Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez' Pitiable Betrayal 4

Will Offensicht sez: "Mr. Obama promised that electricity prices would "skyrocket" based on his plans and that's exactly what happened when Germany followed them; is that what AOC wants for America?"

Sure it is. The air conditioning wouldn't be turned off in the capitol, the white house or the supreme court building. Maintaining occupiability in those, as with operating rooms in hospitals, is an essential public good to the members of the state club. The objective of making electricity unaffordable for those who pay their own bills and also the taxes to cover the expense of viable working conditions for the decision makers is control of the choices available to those little people, not the decision makers themselves.

Can we take up a collection to have Will and AOC get together so he can correct her delusion? Or better yet, get her out of our news feed.

BBC just confirmed that India will not only burn a lot more coal. they're promising farmers free electricity! Good way to make demand become infinite!

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-48283612

The world's second largest populous country emitted 2.3bn tonnes of carbon dioxide in 2018 - a nearly 5% rise on the previous year, the International Energy Agency (IEA) says.

About 90% of India's energy still comes from fossil fuels and nearly two thirds of that from coal - the dirtiest of fossil fuels.

Nearly 70% of India's CO2 emissions come from the energy sector and more than two thirds of that is electricity generation.

The British Petroleum is forecasting that coal's share in India's power mix will increase by roughly 10% by 2040.

"Renewable energy consumption surges from 20 Mtoe (million tonnes of oil equivalent) today to 300 Mtoe by 2040 - concentrated mainly in the power sector and driven largely by growth in solar capacity," the BP says.

"Yet despite this growth in renewables, coal continues to dominate India's power generation mix, accounting for 80% of output by 2040."

"On one hand, the country is so aggressive on renewables, on the other hand, political parties are promising free electricity to farmers," says Srinivas Krishnaswamy, chief executive officer of Vasudha, an NGO that works in the area of energy and climate policies.

"That makes me doubt that the country's dependence on coal is going to go away."

Since the middle of this decade, India has said it will double coal production to one billion tonnes by 2020. This is on top of what India imports from countries like Australia and Indonesia.

The import increased to nearly 210m tonnes in 2018 from 190m tonnes the year before.

The IEA said recently coal demand had increased in India by 5% last year - just when it was decreasing in many countries.

In its earlier report, the agency projected electricity demand to triple in 2018-40.

Here is yet another recently-discovered CO2 unknown. In spite of the many times the scientists say they do not know what worms will do to CO2, the times stays all-in for spending trillions:

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/20/science/earthworms-soil-climate.html

Worms are wriggling into Earth’s northernmost forests, creating major unknowns for climate-change models.

Native earthworms disappeared from most of northern North America 10,000 years ago, during the ice age. Now invasive earthworm species from southern Europe — survivors of that frozen epoch, and introduced to this continent by European settlers centuries ago — are making their way through northern forests, their spread hastened by roads, timber and petroleum activity, tire treads, boats, anglers and even gardeners.

As the worms feed, they release into the atmosphere much of the carbon stored in the forest floor. Climate scientists are worried.

Moreover, the threat is still so new to boreal forests that scientists don’t yet know how to calculate what the earthworms’ carbon effect will be, or when it will appear.

“It is a significant change to the carbon dynamic and how we understand it works,” Ms. Shaw said. “We don’t truly understand the rate or the magnitude of that change.”

The relationship between carbon and earthworms is complex. Earthworms are beloved by gardeners because they break down organic material in soil, freeing up nutrients. This helps plants and trees grow faster, which locks carbon into living tissue. Some types of invasive earthworms also burrow into mineral soil and seal carbon there.

But as earthworms speed decomposition, they also release carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. As they occupy more areas of the world, will they ultimately add more carbon to the atmosphere — or subtract it?

That question led to what Ingrid M. Lubbers, a soil researcher at Wageningen University in the Netherlands, christened the “earthworm dilemma” in a paper published in 2013 in Nature Climate Change. Scientists have been keen to resolve it ever since.

