By Paul Homewood
If were Ben Rich, I would stick to weather forecasting!
https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/videos/cr5494qjgeyo
Does not the clown realise what a fool he has just made of himself?
If global warming caused this downpour, what caused the previous one 30 years ago?
And if this is the first such downpour for 30 or 50 years, they clearly are not becoming more frequent!
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 16, 2024 at 05:17AM
53.97558 -2.13376 Met Office Assessed CIMO Class 5 & Satisfactory Installed 1/1/1972 but temperature readings only archived from 1/2/2006.
A neighbour told me he had seen a terrible weather station about 10 years ago on a barging trip but could only remember the rough area as in North Yorkshire and that it was by a lock gate. Always up for a challenge I set about looking and found a genuinely terrible site. “That’s it….piles of building rubble all around it” he confirmed on seeing the street view image.
Although site records claim an installation date of 1972 it was only as a rain gauge site. Temperature records start from 1/10/2006 and the screen does not appear on historic aerial images before then. What this indicates is yet another modern site paying little regard to being a representative location for historic temperature record purposes. There may be other reasons for a siting a weather station here (a rain gauge by canal and river is fairly obvious) but I am unsure why any temperature readings are of any merit outside immediate hydrology purposes.
The roadways (with apparent regular vehicle movements) and particularly walling are clearly problems, indeed the canal and all its site modifications themselves can be seen as negative issues.
However, over and above the question of why the Met office chooses to include such low grade sites to contribute to its historic climate record is the issue of ongoing maintenance of these sites. The one-off dated “street view” images above indicate “Jumbo Bags” of building materials literally dumped alongside the screen – this conforms to my neighbour’s original comments about “piles of rubble” on a different occasion. “Google Earth Pro” historic images, though, reveal a very enigmatic history. Many show almost pristine surroundings, others more akin to a building site obviously indicative of a “working” site appropriate to a canal lock. However, most striking is the infringement on the original site of a new vehicular route – the 2008 image below shows the recently installed screen.
Whilst the 2018 image indicates the new route and more “cramped” nature of the screen’s surroundings.
Subsequent images show further building development to the east of the screen, more extensive tree growth leading to significant shading effects and overall a general degradation of the quality of the site.
Overall another modern poor quality site. The entire area seems to be reminiscent of the Motherwell: Strathclyde Park – the only thing missing is probably the ice cream van (as below)!
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
October 16, 2024 at 04:54AM
By Paul Homewood
While we are busy shutting down North Sea oil as soon as possible, Norway want to keep pumping for decades:
OSLO, Oct 14 (Reuters) – A Norwegian appeals court said on Monday it had ruled in favour of the government in a case brought by environmental activists who sought to halt the development of three oil and gas fields.
Greenpeace and others had sued the Norwegian government to prevent the development of the new oil and gas resources, in the latest legal dispute linked to global climate change.
A lower court ruled in January that Norway’s energy ministry failed to fully assess the climate impact from the future use of the fields’ oil and gas, so-called scope three emissions, in a lawsuit brought by Greenpeace and its partner Nature and Youth.
At that time, the court also ordered temporary injunctions against the development of the three fields known as Yggdrasil, Tyrving and Breidablikk.
But the appeals court in March put the injunctions on hold, giving the government and field operators Aker BP and Equinor leeway to continue working on the fields.
In September the government asked the appeals court to lift the injunctions, part of a wider effort by Oslo to overturn the lower court’s verdict.
The appeals court on Monday said it had attached considerable importance in its decision to democratic considerations and to the court’s right of review.
"The concrete decisions to deal with the climate crisis, including a possible shutdown of petroleum activities, must primarily be made by parliament and the government," the court said in its ruling.
Norway, which derives one quarter of its gross domestic product from oil and gas, says that while it seeks to pump hydrocarbons for decades to come it is complying with the Paris climate accords seeking to limit global warming.
The key to this ruling is that decisions must primarily be made by parliament and the government. If only our left wing judges obeyed this obvious necessity.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
October 16, 2024 at 04:22AM
By Vijay Jayaraj
The electric vehicle (EV) is heralded as a cornerstone of the fight against climate change, with promises of a cleaner, greener future. As recently as July, the Biden-Harris administration announced billions of dollars of government support for EV manufacturing.
However, a growing concern lies beneath the shiny surface of electric cars and bikes: the safety risks of lithium-ion batteries, particularly their propensity to catch fire.
The rosy image of EVs as environmental saviors doesn’t align with their increasing reputation as flammable hazards.
Lithium batteries are designed to store a significant amount of energy in a compact space, which increases not only their efficiency but also their risk profile. When these batteries overheat, short-circuit or suffer physical damage, they can ignite and burn with alarming intensity.
New York is particularly notorious for the large number of E-bike fires. Entire shipments of cars on cargo ships have been burnt up in the middle of ocean due to fires from EV batteries.
Recently, containers holding 33,000 pounds of lithium batteries at Canada’s port of Montreal caught fire, prompting city authorities to warn residents to remain indoors. The fire, which occurred around 2:45 p.m. September 23, was not extinguished until 3 a.m. the next day!
“Due to the amount of energy that these batteries store, it took us quite a while to extinguish the fire,” said the fire department chief.
Chinese Properties Ban EV Cars
China is now witnessing more and more cases of dangerous EV fires — so much so that electric cars are now being banned from underground parking lots.
“Hotels and other buildings in Hangzhou, Ningbo, Xiaoshan and other places in Zhejiang have banned electric vehicles from entering underground garages for safety reasons, sparking heated discussions,” reports a Chinese source.
On August 25, an internet user uploaded a notice from the owner of Huigang Building in Yinzhou District, Ningbo City, restricting the parking of electric vehicles and making separate provisions for EVs due to safety concerns.
The fact that China, a leader in the EV market, is taking such drastic measures should raise alarms for the global EV industry. This is a clear acknowledgment that lithium battery fires pose a significant risk, one that cannot be ignored simply because EVs are touted as environmentally friendly.
Furthermore, it calls into doubt the EV crusaders’ assertion that electric cars are less prone to fires than traditional combustion engine cars. If that’s the case, why aren’t Chinese property owners restricting gas cars as well as EVs?
Child Slavery and Toxic Byproducts
Beyond the safety risks, the production of lithium-ion batteries presents a host of environmental and ethical concerns. The mining and processing of the raw materials required for these batteries—such as lithium, cobalt and nickel—are far from clean operations.
A significant portion of the world’s cobalt, a key battery component, comes from the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), where child labor is prevalent in mining. Children as young as 7 years work in dangerous conditions to extract the mineral.
The DRC is believed to contain the world’s largest lithium reserve, with more than 6 million tons located near the Manono region. The environmental damage caused by mining in the DRC is staggering. Large tracts of land are stripped bare, water sources polluted, and local ecosystems destroyed.
The majority of the global market is controlled by two of the world’s major lithium producers in the Chinese provinces of Jiangxi and Sichuan. The extraction of lithium from lepidolite ore generates toxic byproducts like thallium and tantalum and leads to serious water contamination.
Visible to NASA satellites are colorful patterns of toxic lakes several miles long, which have been produced by rare-metal mines in China’s deserts.
The Organization for Research on China and Asia says “the extraction of lithium has led to irreversible damage to ecology.” Chinese residents have reported health problems linked to pollutants released during production.
At least one issue remains conspicuously under-reported: Tire wear of the relatively heavy EVs and the resulting particulate pollution is significantly greater than for conventional vehicles. This inconvenient truth is frequently glossed over by both media and policymakers, who continue to extol the “virtues” of EVs.
The romanticization of EVs is one more fabrication of a green delusion that on balance presents more threats than benefits to public health and safety. It’s time to get real.
This commentary was first published at Townhall on October 12, 2024.
Vijay Jayaraj is a Science and Research Associate at the CO2 Coalition, Arlington, Virginia. He holds an M.S. in environmental sciences from the University of East Anglia and a postgraduate degree in energy management from Robert Gordon University, both in the U.K., and a bachelor’s in engineering from Anna University, India.
via Watts Up With That?
October 16, 2024 at 04:02AM
