Government Whitewashing Gummer’s £600,000 Green Scandal
By Paul Homewood
The inevitable cover up has begun, as Guido reports:
Lord Deben’s scandalous £600,000 conflicts of interests over vast payments funnelled to his firm, Sancroft International, from ‘Green’ corporations continues to be swept under the rug. Conor Burns submitted a written question earlier this week over Deben’s conflicts of interests, receiving a vapid response back from Energy Minister Claire Perry:
“The Chair of the Committee on Climate Change declared his interests with Sancroft International as part of his appointment process in 2012.
“We have received assurances from the Chief Executive of the Committee on Climate Change on their processes for managing potential conflicts of interests. These include a clear policy on conflicts of interests, publication of members’ interests, and actively inviting information on actual or perceived conflicts as the first agenda item at each Committee meeting.”
Perry has not done her homework – what Deben actually told MPs during his Pre-Appointment Hearing in 2012 was that:
“almost everything that it does has no connection with the Committee on Climate Change, but there was one thing that I felt we ought to disengage from, and I said that.”
Self-evidently Deben was not telling the whole truth given that £600,000 has now found its way to his company from big green businesses that Deben uses his powerful position as Climate Change Committee Chair to persistently lobby for handouts of vast sums of taxpayers’ cash to.
Cursory research reveals that Deben appears to have failed to declare his Sancroft interest more than 15 times in the House of Lords. Guido hears that Tory whips have been discouraging MPs from making a fuss about it, despite the fact that the Commissioner for Standards in the House of Lords has opened a formal inquiry into Deben’s behaviour. Why is the Government trying to cover up for him?
https://order-order.com/2019/02/14/government-whitewashing-lord-debens-600000-green-scandal/
Killer Toast Strikes Again!
By Paul Homewood
h/t Patsy Lacey
You can just see the death certificate now:
“CAUSE OF DEATH: Toast”
Climate Proof Your Home–Says Daily Mail
By Paul Homewood
h/t Patsy Lacey
It is time this nonsense was ended for once and for all.
Talking about the weather may be a long-standing British tradition, but designing our homes to suit the climate has only recently become commonplace.
The idea of ‘climate-proofing’ our homes has now become a priority for some, and with good reason.
Quite apart from short-term weather threats, with temperatures frequently going from freezing to double figures in a matter of days, there is a long-term need for action, too.
A report compiled by scientists and the Met Office, launched by Environment Secretary Michael Gove in November, says global warming might see average summer temperatures increase by 5.4c and winter norms rise 4.2c by 2070.
The country is likely to see more extreme weather in the form of wet winters, flooding and summer heatwaves — and even wildfires.
At the same time, there’s an energy crisis brewing. Back in 2016, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers forecast that as soon as 2025, the demand for electricity could outstrip its supply by as much as 40 per cent chiefly because of the country’s growing population.
So what can be done in our homes — now and in the future — to save energy, push down ever-increasing fuel bills, and engineer more eco-friendly long-term designs?
EASY SOLUTIONS
‘Most households could save hundreds a year and improve their green credentials with simple measures’, insists Stephen Naughtie, a London-based domestic energy consultant.
He suggests households irrigate gardens from a water butt: ‘It costs £50 but if you’re on a water meter, you could save £100 in just one hot summer.’
In addition, Naughtie says sealing draughts, insulating the loft and moving sofas away from radiators all make homes warmer without even turning the heating up.
Meanwhile a low-flow shower and ultra-low flush toilet can save a combined total of up to 15,000 litres of water per person per year. Water-efficient washing machines could save 5,000 litres of water annually per person. All of these could save up to £160 per year.
Solar shading in the form of shutters, curtains or reflective blinds over windows is another way to prevent homes overheating in the sun and so reducing the need for air conditioning.
LAWNED ROOFS
In the long-term more fundamental changes to our homes may be needed to fight climate change and energy shortages.
Hillarys, an interior design and house fittings company, says there are many big changes that house design is going through to prepare for global warming.
Tara Hall, spokesperson for Hillarys, says: ‘We’ve looked at the practical and often simple measures that all UK homeowners can start making now to ensure their homes are able to withstand more extreme weather conditions.’
These include ‘lawned’ green roofs which absorb sunshine and reduce the temperature in summer while aiding thermal efficiency in winter by helping contain heat inside.
LOOK TO FUTURE
Harvesting rain water and passive cooling — the strategic placing of windows, doors and walls to keep spaces cool in summer and warm in winter — are also becoming increasingly common in new homes.
The Unique Property Group is designing homes at Cricklewood in North London to be 35 per cent more energy-efficient than planning requirements. It’s building them in a factory then transporting in sections them to the site.
‘The modules can be specially wrapped within the factory to provide a high grade thermal fabric … to get close to zero emissions,’ explains Unique’s managing director, Sonny Gowans.