“It’s just another of the many reasons why you need to know more about systems,” Dr. Lubbers said in an interview. “Because there could be an effect that would enhance climate change and enhance the rising temperatures.”

In severely affected areas, the biomass of earthworms underground is 500 times greater than the biomass of moose in the same areas. Even where earthworms were sparse, they still matched the biomass of moose, which is considered a keystone species in Alaska.

To his horror, Dr. Yoo also found earthworms right on the edge of the permafrost in the northern boreal. The pace of permafrost melt and its release of carbon is of great concern to researchers who model climate change.

His biggest concern is that earthworms will penetrate even further north in the boreal and spread into the permafrost. “Their impact alone could be quite devastating, based on what we have been seeing in Minnesota and New England and in parts of Canada,” said Dr. Yoo.

No mechanism exists to eradicate earthworms from the boreal forest; their impact is permanent. However, earthworms move less than 30 feet a year on their own. Educating people to not transport them into unaffected parts of the forest might help keep those areas earthworm-free, said Mr. Wackett.

As scientists analyze the effects of the earthworms they know about, they also are keeping an eye on a new invader: Asian earthworms, which have made their way to southern Quebec and Ontario.

“I’m not sure what their implications are for carbon, but they’re pretty aggressive and they seem potentially to be better competitors than European earthworms,” said Dr. Cameron. “That’s another issue on the horizon.”

AOC - Stupid is as stupid does.

It gets worse and worse. It turns out that all those vaunted "carbon credits" which Al Gore buys to offset his massive carbon footprint are an ineffective scam:

https://features.propublica.org/brazil-carbon-offsets/inconvenient-truth-carbon-credits-dont-work-deforestation-redd-acre-cambodia/?utm_source=digg&utm_medium=email

The appetite is global. For the airline industry and industrialized nations in the Paris climate accord, offsets could be a cheap alternative to actually reducing fossil fuel use.

But the desperate hunger for these carbon credit plans appears to have blinded many of their advocates to the mounting pile of evidence that they haven’t — and won’t — deliver the climate benefit they promise.

I looked at projects going back two decades and spanning the globe and pulled together findings from academic researchers in far-flung forest villages, studies published in obscure journals, foreign government reports and dense technical documents. I enlisted a satellite imagery analysis firm to see how much of the forest remained in a preservation project that started selling credits in 2013. Four years later, only half the project areas were forested.

In case after case, I found that carbon credits hadn’t offset the amount of pollution they were supposed to, or they had brought gains that were quickly reversed or that couldn’t be accurately measured to begin with. Ultimately, the polluters got a guilt-free pass to keep emitting CO₂, but the forest preservation that was supposed to balance the ledger either never came or didn’t last.

....

I traveled to Acre to see how its program was working. I found swaths of cow pasture where locals once tapped rubber from trees; there’s no way to make a living from sustainable alternatives, they told me, so the trees have to go. Government workers spoke of conservation, but political leaders have cut funding for it and plan to expand agribusiness. Several Acre officials readily acknowledged that their priority is getting foreign aid to protect forests; the validity of the offsets is an afterthought.

Those eager to see the Acre program succeed told me it was OK if the offsets didn’t really cancel out all of the carbon emissions they were supposed to, as long as some trees were saved and smaller gains were made.

“Perfection can be the enemy of delivery,” Brown said. “There are a whole bunch of problems with it. … What is the alternative?”

The NY Post reported on a study which shows there simply aren't enough rare earths available to make enough batteries to replace internal combustion engines in cars. I guess we peasants will simply have to do without cars...

https://nypost.com/2019/06/20/why-we-cant-possibly-switch-everyone-to-electric-cars/

Converting the state’s cars, trucks and buses from oil to electricity will require New York to gobble up huge portions of the world’s supply of materials like cobalt and neodymium, which will make the state’s auto fleet heavily reliant on a single supplier: China.

The CCPA requires New York to slash its greenhouse gas emissions by 85% by 2050. Transportation accounts for about one-third of that output.

