Beiji Village in Mohe, China’s northernmost city [image credit : china.org.cn]

The reporter here says it’s ‘so cold it feels uncomfortable in your lungs’ then goes on to speculate on possible/imagined links to global warming aka climate change. ‘Research suggests’…etc. The freezing cold air coming south from Siberia gets billed as an ‘extreme weather event’.
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Mohe is known as China’s North Pole for a good reason, says Sky News.

It is the country’s most northern city and is a very, very cold place.

It’s difficult to describe what temperatures this low feel like.

On Sunday it hit -53C, a new low for the coldest temperature recorded in the country since modern monitoring began.

The National Meteorological Centre confirmed the previous record of -52.3C, set in 1969, had been beaten.

It’s so cold that the air catches in your throat, it feels uncomfortable in your lungs and you almost feel like you need to cough it out.

There is a strange freezing sensation around any part of your body where moisture lingers.
. . .
Mohe is located on the top tip of a slimmer section of China that protrudes right up into Russia – it’s surrounded by Russia from the north, east and west and is often exposed to harsh air travelling south from Siberia.

It’s around 1,500 miles north of Beijing, which is already considered pretty far north.

It’s a picturesque, snow-covered place, home to about 85,000 residents who work in industries from farming to tourism.

Some homes are modern and well-equipped, but others are old-fashioned, heated with small coal burners.

Local heating companies in Mohe have said the boilers are running at full power to help people through the winter and Beijing News reported that coal consumption has increased by a third in the city.

While extreme temperatures are not unusual here, they are around 15C to 20C lower than the average. It raises now-familiar questions about the increased frequency of extreme weather events and what’s causing it.

Full article here.

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January 28, 2023 at 05:03AM

By Paul Homewood

The CO2 Coalition is a useful source for facts about carbon dioxide, such as this:

During each of the last four glacial advances, CO2 concentration fell below 190 ppm. At the end of the last glacial advance, it fell to 182 ppm, thought to be the lowest in the Earth’s history. Why is this alarming? Because below 150 ppm, most terrestrial plant life cannot exist.

We came within about 30 ppm (30 molecules out of every one million) to the extinction of most plant life on land, and with it the extinction of all higher terrestrial life-forms that depend on it. Bear in mind that, before we began adding CO2 to the atmosphere, we weren’t sure that we wouldn’t cross that critical 150-ppm threshold during the next glacial period.

Please note that many people confuse the glacial advance with “ice age.” The current ice age we are still in began about 2.4 million years ago. The planet altered between very cold periods known as glacials and warm periods called interglacials. We are thankfully in the tail end of interglacial warm trend.

https://co2coalition.org/facts/water-vapor-is-the-primary-greenhouse-gas/

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January 28, 2023 at 04:46AM

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January 28, 2023 at 04:46AM

By Paul Homewood

Jeremy Hunt has revealed that the UK is sitting on an energy goldmine, as wind power has generated record amounts of energy in the past year. In a keynote speech at Bloomberg’s European headquarters in London, the Chancellor delivered an upbeat message as he unveiled his plan to turbocharge Britain’s economy. At this speech, Mr Hunt hailed the UK’s renewable energy industry as a "big growth area", which he estimates could be worth a trillion pounds by the end of the decade. He also pointed to recent announcements made by the National Grid’s Electricity Systems Operator, which showed that the UK has produced staggering amounts of electricity in the past year.

In the speech, Mr Hunt said: "Another big growth area is out green and clean energy sector. The UK is a world leader here, with the largest offshore wind farm in the world.

"Last year we were able to generate an incredible 40 percent of our electricity from renewables. On one day, on a rather windy December 30th, we actually got 60 percent of our electricity from renewables, mainly wind.

"McKinsey estimates that the global market opportunity for the UK green industries could be worth more than a trillion pounds between now and 2030."

https://www.express.co.uk/news/science/1727064/hunt-hidden-gem-energy-crisis-uk-wind-power-record-national-grid-eso

Hunt is being rather disingenuous here. The McKinsey report he refers to states:

Overall, we estimate that the capital expenditure into low-carbon assets in the world’s broader energy, transport, food, and land-use systems could be around £40-50 trillion in the period 2021–2030. ¹⁶ The global market opportunity for UK companies producing the goods and services to feed this green capex revolution could be worth more than £1 trillion by 2030

https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/sustainability/our-insights/opportunities-for-uk-businesses-in-the-net-zero-transition

Whether the export opportunities identifies materialise or not, they have very little to do with Britain’s offshore wind industry. It is extremely unlikely we will export turbine blades, for instance, or actually instal anything, or even provide consultancy.

The opportunities are most likely to revolve around our traditional strengths, such as finance and professional services. We will be in a good place to do this whether we go for Net Zero or not.

But what Mr Hunt forgot to mention was the crippling cost of Net Zero. A year ago the same McKinsey published another report on Net Zero:

The net-zero transition will cost $275 trillion globally by 2050 as low-emission activities are ramped up and high-emissions activities decrease, according to a new report from consultancy McKinsey & Company.

The increase in capital spending on physical assets for energy and land-use equates to an average $9.2tn per year or an increase of $3.5tn on today’s annual spending, McKinsey found in its latest study: The net-zero transition: What it would cost, what it could bring.

The transition will also lead to extensive labour reallocations, with about 200 million direct and indirect jobs added to the labour market by 2050, making up for the 185 million positions lost over the same period, the report found, which assessed sectors that produce 85 per cent of overall emissions, with a detailed assessment of 69 countries.

“The net-zero transition will amount to a massive economic transformation,” said Mekala Krishnan, a partner at the McKinsey Global Institute and lead author of the report.

https://www.thenationalnews.com/Business/UK/2022/01/25/mckinsey-net-zero-transition-will-cost-275-trillion-globally-by-2050/

Business will doubtlessly benefit from all of this capital spending, but it will be the public who end up paying the bill. Meanwhile it will be  painful transition for those 185 million who will lose their jobs. The idea that they will simply walk into one of the 200 million new jobs is ridiculous – life does not work like that.

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January 28, 2023 at 04:24AM