Village Makers — has a 51-home scheme at Great Oakley in Essex, where every property will have triple glazing plus solar panels and insulation that is so effective that little ‘switch on’ heating will be required. The stuff of science fiction? Not any more.
A UN report warns that the first effects of global warming on property may be felt in just 12 years so any action we take now could pay dividends quicker than we imagine.
It must be obvious to anybody with half a braincell that our summers are not going to 5.4C hotter by 2070, nor that winters will be 4.2 warmer.
Nor are winters getting any wetter, or summers drier:
My dad had a water butt in our house in the 1960s, but it was not because of global warming. We also had curtains!
What saving water, sealing drafts and insulating lofts has to do with climate change, heaven knows.
Instead of repeating UN warnings that the first effects of global warming on property may be felt in just 12 years, why does not the Mail give its readers the real facts for a change, and help expose the lies?
As for Michael Gove, shouldn’t he be more worried about statements like this, than fake UN pronouncements?
At the same time, there’s an energy crisis brewing. Back in 2016, the Institute of Mechanical Engineers forecast that as soon as 2025, the demand for electricity could outstrip its supply by as much as 40 per cent chiefly because of the country’s growing population.
Constraint Payments Rise To £124 Million
By Paul Homewood
https://www.ref.org.uk/constraints/indexbymth.php?order=mth&dir=desc&start=
Constraint payments to wind farms last year cost £124 millions last year, at an average of £72.29/MWh
These are paid when there is too much wind power for the grid to handle, and the cost is added to electricity bills.
Search For Shackleton’s Ship Abandoned As Sea Ice Moves In
By Paul Homewood
From the BBC:
The attempt this week to find Sir Ernest Shackleton’s missing ship, the Endurance, has ended – without success.
A UK-led expedition to the Weddell Sea sent a sub to the ocean floor to look for the sunken polar yacht, but this robot was itself lost in the process.
The team has now withdrawn from the area because of deteriorating weather and sea-ice conditions.
Shackleton and his crew were forced to give up the Endurance in 1915 when frozen floes crushed its hull.
Their escape across the Antarctic sea-ice on foot and in lifeboats is an astonishing story of fortitude and survival.
The idea of finding the remains of the Endurance has captivated maritime historians and archaeologists for decades.
"As a team we are clearly disappointed not to have been successful in our mission to find Endurance," said Mensun Bound, the director of exploration for the Weddell Sea Expedition 2019 group.
"Like Shackleton before us, who described the graveyard of Endurance as ‘the worst portion of the worst sea in the world’, our well laid plans were overcome by the rapidly moving ice, and what Shackleton called ‘the evil conditions of The Weddell Sea’."
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-47227657
Although the BBC story is a bit vague, the expedition website makes absolutely clear that the ship got out because of the real risk of being trapped in sea ice:
https://twitter.com/WeddellSeaExped/status/1095626803971006465
Indeed, the ship was already surrounded by sea ice before leaving:
https://twitter.com/WeddellSeaExped
Given that the Antarctic is now at the end of summer, it shows that there is just as much sea ice around in that part of the world as there was in Shackleton’s time a century ago.
This should not come as a surprise, as Scott and Shackleton’s log books gave exactly the same message, as did my analysis of Shackleton’s voyage.
It’s The Oceans, Stupid!
By Paul Homewood
https://www.ospo.noaa.gov/Products/ocean/sst/anomaly/index.html
Climate experts tell us that the oceans are warning rapidly, as a result of GHGs.
Perhaps they might explain how their little theory accounts for the large areas of ocean which show long term cooling.
If there is one thing we know about oceans, it is that they store such enormous amounts of energy that their temperatures cannot change at the flick of a switch.
Whatever forces are going on in the oceans, they are dwarfing any microscopic effects from atmospheric warming.
Minnesota’s Solar Pathway
By Paul Homewood
A reader sent me this recent study, claiming to show how a high level of wind and solar generation could be integrated into Minnesota’s grid.
http://mnsolarpathways.org/spa/#finding1
Its main finding was that solar and wind could supply 70% of Minnesota’s electricity by 2050, and at a cost comparable to natural gas:
I was expecting some technically sophisticated solutions, but there is actually very little new in it.
Having said that though, the authors have developed a clever toolkit for analysing hourly generation and demand patterns, to test out various scenarios.
But to put the above numbers into perspective, we need to look at Minnesota’s current demand load:
Australian Met Office Accused Of Man-Made Climate Change
By Paul Homewood
Graham Lloyd has picked up on the story that the Australian BOM have rewritten Australia’s temperature records for the second time in six years, and once again the rate of warming has conveniently increased.
