Toronto headed for one of the most prolonged cold periods in history – Video

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The Weather Network calls it “most significant cold snap in decades.”

“One of the most prolonged cold periods in history,” and they call it a “cold snap”?

Looks to me like an attempt to downplay the historic nature of the cold.

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“The record for the most single-digit days in a row in May is five, and that was back in May of 1974,” says The Weather Network meteorologist Tyler Hamilton. “Currently, we’re forecast to get five days of single digits, making it one of the most prolonged cold periods in history.”

Hamilton calls for possible snow this weekend all the way into Toronto. Some areas farther west could get enough snow that “you may need to shovel.”

Temperatures 10 degrees below seasonal will make it feel more like March.

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Thanks to Glenn Cuthbert for this link

The post Toronto headed for one of the most prolonged cold periods in history – Video appeared first on Ice Age Now.

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May 5, 2017 at 06:59AM

Tesla’s SolarCity’s Installations Crash Nearly 40%

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By Paul Homewood

From Business Insider UK:

– Tesla’s SolarCity reported a drop of nearly 40 percent in solar installations for the first quarter on Wednesday, the latest sign of a reversal in fortunes for the once high-flying residential solar industry.

In an earnings report this week, Tesla said it deployed 150 megawatts of solar generation in the first quarter of 2017 compared to 245 MW in the first quarter of last year.

The company, which announced last week it was curatiling door-to-door sales, said it had prioritized higher-margin projects that generate cash up front rather than trying to sell as many installations as possible. But the dramatic drop in sales for a company that had consistently delivered double-digit growth puts it in line with a broad trend affecting the rooftop-solar industry.

Across the sector, installers report more difficulty finding customers. Subsidies have dwindled or been eliminated in some states, and many of the easiest consumers to sell to – environmentally conscious homeowners with disposable income – have already purchased rooftop systems.

"The trendsetters are kind of gone," Tammy Goad, vice president of corporate development for California-based Valley Energy said at a solar industry conference in San Diego on Tuesday.

Stiff competition in the industry has pushed some companies out of the market, or forced them to scale back. One of the nation’s biggest rooftop solar companies, Sungevity, filed for bankruptcy earlier this year.

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May 5, 2017 at 06:39AM

One coal worker or 79 solar ones, same electricity

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Solar – creating 79 pointless jobs

The New York Times tells us that Today’s Energy Jobs Are in Solar, Not Coal. But watch the pea –  these jobs are “energy jobs”, not jobs that use energy.

Apparently it takes 79 people to create the same energy through solar as one person does through coal. (And that would be cheaper, how? )

Washington Examiner.

To start, despite a huge workforce of almost 400,000 solar workers (about 20 percent of electric power payrolls in 2016), that sector produced an insignificant share, less than 1 percent, of the electric power generated in the United States last year (EIA data here). And that’s a lot of solar workers: about the same as the combined number of employees working at Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Apple, Johnson & Johnson, Microsoft, Pfizer, Ford Motor Company and Procter & Gamble.

In contrast, it took about the same number of natural gas workers (398,235) last year to produce more than one-third of U.S. electric power, or 37 times more electricity than solar’s minuscule share of 0.90 percent.

…to produce the same amount of electric power as just one coal worker would require […]

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May 5, 2017 at 06:01AM

The New Pause: Europe’s Trend Of CO2 Reductions Seems To Have Stopped

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The EU’s statistical agency Eurostat announced Thursday (4 May) that CO2 emissions resulting from the EU’s energy use have “slightly decreased” in 2016, compared to the year before. But Eurostat’s press release did not mention that the small decrease has not made up for the small increase in CO2 emissions the year before and that […]

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May 5, 2017 at 04:01AM