Germany is planning to rely on wind and solar. Last week on April 8th, wind and solar combined for 0.94GW out of 55GW.
Averages don’t keep the electricity on. They will need lots more brown coal when they shut down the nuclear power stations.
The whole week (just solar and wind). Yes, sometimes combined they generate a lot of electricity.
But on April 8th Germany went almost a 1.5 days where almost nothing was generated by wind.
Once upon a time asthma inhalers had a teensy amount of CFC’s (chlorofluorocarbons) in them.
But those asthmatics and their inhalers were evil and had to be punished because they ran afoul of the Montreal Protocol
“Albuterol inhalers contributed less than 0.1 percent of the CFCs released when the treaty was signed.”
The CFC inhalers were banned in the USA in 2008 and replaced with HFA inhalers which did not work as well.
HFA did not shoot the medication as far back as CGC did.
So … to placate the rabid AGW cults, 10s of million of asthmatics were forced to use substandard inhalers that cost more.
I have no idea what is the right data. The NSIDC says:
“The daily sea ice extent images are sporadically displaying erroneous data. NSIDC is investigating with our satellite data providers.”
After they fix the satellite I’ll have to decide whether to snooth the data or leave it as is. Maybe I’ll have a poll!
Its not every day you get to write that kind of headline. Nazis in Antarctica! Photos here.
At the beginning of 1939, a Nazi expedition explored a hitherto uncharted area of the Antarctic. By foot and plane, the Nazis surveyed an area between latitudes 69°10’ S and 76°30’ S and longitudes 11°30 W and 20°00’ E, totaling 600.000 sq. km. They called it Neuschwabenland, or New Swabia.
At first glance, Neuschwabenland doesn’t warrant much enthusiasm. Most of it is covered in eternal snow and ice, with only a few places ice-free, mainly around a few hot springs. Yet annexation was an express purpose of the expedition, led by captain Alfred Ritscher, ordered by Hermann Göring himself. Before leaving, the expedition members received practical advice from Richard E. Byrd, an American admiral and experienced polar explorer.
The planes were used for reconnaissance flights over the impassable hinterland of the heretofore unexplored part of Antarctica, and were thus instrumental in the German Antarctic Expedition. Each plane could stay in the air for a maximum of nine hours and no inland airfields were constructed, so this provided the outer limit for the area to be explored.
In total, 350.000 sq. km were overflown and more than 11.000 photographs taken during 15 flights. These pictures were used in drawing up a map of the territory. During the flights and expeditions on foot, hundreds of Nazi German flags were dropped to symbolize Germany’s possession of the territory. Additionally, the expedition established a provisory base camp and reported that around the so-called Schirmacher See there existed some vegetation, due to the hot springs near the lake.
There is an AGW site called RealClimate (I’m not going to link to them). They have a post up mocking the use of volcano’s as a source of CO2/SO2 etc compared to human sources.
I did a post a while back looking at the amount of SO2 produced by one volcano.
Here is another news snippet from the same period.
“The sulfur dioxide (SO2) emitted from the Holuhraun eruption has reached up to 60,000 tons per day and averaged close to 20,000 tons since it began. For comparison, all the SO2 pollution in Europe, from industries, energy production, traffic and house heating, etc., amounts to 14,000 tons per day.”
Admittedly this is unusual. But there are 3,000,000 undersea volcanoes.
And they could have pumped out a lot of CO2 in the past.
The climate-driven rise and fall of sea level during the past million years matches up with valleys and ridges on the seafloor, suggesting ice ages influence underwater volcanic eruptions, two new studies reveal. And because volcanic chains suture some 37,000 miles (59,500 kilometers) of ocean floor, the eruptions could pump out enough carbon dioxide gas to shift planetary temperatures, the study authors suggest.
The title of this post is Bishop Hill’s suggestion for a new cool catchphrase for landfills since it appear recycling is a massive money losing scam. It made me chuckle.
The news that a vast, shiny, new state of the art recycling centre in Lancashire is to be mothballed after incurring “catastrophic losses” will not come as much of a surprise to anyone who keeps an eye on the green scene. A moment’s thought by anyone with more than a couple of braincells to rub together leads to the inevitable conclusion that expending vast resources – energy, labour, capital, chemicals and the like – to turn low value items into even lower value items is not much of an economic proposition. With councils increasingly cash-strapped, it is becoming ever harder to sustain the illusion that recycling is anything other than virtue-signalling from middle-class poseurs.
Perhaps landfill needs to have its brand detoxified. Rather than wasting all those precious resources on collecting refuse to turn it into heaven knows what, let’s use the power of Mother Nature to break down and recycle what can be broken down, leaving what is inert to cause no trouble to anyone. Yes, it will be slower than what passes for recycling now, but aren’t greens in favour of using slower, more natural approaches whenever they can?
Every once in a while I joke that China has a spy high up in the EU making the EU do stupid stupid things … then I read these stories and I think I might be right.
British taxpayers have been forced to subsidise the very Chinese steel companies that are threatening 40,000 UK jobs, critics say.
It comes after revelations that the European Investment Bank has given so-called “soft loans” to China of £80million as part of a climate policy intended to lower emissions.
The astonishing figures include a loan of £40million to one of the world’s worst “steel dumping” culprits, the Wuhan Iron & Steel Corporation.
To add insult to injury Wuhun, the world’s eighth largest steel producer, boasts the Chinese state as its main shareholder. Wuhun is such a prolific steel dumper that it has now been especially targeted by the European Commission, which wants to slap it with 36.6 per cent tariffs.
Just five years ago, however, EU bankers decided to lend it €50million (£40million) to put towards a €207million (£167million) Euro Combined Cycle Plant.
The loan was paid out under the China Climate Change Framework Loan II. The money is supposed to persuade the steel giants to invest in lower emission technology.
Furious critics last night pointed out the irony that the loan was concerned with reducing the cost of power generation while one of the complaints of Tata Group is the high cost of energy associated with its steel production operation in South Wales.
PIOMAS is: “Sea Ice Volume is calculated using the Pan-Arctic Ice Ocean Modeling and Assimilation System (PIOMAS, Zhang and Rothrock, 2003) developed at APL/PSC. Anomalies for each day are calculated relative to the average over the 1979 -2014 period for that day of the year to remove the annual cycle.”
The PIOMAS daily data is up to the end of March 2016. Both graphs are just March. First graph is from 2011. Second is from 1979.
The “death spiral” for March PIOMAS ended in 2011.
References:
Volume time series and uncertainties:
Schweiger, A., R. Lindsay, J. Zhang, M. Steele, H. Stern, Uncertainty in modeled arctic sea ice volume, J. Geophys. Res., doi:10.1029/2011JC007084, 2011
Model details:
Zhang, J.L. and D.A. Rothrock, “Modeling global sea ice with a thickness and enthalpy distribution model in generalized curvilinear coordinates“, Mon. Weather Rev., 131, 845-861, 2003
sunshine hours 