Category: Uncategorized

Uncategorized 16 Apr 2017

On March 1st Arizona State University reported on Antarctica’s record high temperature. Surprisingly the record was set not this year, or even this decade, rather it was set in the year 1982:

World Meteorological Organization verifies highest temperatures for Antarctic region
ASU climate expert, WMO rapporteur talks about importance of such verification

The World Meteorological Organization announced Wednesday new verified, record high temperatures in Antarctica, an area once described as “the last place on Earth.” The temperatures range from the high 60s (in Fahrenheit) to the high teens, depending on the location they were recorded in Antarctica. Knowledge and verification of such extremes are important in the study of weather patterns, naturally occurring climate variability and human-induced change at global and regional scales, said Randy Cerveny, an Arizona State University professor of geographical science and urban planning and the Rapporteur of Climate and Weather Extremes for the WMO. “The temperatures we announced today are the absolute limit to what we have measured in Antarctica,” Cerveny said. “Comparing them to other places around the world and seeing how other places have changed in relation to Antarctica gives us a much better understanding of how climate interacts, and how changes in one part of the world can impact other places.” Because Antarctica is so vast (it is roughly the size of the United States) and varied the WMO committee of experts, convened by Cerveny, provided three temperature measurements for the Antarctic.

The highest temperature for the “Antarctic region” (defined by the WMO and the United Nations as all land and ice south of 60-deg S) of 19.8 C (67.6 F), which was observed on Jan. 30, 1982, at Signy Research Station, Borge Bay on Signy Island. The highest temperature for the Antarctic Continent, defined as the main continental landmass and adjoining islands, is the temperature extreme of 17.5 C (63.5 F) recorded on Mar. 24, 2015 at the Argentine Research Base Esperanza located near the northern tip of the Antarctic Peninsula. The highest temperature for the Antarctic Plateau (at or above 2,500 meters, or 8,200 feet) was -7 C (19.4 F) made on Dec. 28, 1980, at an automatic weather station site D-80 located inland of the Adelie Coast.

The Antarctic is cold, windy and dry. The average annual temperature ranges from -10 C on its coasts to -60 C (14 F to -76 F) at the highest points in the interior. Its immense ice sheet is about 4.8 km (3 miles) thick and contains 90 percent of the world’s fresh water, enough to raise sea levels by around 60 meters (200 feet) if it were all to melt. Cerveny said that observing the extremes of what the Polar Regions are experiencing can provide a better picture of the planet’s interlinked weather system. “The polar regions of our planet have been termed the ‘canary’ in our global environment,” Cerveny said. “Because of their sensitivity to climate changes, sometimes the first influences of changes in our global environment can be seen in the north and south polar regions. Knowledge of the weather extremes in these locations therefore becomes particularly important to the entire world. The more we know of this critically important area to our environment, the more we can understand how all of our global environments are interlinked.” Cerveny said an additional benefit is understanding how those extremes were achieved. “In the case of the Antarctic extremes, two of them were the result of what are called ‘foehn’ winds — what we call Chinook winds — very warm downslope winds that can very rapidly heat up a place. These winds are found even here in the United States, particularly along the front range of the Rockies. The more we learn about how they vary around the world, the better we can understand them even here in the United States. Full details of the Antarctic high temperatures and their assessment are given in the on-line issue of Eos Earth and Space Science News of the American Geophysical Union, published on March 1, 2017

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PS: Happy Easter everybody! -PG

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April 16, 2017 at 01:24AM

Uncategorized 16 Apr 2017

The Seventh Thing To Know About Climate Change–Nat Geographic

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By Paul Homewood

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It is hard to know where to start with this load of garbage!

1) If climate change was not a serious danger, would 195 countries have signed the Paris Agreement, pledging to keep the warming below 2C?

Clearly National Geographic have failed to read what actually was agreed at Paris.

For a start, the Agreement itself actually states that, under the “pledges” made, emissions will continue to rise. To meet the 2C scenario, they would need to be cut by at least half.

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Secondly, the vast majority of the 195 countries, including China and India, are designated as “developing” countries. As such, the Paris Agreement places no obligation on them at all to cut emissions, as it does on developed nations.

