Stupid and dirty biomass. Produces more CO2 than coal. Lots of particulate matter. Cuts down forests.
Idiots!
“What’s actually happening is we are basically cutting down perfectly healthy, productive trees,” says Tim Searchinger, a research scholar at Princeton University.
In 2015, biomass — which refers to trees or other organic matter burned for fuel — produced more electrical energy in the U.S. than solar panels.
Oh no … what a surprise …
Researchers at the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Applied Science & Engineering looked at the emissions from gasoline direct injection (GDI) engines, which are smaller and more efficient than traditional petrol engines.
Car manufacturers have adopted GDI engines in models to satisfy demand for more miles per gallon, and increased power output. According to the team, the number of GDI engines found in new cars between 2009 and 2015 has jumped to from five per cent to 46 per cent.
But their analysis revealed while carbon dioxide emissions were lower in GDI engines, they pumped out more soot and harmful organic compounds such as benzene and toluene.
‘The whole motivation for creating these engines in the first place was fuel efficiency. But what we haven’t considered are the other climate-related emissions,’ explained Professor Greg Evans, an engineer and applied chemist at Toronto.
‘If a vehicle emits a small amount of soot, it can completely negate the lower amount of CO2 that it’s emitting.‘
Wait. It isn’t CO2 causing an early spring?
Human use of artificial light is causing spring to come at least a week early in the UK, researchers at the University of Exeter in Cornwall have found.
New research led by a team of biologists based at the University’s Penryn campus highlights for the first time and at a national scale the relationship between the amount of artificial night-time light and the date of budburst in woodland trees.
The study, the result of a long term collaboration with independent environmental consultants Spalding Associates, in Truro, made use of data collected by citizen scientists from across the UK, after the Woodland Trust asked them to note down when they first saw sycamore, oak, ash and beech trees in leaf as part of the charity’s Nature’s Calendar initiative. The research team analysed this, information, correlated with satellite images of artificial lighting.
The research, published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, found that buds were bursting by up to 7.5 days earlier in brighter areas and that the effect was larger in later budding trees.
https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2016/06/160628221707.htm
No surprise for anyone paying attention.
A study published in late April by an environmental group found that Europe’s biofuel regulations created 80 percent more carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions than the conventional oil they replaced. The report estimates the biofuels create new emissions equivalent to putting an extra 12 million cars on the road.
Europe has been blending small percentages of biofuels into conventional gasoline and oil and diesel specifically to reduce CO2 emissions. The continent plans to require biofuels account for 10 percent of all fuel used by 2020. The EU’s CO2 emissions are estimated to have increased by 0.7 percent last year relative to 2014, even though the continent has spent an estimated $1.2 trillion financially supporting green and bio-energy with the goal of lowering CO2 emissions.
The arctic is greening. So says NASA. Its probably all that extra CO2.
Scientists from America’s space agency have found that nearly a third of the land cover in Canada and Alaska has greened in recent decades as a result of climate change.
As the far north warms as a result of climate changes, plants are moving north as well, “greening” the far north.
It also shows that the boreal forest is “browning” as a result of hotter and drier weather.
Greening is unmistakeable
NASA analyzed some 87,000 images captured by the Landsat satellite showing a trend towards much more plant life across the north. Their findings were reported in the science publication Journal of Remote Sensing under the title- The vegetation greenness trend in Canada and US Alaska from 1984–2012 Landsat data.
The data shows that about a third of the previously mostly barren tundra had become covered with plants. Areas that were previously grassland showed small shrubs had moved in, and in turn larger shrubs then took over even as the grasslands and other small plants moved further north.
The article also says:
a warming Arctic could release massive amounts of carbon stored in the Arctic soil and permafrost
Hey! Doesn’t more vegetation suck CO2 out of the air and store it in the ground?
Lets parse a couple of statements from this article:
April’s carbon dioxide level of 407.42 was a record 2.59 ppm rise from March.
More plant life caused by warmer weather caused by El Nino. OK.
Carbon dioxide levels are cyclical, peaking in May and then dropping until fall.
OK. More vegetation in the Northern Hemisphere (which has more land mass) dominates the annual cycle.
That’s on top of a steady 2.5 to 3 ppm yearly increase from the burning of fossil fuels, which means each year the world sets new record for levels of heat-trapping gas in the air.
Wait!
What if more vegetation = more plant life which means more CO2?
How much of that 2.5 to 3 ppm is more plant life?
Fracking has really dropped the price of natural gas in the USA leading to major switch from coal to natural gas in power plants.
But China is resisting this change because of costs.
China’s effort to promote natural gas over coal to cut pollution is facing resistance from buyers who prefer cheaper to cleaner. The world’s largest energy consumer seeks to raise the share of less-polluting natural gas to 10 percent of its energy mix by 2020 from 6 percent last year. Yet even with the government cutting the cost of gas, it remains almost three times more expensive than coal when used to generate electricity. That’s putting a damper on the switch from a fuel that now accounts for more than 60 percent of demand.
Electricity generated from gas costs almost three times that from coal — about 0.6 yuan a kilowatt-hour in eastern China, while coal-fired output costs 0.22 yuan.
The Shanghai city-gate price — a wholesale cost of gas delivered to distributors — was cut in November to 2.18 yuan a cubic meter. That’s about $9 per million British thermal units, compared with $2.039 for U.S. benchmark prices and $4.24 in the U.K. as of Thursday.
Fracking is amazing.
A new report by the Energy Information Administration (EIA) found hydraulic fracturing, or fracking, has pushed 
carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from electricity generation to the lowest levels since 1993.
Fracking created immense amounts of natural gas, lowering the price and causing the amount of electricity generated from natural gas to pass the amount of electricity generated from coal for seven of the months in 2015, according to the new EIA report. The report specifies that natural gas power plants produce about 40 percent of the CO2 emitted from a coal plant creating the same amount of electricity. This caused U.S. CO2 from the electricity sector to fall by 21 percent since their high in 2005.
“[T]he drop in natural gas prices, coupled with highly efficient natural gas-fired combined-cycle technology, made natural gas an attractive choice to serve baseload demand previously met by coal-fired generation,” read the report. “Coal-fired generation has decreased because of both the economics driven by cost per kilowatthour compared to that of natural gas and because of the effects of increased regulation on air emissions.”
It appears that fracking is causing a split in the green movement. Its about time.
If you are sane and you read the studies you know that fracking and cheap natural gas has actually lowered CO2 emissions in the USA by a significant amount by replacing coal.
“In 2015, U.S. energy-related carbon dioxide emissions were 12% below the 2005 levels, mostly because of changes in the electric power sector.
Energy-related CO2 emissions can be reduced by consuming less petroleum, coal, and natural gas, or by switching from more carbon-intensive fuels to less carbon-intensive fuels. Many of the changes in energy-related CO2 emissions in recent history have occurred in the electric power sector because of the decreased use of coal and the increased use of natural gas for electricity generation.”
Back to the green war …
Anti-fracking environmentalists, led by 350.org, Greenpeace and The Sierra Club, claim that natural gas is actually accelerating global warming more than coal due to methane emissions, even if it does cut carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions. These activists heavily doubt the official Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) figures on methane leaks, largely because of an article published by Bill McKibben, the leader of 350.org.
Pro-fracking environmentalists, led by The Breakthrough Institute, point out that McKibben misrepresented the scientific research on methane emissions to attack fracking. These environmentalists point out that a study published in the journal Science in March blames agricultural practices, not oil and natural gas, for increasing methane emissions. The same study points out that the American greenhouse gas emissions that cause global warming are declining largely due to fracking.
The split in the environmental movement has led to a green civil war over proposed EPA regulations intended to lower methane emissions from fracking. These regulations, however, would only lower the temperature by 0.0047 degrees Celsius by the year 2100, according to the EPA’s own data.
The anti-fracking zealots have done so much harm in most of Europe. In Canada and the USA fracking took off before the anti-frackers could get organized. The UK may (if it is lucky) win its fracking war (many years late).
sunshine hours 