Arctic Sea Ice Recovers Strongly In 2021

By Paul Homewood

 

 

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2012/sep/17/arctic-collapse-sea-ice

For years we were assured that the summer sea ice in the Arctic would be long gone by now. After all, even that expert Al Gore pronounced in 2009 that it would have all melted away within four years, and many other Arctic experts concurred.

But when it comes to climate clowns, surely the gold medal must go to Peter Wadhams, who is amazingly still Professor of Ocean Physics, and Head of the Polar Ocean Physics Group at Cambridge University. His predictions included these beauties:

• In 2012, he predicted that the Arctic would be ice-free by 2015/16
• In 2014, he thought it might last till 2020.
• In 2016, he confidently predicted the Arctic would be ice -free that summer (though curiously he now defined ‘ice-free’ as less than 1 million square kilometers!)

In reality, the ice has robustly recovered from its low extent in 2012, and this year has seen the highest minimum extent since 2014, and the fourth highest since 2007:

Suspend climate policies and cancel COP26 to save Britain from looming energy disaster

By Paul Homewood

The GWPF calls for suspension of climate policies:

 

The GWPF has consistently warned that Britain’s unilateral climate policies under both Labour and Conservative administrations were creating an insecure and expensive energy sector that would ultimately fail due to consumer costs and collapsing security of supply.

These warnings are now fully vindicated. Over-reliance on renewables and interconnectors and a failure to maintain a diverse portfolio of energy supply and electricity generation has resulted in a fragile, weather-dependent British system that is critically vulnerable to pan-European low wind conditions, interconnector failure, and high regional gas prices.

Income support subsidies to renewable energy investors currently total about £10 billion a year, and are still rising, while grid management costs have increased six-fold (to just under £2 billion a year) since the early 2000s when renewables were first introduced in significant quantities.

In spite of this large and growing cost burden, renewables do not protect the consumer effectively against fluctuations in gas prices, since wind and solar are both critically reliant on gas to guarantee security of supply. The UK’s apparent diversity of supply is an illusion.
The current energy cost and supply crisis is the result of decades of ill-considered climate policy which has prioritised costly emissions reductions technologies while neglecting the consumer interest, security of supply and macro-economic impact.

The severity of the current crisis merits emergency measures, not only to protect consumers and the economy, but also to avoid the crisis from turning into social disaster as winter approaches.

The GWPF is calling on the Government to:

1. Suspend all green levies on energy bills, funding subsidies temporarily out of taxation, but acting firmly to cancel these subsidies in the near term.

2. Cancel constraint payments, and compel wind and solar generators to pay for their own balancing costs, thus incentivising them to self-dispatch only when economic.

3. Remove all fiscal and other disincentives to oil and gas exploration, including shale gas, to increase domestic production levels.

4. Suspend carbon taxation on coal and gas generation in order to provide consumer relief and ensure security of supply.

5. Re-open recently closed gas storage facilities and support new storage projects.

6. Suspend all further policy initiatives directed towards the Net Zero target, including the Carbon Budgets, the heat pump targets, and the overly ambitious timetable for the ban on petrol and diesel engines, until the UK energy sector has been stabilised.

7. Facilitate the acceleration of building and deploying Small Modular Reactors for both electricity and heat.

Dr Benny Peiser, GWPF director, said:

Britain’s boasts of low carbon leadership are collapsing in humiliation. Our foolish and badly engineered green policies show the world that we have nothing to offer, except a grim warning. The Prime Minister should cancel COP26 and focus on saving Britain from a deepening energy crisis.”

Moray East Offshore Windfarm Costings

By Paul Homewood

Andrew Montford has updated his costings for Moray East offshore wind farm:

A year ago, I looked at the acccounts of Moray East, the first of the (allegedly) very cheap offshore windfarms that are supposed to be saving us from the perils of global warming. My review suggested that far from being very cheap, Moray East was in fact on the expensive side, with a likely cost approaching £4 billion, for a windfarm of around nearly 1 GW.