Slashing transportation emissions will require electrifying nearly all of New York’s 11.3 million motor vehicles. What would that mean? We can get an estimate by looking at a remarkable June 3 letter that was sent to the British government by professor Richard Herrington, the head of earth sciences at the Natural History Museum in London, and seven colleagues.

Herrington and his colleagues looked at the UK’s climate goals and the requirement that all its vehicles be converted to electricity by 2050. They found doing so would require two times the total annual world cobalt production, nearly the entire world production of neodymium, three quarters the world’s lithium production and at least half of the world’s copper production during 2018. Remember, that’s just for the UK!

New York’s automotive fleet is about a third the size of Britain’s. So if we use Herrington’s estimates, converting all of the Empire State’s vehicles to electricity will require roughly 60% of the world’s cobalt production, 30% of global neodymium, a quarter of global lithium and 15% of all copper production.

Who controls those commodities? The copper market is fairly well diversified. But China controls about half of global lithium production and about 85% of the world’s supply of cobalt, a critical ingredient in the batteries used in electric vehicles. China also mines about 70% of the world’s supply of “rare earths,” including neodymium, which is an essential ingredient in electric motors.

China’s dominance of the cobalt and rare-earth industries has allowed it to become a leader in electric vehicle manufacturing and deployment. And it doesn’t plan to cede that leadership role.

Chinese President Xi Jinping recently visited a rare-earth processing plant, a move widely seen as a signal to the United States not to impose tariffs on China’s goods. In addition, the official People’s Daily newspaper warned: “Don’t underestimate China’s ability to strike back.”
see also
A bogus climate-change law from New York’s cynical leaders

Even if cobalt, neodymium and the other commodities needed to produce millions of electric vehicles were widely available — and not controlled by the Chinese government — mining and smelting the vast quantities of material needed to make those automobiles will itself require enormous amounts of energy, and therefore mean more carbon dioxide emissions.

The problems with renewables keep piling up:

https://townhall.com/columnists/vijayjayaraj/2019/07/06/abundant-sun-yet-no-energy-solar-panels-leave-people-high-and-dry-n2549344

Solar Failure in Australia and India
Australia saw a spike in domestic solar installations during the past five years. Around 20 percent of Australian homes have installed rooftop solar. But, it came with baggage.

There have been increasing reports of solar installation failures and even proven cases of fire hazard to the homes. Nearly 17 percent of rooftop solar systems were declared “substandard,” and around 3 percent of all installations were deemed unsafe.

Melbourne Fire Brigade has acknowledged that there have been at least 25 fires in the Melbourne metropolitan area in the past five years started by problems with rooftop solar.

...

on the ground, solar’s future is not so encouraging. Raj Prabhu from Mercom Capital Group—an observer of the Indian energy market—said, “Poor quality installations if not brought under control will affect all installers in the country as word spreads among consumers about unviable projects and poor-quality installs that may not last long. … the current scenario in the residential rooftop segment is untenable.”

...

The other rarely addressed drawback is the environmental hazard associated with the disposal of used solar panels, which is proving to be more and more difficult and harmful to the environment because of the large amounts of toxic, rare-earth metals in them.

A transition to solar is a recipe for disaster. Wise individual house owners will stay away from solar installations, given the overwhelming evidence of their inefficiency, excessive cost, hazardous nature, and spurious sales of substandard materials.

No doubt any imaginable air conditioner technology will use some amount of energy, but it's easy to imagine that there may be ways to dramatically increase efficiency and lower electricity consumption."

This is not true. In economics,Jevon's Paradox occurs when technological progress or government policy increases the efficiency with which a resource is used (reducing the amount necessary for any one use), but the rate of consumption of that resource rises due to increasing demand.

Some actual facts about energy.

https://economics21.org/inconvenient-realities-new-energy-economy

Bill Gates has said that when it comes to understanding energy realities “we need to bring math to the problem.”

He’s right. Realities About the Scale of Energy Demand:

1. Hydrocarbons supply over 80% of world energy: If all that were in the form of oil, the barrels would line up from Washington, D.C., to Los Angeles, and that entire line would grow by the height of the Washington Monument every week.

