THE NEXT BIG THING IN CLIMATE NEWS PRESENTERS

Energy-conscious public broadcasters who want to cut CO2 emissions can eliminate air conditioning by trading in news presenters for tropical birds. The unsurpassed ability of  climate desk parrots to chirp press releases and parrot

Guardian ledes actually improves with rising studio temperatures. 

Besides their native aptitude for parroting

slogans, parrots can save CO2 in covering the climate crisis by flying to  headline scenes without fossil fuel intensive jets.

Those who stick to their perches at NPR, Extinction Rebellion and the BBC can set behavioral examples for further studio cost and carbon footprint economies.It costs far less to keep them in organic hemp seed than provide PBS and BBC humans with Starbucks Lattes or Green Room champagne.

 

THAT LOOKS FAMILIAR

Map of ye island on whych be buried the
thousand Tonnes of Gold Captain Musk gave
for his shares in the Company formerly known as
Twitter, soon to be relaunched as
AVAST !

 

 

THE HERITAGE FOUNDATION INHERITS THE WIND

• The saddest victim of climate change is Heritage Foundation  Stephen Moore. Demented by a savage heat-stroke, the WSJ journalist turned oil-patch PR flack has recast conservative climate policy as a bullet-spitting Two Minute Hate that lacks only Tucker Carlson's signature cackle :

• "It’s cars and planes and air conditioners and fossil fuels that are heating the planet. Wrong — these are the things that keep us cool" 

• "The Big Bang created this giant rock orbiting the sun."

• The biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions has been Mother Nature. 

• "Volcano eruptions have been... leading causes of greenhouse gases"

• Forest fires… have undone almost all the “progress” in reducing carbon emission

 

• Never mind Greece and Italy burning: 

Or vacationers fleeing Florida beaches as ocean temperatures rise high enough to poach a shark.

Confronted with 100 degree seawater, Moore  just points inland and starts understating desert heat.

Finding the weather in Tucson fine when

 "the thermostat [sic] hits 112." 

Never mind that the half-mile high metropolis is a dozen degrees cooler than Arizona's cities of the plain, where a fit 25 year old  just died as the mercury in Yuma hit 124.

THE WORST  OF MOORE'S IGNORAMUS ET IGNORABIMUS BITS ARE  BOLDED BELOW,  AND DISSECTED IN DETAIL HERE:

   Much of the Hot Air Is Coming From Washington

Stephen Moore

July 25, 2023

Baby, it’s hot outside.

Right on cue, a New York Times headline links this surge in temperatures to “climate change.”

Temperatures have climbed to well over 100 F in Las Vegas, Arizona, much of Texas, and New Mexico in recent weeks. In Phoenix, the heat wave is the worst since 1974.

Is The New York Times right? Is this climate change? Of course, yes. The climate on Earth has been changing since the Big Bang created this giant rock orbiting the sun.

We had multiple ice ages and heat waves long before we had coal mines, gas-guzzling automobiles and air conditioning. Or human-made CO2 emissions. Or human-made anything. 

The biggest source of greenhouse gas emissions has been Mother Nature. 

Forest fires and volcano eruptions have been some of the leading causes of greenhouse gases being released into the atmosphere. The forest fires in California last year and Canada this summer have undone almost all the “progress” in reducing carbon emissions from the green energy fad. Instead of outlawing cars, how about better forest management.

You’ve probably heard some of the preposterous scaremongering from politicians and the media. CNN declared in big, bold letters that “global temperatures are likely highest in at least 100,000 years.”

According to whom? “One scientist told CNN.” Gee, that sounds authoritative.

Yet other major news outlets, including the Washington Post “fact-checkers,” assured us this was true.

Huh? Does any sane person think anyone has scientifically reliable daily temperature data from 1,000 years ago, let alone 100,000 years ago? Is it really beyond doubt that the temperature this summer is hotter than in, say, July 90,000 B.C.?

One of my favorite climate change “fact-checkers,” Steve Milloy, who runs the blog JunkScience, has noted in a brilliant rebuttal that “reliable satellite temperature data for the planet didn’t even exist a century ago.”