A year on, the windfarm has published another set of accounts, which reveal that in the last 12 months it has burned through another £1 billion – its spend to date is £2.2 billion. However, its website reveals that turbine installation only began in January this year. That means that there is well over a billion pounds of expenditure to come. That being the case, my estimate of the outturn cost remains unchanged at £3.8 billion. That said, there are hints that Moray East is having to do remedial works to protect offshore cables – the notices of operations speak of remedial works, placing rocks over the cables to protect them from scour. That work seems to have continued for the first six months of the year.

With a capital cost of £3.8 billion, and a prospective load factor in its first year of perhaps 47% (i.e. the same as Beatrice, the windfarm next door), we might optimistically expect Moray East to have a levelised cost of £130/MWh, which is pretty much typical of recent offshore units.

Which leaves us still with the mystery of why Moray East submitted a bid for a CfD at £57. It has been indexed up to £68 already, but even so, it’s hard to see how they make money in the short term.

https://www.thegwpf.com/moray-east-costs/

Record Power Prices & Blackouts Hit Germany

By Paul Homewood

 

Just in case anybody thinks that the energy crisis is just a UK one, think again!

This article is from the German site,  Blackout News:

 

The Germans have broken a record again. Drastically increased wholesale prices and expensive emission rights are driving electricity prices in Germany to ever new record levels. In addition, of course, there are also high taxes and levies for renewable energies and the network charges, which we have already listed in our article “This is why we have the most expensive electricity in the world”.

AEP Finally Wakes Up To The Green Nightmare

By Paul Homewood.

 

This, in a way, is an astonishing article by AEP.

For years he has been forecasting the rapid demise of fossil fuels, yet now he realises how critical they are:

 

 

British manufacturing leaders fear an industrial collapse over the winter as spiralling gas and electricity prices overwhelm the country’s energy defences.

Wafer-thin gas reserves have left the British economy almost uniquely vulnerable to an extreme global supply squeeze, and dangerously reliant on cross-Channel interconnectors that may be curtailed if Europe itself faces power blackouts and serious industrial stoppages.

 

Britain’s “Diverse and Reliable” Electricity System

By Paul Homewood 

 

 According to Kwasi Kwarteng, we have a diverse and reliable electricity system:

 

 

 

 

Well, we used to anyway!

 

The chart below sums up exactly we and Europe are in the mess we are now:

 

 

BP Energy Review

 

Because coal power capacity has been squeezed out of the system, we are now ultra reliant on natural gas when renewables fail to deliver, with the inevitable impact on power prices which we are now seeing.

Meanwhile if the government is serious in getting energy prices back down, I would suggest the following actions should be taken immediately:

 

• Abolish carbon pricing forthwith
• Support the opening of new oil and gas fields in the North Sea
• Impose an Intermittency Tax on wind and solar farms, so that they carry the full cost of intermittency, instead of the consumer.
• Take action to increase the UK’s natural gas storage capacity
• Abandon all spending plans for Net Zero, allowing money to be returned to taxpayers or energy users.

These actions would have an immediate impact on energy prices, as well as providing longer term energy security at little or no cost to the Exchequer.

Don’t Upset China, Say Greens

By Paul Homewood

 

Roger Harrabin talks to his green chums, and comes away more confused than ever!

 

 

 

 

China will be urged at the UN next week to speed up the timetable for curbing its planet-heating carbon emissions.

It will be nudged by the UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson, who’s experiencing climate pressure himself from activists blocking motorways.

But is the UK, with its world-leading emissions targets, the right target for demonstrators?

China produces 28% of global emissions and the UK just 1%. So shouldn’t they be picketing the Chinese embassy instead of the M25 motorway?

On the face of it, that seems a reasonable question. And some veteran activists would indeed support a well-judged China protest – we’ll come to that later.

But when I initially asked the radical green group Extinction Rebellion (XR) if they had considered demonstrating against China, it triggered a furious response.

An XR member tweeted accusing me of perpetuating anti-Chinese racist stereotypes and failing to report climate change properly.

