As fossil fuel usage continues to grow around the world, the UN continues to say they are phasing out fossil fuels.
“UN warns world will miss climate targets unless fossil fuels phased out”
Global primary energy consumption by source
Global Monitoring Laboratory – Carbon Cycle Greenhouse Gases
via Real Climate Science
September 9, 2023 at 08:07AM
To show how adolescent this has become, last year Swiss Environmental Minister Simonetta Sommaruga suggested that residents “shower together” to save energy. OK, now we’re getting somewhere.
The post The Climate ‘Emergency’ Is Coming for You – ‘The urge to curtail individual freedom is visible in countless blueprints for a controlled future’ first appeared on Watts Up With That?.
via Watts Up With That?
September 9, 2023 at 08:02AM
By Paul Homewood
h/t Paul Kolk
Network Rail has been fined £6.7m after admitting a series of failings which led to the deaths of three people in a train crash near Stonehaven.
The Aberdeen to Glasgow service derailed at Carmont after hitting a landslide following heavy rain.
Network Rail pleaded guilty to a number of maintenance and inspection failures before the crash in August 2020.
It also admitted failing to warn the driver that part of the track was unsafe or tell him to reduce his speed.
Driver Brett McCullough, 45, conductor Donald Dinnie, 58, and passenger Christopher Stuchbury, 62, died in the crash.
The judge, Lord Matthews, said no penalty could compensate for the loss suffered by the families of those who died and of the six people on board the train who were injured.
Speaking outside court, Ray McCullough, the father of the train’s driver, said the fine was "not enough".
"At the end of the day, the train should not have gone out," he said.
Kevin Lindsay, Scottish organiser for train drivers’ union Aslef, added that the sentence offered "no comfort".
The train hit a landslide near Stonehaven in August 2020 after heavy rain in an area where a drainage system had been incorrectly installed.
The 06:38 service to Glasgow had been unable to complete its journey due to the conditions and was returning to Aberdeen when the accident happened.
A recording of the driver showed he queried with a signaller if any reduced speed was needed to return north. He was told everything was fine for normal speed.
The train struck debris from a landslide on the track, derail and collided with a bridge parapet.
Passing sentence at the High Court in Aberdeen, Lord Matthews said that very few people who saw the images of the crash would ever forget them.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-66749546
And yet despite all of these damning facts, the contemptible BBC still want to link the accident to climate change:
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-north-east-orkney-shetland-66750650
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
September 9, 2023 at 08:00AM
By Paul Homewood
It’s only taken these so-called experts two decades to work this out!
Britain must set up a vast network of hydrogen-filled caves to guard against the risk of blackouts under the net zero shift, according to the country’s premier science body.
The Royal Society has said 900 caverns filled with hydrogen will be needed to ensure the UK can keep the nation’s lights on during periods of low wind and sunshine.
he proposed facilities would be capable of storing billions of cubic metres of hydrogen, which could be used to power electricity generators during bouts of mild weather when wind farm outputs plummet.
The report is perhaps the starkest warning yet of the risks faced when relying on intermittent weather-dependent energy sources without sufficient backup.
It warns: “The UK’s need for long-term energy storage has been seriously underestimated.
“Large-scale energy storage is essential to mitigate variations in wind and sunshine, particularly long-term variations in the wind, and to keep the nation’s lights on. Storing hydrogen, in salt caverns, would be the cheapest way of doing this.”
The report finds that up to 100 Terawatt-hours (TWh) of storage will be needed by 2050, roughly equivalent to the energy contained in 1.2 billion Tesla car batteries.
The forecast is based on 37 years of weather data and the assumption that oil and gas power sources will be phased out in the coming decades. 100 TWh of backup power would be enough to power the country for weeks on end if needed but would require huge infrastructure.
Sir Chris Llewellyn Smith, lead author of the report, said: “Demand for electricity is expected to double by 2050 with the electrification of heat, transport, and industrial processing, as well as increases in the use of air conditioning, economic growth, and changes in population.
“The demand will mainly be met by wind and solar. They are the cheapest forms of low-carbon electricity generation, but they are volatile and will have to be complemented by large-scale supply from energy storage or other sources.”
Sir Chris said that although nuclear, hydro and other sources were likely to play a role, they are also more expensive than hydrogen storage.
Theoretically all of this may be technically possible, but at what cost.
Apart from the cost of storage (and the distribution network to take hydrogen to and from these salt caverns, electrolysis is a very expensive process. Moreover it wastes a lot of energy. Because of low energy efficiency, you would need 500 TWh of wind power to produce enough hydrogen to make 100 TWh of electricity.
And we now know that offshore wind is a lot more expensive than we were told.
And on top of all of that, we would need to build 100 GW of hydrogen burning power stations for the times when there is little wind.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
September 9, 2023 at 07:42AM
Iowa Climate Science Education 