2. The small two percentage-point decline in the hydrocarbon share of world energy use entailed over $2 trillion in cumulative global spending on alternatives over that period; solar and wind today supply less than 2% of the global energy.

3. When the world’s four billion poor people increase energy use to just one-third of Europe’s per capita level, global demand rises by an amount equal to twice America’s total consumption.

4. A 100x growth in the number of electric vehicles to 400 million on the roads by 2040 would displace 5% of global oil demand.

5. Renewable energy would have to expand 90-fold to replace global hydrocarbons in two decades. It took a half-century for global petroleum production to expand “only” 10-fold.

6. Replacing U.S. hydrocarbon-based electric generation over the next 30 years would require a construction program building out the grid at a rate 14-fold greater than any time in history.

7. Eliminating hydrocarbons to make U.S. electricity (impossible soon, infeasible for decades) would leave untouched 70% of U.S. hydrocarbons use—America uses 16% of world energy.

8. Efficiency increases energy demand by making products & services cheaper: since 1990, global energy efficiency improved 33%, the economy grew 80% and global energy use is up 40%.

9. Efficiency increases energy demand: Since 1995, aviation fuel use/passenger-mile is down 70%, air traffic rose more than 10-fold, and global aviation fuel use rose over 50%.

10. Efficiency increases energy demand: since 1995, energy used per byte is down about 10,000-fold, but global data traffic rose about a million-fold; global electricity used for computing soared.

11. Since 1995, total world energy use rose by 50%, an amount equal to adding two entire United States’ worth of demand.

12. For security and reliability, an average of two months of national demand for hydrocarbons are in storage at any time. Today, barely two hours of national electricity demand can be stored in all utility-scale batteries plus all batteries in one million electric cars in America.

13. Batteries produced annually by the Tesla Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory) can store three minutes worth of annual U.S. electric demand.

14. To make enough batteries to store two-day’s worth of U.S. electricity demand would require 1,000 years of production by the Gigafactory (world’s biggest battery factory).

15. Every $1 billion in aircraft produced leads to some $5 billion in aviation fuel consumed over two decades to operate them. Global spending on new jets is more than $50 billion a year—and rising.

16. Every $1 billion spent on datacenters leads to $7 billion in electricity consumed over two decades. Global spending on datacenters is more than $100 billion a year—and rising.

Realities About Energy Economics

17. Over a 30-year period, $1 million worth of utility-scale solar or wind produces 40 million and 55 million kWh respectively: $1 million worth of shale well produces enough natural gas to generate 300 million kWh over 30 years.

18. It costs about the same to build one shale well or two wind turbines: the latter, combined, produces 0.7 barrels of oil (equivalent energy) per hour, the shale rig averages 10 barrels of oil per hour.

19. It costs less than $0.50 to store a barrel of oil, or its equivalent in natural gas, but it costs $200 to store the equivalent energy of a barrel of oil in batteries.

There's much more in the article....

What does the Earth’s magnetic field have to do with “climate change”? Everything!

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/what-does-earths-magnetic-field-have-do-climate-change-steven-devito/

The Earth has a magnetic field that protects us by deflecting harmful solar wind or radiation. The magnetic field is produced by the Earth’s liquid iron core spinning around like a generator. Without this protective forcefield, too much solar radiation would strip away our atmosphere. If the Earth’s magnetic field were much weaker the Earth would be transformed into a dead barren planet like Mars.

That was the good news. The bad news is that the Earth's magnetic field has been getting weaker since the formation of the Earth. Maybe as the liquid iron core cools, it becomes less liquid and slows down. And once it is completely cooled and solid iron it will stop spinning. We don't know how but we do know it changes over time and it is weakening at an increasing rate. Scientist extrapolate that the earth’s magnetic field was 20 times stronger less than 10,000 years ago. The erosion of the field is not linear. A Forbes article from March 29, 2018 “Is Earth’s Magnetic Shield Eroding”, states: The strength of Earth’s main magnetic field is currently about 29.5 microteslas, down 5 microteslas, or 14 percent from its strength three centuries ago.

And an article from Sciencealert.com dated May 11, 2016 stated: “New research has shown in the most detail yet how rapidly Earth's magnetic field - which acts like a shield to protect us from harsh solar winds and cosmic radiation - is changing, getting weaker over some parts of the world, and strengthening over others.” Another sciencealert headline reads: A Mysterious Anomaly Under Africa Is Radically Weakening Earth's Magnetic Field! Many in the liberal camp blame the U.S. for climate change in Africa.

What does the Earth’s magnetic field have to do with “climate change”? Everything!

Carbon-14 is produced in the Earth’s upper atmosphere through the bombardment of Nitrogen-14 (which is approximately 78% of atmospheric gases) by thermal neutrons which come from the powerful cosmic radiation, primarily generated by the sun. This bombardment causes a nuclear reaction to take place. The Carbon-14 produced by this process is then converted into carbon dioxide or CO2.

The decay of the earth’s magnetic field is an ongoing process. As the magnetic field decreases, more cosmic radiation penetrates the earth’s atmosphere and this causes a slow long-term increase in Carbon-14 and carbon dioxide production.

Is so-called climate changed caused by people? I doubt it.

College Professor Pens Scathing and Brilliant ‘Open Letter’ To Teen Climate Activist Greta Thunberg

https://www.waynedupree.com/professor-jason-d-hill-greta-thunberg/

As I read this piece, I had to stop myself from standing up and cheering. It was that good.

Lines like this: “If civilization is left in the hands of your ecofascist supporters we will be living in grass huts, drinking animal feces infested water, and shrinking in fear from polar bears instead of killing them for food when they attack us” are just the tip of the iceberg (pun intended) in this absolute rebuke of everything Greta Thunberg stands for, preaches, and lectures on behalf of her handlers.

Professor Jason D. Hill points out that Greta’s generation cannot eat meat without “crying,” or be away from their technology for more than an hour without falling into a deep depression. And speaking of that, creating all of those technology devices and gadgets that her generation is so dependent on is a leading cause of “carbon-spewing.”

Here is a hard truth to ponder, Greta: if the great producers of this world whom you excoriate were to withdraw their productivity, wealth and talents—in short—their minds from the world today, your generation would simply perish. Why? Because as children you have done nothing as yet, with your lives besides being born. This is what we expect of children until such time as they can be producers by learning from their elders. You are understandably social and ecological ballast. You are not yet cognitively advanced to replicate the structures of survival of which you are the beneficiaries.

Children are important installments on the future. We have invested in you. It is you and your smug generation which think they have nothing to learn from the older ones who are failing themselves. Whom do you expect to employ the majority of you if you have neither the job credentials or life competency skills to navigate the world? The future unemployable-skipping- school-on-Friday obstreperous children?

The truth, as one anonymous blogger aptly put it, is that your generation is unable to work up to forty hours per week without being chronically depressed and anxious. Its members cannot even decide if they want to be a boy or a girl, or both, or neither, or a “they.” They cannot eat meat without crying. I might add that your generation needs “trigger warnings” and “safe spaces” as pre-conditions for learning in school. Its members have a pathological need to be coddled and protected from the challenging realities of life. Your generation is the biggest demander and consumer of carbon spewing technological gadgets and devices. An hour without any of them and too many of you succumb to paralyzing lethargy. Your generation is the least curious and most insular set of individuals one has ever encountered. Your hubris extends so far that you think you have nothing to learn from your elders. [FrontPageMag]

It matters not what we do, the Chinese are smoking! China isn't violating the Paris agreement - they were permitted to do anything they wanted until 2030 based on an agreement between China and Mr. Obama which the New York Times at first lauded to the skies before comprehending the reality:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/04/world/asia/obama-xi-jinping-china-climate-accord.html

In recent years, the Obama administration has sought to highlight cooperation on climate change, but China’s commitments, first made in 2014, have been less a concession to American pressure than a restatement of its own goals. They include a promise for China’s carbon emissions to reach a plateau or decline “around 2030,” but without any specific target for reductions like those Mr. Obama pledged for the United States (between 26 and 28 percent of 2005 levels by 2025). That means China has plenty of room to continue burning fossil fuels to power its economy.