But what we do know well is that the planetary temperature over the past 25 years shows no trend line toward extreme heat waves despite this year’s scorcher.

Then, if we look at the thermostat data climate researchers at the Heartland Institute have documented, the famous heat wave of the mid-1930s was at least on par with the current surge in temperatures and probably worse.

This begs the question: Was the 1930s heat blast due to “human-made climate change,” too?

That would be a virtual impossibility. The yearslong oppressive heat blasts during the Great Depression happened before 90% of the global CO2 emissions were belched into the Earth’s atmosphere.

We also know that death rates from extreme weather conditions have rarely, if ever, been lower than they are today.

That’s because what is different now than at any other time in history is we have refrigeration and air conditioning and cars and airplanes (to take us north during the summertime). Those on the Left have everything upside down. They think it’s cars and planes and air conditioners and fossil fuels that are heating the planet. Wrong — these are the things that keep us cool, even when the thermostat hits 112 in Tucson.

CAN LAB-GROWN STRUCTURED HORSEMEAT MAKE HORSELESS CARRIAGES OBSOLETE?

With lab-grown wood, researchers envision a future of furniture without deforestation

IF YOU WANT A TABLE,
THEN YOU SHOULD JUST GROW A TABLE

 

ANTHROPOCENE

By Prachi Patel February 4, 2021

Meat grown in labs is on its way from laboratory curiosity to marketable product...

So why stop at meat? Researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are now applying the concept to plants and trees. They have demonstrated a technique to grow plant-like tissues in the lab.

It’s an early proof-of-concept demonstration, but the team envisions a future in which you wouldn’t have to chop down trees or grow plants for years before using them for food, energy, consumer goods and infrastructure. “If you want a table, then you should just grow a table,” said Luis Fernando Velásquez-García, a scientist at MIT’s Microsystems Technology Laboratory in a press release.

Plant products are lauded as being renewable compared to their fossil fuel counterparts, says Ashley Beckwith, a mechanical engineer and lead author of the paper in the Journal of Cleaner Production. 

But producing biomaterials is an age-old process that involves growing whole plants, separating the small fraction of the harvested plant matter that is useful for food or materials, and throwing away or burning the leftovers.

Besides being inefficient, this process is constrained by climate, weather, and local resources. Plus, forestry and agriculture cause deforestation and biodiversity loss, and put pressure on environmental resources such as land and water while creating fertilizer and pesticide runoff.

Instead, growing plant tissue in laboratories uses “only resources we need to generate the materials we need,” she says. “Grown materials do not require access to farmable land and can be produced anywhere in the world, irrespective of climate and season, and require no harmful pesticides.”

The researchers grew wood-like plant tissue without soil or sunlight. They started by extracting live cells from the leaves of a Zinnia plant, and culturing them in a liquid growth medium. Then they transferred the cells to a 3D gel and added two plant hormones called auxin and cytokinin. By adjusting the levels of these hormones, the team coaxed the cells to produce lignin, the protein that gives plant tissue its rigidity and strength.

They could also make simple tweaks to the biochemical and mechanical properties of the gel scaffold to direct the cells to grow into certain types and produce plant material in customizable shapes. This could allow directly growing useful products without downstream processing, Beckwith says.

Lots more work needs to be done before lab-grown wood and plant fibers can be practical. 

Source: Ashley L. Beckwith, Jeffrey T.Borenstein, and Luis F. Velásquez-García. 

Tunable plant-based materials via in vitro cell culture using a Zinnia elegans model.

 Journal of Cleaner Production, 2021.

WATCHING THE GULF STREAM RUN AMOC

From RealClimate

What is happening in the Atlantic Ocean to the AMOC?

24 JUL 2023 BY STEFAN 

For various reasons I’m motivated to provide an update on my current thinking regarding the slowdown and tipping point of the Atlantic Meridional Overturning Circulation (AMOC). I attended a two-day AMOC session at the IUGG Conference the week before last, there’s been interesting new papers, and in the light of that I have been changing my views somewhat. Here’s ten points, starting from the very basics, so you can easily jump to the aspects that interest you.