One of the most aspects is that the BOM quietly introduced these changes last October , without announcing them:
Rather than the nation’s temperature having increased by 1C over the past century, the bureau’s updated homogenised data set, known as ACORN-SAT, now shows mean temperatures have risen by 1.23C.
Bureau data shows the rate of mean warming since 1960 has risen to 0.2C a decade, putting the more ambitious IPCC target of limiting future warming to 1.5C close to being broken.
Homogenisation of temperature records is considered necessary to account for changes in instrumentation, changes in site locations and changes in the time at which temperatures were taken. But the bureau’s treatment of historical data has been controversial. In recent years there have been claims that the organisation was treating temperature records in such a way that left it exposed to accusations that ideological pursuits had trumped good scientific practice.
Former prime minister Tony Abbott unsuccessfully pushed for a forensic investigation into the bureau’s methods.
A number of reviews of the bureau’s network equipment and its temperature data handling have been carried out. A technical panel found the homogenisation methods used were largely sound.
But a key recommendation, to include confidence levels or error margins in the data, remains unfulfilled. A BoM spokesman said work was under way on a number of scientific papers looking at uncertainty and confidence intervals for temperature data observations, adjustments and national averages.
“This work will be made available to the public following thorough peer review,” the spokesman said.
The bureau had fiercely defended the accuracy of its original ACORN-SAT data. But more recent analysis, including the removal of rounding errors, has effectively increased the rate of warming by 23 per cent, compared with the earlier homogenised ACORN version-one data.
Detailed technical information on the ACORN-SAT update was published late last year, but there has been no public announcement of the revised data, which is now considered the official national average temperature record. A bureau review of the homogenised data said the new version had “increased robustness and greater spatial coherence”.
The updating of the ACORN-SAT data coincided with the release last October of a new version of US weather agency NOAA’s global land temperature data set.
A bureau spokesman said ACORN-SAT version two was the bureau’s “improved official homogeneous temperature data set”. The new data set benefited from “the numerous scientific and technological advances which have occurred over the past six years, as well as the insights and recommendations from an independent ACORN-SAT technical advisory forum”.
“It also contains new data which was not previously available when the bureau developed the first data set,” he said.
The bureau said the updates had been independently peer-reviewed, and the findings were that the methodology was “rigorous and reliable”.
Scientist Jennifer Marohasy said that while version two of the data had used the same set of 112 stations as had been used in version one, the data had been remodelled relative to the raw data and also relative to the remodelled version one.
The bureau said the data in version two was subjected to two rounds of homogenisation, as had been the case with version one. “In total, 22 of the 966 adjustments applied in version two of the ACORN-SAT data set arose from this second-round procedure,” the bureau said.
A technical analysis of ACORN-SAT 2 by the bureau said 1910-2016 trends in Australian temperature were about 0.02C a decade higher than those found in version one. It said rounding errors in version one accounted for much of the new trend.
Dr Marohasy said the bureau had not explained how it could have generated a 23 per cent increase in the rate of warming, just through updating the official ACORN-SAT record.
The maximum-temperature trend from 1910 to 2016 at the 112 ACORN-SAT weather stations is now an increase of 0.116C a decade. It was 0.09C a decade in the earlier homogenised data.
The minimum-temperature trend is now an increase of 0.13C a decade, compared with 0.109C in ACORN-SAT 1.
The bureau said improved accounting for the widespread relocation of sites out of towns during the 1990s and 2000s, and the incorporation of recent data from new sites, were also substantial contributors.
Dr Marohasy said movement of sites was meant to be part of the adjustments made in the first version of the data.
“The incorporation of data from new sites may account for some of the 23 per cent increase,” Dr Marohasy said, “because the bureau have opened new sites in hotter western NSW, while closing higher-altitude weather stations, including Charlotte Pass in the Snowy Mountains.”
https://www.thegwpf.com/australian-met-office-accused-of-man-made-climate-change-again/
Polar Bears Prefer Dining At The Dump
By Paul Homewood
h/t Dennis Ambler
More on that story of polar bears and rubbish dumps.
First a look at the temperature trends on Novaya Zemlya:
https://data.giss.nasa.gov/cgi-bin/gistemp/stdata_show.cgi?id=222207440000&dt=1&ds=5
According to GISS, there is little trend, and temperatures were just as high in the 1930s and 40s, and even the early 1900s, when there were plenty of polar bears but no internet.
The attraction of rubbish dumps for polar bears is hardly new. The New York Times reported exactly the same happening in Churchill, Manitoba in 1971:
OTTAWA, Nov. 20—Last month, 24 polar bears were flown out of the town of Churchill, Manitoba, at a cost of about $400 each in a much publicized rescue operation.
Two of the bears were back in town this week and, according to officials in Ottawa, it is only a matter of time before the others follow.
