Tim Channon

via Tallbloke’s Talkshophttps://tallbloke.wordpress.com

With sadness, I’m sharing the news that my Talkshop co-blogger Tim Channon passed away on Friday. Tim had been bravely battling with cancer for some time, and was still upbeat and lively-minded when I spoke with him last week. Since then unfortunately, medical complications set in.

Tim was one of a kind. A humorous, thoughtful and technically brilliant individual. His contribution to our understanding of cyclic phenomena through the analysis software he wrote propelled me into my own research. His patient recording of weather data and survey of UK weather stations demonstrate the depth of interest and passion he had for bringing facts to bear on the climate debate. His dedication, skill and good natured rebukes against uninformed speculation and bad theory puts him in the Pantheon of great sceptical thinkers and scientists.

Tim will be missed and remembered.

_____________________________________

If anyone wants to attend the funeral or send flowers, let me know and I’ll ask Tim’s wife how she wishes to proceed.

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop http://ift.tt/1WIzElD

March 12, 2017 at 06:21AM

Elon’s Fix!

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAThttps://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com

By Paul Homewood

h/t Patsy Lacey

http://ift.tt/2mfZWez

Ever the showman, Elon Musk has promised to fix South Australia’s power problems!

From Yahoo:

Elon Musk is not shy of a challenge. The billionaire entrepreneur behind Tesla has promised that he can install enough battery capacity in South Australia’s power grid to fix the state’s energy capacity problems within 100 days, and if he fails, will do the whole thing for free.

Musk made the promise after Tesla’s vice president for energy products Lyndon Rive told the Australian Financial Review that a battery storage grid that can store between 100 and 300 megawatt hours of energy, enough to provide the extra capacity needed to prevent blackouts in the region, could be installed 100 days after a contract was signed.

The boast about extra capacity comes after increased battery production at Tesla’s gigafactory in Nevada, but Musk showed he wasn’t kidding by saying that if he didn’t deliver, he’d do the whole thing for free. When Mike Cannon-Brookes, the billionaire founder of tech company Atlassian, asked if Rive was serious, Musk replied on Twitter with the promise.

http://ift.tt/2mfZWez

So what is this miracle Mr Musk has offered? In fact, there is no guarantee he will solve the problems at all. All he has promised is to install the batteries within 100 days.

Mike Cannon-Brookes @mcannonbrookes

Lyndon & @elonmusk – how serious are you about this bet? If I can make the $ happen (& politics), can you guarantee the 100MW in 100 days? https://twitter.com/mcannonbrookes/status/839762369332985856 …

Follow

Elon Musk

✔ @elonmusk

@mcannonbrookes Tesla will get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free. That serious enough for you?

2:50 AM – 10 Mar 2017

And the cost?

Musk may well have to come through on his offer. Cannon-Brookes said he would take a week to try and raise the funds and political support for the project. At an estimate cost of some A$200 million (£125m), its an expensive bet for Musk to take.

In other words, £125m for 100 MWh of storage.

Let’s put these numbers into some sort of perspective.

Wind power provided 13 TWh in the UK during Q1 last year. This equates to 142,857 MWh.

So for £125m, we could have enough battery storage to replace this wind power for a whole minute, should the wind stop.

Bargain!

via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT http://ift.tt/16C5B6P

March 12, 2017 at 05:54AM

Discovery of tiny moon completes the set for worlds past Neptune 

via Tallbloke’s Talkshophttps://tallbloke.wordpress.com

The largest ‘TNOs’

This is about the ‘no-name’ dwarf planet 2007 OR10, which has the unusual property of being 3 times further from the Sun at aphelion (furthest) than at perihelion (nearest).

Everybody gets a moon! With the discovery of a small moon orbiting the third-largest dwarf planet, all the large objects that orbit beyond Neptune now have satellites, reports New Scientist.

Trans-Neptunian objects (TNOs) spend most or all of their orbits beyond Neptune. Last April, the dwarf planet Makemake became the ninth of the ten TNOs with diameters near or above 1,000 kilometres known to have a moon.

So when dwarf planet 2007 OR10 was found to be rotating more slowly than expected, it was suspected that a moon might be the culprit.

To try to find it, John Stansberry at the Space Telescope Science Institute in Baltimore, Maryland, and his colleagues went back to the Hubble Space Telescope archives and found eight images of the world from 2009 and 2010.

“We basically just stretched the images a lot harder than the people who originally took the data, and there was a moon,” says Stansberry. The moon was in every image. The team presented these results at a planetary sciences meeting in October and now in a paper.

The discovery of moons around all the largest TNOs gives us a window, not just into the objects themselves, but also into our solar system’s history. TNOs are relics from the era of planet building, so they present an opportunity to peer into the past.

Full report: Discovery of tiny moon completes the set for worlds past Neptune | New Scientist

via Tallbloke’s Talkshop http://ift.tt/1WIzElD

March 12, 2017 at 05:51AM

Massive Oil Discovery In Alaska: U.S. Poised For Record Oil Production

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF)http://www.thegwpf.com

The massive find of conventional oil on state land could bring relief to budget pains in Alaska brought on by slumping production in the state and the crash in oil prices.

The new discovery was made in just the past few days in Alaska’s North Slope, which was previously viewed as an aging oil basin.

Spanish oil giant Repsol (REPYY) and its privately-held U.S. partner Armstrong Energy announced the find on Thursday, predicting production could begin as soon as 2021 and lead to as much as 120,000 barrels of output per day.

The oil resources lie in a well, called Horseshoe, that’s 75% owned by Denver-based Armstrong. Repsol owns the rest of this well.

There are increasing signs that shale oil producers are preparing to ramp up output after surviving a two-year price war with OPEC.

America is likely to set a record-breaking 2018, taking out the all-time oil production high set in 1970, according to new forecasts published this week by the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

OPEC’s price war did spark a wave of bankruptcies, painful job cuts and a dip in U.S. oil production as crude plummeted to as low as $26 a barrel. Domestic output peaked at an impressive 9.6 million barrels per day in April 2015.
But the oil boom didn’t collapse completely. U.S. oil output fell only a little, bottoming out at 8.7 million barrels in July 2016 and has since stabilized.

All eyes are on the frenzy of shale activity in the Permian region. Frackers have scrambled to add rigs in the Permian. The rig count has nearly tripled from a low of 132 last April to 308 now.

The EIA also cited changes to its forecasting model that better account for how U.S. rigs have become vastly more efficient.

Those efficiency gains have been critical. Lower prices, better technology and improved balance sheets have allowed U.S. shale companies to do more with less.

Full post

via The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) http://www.thegwpf.com

March 12, 2017 at 05:24AM