From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Earlier this month the Met Office declared the hottest day of the year so far in the U.K. with the temperature reaching 34.8ºC in Cambridge. The Met Office claimed it was only the eleventh time since 1961 that the temperature had reached that level, with six of these occasions having been recorded in the last 10 years. Needless to say, missing from the account was a note that the station in Cambridge’s National Institute for Agricultural Botany (NIAB) is located just metres from a massive heat-generating electricity sub-station complex.

Electricity sub-stations give off so much heat into the surrounding atmosphere there are even plans to trap it for commercial use. The Cambridge station at Histon has recently benefitted from a £5 million upgrade including the installation of a third heat-pumping transformer. It is difficult to think of a worse place to locate an instrument to accurately measure nearby uncorrupted air temperatures, other than favoured Met sites at international airports and solar farms.

Cambridge NIAB crops up regularly in the Met Office’s local daily ‘records’. Last year it claimed a recording at this site was the highest measured in the eastern region during September since 1949. The World Meteorological Office (WMO) rates Met Office sites from class 1 to 5 and Cambridge NIAB is said to have a pristine class 1 designation with no temperature ‘uncertainties’ due to local natural and unnatural influences. But how reliable is this superior rating? The view from Google Earth suggests that questions about its validity can legitimately be asked.

WMO guidelines state that any heat source in class 1 sites must be at least 100 metres away. But the google map above suggests that 100m is a very generous distance between the Histon grid and the red Met station marker. An even nearer straight line path or road might also not be considered helpful in taking an uncorrupted measurement. Recent expansion at Histon has added a third heat-pumping transformer to help increase capacity.

Electricity sub-stations release huge amounts of heat into the nearby surroundings. There have even been plans to capture the output from these ‘boilers’ for commercial use. In 2021, SSE Energy Solutions and the National Grid unveiled plans to use the heat generated to produce hot water and space heating for domestic and industrial premises. As Nathan Sanders, managing director at SSE, noted: “Electric power transformers generate huge amounts of heat as a by-product when electricity flows through them. At the moment, this heat is just vented directly into the atmosphere and wasted.”

Not entirely wasted, the cynical might observe. It serves to boost temperatures – highly useful for spreading political Net Zero panic and alarm – across the entire U.K. Met Office measuring network. As regular readers will know, this network is composed of largely junk stations in class 4 with WMO ‘uncertainties’ of 2ºC, and super-junk class 5 with possible errors up to 5ºC. Almost eight in 10 stations across the 380-strong network are labelled class 4 and 5. Many of these stations, such as the urban heat furnace that is Heathrow airport, produce regular daily ‘records’. Incredibly, the overall data is used by the Met to claim it can measure air temperature across the four countries of the U.K. down to one hundredth of a degree centigrade.

The Daily Sceptic is obliged to citizen journalist Ray Sanders for drawing our attention to the obvious corruptions at Cambridge NIAB. Ray is a frequent contributor to Paul Homewood’s blog, an excellent online publication that has long drawn attention to the obvious and widespread problems at the Met Office sites. Earlier this year, the Daily Sceptic broke the story that revealed most of the stations are junk following a freedom of information request. Interest in this scientific scandal is now widespread on social media, but it remains of little concern to mainstream media. Most writers captured by the lazy Net Zero narrative continue to tout the heat corrupted figures and ‘records’. To date, the Met Office has failed to respond to the growing critical interest in its obviously flawed temperature readings.

Heat corruptions caused by electricity sub-stations can be found at other locations used by the Met Office. Ray has also drawn our attention to the ‘notorious’ Bingley No 2 site, in use since 1972.

Again, it is just metres away from a major city sub-station. Unsurprisingly, in this case it has a class 4 junk designation.

The final meteorological horror show can be seen at Amersham where temperatures at this class 4 site are again taken just a few metres away from the area’s main sub-station. This site is a new one, having been established in 2015. It begs the question why the Met Office continues to locate scientific measuring stations in such unsuitable places. Another recent FOI request has revealed that over eight out of 10 of the 113 stations opened in the last 30 years are in classes 4 and 5. Worse, 81% of the stations started in the last 10 years, including Amersham, are junk, as are eight of the 13 new sites in the last five years.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

The Electric Vehicle crowd are struggling to deflect attention from the disastrous environmental impacts caused by their shiny new Teslas. Wedded to their own virtuous piety, EV owners evidently ignore the hypocrisy that sits at the heart of every EV: a lithium-ion battery.

The lithium-ion battery, whether it’s used to power an all-EV or as a standalone store for electrons lovingly harvested from mother nature, is a wealth of rare earths and scarce minerals, the provenance of which can only be described as troublesome, as Frits Byron Soepyan details below.

EVs, wind, and solar are neither reliable nor environmentally friendly: here’s why
Life Site News
Frits Byron Soepyan
3 April 2024

Various governments have made commitments to expand the use of electric vehicles (EVs) and alternative energy systems. The stated objectives include reducing pollution, improving human health and the environment, protecting the environment and providing reliable energy at lower costs. Among those jumping on this band wagon are the governments of the United States, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and the European Union, and the Governorate of Vatican City State.

Here’s the big question: Will adopting these technologies achieve these goals? To get an answer, we will examine what they require for operation, decommissioning and supporting infrastructure.

For starters, EV batteries require lithium, whose mining needs 2 metric tons of water for every 1 kilogram (kg) of extracted metal. To put things into perspective, each Tesla battery requires about 10 kg of lithium, which means that 20 metric tons of water are needed for each battery. To make matters worse, lithium is usually found in deserts that lack readily available water in large quantities.

EV batteries also require cobalt, with the Democratic Republic of the Congo being the largest producer and exporter of cobalt. Unfortunately, the expansion of cobalt mines has turned green areas into barren lands and often employs child labor in the extraction. For instance, Kasulo, located in the Democratic Republic of the Congo and formerly a popular urban neighborhood, has been made unlivable since underground ores began to be exploited in 2014.

As if these weren’t enough, EVs and wind and solar energy systems require rare earth metals. The mining of these results in environmental destruction, including deforestation, soil erosion, water contamination, loss of wildlife habitats, changes in landscapes, air pollution and adverse health effects to miners, including lead poisoning.

Thus, instead of reducing pollution and protecting the environment, switching to EVs and alternative energy systems does the opposite, beginning with the mining of necessary materials.

The construction of the infrastructure needed for alternative energy systems (e.g., hydro, solar, wind and geothermal) requires more than four times the amount of materials (e.g., steel, glass, copper, cement/concrete, aluminum, iron, lead, plastic and silicon) than conventional energy systems (coal, natural gas and nuclear). Compared to coal-fired power plants, land requirements for solar and wind energy systems are about 33 and 179 times more, respectively. These high material and land costs increase the cost of energy.

During their operation, solar energy systems and wind turbines kill birds, with the latter being fatal to bats as well, and have proved to be unreliable.

Reliability issues induced by over-reliance on wind and solar have arisen in numerous locales around the globe. For instance, California has been converting to solar, decommissioning all but one of its coal-fired power plants and all but one of its nuclear power plants and minimizing its use of gas-fired power. As a result, the state experienced rolling blackouts during a heat wave in the summer of 2020.

Similarly, Texas invested heavily in wind and solar only to have both fail miserably during a winter storm in February 2021. Frozen wind turbines and snow-covered solar panels left much of Texas without electric power for long periods, which led to the deaths of more than 200 people and billions of dollars in economic losses. The following July, natural gas power plants were called upon to make up for failing wind and solar energy systems during a heat wave.

During the winter of 2020-21, Germany had an experience similar to that of Texas when wind and solar succumbed to the effects of cold and snow. Since the country began switching to wind and solar around 2000, the price of German electricity has more than tripled.

In short, wind and solar energy systems are not cheap, reliable or environmentally friendly.

EVs also prove to be dangerous, unreliable and expensive. Because their lithium-ion batteries store so much chemical and electrical energies, EVs have become known as fire hazards. Compared to internal combustion engines, the power systems of EVs produce fires that are harder to extinguish because the batteries could reignite and cooling the battery pack is difficult. To make matters worse, EV fires may release large amounts of poisonous gases, such as hydrogen fluoride.

Cold weather is a nemesis of EVs, as it is for many battery-operated devices. Temperatures below 32 °F (0 °C) can cause the driving range of EVs to drop significantly or even render the vehicle useless due to the increase in the internal resistance of lithium-ion batteries at cold temperatures. Charging EVs in cold weather can significantly increase the time needed for recharging and may cause permanent battery damage.

While it’s true that EVs do not have exhaust emissions, one needs to consider that there are other types of emissions, including particulate matter (PM) from brake wear, tire wear, road wear and resuspension of road dust. Because EVs are 24 percent heavier (due to their batteries) compared to their equivalent internal combustion engine vehicles, EVs emit about the same amounts of PM10 and emit only about 1-3 percent less PM2.5 than internal combustion engine vehicles. In fact, there is a positive relationship between the vehicle weight and its particulate matter emissions.

Finally, the disposing of EV batteries and the decommissioning of wind turbines and solar panels are both problematic environmental issues.

EV batteries last about 5 to 10 years and need to be replaced when their output goes below 80% of their initial capacities. Storing, burying, and exporting these used lithium-ion batteries are no longer acceptable. Unfortunately, the direct recycling of these batteries, with high remaining capacities, would be prohibitively expensive and highly energy- and resource-intensive, and would pollute the air, water and land.

Similarly, the blades of wind turbines last about 10 years. The life of wind-turbine towers and solar panels is about 25 years. Only a few landfills in the United States are large enough to handle the wind turbine blades. Solar panels are not particularly welcome in landfills, because they contain toxic materials, such as lead and cadmium, that can leach into soil. Dr. Wallace Manheimer noted that despite these dangers, solar panels have been put in landfills because “the cost of the recycled materials is considerably more than the cost of the raw materials.”

EVs and wind and solar energy are not environmentally friendly nor provide reliable and affordable energy and transportation. They should be discontinued for the well-being of humanity and the environment.
Life Site News