State-run Coal India Ltd, saddled with millions of tonnes of unsold coal, is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of a controversial government decision to more than halve the local sales tax on the fuel after a jump in local supplies.
The world’s third-largest greenhouse gas emitting country said last Friday it would lower the duty on domestic coal from July 1 and impose a new 18 percent tax on solar cells and modules as part of a broader tax overhaul.
The moves are seen as helping boost sales of the fossil fuel mined locally and used mainly in thermal power plants. But imports of high-quality coal which are scarce in India and used in the steel making process by companies such as JSW Steel and Tata Steel will become expensive following changes to the duty structure.
The duty revamp under the national India’s Goods and Services Tax (GST) could also hurt the young and booming solar power industry, which relies heavily on cells and modules imported from China.
Output by Coal India, the world’s largest coal miner that mainly produces low-grade coal for power companies, has expanded rapidly as the government speeds up environmental and other approvals as part of its efforts to provide electricity across the country. However, highly indebted power companies struggled to match the same growth rates.
US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) chief Scott Pruitt
As Dr Roy Spencer points out: ‘You can’t build a case for human-caused warming by relying on natural warming! (But, they did anyway.)’
A new paper in Nature: Scientific Reports by Santer et al entitled Tropospheric Warming Over the Past Two Decades begins with this:
After a recent Senate confirmation hearing, Scott Pruitt the new Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency received a written question regarding observed warming estimates. In response, Mr. Pruitt claimed that over the past two decades satellite data indicates there has been a leveling off of warming. We test this claim here.
Now, exactly how does one scientifically test a claim of “leveling off of warming”?
First, the claim would have to have some unambiguous meaning which can be evaluated quantitatively. Does it mean that warming has decelerated in the last two decades, and is approaching zero? That would be my first interpretation of “leveling off”.
And by “two decades” did Pruitt mean exactly 20 years?
The wording is ambiguous. But the authors decided Pruitt meant “there has been zero warming” for exactly 20 years. They proceeded to evaluate this interpretation with a statistical analysis of the various satellite temperature datasets, as well as with climate models.
The result is a peer-reviewed study which took less than one month to sail through peer review.
Wow. If I only knew earlier that I could get peer-reviewed scientific papers by evaluating the silly climate claims made by politicians (Al Gore, Barack Obama, et al.) over the years.
Please, will someone show this graph to President Trump.
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Now the coldest millennium in 8,000 years
The reversion to a true ice age is almost overdue
By Ed Hoskins
The last millennium, 1000AD – 2000AD, has been the coldest millennium of the entire current Holocene interglacial.
Graph by Ed Hoskins
Each of the notable high points in the Holocene temperature record, (Holocene Climate Optimum – Minoan – Roman – Medieval – Modern), have been progressively colder than the previous high point.
For its first 7-8000 years the early Holocene, including its high point known as the “climate optimum”, temperatures have been virtually flat, with an average drop of only ~0.007 °C per millennium.
But the more recent Holocene since a “tipping point” at around 1000BC, 3000 years ago has seen temperature fall at about 20 times that earlier rate at about 0.14 °C per millennium .
The Holocene interglacial is already 10 – 11,000 years old and judging from the length of previous interglacial periods, the Holocene epoch should be drawing to its close: in this century, the next century or this millennium.
But the slight beneficial warming at the end of the 20th century to the Modern high point has been transmuted into the “Great Man-made Global Warming Scare”.
The recent warming since the end of the Little Ice Age has been wholly beneficial when compared to the devastating impacts arising from the relatively minor cooling of the Little Ice Age, which include:
• Decolonisation of Greenland
• Black death
• French revolution
• Failures of the Inca and Angkor Wat civilisations
• etc., etc.
As global temperatures have already been showing stagnation or cooling over the last nineteen years or more, the world should now fear the real and detrimental effects of cooling, rather than being hysterical about limited, beneficial or probably now non-existent further warming.
Warmer times are times of success and prosperity both for man-kind and the biosphere.
One should think of the Holocene interglacial epoch as a whole with its progressively cooler and cooler warm episodes:
• the Holocene Climate Optimum
• the Minoan warming
• the Roman warming
• the Medieval warm period
• recent modern warming, 1975 – 2000.
For example during the Roman warm period the climate was warmer and wetter so that the Northern Sahara was the breadbasket of the Roman empire .
According to the Ice Core records, each of these successive Holocene warm periods have been cooler than the one previously and a tipping point towards accelerated global cooling occurred at about 1000BC.
The coming end of the present Holocene interglacial will in due course again result in a mile high ice sheet over much of the Northern hemisphere. As the Holocene epoch is already about 11,000 years old, the reversion to a true ice age is almost overdue and would be the real climate catastrophe.
With the present reducing Solar activity, significantly reduced temperatures, at least to the level of another Little Ice Age are predicted for later this century .
Whether the present impending cooling will really lead on to a coming glacial ice age or not is still in question.
