Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 2 Jul 2017

Can’t slip old solar panels into the compost heap. A toxic cadmium, lead headache coming?

So having some solar waste panels lying around is not exactly like having a second-hand nuclear fuel rod in the basement, but there will be Gigatons-to-Go, the volume is spectacular, and we can’t eat cadmium for breakfast. There will literally be a mountain of toxic garbage — and only Europe, apparently, has a rule about solar manufacturers having to collect and figure out what to do with the solar waste. (And with a 25 year lifespan, how much, exactly, is even that worth? Just say “Solyndra“.)

A new study from a group called Environmental Progress shows that solar panels make 300 times more toxic waste per megajoule as nukes do. All estimates like these are based on assumptions and guesses, so perhaps it’s not that bad. The study might be exaggerated, and maybe solar panels are only 100 times worse than nukes eh? Where’s the Green outcry.

…

Study: Solar panels a looming toxic ‘crisis’

Discarded solar panels, piling up around the world, are detrimental to the environment, according to a new study by Environmental Progress.

And carcinogenic.

And teratogenic.

While environmentalist have warned for decades of the hazard of nuclear power, […]

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July 2, 2017 at 01:05PM

Uncategorized 2 Jul 2017

Ted Nordhaus: “Demons Under Every Rock The Ever-Expanding Definition of Climate Denial”

via Watts Up With That?
http://ift.tt/1Viafi3

May 04, 2017 | Ted Nordhaus

[…]

This disturbing and memorable story has kept coming back to me the last few years, as a cadre of climate activists, ideologically motivated scholars, and sympathetic journalists have started labeling an ever-expanding circle of people they disagree with climate deniers.

Climate change, of course, is real and demons are not. But in the expanding use of the term “denier,” the view of the climate debate as a battle between pure good and pure evil, and the social dimensions of the narrative that has been constructed, some quarters of the climate movement have begun to seem similarly unhinged.

Not so long ago, the term denier was reserved for right-wing ideologues, many of them funded by fossil fuel companies, who claimed that global warming either wasn’t happening at all or wasn’t caused by humans. Then it was expanded to so-called “lukewarmists,” scientists and other analysts who believe that global warming is happening and is caused by humans, but either don’t believe it will prove terribly severe or believe that human societies will prove capable of adapting without catastrophic impacts.

As frustration grew after the failure of legislative efforts to cap US emissions in 2010, demons kept appearing wherever climate activists looked for them. In 2015, Bill McKibben argued in the New York Times that anyone who didn’t oppose the construction of the Keystone pipeline, without regard to any particular stated view about climate change, was a denier.

Then in December 2015, Harvard historian and climate activist Naomi Oreskesexpanded the definition further. “There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late,” Oreskes wrote in the Guardian, “one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs. Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power.”

Oreskes took care not to mention the scientists in question, for that would have been awkward. They included Dr. James Hansen, who gave the first congressional testimony about the risks that climate change presented the world, and has been a leading voice for strong, immediate, and decisive global action to address climate change for almost three decades. The others—Kerry Emanuel, Ken Caldeira, and Tom Wigley—are all highly decorated climate scientists with long and well-established histories of advocating for climate action. The four of them had travelled to the COP21 meeting in Paris that December to urge the negotiators and NGOs at the meeting to embrace nuclear energy as a technology that would be necessary to achieve deep reductions in global emissions.

So it was only a matter of time before my colleagues and I at the Breakthrough Institute would be tarred with the same brush. In a new article in the New Republic, reporter Emily Atkin insists that we are “lukewarmists.” She accuses us of engaging in a sleight of hand “where climate projections are lowballed; climate change impacts, damages, and costs are underestimated” and claims that we, like other deniers, argue “that climate change is real but not urgent, and therefore it’s useless to do anything to stop it.”

[…]

The Breakthrough Instiute

Mr. Nordhaus,
As a luke warmer geologist and frequent contributor to Watts Up With That, who thinks that humans are only responsible for 20-40% of recent warming, that the climate sensitivity (TCR) is less than 1.5 C, that there is almost no chance of catastrophic climate change (short of the end of this interglacial stage) and that N2N (natural gas to nuclear) is the only viable pathway to low carbon-emission energy, I say…

Welcome to the “club”!

Maybe we need a betting pool for which activist is the last to be labeled a “denier.”

Happy Independence Day! … a couple of days early.

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July 2, 2017 at 12:53PM

Uncategorized 2 Jul 2017

Forget Paris: 1600 New Coal Power Plants Built Around The World

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

1,600 new coal-fired power plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries.

Image result for global coal plants in planning

When China halted plans for more than 100 new coal-fired power plants this year, even as President Trump vowed to “bring back coal” in America, the contrast seemed to confirm Beijing’s new role as a leader in the fight against climate change.

But new data on the world’s biggest developers of coal-fired power plants paints a very different picture: China’s energy companies will make up nearly half of the new coal generation expected to go online in the next decade.