Why so vitriolic?

Well, there are two reasons. The first is practical: climate campaigning groups like Greenpeace and WWF have offices in Beijing and if they rattle China too hard, they could be swiftly closed down.

The second reason touches a sore spot on the geopolitical history of climate change. For the purposes of climate negotiations, China has been regarded as a developing country because major industrialisation occurred from the mid-20th Century – after some other countries.

Picketing the Chinese embassy would ostensibly transfer blame for the current crisis on to Beijing – while easing pressure for carbon cuts in historically wealthy nations such as the UK.

That’s exactly what some newspaper columnists want.

Rich countries caused most warming

But it runs counter to global climate diplomacy, which acknowledges that it’s rich countries with a longer history of industrialisation that have caused most of the warming so far.

What’s more, much of the CO2 on China’s carbon accounts is created by manufacturing stuff that Western consumers buy.

So much stronger action from Beijing is certainly essential to prevent global heating getting even worse. But to be fair, China’s not quite as blameworthy as it seems.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-58584976

And so it goes in a similar vein for an interminably long time!

 

Overall his green buddies argue that:

• China will shut us down if we make trouble
• If we do protest, it will into those wicked right wingers’ hands
• The West is really to blame for making the world so much richer
• It’s not really China’s fault, because we buy their goods.

The consensus seems to be that we all wave a few banners, in the naive hope that China will cut its emissions in half next year.

I’m sorry, but I am obviously under a misapprehension here!

I thought this was all about saving the planet, not playing silly little green political games.

Obviously we are not heading for a climate apocalypse after all!

The Impossibility Of The 1.5C Target

By Paul Homewood

As you will recall, the Paris Agreement set a target of 2C warming from pre-industrial levels, but parties agreed to pursue efforts to limit the temperature increase to 1.5 °C. These of course were only “wishes”, and the Agreement had contained nothing of substance to meet either of these objectives.

Nevertheless, the upcoming COP26 is increasingly being presented as an opportunity to get global warming down from 2C to 1.5C. Even if you accept the basic premise of GHGs, this is a nonsense. As already pointed out, the national pledges made at Paris implied that emissions would carry on rising rapidly up to 2030, meaning that even 2C was not achievable. Now a new paper in Nature reveals just how far and how quickly emissions would have to be cut to meet the 1.5C target:

 

Biden’s Climate Forum Flop

By Paul Homewood

 

Sleepy Joe’s climate flop:

 

 

 

A number of key world leaders were notably absent from President Joe Biden’s Friday morning climate forum.

Chinese President Xi Jinping and Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi, representing the two countries the scientific community believes are the linchpins in effectively combating climate change, did not participate in the reconvening of the Major Economies Forum on Energy and Climate. Both leaders took part in the first forum, held by the White House in spring 2021.

French President Emmanuel Macron, German Chancellor Angela Merkel, and other European heads of state also did not participate, though the continent was represented by European Council President Charles Michel and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen.

The remaining participants, per White House officials, included President Alberto Fernandez of Argentina, Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina of Bangladesh, President Joko Widodo of Indonesia, President Moon Jae-in of South Korea, President Andres Manuel Lopez Obrador of Mexico, Prime Minister Boris Johnson of the United Kingdom, and United Nations Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. Biden, Secretary of State Antony Blinken, and Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry spoke on behalf of the United States.

White House officials noted to the Washington Examiner that although Xi, Merkel, and Modi did not participate in the president’s session, representatives from China, Germany, India, and Russia joined Kerry for a ministerial-level session following Biden’s departure.

https://news.yahoo.com/leaders-china-india-other-major-145800044.html?mc_cid=8f620249a5&mc_eid=4961da7cb1

BBC’s Anti-Mine Campaign Update

By Paul Homewood

 

 In my weekly column for The Conservative Woman this week, I have written an update of the story about the BBC’s campaign against the Cumbrian coal mine. You can read it here.

I am pleased to report that Guido has also linked to it, so it should get some good publicity: