Northern Hemisphere this time. Snow Water Equivalent.
March 2000: According to Dr David Viner, a senior research scientist at the climatic research unit (CRU) of the University of East Anglia,within a few years winter snowfall will become “a very rare and exciting event”.
“Children just aren’t going to know what snow is,” he said.
Snow seems to be ignoring David Viner.
Whales recovering. Thats good. Right? Not according to “experts”.
This is good … right?
Rapid growth in humpback whales in the Australian Southern Ocean could lead to a ‘population explosion’
And this is good too … right?
The population was brought to the brink of extinction in the 1960s, with just a few hundred surviving in the wild, a result of commercial whaling.
However, conservation efforts and the introduction of the Endangered Species Act saw the humpback population almost totally recover by 2015, to more than 25,000.
But nooo. Climate change rears its ugly head!
experts are now warning that the population could become too large for the ecosystem to support because of declining food sources in our oceans due to climate change.
What declining food sources? The population of whales just went up by 100x!!!
Climate change is such a party pooper.
If they stopped shooting 600 polar bears a year there would be a population explosion too. Oh wait … there is one.
The “experts” are always sad when the poster children of climate change refuse to die off.
From DMI
From DMI
From DMI
U.S. roads and bridges are in abysmal shape – and that was before the recent winter storms made things even worse.
In fact, the government rates over one-quarter of all urban interstates as in fair or poor condition and one-third of U.S. bridges need repair.
To fix the potholes and crumbling roads, federal, state and local governments rely on fuel taxes, which raise more than US$80 billion a year and pay for around three-quarters of what the U.S. spends on building new roads and maintaining them.
I recently purchased an electric car, the Tesla Model 3. While swerving down a particularly rutted highway in New York, the economist in me began to wonder, what will happen to the roads as fewer and fewer cars run on gasoline? Who will pay to fix the streets?
Fuel taxes 101
Every time you go to the pump, each gallon of fuel you purchase puts money into a variety of pockets.
About half goes to the drillers that extract oil from the earth. Just under a quarter pays the refineries to turn crude into gasoline. And around 6 percent goes to distributors.
The rest, or typically about 20 percent of every gallon of gas, goes to various governments to maintain and enhance the U.S. transportation’s infrastructure.
Currently, the federal government charges 18.4 cents per gallon of gasoline, which provides 85 percent to 90 percent of the Highway Trust Fund that finances most federal spending on highways and mass transit.
Read more at: https://phys.org/news/2019-02-electric-cars-america-crumbling-roads.html#jCp
Obvious to some, but here is a great essay.
“As for house cats, they don’t kill big, rare, threatened birds. “
“In fact, wind turbines are the most serious new threat to important bird species to emerge in decades. The rapidly spinning turbines act like an apex predator which big birds never evolved to deal with.
Solar farms have similarly large ecological impacts. Building a solar farm is a lot like building any other kind of farm. You have to clear the whole area of wildlife.
In order to build one of the biggest solar farms in California the developers hired biologists to pull threatened desert tortoises from their burrows, put them on the back of pickup trucks, transport them, and cage them in pens where many ended up dying.”
As we were learning of these impacts, it gradually dawned on me that there was no amount of technological innovation that could solve the fundamental problem with renewables.
You can make solar panels cheaper and wind turbines bigger, but you can’t make the sun shine more regularly or the wind blow more reliably. I came to understand the environmental implications of the physics of energy. In order to produce significant amounts of electricity from weak energy flows, you just have to spread them over enormous areas. In other words, the trouble with renewables isn’t fundamentally technical—it’s natural.
Read it all at Quillette.
sunshine hours 