The airlift, carried out with an old DC‐3 plane equipped with two cages, was organized and financed by Brian Davies, executive director of the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Mr. Davies is a 36‐year‐old conservationist of Fredericton, New Brunswick, who fellow conservationists may remember for his crusades to save the baby seals from the annual spring slaughters in the Gulf of St. Lawrence.
In an effort to rescue the Churchill polar bears, Mr. Davies in recent weeks raised $5,000 to start the airlift. His fund‐raising activities were so well publicized that his arrival in Churchill three weeks ago was attended by reporters from all over Canada, from London, Bonn and Paris, and by a television team from Chicago.After the airlift, what astonished Jack Howard, acting chief of the wildlife operations for the Manitoba government, was the speed and stamina displayed by the re turning animals.
“It may be only 150 miles by air,” he said, “But it’s more than 300 miles the way the polar bears travel,”
The 24 bears were flown to an isolated point on Hudson Bay east of Churchill where it was felt they might go about their winter seal hunting unmolested. The two animals made it back in about 15 days, which means they averaged 20 miles a day. Since polar bears in normal migration cover no more than five miles a day, wildlife men speculate that the rewards of the Churchill garbage dump may have stimulated the bears’ natural homing instinct.
The garbage dumps at Churchill and nearby Fort Churchill, a military installation, have become happy hunting grounds for the Arctic bears. Townsmen, bothered by the bears wandering their streets, had felt it better, easier and cheaper to move the animals than the dumps.
A. G. Loughrey, deputy di rector of the Canadian Wild life Service in Ottawa, told a reporter that globally the polar bear is in some danger of extinction. But this doesn’t seem to be the case in the Churchill area. On a recent flight around Churchill, a port city on Hudson Bay, 1,200 miles north of Ottawa, Mr. Howard spotted 50 to 60 of the animals in one area, and 160 near Cape Churchill.
Bear (sorry for the pun!) in mind that this report was filed in November, by when polar bears would normally be out on the ice.
The attractions of ready meals down at the dump were so great, that the bears were happy to walk 300 miles back to town.
And Churchill’s relationship with polar bears goes back much further:
Polar bears walking the streets on Novaya Zemlya are habituated garbage bears, not victims of climate change
By Paul Homewood
News about the “polar bear invasion” of Novayo Zemlya has inevitably been seized on by the media as the consequence of climate change:
However, saner headed local experts know the real reason, as the Barents Observer reveals:
This story could very well be headlined: «When internet came to Novaya Zemlya».
Locals started to post photos and video of the more than 50 polar bears in their neighborhood. Over the last week, social media as well as online newspapers globally have gone mad over the news coming out from one of the remotest towns on the planet, the closed military settlement of Belushaya Guba.
The little-known town on the Russian Arctic archipelago have since last autumn been struggling with polar bears walking the streets and around the corners of apartment- and office buildings. Even walking by a baby-stroller inside an entrance, one of the video-recordings show.
Regional authorities have declared a state of emergency after the bears no longer react to noice- and light signals from guards trying to scare them off.
Belushaya Guba, like the entire Novaya Zemlya, is closed off military area. The newly upgraded air base Rogachevo is just a few kilometers outside of town.
But why don’t the bears want to leave the settlement? As previously reported by the Barents Observer, the Kara Sea off the east coast of Novaya Zemlya is this winter packed with very close drift ice.
Now, it appears like the human food-waste has a much more central role in the story than just the warming Arctic.
But first a look at the many media, including the Barents Observer, that last week jumped to conclusions pointing at climate changes when the stories about polar bears in trouble, or making trouble, found its way to global newsrooms.
The blog portal Polar Bear Science has collected links to many of the newspapers reporting about the sensational images from Novaya Zemlya.
The Guardian writes «What polar bears in a Russian apartment block reveal about the climate crisis.» The Washington Post writes under the headline «A ‘mass invasion’ of polar bears is terrorizing an island town. Climate change is to blame» and CBC makes a similar conclusion headlining its article «Russian Arctic town overrun by polar bears, climate change blamed.»
Mats Forsberg has sailed expeditions since 1982 and has assisted in TV productions about the polar bears in the Arctic. He has first hand knowledge on polar bears’ behavior.
«These bears are well-fed,» he says to the Barents Observer after reviewing some of the videos.
«I would say these bears are not hanging around the houses due to climate changes. They have huge amount of food dumped into nature by humans,» Forsberg says and concludes: «This is purely a on-site human made problem.»
Some of the videos posted by local residents on Vkontakte show how tens of polar bears are eating garbage at the local dump site in Belushaya Guba. The bears actually look fat.
Evaluating media’s reporting, the blog site Polar Bear Science concludes. «Global warming is blamed for the problem but as is so often the case, that claim does not stand up to scrutiny.»
The blog is run by Susan Crockford, a zoologist with more than 35 years experience, including published work on the Holocene history of Arctic animals.
