongated.
Over time, the position of the barycenter—the center of mass between the orbiting bodies of the Earth and the moon—has moved closer to Earth’s surface and now oscillates 600 km per month relative to the geocenter, Hofmeister said. This sets up internal stresses, as the Earth continues to spin.
“Because the oscillating barycenter lies ~4600 km from the geocenter, Earth’s tangential orbital acceleration and solar pull are imbalanced except at the barycenter,” Hofmeister said. “The planet’s warm, thick and strong interior layers can withstand these stresses, but its thin, cold, brittle lithosphere responds by fracturing.”
Daily spin flattens the Earth from a perfect spherical shape, which contributes to this brittle failure of the lithosphere. These two independent stresses create the mosaic of plates observed in the outer shell, the authors suggest.
The variety of plate motions comes from the changes in size and direction of the imbalanced gravitational forces with time. But how to test this alternative?
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
January 22, 2022 at 06:27AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 