Month: September 2024

Daily News

Aussie Firefighters Warn of Lithium Battery Vehicle Fire Danger

Essay by Eric Worrall

Mike Gallagher, CEO of Ports Australia – “You can’t put them out. So you can imagine it on the street if you can’t put them out, imagine them on a vessel out at sea or in a port.”

Warning over electric scooter and bike batteries amid daily fires

By 9 News Staff 8:24pm Sep 22, 2024

…

Fire crews are noting a spate of explosions caused by lithium batteries found in e-scooters and e-bikes – and it could even happen when they’re being shipped to shops.

“The fires we’re encountering almost on a daily basis are from our smaller e-scooters, e-bikes type of batteries,” Darren Mallouk from Queensland Fire Department’s Investigation Unit told 9News.

…

Mike Gallagher, CEO of Ports Australia, said ship fires caused by these flammable batteries were virtually impossible to safely put out.

“They are packed like sardines inside a tin, except these are very dangerous sardines,” he said.

“You can’t put them out. So you can imagine it on the street if you can’t put them out, imagine them on a vessel out at sea or in a port.”

…

In 2022, a cargo ship carrying luxury vehicles including EVs sunk to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean.

…

Read more (includes video): https://www.9news.com.au/national/lithium-battery-fires-firefighters-warning-over-electric-vehicles-ships/a1496745-3ef2-4660-be8d-c91f93713d04

The ferocity and speed of Lithium fires cannot be overstated, Lithium fires are more like tossing a match in a box of fireworks than a normal fire. The people in the video below were lucky to escape with their lives, there was no time to do anything but flee.

If professional firefighters struggle to extinguish lithium fires, nobody else should attempt it. Not only are you at risk of severe burns from exploding debris which are hot enough to melt steel, The fumes from Lithium are horribly poisonous.

Lithium is a powerful psychoactive. In small doses Lithium has therapeutic value in treating manic depressive disorders, but patients on Lithium have to have regular blood tests to minimise the risk of Lithium poisoning. Even at therapeutic doses Lithium can cause a variety of short and (if you are unlucky) long term insidious physiological ailments, including dementia like brain injuries, known as Lithium Neurotoxicity.

Even if firefighters control the blaze and save the house, would you really want to live in a house contaminated by Lithium? Sooner or later insurers will catch on that even if adjacent structures survive the blaze, there is a significant lingering litigation risk from people claiming their health was damaged by exposure to lithium.

Ship transport is the only part of the Lithium risk profile which seems fixable with current technology. The Lithium could be transported in a non-flammable form, such as Lithium carbonate, minimising the risk of fire. Though Lithium carbonate is still a dangerously toxic substance, applying similar protocols to transportation of other toxic substances should suffice for non flammable forms of lithium.

But converting non flammable forms of Lithium into batteries is very energy intensive, it requires lots of cheap energy – something green obsessed Western nations are struggling to provide to industry. So ships and their crews continue to risk their lives transporting unstable forms of Lithium such as finished Lithium batteries, to help green politicians maintain the fiction they are reducing CO2 emissions.

via Watts Up With That?

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September 23, 2024 at 12:06PM

Daily News

SCOTUS Must Stop Climate Extortion Lawfare

Jon Decker explains what’s at stake in the case awaiting US Supreme Court consideration.  His Real Clear Markets article is The Supreme Court Must Stop Climate Extortion Schemes.  Excerpts in itallics with my bolds and added images.

Chevron recently announced that it is moving out of California after almost a century and a half in the state. No wonder, since Sacramento sued the company, along with a number of other oil companies, for allegedly deceptive practices.

In their war on energy, progressive politicians increasingly turn to lawfare as another scheme to extract funds from productive citizens and dramatically reshape the economy. In the coming weeks, we’ll learn if the Supreme Court will stand up to them.

The critical case is Sunoco v. Honolulu, currently pending before SCOTUS. Honolulu is suing several oil companies, alleging their fossil fuel production caused significant damage to the city through rising sea levels and other climate-related infrastructure issues.

That these companies are being sued not for specific instances of purported environmental harm, but instead under “public nuisance” and “consumer fraud” laws for an alleged “multi-decadal campaign of deception” about the nature of their products is crucial. That’s because it lets progressive cities and states get around long-standing legal doctrine that kept climate cases in federal courts, where defendants are somewhat likelier to get a fair hearing.

Knowing that federal environmental law presents a more difficult path for litigation, activists instead went “venue shopping” with their climate agenda to deep blue states, knowing that a multi-jurisdictional assault would be unworkable, and potentially fatal, for American energy companies. The progressive politicians who support this approach not only see a boost for their careers and fundraising goals, but a potentially massive source of new government revenue.

Because Honolulu, like a spate of other lawsuits driven by ambitious progressive state AGs and prosecutors, models its assault on energy companies on the 90s tobacco wars. And they are unsurprisingly seeking an eye-watering settlement similar to what the tobacco industry was forced to pay (dollars that still flow to the government to this day).

But you don’t have to be a fossil fuel corporate booster or a climate change skeptic to recognize that these paydays will come at the expense of ordinary consumers and taxpayers, and of the economy as a whole.

Fossil fuels are ubiquitous in every sector, from agriculture and clothing to steel production, electricity, heating, and transportation. If this lawfare succeeds then every single one of these products and services—anything that takes energy as an input—becomes more expensive.

There’s also a kind of incoherence to the idea that a small handful of companies are alone to blame for perceived climate ills. What about the thousands of companies worldwide that are involved in the exploration, production, and distribution of fossil fuels – or the millions of companies that use fossil fuels to make their own goods and perform their services? That’s not even to mention the fact that the same few energy companies now being sued also play a critical role in the U.S. leading the world in CO2 emission reductions, through greater adoption of natural gas. How do the companies spearheading the natural gas renaissance figure into the supposed “deception” at work here?

The stakes here remind us that judges—and therefore elections—matter. Hawaii Supreme Court Chief Justice Mark Recktenwald, who ruled in favor of Honolulu and thereby triggered SCOTUS review, has been associated with the far-left Environmental Law Institute’s (ELI) Climate Judiciary Project, a group that “trains” and “educates” thousands of judges and government lawyers across the country to deliver legal outcomes favored by progressives.

The Supreme Court may be the last line of defense against
fringe activists dictating energy policy for the rest of us.

But of course, SCOTUS itself is in the crosshairs of left-wing judicial scheming, with top Democrats, including presidential nominee Kamala Harris, threatening to pack the Supreme Court if elected. No doubt with judges in the Mark Recktenwald mode.

If Honolulu succeeds in its case, and progressives in their larger campaign of lawfare, Americans can say Aloha to higher prices.

Postscript on Arguing Deception in These Cases

As noted above, the rationale for filing these cases in state rather than federal courts depends on claiming consumer fraud, I.e. oil companies deceived the public while knowing about their damaging energy products.  A good rebuttal against the “Exxon Knew” fiction is provided (with my bolds) by Randal Utech at Master Resource:

To say that Exxon knew the truth back in the early 80s is a laughable fallacy. Effectively they built a primitive model that is characteristically similar to the erroneous modern climate models of today.

Fundamentally their work is based on the poorly understood climate sensitivity (ECS) derived from radiative convective models and GCM models. To their credit, they actually acknowledged the high degree of uncertainty in these estimations. Today, even Hausfather (2022 vs 2019) is beginning to understand the climate sensitivity (ECS) is too high. CMIP6 is running still even hotter than CMIP5 and using ECS of 3 to 5° C rather than ~ 1.2° C as highlighted in Nick Lewis’s 2022 study.

CMIP6 should have been better because it incorporated solar particle forcing (Matthes et. al.) and as they incorporate more elements of natural forcing (an active area of research as we still do not have a predictive theory for climate), the effect is highlighting more underlying problems with the models.

However, Exxon investigators fell into the same trap that climate modelers of today where they build the models to history match temperatures and then wow, because they can create a model that appears to history match temperatures, they assume it is telling them something. Truth? Anyone can create a model to do this, but it would never mean the model is correct. While the models today are much more complex, they are based on a complex set of non-linear equations, and the understanding of the various sources of nonlineararity is poor. This opens up wide degrees of uncertainty yet wide opportunity for tuning. Furthermore, natural forcing is undercharacterized and deemed inconsequential.

The contrived sense of accomplishment in history matching is spurious correlation for an infinitesimally small period of time. Using Exxon’s internal analysis of CO2 climate forcing is little more than a propaganda tool. Current climate models, much more sophisticated, face the same problem of unknown, false causality.

See Background Post:

19 State AGs Ask Supremes to Block Climate Lawsuits

via Science Matters

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September 23, 2024 at 10:18AM

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Tuesday

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via JoNova

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September 23, 2024 at 09:31AM

Daily News

Achfary DCNN0337 – More Foehn Effects

58.31084 -4.91636 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 5 & “Satisfactory” Installed (elsewhere) 1/1/1914 Originally a rain gauge site, archived temperature records only date from 1/10/2006 hence probable Screen installation date.

A station in a remote Sutherland village showing a long term history but only as a rain gauge site and one that has had several relocations and numbering changes. What appears to be a front garden site it records data manually and is a lowly rated CIMO Class 5 with inaccuracy due to siting recognised as up to 5 °C. Despite the relatively unassuming nature of the site it is a double UK all time record holder.

In just 16 years of 21st Century operation, Achfary holds both the January and December highest temperature records with the December record late in the month. Clearly the typical climate of northern Scotland is not warmer than for example southern England (far from it) so these must be exceptional events. As has been highlighted here before, mountainous areas (for the UK typically Scotland and North Wales) frequently experience Foehn Effects.

Scottish Highlands experience 16.8C December temperature record – due to the Foehn effect

Locating the site from google aerial view clearly indicates mountainous terrain.

The general panorama is of spectacular Scottish scenic beauty.

An issue is, should recording what are relatively rare, usually very short lived and localised phenomena be included in the long term historic record? And even should they be really noted at all in the way the Met Office highlights them? Including such slightly “freak” events seriously risks distorting comparison over time. The issue of breaching thresholds (as highlighted regarding Wiggonholt ) currently seems to be an imperative at the Met Office with regular historic comparisons of “apples with oranges”. In the case of Achfary, its two recent monthly records (set over the last 16 years of operation) cannot possibly be compared with the same period of the early 20th century as it simply was not there to record any of the transient events that would most certainly have occurred.

There is obviously nothing wrong with recording exceptional localised weather events. Despite the likely siting inaccuracy of “normal” temperature recording this Class 5 site has, it almost certainly has accurately recorded the Foehn winds temperature. What actual relevance these effects should be given in the historic temperature record is very much a debatable point.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop

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September 23, 2024 at 08:17AM