Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 5 Jun 2017

Sea Levels Are Stable To Falling At About Half Of The World’s Tide Gauges

via NoTricksZone
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Is Sea Level Rise ‘Global’ If Roughly 50% Of

**Gauges Show Stable To Falling Sea Levels?**

Image from Mörner, 2017

A few years ago, a comprehensive analysis of selection bias in tide gauge measurements between 1807-2010 indicated that (a) sea levels are only rising at a rate of about 1 mm/yr (as of 2010), and (b) a total of 65% of the world’s tide gauges have recorded stable to falling sea levels.

Beenstock et al., 2014

“Tide gauges dating back to the 19th century were located where sea levels happened to be rising. Data reconstructions based on these tide gauges are therefore likely to over-estimate sea level rise.”

“We therefore study individual tide gauge data on sea levels from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level (PSMSL) during 1807 – 2010 without recourse to data reconstruction. Although mean sea levels are rising by 1mm/year, sea level rise is local rather than global, and is concentrated in the Baltic and Adriatic seas, South East Asia and the Atlantic coast of the United States. In these locations, covering 35 percent of tide gauges, sea levels rose on average by 3.8mm/year. Sea levels were stable in locations covered by 61 percent of tide gauges, and sea levels fell in locations covered by 4 percent of tide gauges. In these locations sea levels fell on average by almost 6mm/year.”

Out of a database of over 2,100 tide gauge measurements available from the Permanent Service for Mean Sea Level, NOAA has selected 240 tide gauges for their analysis of global-scale sea level rise. Of these, there are about 15 gauges that did not extend far enough into the last few decades (for example, Latvia, Antarctica, Ghana, Colombia), precluding a recent trend analysis.

Of the remaining 225 tide gauges in the NOAA database, there are at least 100 located in regions where sea levels are stable (no significant change in either direction) or falling. A graphical illustration of these non-trend tide gauge measurements is provided below.

With 45% to 65% of tide gauge measurements from across the globe indicating that there has been no significant sea level trend in the last 30 to 50 years (at least), why is it considered accurate to claim that sea level rise is occurring globally, rather than in some localities?

The tide gauge sites where sea levels have been stable to falling include such locations as: Canada, Alaska, Argentina, Australia, Russia, Greece, Sweden, Pacific Ocean, Denmark, California/Oregon/Washington (US), Croatia, Costa Rica, Norway, Chile, India, UK, Ireland, Spain, Philippines, South Korea, Singapore, Vietnam, and Thailand.

via NoTricksZone http://notrickszone.com

June 4, 2017 at 10:07PM

Uncategorized 5 Jun 2017

Madness: Energy Bills Rise €30 To Pay For EU Green Energy Targets

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

Electricity bills [in Ireland] are set to rise by more than €30 a year from October to pay for meeting EU targets on renewable energy.

The Commission for Energy Regulation confirmed that it had approved a €104 million increase in the public service obligation (PSO) levy to €496.5 million. This will mean that domestic customers will pay an extra €32.28 each year after VAT. The revenue is passed on to energy suppliers.

The PSO levy of €112.64 is included in bills to pay for switching to sustainable and renewable energy sources, which are more expensive that fossil fuels. To meet EU targets and avoid large fines, 40 per cent of the country’s electricity must come from renewable sources by 2020. About 25 per cent of Ireland’s electricity was generated from renewable sources last year.

Dermott Jewell, a policy advisor for the Consumers’ Association of Ireland, said that the increase would not win customers over to renewable energy. “It only serves to alienate them from a move towards more renewable energy sources,” Mr Jewell said.

Full story

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

June 4, 2017 at 09:45PM

Uncategorized 5 Jun 2017

Scrap The Act

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By Paul Homewood

President Trump’s decision to exit the Paris Agreement has brought to a head the arguments surrounding Britain’s Climate Change Act.

The UK is the only country in the world to commit itself by law to large cuts in emissions of GHGs. The Climate Change Act calls for a cut in emissions of 80% from 1990 levels by 2050.

According to government statistics, between 1990 and 2015 UK GHG emissions fell by 38%, from 797 to 497 MtCO2e. Therefore, to meet the 2050 target, emissions would have to fall to 159 MtCO2e, a cut of 68% from current levels.

One of the explicit aims of the Act was to demonstrate strong UK leadership internationally, in order to encourage other countries to follow our lead.

Patently, this has failed.

The Act should therefore be abolished for the following reasons.

COST

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Official projections from the OBR show that by 2021/22 the cost of environmental levies and RHI will amount to £14.7bn a year. This equates to about £540 per household.

Unfortunately, part of this cost is already committed for Renewable Obligations and CfDs on existing projects. Efforts need to be made now to mitigate these costs.

In the meantime, an immediate stop needs to be put to all subsidies for new projects.

It is extremely likely that these cost of subsidies will continue to mount after 2020. Some estimates put the total cost at £319bn between now and 2030.

This is quite simply unaffordable.

Post 2030

Most official calculations and plans only take us to 2030. Thereafter, decarbonisation will become progressively more difficult and expensive, as the low hanging fruit will already have been picked.

For instance, a large part of the emissions savings so far made since 1990 have been due to:

Loss of manufacturing base in the 1990s and 2000s, particularly following the financial crash
The substitution of natural gas for coal in power generation.

Decarbonisation after 2030 will involve much more radical changes.

We have no way of knowing what technologies will be around in twenty years time, and it would be dangerous to commit the UK to further decarbonisation until we do know.

We are already committed to high cost low carbon technologies such as offshore wind and Hinkley Point. It would have been much more prudent to wait until either these technologies, or alternative ones provided much lower costs of generation.

Industrial Competitiveness

http://ift.tt/2nC2MQU

By the end of 2015, the UK had the second highest price of electricity for industrial consumers in the EU. Only Italy had higher costs.

Worse still, the UK had the highest price of all, excluding tax.

As we know, the price of electricity will continue to rapidly rise as a direct result of government climate policy.

Bear in mind as well that EU electricity prices are already high by world standards.

Unless the Climate Change Act is repealed, UK industry will be permanently damaged.

EU Commitments

The EU Nationally Determined Contribution under the Paris Agreement specifically refers to:

a binding target of at least 40% domestic reduction in GHGs by 2030 compared to 1990 to be fulfilled jointly

http://ift.tt/1BkMM6i

Yet, under the auspices of the Climate Change Act, the Fifth Carbon Budget now commits the UK to a cut of 57% for the period 2028-32.

There is no justification for the UK having to make much larger reductions than other EU countries.

Regardless of Brexit or our pledges to the Paris Agreement, both the Fourth and Fifth Carbon Budgets should be withdrawn immediately.

The Paris Agreement

As already stated, one of the objects of the Act was to demonstrate global leadership. In other words, by setting an example, the rest of the world would follow suit.

Despite much hype, the simple reality is that the Paris Agreement did nothing to reduce global emissions. According to their own data, as a result of all of the NDCs submitted, GHGs will rise to 55 GtCO2e in 2030, from 49 GtCO2e in 2010.

Whilst developed countries have promised reductions, most of the rest of the world has pointedly refused to. Instead they have only made vague promises such as reducing carbon intensity or installing more renewable energy capacity.

In particular, China and India, the biggest and third biggest emitters of GHGs, have submitted NDCs which are likely to see large increases in emissions by 2030.

Under the terms of the Paris Agreement, developing countries are under no obligation to reduce emissions:

http://ift.tt/1pjKpM7

Both China and South Korea are classified as “developing”, something which dates back to the formation of the UNFCCC in 1992.

Given both countries’ economic development since, this is clearly not justifiable today. It is also true that CO2 emissions per capita are now actually higher in China than in the UK.

Not only has Paris failed to reduce emissions, it has produced a lopsided and unfair balance of responsibilities.

Yet under the Climate Change Act, the UK is committing to go much further and faster than most other countries.

Trump

The decision to take the US out of the Paris Agreement should be the final nail in the coffin of the UK Climate Change Act.

It was introduced in the hope that other countries would quickly follow our lead, something that plainly has not happened.

Our policy should now be to decarbonise only at the rate that our competitors do, including China, the USA, and the EU.

If the Climate Change Act is not soon repealed, the effect on the UK economy will be extremely damaging.

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June 4, 2017 at 07:54PM

Uncategorized 5 Jun 2017

The madness of the #ParisAgreement on climate

via Watts Up With That?
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Guest essay by Iain Aitken

The December 2015 COP21 Climate Conference in Paris, in which 40,000 delegates from 196 countries flew in (and imagine the carbon dioxide emissions all that travel created) and finally agreed an ‘historic’ document that legally committed nobody to any carbon dioxide emission reductions, simply repeated the failure of the Lima conference of the previous year and Copenhagen before that. These conferences are wasteful and pointless charades, being cynically designed to give the public the impression that the politicians are actually serious about ‘saving the planet’. The Paris deal, in particular, allowed nations to set their own voluntary carbon dioxide targets and policies without any legally binding caps or international oversight.

To achieve the goal agreed in Paris of a maximum 2⁰C increase in global temperatures above pre-industrial levels has been estimated to have a global cost of $17 trillion by 2040 (about 800 times more than was spent on all the Apollo missions to the moon) – and it would require carbon dioxide reductions about 100 times greater than those pledged in Paris. Pledges are cheap (if not worthless). For example, take China, the world’s biggest emitter of carbon dioxide. China’s pledge was to reduce its carbon dioxide emissions by 60-65% of 2005 levels by 2030. Yet its stated plan is to build 363 coal-fired power stations between now and 2030 which has been estimated to double its carbon dioxide emissions. It has also announced that it will build no further wind turbines owing to their excessive infrastructure costs and their destabilising effect on the grid. How can we reconcile the pledge with the plans? India, the world’s third-equal largest emitter, plans to treble its emissions. So long as they are not required to make any legally binding (and overseen) decarbonisation commitments the pledges do the developing countries no harm – and may even do much ‘good’ (in the sense of serving self-interests), if the developed nations do indeed decarbonise (so making them less globally competitive owing to their higher energy costs) and hand over hundreds of billions of dollars to help the developing nations move more rapidly to renewable energy. Whether the politicians of the developing nations believe a word of the IPCC reports is irrelevant – it appears to make very good political and business sense to pretend you do. When Donald Trump described climate change as a ‘Chinese hoax’ this is presumably what he had in mind.

To gain an empirical insight into the likely behavior of nations that ratify the Paris Climate Accord we need look no further than the very similar (but actually ‘legally binding’) ‘Kyoto Protocol’ emissions-reduction treaty from COP3 of 1997. The Kyoto Protocol was also hailed as ‘historic’. Some countries (like Canada) that ratified it subsequently withdrew as the economic pain became apparent. Countries adopting costly decarbonisation policies under Kyoto’s first commitment period seriously damaged their economies and yet actually increased emissions at a rate faster than the U.S.A. (who did not ratify Kyoto). By 2012 17 of the 36 countries left who were bound by the Protocol had failed to meet their targets (the big emitters generally having the worst record). Had everyone actually achieved their targets the end result by 2050 would anyway have only been a 0.05⁰C reduction in temperature. As Chairman Inhofe of the US Environmental Works Programme said in 2006, ‘The Kyoto Protocol is a lot of economic pain for no climate gain.’ All Kyoto appeared to achieve was constrained economic growth in the developed nations that ratified it while allowing unconstrained growth in developing nations like China and India. Similarly even if all 196 nations actually delivered on their Paris pledges by 2030 it would once again result in only about a 0.05⁰C temperature reduction (0.17⁰C if the pledges were sustained to the end of the century).

Basically, at the very best the Paris Climate Accord is just symbolic – but a very, very expensive symbol. It is not even legally binding and, just like the Kyoto Protocol, effectively allows China and India to continue with ‘business as usual’ emissions up to 2030; indeed the agreement explicitly states (in Article 4(7)) that ‘economic and social development and poverty eradication are the first and overriding priorities of the developing country Parties’ – which gives carte blanche to developing nations like China and India to increase their carbon dioxide emissions as much as they like. On this basis it is reasonable to suppose that the Paris Climate Accord is unlikely to be any more successful than the Kyoto Protocol. The Paris Accord was a great success from a public relations point of view – but an unmitigated failure from a climate change point of view. As Walter Russell Mead presciently saw it (since he was writing before the Paris conference), ‘It is, in its way, a perfect solution. It is a legally binding agreement to disagree about carbon. Each country is legally bound to do exactly what it wants… To produce a failure but to call it a success is one of the oldest political tricks in the book.’

So long as much cheaper fossil fuel energy is available in the developing nations they are likely to avail themselves of it in order to improve standards of living and help alleviate as fast as possible the plight of millions of starving and poverty-stricken citizens. Indeed some developing nations are reducing the proportion of renewable energy in their power mix in order to respond to the demand for cheaper energy. There are few better and faster ways to alleviate poverty and disease than cheap energy – but global decarbonisation may defer that for decades. Decarbonisation is not a victimless ‘crime’. To paraphrase Ronald Reagan (who was talking about government), it may be the case that decarbonisation is not the solution to our problem; decarbonisation is the problem. Since nearly 1.3 billion of the world’s poor do not even have electricity (many dying prematurely as a result of smoke inhalation through burning dung in their huts), what right do we, in the developed nations, have to deny them the chance to acquire it?

The politicians of the developed nations who have signed up to the Accord are falling over themselves to be seen to take the lead in ‘saving the world’, irrespective of the fact that it almost certainly does not need saving and, even if it did, the reductions in carbon dioxide emissions being committed to are, in practice, unachievable (because even if they were theoretically achievable the electorates of the democracies would not tolerate the economic pain and environmental damage that this would entail). We can be very confident that there will be no material climate gain from the Paris Climate Accord, certainly in the near future (because that would require China and India to actually start to honour their pledges in the short term, which appears to be a fantasy) – but very material economic pain for the developed nations who seriously pursue decarbonisation policies.

The alarmists’ response to all of the above is of course that if the developed nations do not pursue decarbonisation policies then it legitimises the developing nations doing the same – so the developed nations must take the ‘moral lead’. But that only makes any sense if the developing nations actually follow that lead (instead of profiting from the reduced global competitiveness of the ‘moral lead’ nations) – and it is very clear that they have no intention whatsoever of following that lead.

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

June 4, 2017 at 07:46PM