These Chinese corporations are building or planning to build more than 700 new coal plants at home and around the world, some in countries that today burn little or no coal, according to tallies compiled by Urgewald, an environmental group based in Berlin. Many of the plants are in China, but by capacity, roughly a fifth of these new coal power stations are in other countries.

Over all, 1,600 coal plants are planned or under construction in 62 countries, according to Urgewald’s tally, which uses data from the Global Coal Plant Tracker portal. The new plants would expand the world’s coal-fired power capacity by 43 percent.

The fleet of new coal plants would make it virtually impossible to meet the goals set in the Paris climate accord, which aims to keep the increase in global temperatures from preindustrial levels below 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit.

Electricity generated from fossil fuels like coal is the biggest single contributor globally to the rise in carbon emissions, which scientists agree is causing the Earth’s temperatures to rise.

“Even today, new countries are being brought into the cycle of coal dependency,” said Heffa Schücking, the director of Urgewald.

The United States may also be back in the game. On Thursday, Mr. Trump said he wanted to lift Obama-era restrictions on American financing for overseas coal projects as part of an energy policy focused on exports.

“We have nearly 100 years’ worth of natural gas and more than 250 years’ worth of clean, beautiful coal,” he said. “We will be dominant. We will export American energy all over the world, all around the globe.”

Full story

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

July 2, 2017 at 12:07PM

Uncategorized 2 Jul 2017

Meteorologist Joe Bastardi: Claims CO2 “Control Knob” Seem “Beyond Folly”…”Almost A Religious Fanaticism”

via NoTricksZone
http://notrickszone.com

Veteran meteorologist Joe Bastardi at Weatherbell gave permission to publish the following, which he writes had appeared behind a paywall at Weatherbell Analytics. Part of what Joe writes was brought up at his Saturday Summary video.

(Correction: Red curve in first figure is 2011/12 year, and not 2016 as Joe originally wrote).
=========================================

Greenland is a Canary in a Coal Mine

By Joe Bastardi, Weatherbell Analytics
(Editing by P. Gosselin)

Nowhere on the planet is there a better example than Greenland of how nature, and not man, is master of the planet’s fate. It demonstrates the process by which there is a natural cap to warming.

How so? Well, first of all let’s look at what’s an amazing 5-year recovery in Greenland snow and ice:

The pinkish line is how far above average we are, the extra yellow tacked on means pink and yellow is the increase since 2012.

I want you to look at that. Suppose it had gone the other way, and instead had DROPPED to 2012 levels from where it is now. Just what do you think would be reported today in the climate media?

Now this is all in the midst of what is the warmest 2-year stretch of temperatures in the satellite era. Let’s not kid around or make excuses; it is by UAH:

It is by the NCEP initialization criteria, which has been doing well in tracking the ups and downs:

This makes some sense because Greenland is a very cold place, even when it’s warmer, and so with more water vapor available from the warmed oceans, it snows more where it’s cold enough to snow. That is simple intuition and proven fact, and I didn’t need any big grant money to come up with that. So increases of water vapor in very cold places produce more snow, and CO2 is not causing more or less snow.

The idea that CO2 can suddenly warm the planet and create these situations is nonsense. At the very most, and this is a stretch, stored CO2 in the lower levels does have some warming effect by influencing the air around it, but quantifying it against the large scale drivers is by no means settled science.

Greenland colder this year

The oceans today are not a product of the increase of 1 molecule of CO2 out of every 10,000 of air over 100 years, but instead large scale events that can be centuries in the making. So someone can claim that warming leads to more snow (by the way that was taught in my climate classes in the 70s), which in turn leads to cooling since more snow makes winters last longer in areas where sun angles are low. Nature’s version of Le Chateliers, or the old adage: for every action, there is a reaction!

Predictably, Greenland in 2017…

…is cooler than it was in 2016:

But the history of Greenland shows that the current warming does not match other warm periods shown by the ice core sampling:

Above is another proxy for global temps, and it is showing a current “hockey stick” look, which certainly backs that idea. The problem is that in the cherry-pick world of climate hysteria, scientists ignore the rest of the periods, thinking that somehow it’s valid global proxy when it agrees with them, and not when it doesn’t. But whether tree rings in Mongolia or wherever, or ice cores in Greenland, the earth shows a wide and varied, always acting and reacting climate system that is independent of whatever minute influences man might offer.

Harsh winter threatening Europe?

To say there is no influence at all to me is folly, anything and everything contributes to the system, but the question lies in its weight. To say CO2 is the climate control knob in the face of what we know and see, seems beyond folly, almost a religious fanaticism. Greenland is indeed a canary in the coal mine as I have heard it put when snow and ice was melting. Problem is that it’s like nature: it’s a canary that changes its tune. Anyone listening?

Tell you what. If there’s blocking over Greenland this winter and I am in Europe, I’d really look out.

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July 2, 2017 at 10:59AM