See also:

https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/01/world/asia/obama-and-president-xi-of-china-vow-to-sign-paris-climate-accord-promptly.html

China going big on coal guarantees the world won’t meet its carbon-cutting goals

https://nypost.com/2019/11/23/china-going-big-on-coal-guarantees-the-world-wont-meet-its-carbon-cutting-goals/

Pretty much everything the rest of the world is doing to reduce carbon emissions is being neutralized by a single big, bad actor — and it’s not the United States under President Trump, but the People’s Republic of China.

Many countries are falling short of the decarbonization goals hammered out at the 2016 Paris climate convention. But Beijing — already the world’s No. 1 carbon emitter, producing more than a quarter of global CO2 exhausts — stands out. With its economy slowed to a rate not seen since the early ’90s, it’s re-embracing the dirtiest fossil fuel.

The International Energy Agency notes that coal accounts for 46% of global carbon emissions. To meet the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change target of keeping global warming below 1.5°C through 2100, the world much achieve, as Global Energy Monitor puts it, a “58[%] to 70% reduction in global coal power generation by 2030.”

GEM, a not-for-profit that tracks global coal use, reports that China’s coal plants under construction, plus shuttered ones recently reopened and new ones planned, put it on track to make that impossible. Says GEM’s Christine Shearer: “China’s proposed coal expansion is so far out of alignment with the Paris Agreement that it would put the necessary reductions in coal power out of reach, even if every other country were to completely eliminate its coal fleet.”

As of July, China had 4,436 operating coal plants, with 487 under construction and many more in the permitting pipeline. Contrast that with 1,291 operating US coal plants, with only closings planned.

The US switch from coal to natural gas leaves it, as of 2018, with “the largest absolute decline [in carbon emissions] among all countries since 2000,” according to the IEA. Call it the difference between talking and actually walking green.

More information about MASSIVE methane emissions from inside the earth.

https://phys.org/news/2020-09-massive-methane-gas-seafloor-southern.html

Massive release of methane gas from the seafloor discovered for the first time in the Southern Hemisphere

Gas hydrate is an ice-like substance formed by water and methane at depths of several hundred meters at the bottom of our oceans at high pressure and low temperatures. Methane is a potent greenhouse gas, roughly 25 times more potent than carbon dioxide, and it is estimated that methane frozen in these sediments constitute the largest organic carbon reservoir on Earth. The fact that methane gas has now started leaking out through gas hydrate dissociation is not good news for the climate.

"It has been estimated that there are more organic carbon in the form of methane in hydrates than in all fossil fuels combined. The leakage of methane could lead to a feedback loop in which the ocean warming melts gas hydrates resulting in the release of methane from the ocean floor into the water. The warmer it gets, the more methane leaks out," explains Marcelo Ketzer, professor of environmental science at Linnaeus University.

This process is believed to have triggered and amplified climate changes in our geological past. In collaboration with Brazilian and French colleagues, the researchers at Linnaeus University have now, with the help of sediment samplers and remotely-operated submarines, discovered that this process takes place in the Southern Hemisphere. The samples with gas hydrates have been collected in the South Atlantic sediments, near the Brazilian coast.

"These findings contribute with new evidence that this is a global phenomenon," says Marcelo Ketzer.

The researchers could also demonstrate that when methane reaches the ocean water it is dissolved and consumed to a certain extent by microorganisms, which results in the formation of carbon dioxide. It is known that, in large quantities, this process can change the chemistry of the oceans.

"The hydrate dissociation and related methane leakage to our oceans is a long-term process that can last for several centuries, and it can lead to a significant amplification of the climate change effects and to changes in the oceans chemistry, for instance, in the form of further acidification," Ketzer continues.

The data was collected during three offshore expeditions in the South Atlantic Ocean in 2011, 2013, and 2014 and have recently been processed and modeled at Linnaeus University, which resulted in the publication of an article in Nature Communications.