Figure 1. A very rough schematic of the AMOC: warm northward flow near the surface, deep-water formation, deep southward return flow in 2000 – 3000 meters depth. In the background the observed sea surface temperature (SST) trend since 1993 from the Copernicus satellite service, showing the ‘cold blob’ in the northern Atlantic west of the British Isles discussed below. Graph by Ruijian Gou.

1. The AMOC is a big deal for climate. The Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC) is a large-scale overturning motion of the entire Atlantic, from the Southern Ocean to the high north. It moves around 15 million cubic meters of water per second (i.e. 15 Sverdrup). The AMOC water passes through the Gulf Stream along a part of its much longer journey, but contributes only the smaller part of its total flow of around 90 Sverdrup. The AMOC is driven by density differences and is a deep reaching vertical overturning of the Atlantic; the Gulf Stream is a near-surface current near the US Atlantic coast and mostly driven by winds. The AMOC however moves the bulk of the heat into the northern Atlantic so is highly relevant for climate, because the southward return flow is very cold and deep (heat transport is the flow multiplied by the temperature difference between northward and southward flow). The wind-driven pa 

THE GOLDEN AGE OF CLIMATE COMMUNICATION

 

IS OSLO ON THE WAY FROM OKLO TO OKALO?

Long ago, fissionable uranium was more abundant than today, because it had not yet had time to decay.  No enrichment process was necessary for water to turn rich deposits of uranium into natural nuclear reactors that went critical, boiling their surroundings and releasing all of the products of neutron capture and  fission most feared by the antinuclear activists of today, from   plutonium and radioiodine to cesium 137 and cobalt 60.

The first of these billion year old natural Chernobyls was discovered  by a French mining company at Oklo in Gabon  half a century ago, and  now , by sheer coincidence , the Finns have chosen a nearly eponymous site, Okalo, for the first nuclear waste repository designed to outlast the time scale of human evolution, which to the extent that it started in Africa, may have received a mutational nudge from the natural history of the reactors that lit up the neighborhood when the world was young.

That the two sites feature gneissic rocks of the same era may have contributed to the Finnish choice- a geological sojourn to Gabon might afford a preview of distant things to come.

Here is the BBC's report on the project

SIGNS OF CAFFEINE DENIAL AT NPR

NPR CLAIMS WARMING IS TURNING HONDURAN COFFEE  GROWERS INTO CLIMATE REFUGEES, BUT PRODUCTION HAS DOUBLED IN THE LAST DOZEN YEARS, DESPITE BACK-TO BACK HURRICANES IN 2020 AND 2021:

LAGUNAS LA IGUALA, Honduras — To reach the Pérez family's farm, you have to drive on miles of narrow dirt roads in the mountains of western Honduras, up and down steep slopes lined with row after row of dark green coffee plants.

Not all of those plants are thriving, and neither are the farmers who tend them.

"When it comes to coffee, it needs water to flower," says Francis Pérez, who grew up picking coffee on his family's farm here. "Often, it flowers but it doesn't grow berries — that's a big loss."

Pérez is… worried that he won't be able to support himself in farming like his parents did. So he's thinking about following hundreds of thousands of other Hondurans and migrating to the U.S.

"I feel that I'm stuck," he says in Spanish. "I don't feel like I can build the future I want here."

More people around the world are on the move than ever before, and the changing climate is one reason why. In Honduras, climate change is making it harder to live off the land...

Some of the reasons are familiar: violence, corruption and a lack of economic opportunity, exacerbated by the pandemic.

Now climate change is adding one more pressure to the list. Experts told us that climate disruptions are making younger Hondurans, and particularly young women, more likely to migrate to the U.S. in search of a better life.

NBC EXPLORES EASTER ISLAND CLIMATE POLICY LINKAGE

By Brandon Specktor, Live Science

Did climate change already kill all the aliens we've been searching for?

According to astrophysicist Adam Frank, it's certainly a possibility — and whether humans are doomed to the same fate may already be out of our hands.... a new paper ... in the journal Astrobiology that aims to take what Frank calls a "10,000-light-year" view of anthropogenic (human-caused) climate change. 

Using mathematical models based on the disappearance of a real-life lost civilization here on Earth (the former inhabitants of Easter Island), Frank and his colleagues simulated how various alien civilizations might rise and fall if they were to increasingly convert their planet's limited natural resources into energy. 

"The laws of physics demand that any young population, building an energy-intensive civilization like ours, is going to have feedback on its planet," Frank said in a statement. "Seeing climate change in this cosmic context may give us better insight into what's happening to us now and how to deal with it."

WHO'S WHO IN UFO EXOENGINEERING

The Ashtar Command is an etheric group of extraterrestrials, angels and lightbeings and millions of "starships" working as coordinators of the activities of the spacefleet over the western hemisphere. 

Under the spiritual guidance of Sananda (the Most Radiant One), the ascended master who walked the Earth incarnated as Jesus the Christ, Ashtar, the commander of the galactic fleet and representative for the Universal Council of the Confederation of Planets, is currently engaged in Earth's ascension-process.

There are 144,000 lightworkers called Eagles connected to the Command. That is the minimum of souls required for the ascension process.

They know they are one with all, and that they are Christ (fundamental to any discussion of New Age Christology is the recognition that New Agers distinguish between Jesus, a mere human vessel, and the Christ consciousness (variously defined, but always divine, and often a cosmic, impersonal entity)).

They serve like cosmic midwives in the ascension process; the birthing of humanity from dense-physical into physical-etheric bodies of Light, capable of ascending with the Earth into the fifth dimension. 

Lightwork is incorporating Jesus' message of Love and Light into our daily lives, ultimately connecting with our Higher-Self. Spiritual gravity can be measured by many beings of celestial order and others, in that not only planets but whole sectors of the galaxy can be categorized according to the vibration that they produce. As we learn more about the unfolding of the “Maya 2012 cycle” based on old manuscripts available on the planet as well as on many new channelings brought by key people... it has become increasingly evident that the core of our galaxy (Sagittarius) hosts the headquarters of our government.

1897 SPACE ALIEN INVASION BLAMED FOR CLIMATE CHANGE

Rep. Burchett: UFOs Could 'Turn Us Into Charcoal Briquette'

By Solange Reyner    |   Thursday, 06 July 2023 07:39 PM EDT

Rep. Tim Burchett, R-Tenn. warned lawmakers to take UFOs more seriously and said aliens have technology that could "turn us into charcoal briquette."

"They [extraterrestrial craft] can travel light years or at the speeds that we've seen defy physics as we know it," Burchett, who sits on the House Oversight Committee, told the "Event Horizon" podcast earlier this week.

"They can fly underwater and don't show a heat trail. We are out of our league. We couldn't fight them off what we wanted to."

The Congressman said Americans have  dealt with D.C. disinformation "since 1947, probably since about 1897 in what was the Aurora, Texas, 'UFO crash,'" and explained that if aliens have this technology, then "they could turn us into a charcoal briquette."

Burchett told the Washington Examiner on Wednesday that the committee plans to hold a hearing on UFOs but would not divulge any information on dates and witnesses, adding that when the witness list is published, "you'll see the naysayers try to discredit them as they've done with me."

LE 1er THERMIDOR ANNÉE DE DIRECTOIRE CLIMAT CCXXVII

NET ZERO TALKS, EVERYBODY WALKS

 University of Leeds NEWS RELEASE 17-JUL-2023

"Cap top 20% of energy users to reduce carbon emissions 

Consumers in the richer, developed nations will have to accept restrictions on their energy use if international climate change targets are to be met, warn researchers

Writing in the journal Nature Energy, the research team - led by Milena Büchs, Professor of Sustainable Welfare at the University of Leeds - analysed several scenarios to identify a potential solution.   

One option is to cap the top 20% of energy users...

Under the energy demand reduction scheme, the top-level energy users would see their energy use restricted to the value of energy use at the 80th percentile. 

In the scenario modelled, that would be 170.2 Giga Joules (GJ) per person per year…" 

One hundred & seventy Billion Joules a year may seem a hefty energy ration, but what does it mean on a daily basis? 

The Leeds press release , like the Nature Energy  article, fails to convert it into more practical units , like horsepower or kilowatt hours.

Dividing a capped ration of 170.2 GJ into a year yields just under half a GJ a day, which equals 127.7 Kilowatt-hours, and  gives you , like the billionaire across the street,  a top tier power budget of 5.3 Kilowatts on which to run your life, indoors and out. 

That's fine for computers, light and appliances, if a bit dodgy for  home air conditioning and heating in climates hot and cold, but what about your car? 

5.3 KW works out to a scant 7 horsepower, which though fine for a scooter,  is going to take an awfully long time to charge a

70 horsepower Prius, let alone a 283 HP Tesla. 

Things get worse when you run the numbers for flying. Since flying around can take 400 or more horsepower per passenger, you'll have to save up for Gigajoule  jet rides for business or pleasure. So forget about Jumbojets.

The only way out may be to fly Norwegian :

CLIMATE TOURISTS FLOCK TO DEATH VALLEY APOCALYPSE

                   

BBC SWEATS AS HEAT DOME FORMS OVER GUARDIAN LEDE EDITOR

IT WAS A HOT AND STORMY NIGHT
SLOWLY THE LEDE EDITOR TURNED, AND TYPED:

 UN Head: 

"The era of global warming has ended; the era of global boiling has arrived.” 

'World is at boiling point'

US weather man threatened with death

 for mentioning climate crisis

“Bubble of hot air that has inflated over southern Europe has turned Italy and surrounding countries into a giant pizza oven”

Temperatures reached 45C in Rome.

Death Valley threatens temperature records but tourists keep coming

US Republicans oppose climate funding as millions suffer in extreme weather

Florida ocean temperatures hit record high 

‘Hell on earth’: Phoenix’s extreme heatwave tests the limits of survival

Big oil quietly walks back on climate pledges as global heat records tumble

Fossil fuel workers are dying inhaling gases – despite US warnings to big oil

El Niño brewing in Pacific raises prospect of record-breaking heat

US faces deadly floods in north-east and longer heatwaves in south and west

Extreme  US  weather :  ‘Definitely unprecedented’  historic Vermont flooding ‘nowhere near over’, says governor

Amid record-shattering warmth this February, BP scaled back an earlier goal of lowering its emissions.

Tourists flock to Death Valley hoping to experience heat record.

CHANGING THE COLOR OF CLIMATE CHANGE

Scientists say they have detected shifts in colours across more than half of the world’s oceans.

This NASA Aqua Satellite image rshows the turbid waters surrounding southern Florida and the Florida Keys [File: NASA via AFP]

Published On 12 Jul 202312 Jul 2023

Over the past 20 years, huge swathes of the world’s oceans have changed colour, displaying a subtle greening towards the tropics that researchers say points to the effect of climate change on life in the world’s seas.

In new research published on Wednesday, scientists said they had detected shifts in colours across more than half of the world’s oceans – an expanse bigger than Earth’s total land area.  Authors of the study in the journal Nature think that is down to changes in ecosystems, and particularly in tiny plankton, which are the centrepiece of the marine food web and play a crucial part in stabilising our atmosphere.

“The reason we care about the colour changes is because the colour reflects the state of the ecosystem, so colour changes mean ecosystem changes,” lead author BB Cael, of Britain’s National Oceanography Centre, told AFP news agency.

The colour of the seas when seen from space can paint a picture of what is going on in the upper layers of the water.

A deep blue would tell you that there is not much life, while if the water is greener it is likely to have more activity, specifically from photosynthesising phytoplankton, which like plants contain the green pigment chlorophyll.

These produce a significant amount of the oxygen we breathe, are a crucial part of the global carbon cycle and are a foundational part of the ocean food web.

Life colours

Researchers are keen to develop ways of monitoring changes in ecosystems in order to track climate changes and enshrine protected areas.

But previous studies have suggested you would need three decades of ocean chlorophyll monitoring to detect a trend because of annual variations.

In the latest study, researchers broadened the colour spectrum, looking at seven hues of ocean colour monitored by the MODIS-Aqua satellite from 2002 to 2022.

These are too subtle for humans to see and would look largely blue to the naked eye.

The authors analysed the observational data to detect a trend above the year-to-year variability and then compared it to computer models of what would be expected with climate change.

They found that the real-world observations tallied closely with the changes predicted.

While the researchers said more work would be needed to find out what exactly those colour changes might mean, they said climate change was very likely to be the cause.

“I’ve been running simulations that have been telling me for years that these changes in ocean colour are going to happen,” said co-author Stephanie Dutkiewicz, of MIT’s Department of Earth, Atmospheric and Planetary Sciences at the Center for Global Change Science.

“To actually see it happening for real is not surprising, but frightening. And these changes are consistent with man-induced changes to our climate.”

THE TELEGRAPH'S MAN IN HYDROGEN LAND REPORTS

Limitless ‘white’ hydrogen under our feet may soon shatter all energy assumptions

There’s a real possibility that vast reserves of this clean fuel can be extracted at competitive costs

13 July 2023 • 6:59pm

Ambrose Evans-Pritchard

Every few years a disruptive technology comes out of left field and entirely changes the future of the global energy system, smashing into our consciousness like a thunderclap. It happened with shale fracking around 2009-2011, confounding OPEC, Russia, and an opinion establishment still hooked on the great red herring of peak oil.  America went from an alarming energy deficit to become the top exporter of oil and gas within a decade. The dollar came roaring back. So did American power.

Today’s exuberant rush for “white” hydrogen has the same feel. 

We are suddenly waking up to the very real possibility that vast reserves of natural hydrogen lie under our feet and can plausibly be extracted at costs that blow away the competition, ultimately undercutting methane on pure price. 

A couple of cranks from Cornell Scientists have long argued that pockets of exploitable geological hydrogen are more abundant than hitherto supposed.  The perpetual burning gas at Chimaera in Turkey – believed to be the source of the Olympic flame – has a hydrogen content reaching 11.3%

There is another such marvel at Los Fuegos Eternos in the Philippines.

It has been known since 2012 that hydrogen beneath the village of Bourakébougou in Mali has 98pc purity. The site was discovered in the 1980s when it blew up in the face of a local man smoking a cigarette while drilling for water. 

Professor Alain Prinzhofer from the Institute of Physics in Paris found that the gas flow remained constant over time – the pressure even rose – confirming a hypothesis that hydrogen can keep renewing itself by a chemical reaction underground.  What is new is that the world now needs that hydrogen and is acting on the insights. 

The US Geological Survey concluded in April that there is probably enough accessible hydrogen in the earth’s subsurface to meet total global demand for “hundreds of years”. Viacheslav Zgonnik, a Ukrainian geologist, thinks white geologic hydrogen could be so cheap and abundant that it conquers the energy market. 

“We think that we can reach $1 a kilo in the long-run and provide baseload power 24/7. It can be compressed for storage in steel tanks. It is not that expensive,” he said. 

If so, that raises awkward questions about the eye-watering subsidies going into green variants (from electrolysis) and blue variants (natural gas with carbon capture).

BOW WOW , WOOF WOOF !

Are the EU, the UK, Japan, and others, barking up the wrong tree with their hydrogen strategies? …

In May, Française De l’Énergie and researchers from GeoRessources made Europe’s biggest discovery to date, finding 15pc hydrogen content at a depth of 1,100 metres. 

“We never found much hydrogen before because we weren’t looking for it,” said Professor Jon Gluyas, a world expert on natural hydrogen at Durham University. Mass spectrometers and sensors were not set to detect it in normal drilling. 

Hydrogen has a little understood and incalculable advantage over fossil fuels. 

“The bore hole can theoretically produce for ever, just like geothermal. You don’t have to keep redrilling, and you don’t have the decline curve of oil and gas. That changes the economics of the project drastically,” Dr Zgonnik said.

“Nobody has yet made a commercial discovery ready for the market. As soon as one happens, there is going to be absolute frenzy,” he said.The next net zero billionaires might well be gas explorers drilling holes in the ground. The surprises never cease.