2) Switch to renewables

They claim that we can save the planet by switching to renewable energy. Yet even their own graph shows that, although the use of renewable energy will roughly double by 2040, this will be dwarfed by the increasing use of fossil fuels.

The reason for this is very simple – the demand for cheap, reliable energy is growing fast amongst developing countries, as their economies expand and the expectations of their people for a better standard of living grow.

Renewable energy, such as wind and solar, is utterly incapable of meeting this demand.

The sort of emission cuts needed “to do something” would condemn billions of people to grinding poverty.

3) In the US, solar now employs more people than coal, oil and gas combined.

Given that solar only provides 0.4% of the US’s energy, this fatuous statement shows just how inefficient solar power really is.

BP Energy Review 2016

4) We can do something about it!

Who is this WE?

In the last decade or so, emissions have been slowly dropping in the US and EU, and now only account for 27% of global CO2.

Meanwhile, emissions in China and the rest of the world have been rocketing upwards.

BP Energy Review 2016

Even if US and EU emissions dropped to zero, it would only take global emissions back to their level in 2002, and make next to no difference to the climate.

This whole series from National Geographic has been based on a combination of irrelevant, fake and cherry picked data.

Sadly this seems to sum up the low standards that it has now sunk to.

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April 16, 2017 at 12:36AM

Uncategorized 16 Apr 2017

Easily through the night on a fully loaded powerwall

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This is already the third post on the Tesla powerwall series and especially how it is (mis)presented in the mainstream media. This misinformation is not only limited to the mainstream media, it is also strong in social media. The subject of this post is a facebook post by the owners of the Tesla home battery mentioned in previous two posts.

It starts informative with a description of their powerwall (translated from Dutch):

Our home battery is a lithium ion battery with a usable capacity of 6.4 kWh (slightly less than our average daily consumption). We decided NOT to go for the #offgrid option, so when the grid voltage is lost, our battery will also not be able to power us. The battery can deliver 2 kW continuous power, with a peak power of 3.3 kW.

The capacity of their powerwall is indeed somewhat lower than their average consumption. I understood from a previous post that their annual consumption is around 3,200 kWh, meaning around 8.77 kW per day. On average of course, their consumption will be lower in summer (when production is high) and in higher in winter (when production is low).

Not sure whether all this 6.4 kWh is really usable and how long it stays that way (this battery is currently brand new, but lithium ion batteries degrade after a while). But that aside.

It becomes a bit trickier in the next sentence when it comes to the limitations of the powerwall (translated from Dutch):

With a load of 2 kW, the battery is depleted after 3 hours.

Followed by the justification that this is not much of a restriction for them (translated from Dutch, my emphasis):

But our home has a nominal consumption of about 150 watt, so even in winter a fully loaded battery gets us easily through the night (even if we make a kettle of tea in the evening).

They lost me with that sentence. What they basically say is that the powerwall has limitations, but that these don’t apply to them because their home has a low nominal consumption and to prove that, they claim that they get through the night on a fully loaded powerwall, even in winter.

First it was not really clear what they meant with “nominal consumption” (which is much lower than their average consumption). From the context of that last statement, my guess is that they mean “their electricity consumption during the night” and then, yes, they will easily get through the night on a fully loaded 6.4 kWh battery.

Even in winter.

Even after they made a kettle of tea in the evening.

To be honest, I am not really impressed: of course, a fully loaded battery gets you easily through the night. That is not a big deal.

People tend to sleep at night, so electricity consumption is low anyway. Getting through the night starting from a (nearly) fully loaded battery is not something to brag about, it is a rather meaningless feat. If they don’t get through the night on a fully loaded battery, then there would be something seriously wrong with their system…

What does this actually prove anyway? Their example looks like a non sequitur to me. Sure, their powerwall has more than enough juice to come through the night, but this doesn’t prove anything for the performance during the day when consumption is high.

As far as I know, capacity problems during the night were never an issue with the home battery, so the example that was given is meaningless for what they want to prove.

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April 15, 2017 at 11:18PM