<snip>

So much for AOC's cow farts

This has been happening for millions of years. Probably since the Earth cooled. it can't be anything new. It has just occurred in a new place -- the southern hemisphere. You just didn't know about it. It's a perfectly natural phenomenon. Well, not perfect, but it is natural.

It's possible this contributes to climate change, but climates around the world have been changing for eons. It's such a slow process it is usually not detected in a lifetime. During the period of time roughly from the renaissance until the late 18th Century, the northern hemisphere experienced what became known as 'the little ice age'. The Thirty Years' War between Protestants and Catholics across central Europe has been linked to the Little Ice Age. Chilly conditions curbed agricultural production and inflated grain prices, fueling civil discontent and weakening the economies of European powers.

The Little Ice Age was caused by the volcano eruption of Krakatau, Indonesia. Volcanic eruptions in the 13th and 15th centuries appear to have triggered the Little Ice Age cooling effect of massive volcanic eruptions which clouded the skies to the extent that it caused an unnatural cooling, and sustained by changes in Arctic ice cover, scientists conclude. New knowledge about this was found by an international research team who studied ancient plants from Iceland and Canada, and sediments carried by glaciers.

This was climate change on a grand scale. For more information see here: https://www.livescience.com/18205-ice-age-volcanoes-sea-ice.html

Please provide a reason my comment was flagged as spam. I would genuinely like to know why.

I can't imagine what I may have said that caused this reaction by your editors. I used only verifiable information even including a url to support it.

I've been invited to post here two times as a guest. Which I have done.

Please respond, Petraeus?

@mondo - it's an automated system and often makes mistakes. We can override it manually, and have done so for your comment.

The British seem to be aiing for zero carbon by 2050, but that will take what they call "a bit of a slog."

https://www.nationalreview.com/2020/09/u-k-net-zero-emissions-target-costly-little-gain/

Target: Zero Net Carbon Emissions by 2050
Fossil fuels, coal (7.9 mtoe, million tonnes of oil equivalent), oil (68.5 mtoe) and gas (875.6 TWh, or 75.3 mtoe) supplied 151.7 mtoe, or 79.6 percent of the primary energy used in the U.K. in 2019, while wind and solar accounted for 3.47 percent of the total primary energy-use (BEIS).

How much additional CO2-free energy will the United Kingdom need to generate by 2050 to replace fossil fuels?
Let us assume that by 2050 the United Kingdom will need to replace only 60 percent of current fossil-fuel energy use (91 mtoe, or 1,058 terawatt hours (TWh) by CO2-free energy, thanks to greater overall energy efficiency. Even on this extremely optimistic assumption, the U.K. will need 121 gigawatts (GW) of new continuous CO2-free power generation, equivalent to 40 nuclear plants of 3 GW each or to 100,000 offshore wind turbines of 3 MW each, given a capacity factor of 0.4 — i.e., 10 MW installed capacity will deliver only 4 MW on average because it is not available all the time. The scope for large growth in the U.K. for inland wind or hydro power is limited. Solar, though coming down in cost, has a very low capacity factor of 0.1. Wind and solar will also require storage systems to cope with intermittency. Incidentally, 1,610 GW of new continuous CO2-free power generation will be needed for the U.S. to replace 60 percent of its current fossil-fuel use.

The existing energy infrastructure has to be dismantled
According to PHAM News, an estimated 26 million gas boilers are installed in the U.K. These are supposed to be converted to electric (heat pumps) heating by 2050. Are there enough heating engineers and electricians in the country to implement this? Are households expected to bear the cost of conversion, or is the government going to pay for this? The enormous challenges of rebuilding the electricity-distribution network required by such changes have been discussed by Mike Travers in The Hidden Cost of Net Zero: Rewiring the U.K., a report from the Global Warming Policy Foundation. He estimates that the total cost will run up to £466 billion, much of which might have to be borne by households.

Net zero will also involve decarbonizing transport, supposedly by eliminating internal-combustion engines (ICEs). This will also require huge investments in new infrastructure (as discussed below) but is not likely to deliver significant reductions in CO2. In addition, greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from agriculture would also need to be taken to zero if climate change is the real concern. Globally, livestock farming for meat and dairy contributes about 14 percent of global GHG, the same share as from all transport. The relevant percentages are likely to be similar for the U.K. Also, the steel, aviation, and cement industries, which are extremely difficult if not impossible to decarbonize, will need to be largely shut down by 2050.

Germany's push for renewables is leading to blackouts.

https://stopthesethings.com/2021/01/19/blackout-bombshell-unreliable-wind-solar-delivering-europes-new-dark-ages/

It begins:

Germany's power grid is on the brink of collapse, thanks to chaotically intermittent wind and solar; a complete power supply failure is just a heartbeat away.

As winter bites and power use soars, dead calm conditions mean there is little or no wind power and solar panels crusted in snow and ice are producing nothing much at all.

Anyone keen to know what our 'inevitable transition' to an all wind and sun powered future might look like, here's a peek at what's coming, courtesy of No Tricks Zone.

Power Supply Fiasco: Green Energy Blackout Hits Germany! Fossil Fuels To The Rescue
No Tricks Zone
Pierre Gosselin
9 January 2021

The denial of electrical power may even be necessary soon in the future, anyway - like it was in communist Romania in the wonderful Ceausescu days. Just look at how Germany's 50 GW - yes, gigawatts - of solar power have performed since January 1st.

Are we sure it's getting warmer? The Thames just froze over fir the first time since 1963.

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2021/02/13/uk-cold-weather-river-thames-freezes-over-for-first-time-in-60-years-pictured/

Interesting pictures.

Hooray for global warming!

The Guardian catches on:

https://getpocket.com/explore/item/the-air-conditioning-trap-how-cold-air-is-heating-the-world?utm_source=pocket-newtab

On a sweltering Thursday evening in Manhattan in the summer of 2019, people across New York City were preparing for what meteorologists predicted would be the hottest weekend of the year. Over the past two decades, every record for peak electricity use in the city has occurred during a heatwave, as millions of people turn on their air conditioning units at the same time. And so, at the midtown headquarters of Con Edison, the company that supplies more than 10 million people in the New York area with electricity, employees were busy turning a conference room on the 19th floor into an emergency command center.

Inside the conference room, close to 80 engineers and company executives, joined by representatives of the city's emergency management department, monitored the status of the city power grid, directed ground crews and watched a set of dials displaying each borough's electricity use tick upward. "It's like the bridge in Star Trek in there," Anthony Suozzo, a former senior system operator with the company, told me. "You've got all hands on deck, they're telling Scotty to fix things, the system is running at max capacity."

Power grids are measured by the amount of electricity that can pass through them at any one time. Con Edison's grid, with 62 power substations and more than 130,000 miles of power lines and cables across New York City and Westchester County, can deliver 13,400MW every second. This is roughly equivalent to 18m horsepower.

On a regular day, New York City demands around 10,000MW every second; during a heatwave, that figure can exceed 13,000MW. "Do the math, whatever that gap is, is the AC," Michael Clendenin, a company spokesman, told me. The combination of high demand and extreme temperature can cause parts of the system to overheat and fail, leading to blackouts. In 2006, equipment failure left 175,000 people in Queens without power for a week, during a heatwave that killed 40 people.

By the evening of Sunday 21 July, 2019, with temperatures above 36C (97F) and demand at more than 12,000MW every second, Con Edison cut power to 50,000 customers in Brooklyn and Queens for 24 hours, afraid that parts of the nearby grid were close to collapse, which could have left hundreds of thousands of people without power for days. The state had to send in police to help residents, and Con Edison crews dispensed dry ice for people to cool their homes.

etc,

Here's another of those "scads of failed predictions by warmists" articles.

Earth Day's legacy of failed apocalyptic predictions

https://www.americanthinker.com/blog/2021/04/earth_days_legacy_of_failed_apocalyptic_predictions.html

This one has links to other sites with their own lists. I do not blieve the warmists have ever gotten anything right.