From DMI
Sea Ice Extent (Global Antarctic and Arctic) – Day 352 – 2018
UK Green Campaigners Furious!!! Outraged!!!
No shortage of phrases that are supposed to elicit anger at the government … but they just make me grin. Solar panels are subsidized by the poor.
The Government is closing an energy payment scheme which will mean homes with solar panels could be giving their excess power to the grid for free, provoking outrage among campaigners.
The Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy Department (Beis) has announced the closure of the ‘export tariff’ scheme.
It pays householders for excess power that is fed back into the grid, to new solar generators from next April.
The closure of the scheme has prompted fury among green campaigners with Dr Doug Parr, chief scientist for Greenpeace UK, describing it as ‘simply perverse‘.
Read the rest…
Does replacing coal with wood lower CO2 emissions? Nope.
Burning wood makes more CO2 than coal.
The conclusions high points:
- biomass used to displace fossil fuels injects CO2 into the atmosphere at the point of combustion and during harvest, processing and transport.
- the first impact of displacing coal with wood is an increase in atmospheric CO2relative to continued coal use
- before breakeven, atmospheric CO2 is higher than it would have been without the use of bioenergy, increasing radiative forcing and global average temperatures, worsening climate change, including potentially irreversible impacts that may arise before the long-run benefits are realized.
- biofuels are only beneficial in the long run if the harvested land is allowed to regrow to its pre-harvest biomass and maintained there.
- The carbon debt incurred when wood displaces coal may never be repaid if development, unplanned logging, erosion or increases in extreme temperatures, fire, and disease (all worsened by global warming) limit regrowth or accelerate the flux of carbon from soils to the atmosphere.
- harvesting existing forests and replanting with fast-growing species in managed plantations can worsen the climate impact of wood biofuel.
- growth in wood harvest for bioenergy causes a steady increase in atmospheric CO2 because the initial carbon debt incurred each year exceeds what is repaid.
- using wood in electricity generation worsens climate change for decades or more even though many of our assumptions favor wood
Scientists Discover Hidden ‘Supercolony’ of 1.5 Million Penguins After Tracking Poop From Space
Scientist: We are running out of penguins due to climate change.
Other Scientist: Nope.
Imagine if your community pooped so much it was visible from space. A supercolony of 1.5 million Antarctic Adélie penguins has bragging rights to this achievement, after scientists discovered the birds thanks to satellite images of their pink guano.
Despite its large population, the colony has managed to remain off the maps since it first took roost on the Danger Islands some 3,000 years ago. The archipelago, which is named for the dangerous ice cover that surrounds it even in the summer, sits near the tip of the Antarctic Peninsula, and has barely been explored.
But when scientists developed an algorithm for detecting penguin guano in NASA Landsat imagery, the Danger Islands showed up as an untapped hotspot.
“We thought that we knew where all the penguin colonies were,” said Heather Lynch, a Stony Brook University ecologist, at a news conference during the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting last week. “But in fact, this small archipelago, that measures only 15 kilometers from one end to the other, [has] more Adélie penguins than the entire rest of the Antarctic peninsula combined.”
Whistler Tries to Extort Money From Oil and Gas Companies – It Does Not Go Well
Whistler ski resort makes a mess of climate extortion.
The oil and gas portion of an investors conference in Whistler has been scrapped after the resort town’s mayor demanded fossil fuel companies pay for costs associated with climate change.
Mayor Jack Crompton posted a video apology to Facebook on Thursday after Postmedia reported on his letter to Calgary-based Canadian Natural Resources Ltd.
“I sincerely regret that anyone felt unwelcome here,” he said. “We recognize there are hundreds of thousands of Canadians who work directly and indirectly in the oil and gas sector and they are very proud of the work they do.”
In the letter, Crompton asked CNRL pay a “fair share” of the town’s “costs of climate change,” including part of a $1.4-million wildfire protection budget.
But the apology hasn’t stopped investors from cancelling their trips to Whistler for the 21st annual CIBC Whistler Institutional Investor Conference in January, and Postmedia has learned CIBC has cancelled the oil and gas sector’s part of the conference.
“The Canadian energy industry has been a global leader of responsible energy development,” CIBC said in a statement. “We are committed to our clients in the energy sector as they play a key role in driving the Canadian economy.”
Crompton acknowledged in his apology how the resort community depends on fossil fuels and said Whistler has “a responsibility to respond to the climate change challenge ourselves, and do it locally.”
Arctic Sea Ice Volume 17-Dec-2018
From DMI
Sea Ice Extent (Global Antarctic and Arctic) – Day 351 – 2018
We Don’t Mine Enough Rare Earth Metals to Replace Fossil Fuels With Renewable Energy
Oops. Not only is rare earth mining filthy … we don’t have enough mines to replace fossil fuels.
A new scientific study supported by the Dutch Ministry of Infrastructure warns that the renewable energy industry could be about to face a fundamental obstacle: shortages in the supply of rare metals.
To meet greenhouse gas emission reduction targets under the Paris Agreement, renewable energy production has to scale up fast. This means that global production of several rare earth minerals used in solar panels and wind turbines—especially neodymium, terbium, indium, dysprosium, and praseodymium—must grow twelvefold by 2050.
Fig 1. Graph depicting global critical metal demand for wind and solar panels, between 2020 and 2050, compared with the 2017 level of annual metal production (2017 = 1).
But according to the new study by Dutch energy systems company Metabolic, the “current global supply of several critical metals is insufficient to transition to a renewable energy system.”
Read the rest …
Popocatépetl Erupts
Mexican Volcano erupts
sunshine hours 