A ‘once every 7.5 million years’ event is currently unfolding in Antarctica: ‘To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough’
A pithy comment from meteorologist Anthony Watts about this claim: To say he is an "incompetent f****** alarmist hack" isn't strong enough. We only have actual data on the Antarctic sea ice extent back to 1979.. everything else is just a wild ass guess
In the past eight years, sea ice in Antarctica has reached a new record low four times, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (ABC) reports. The first three times, ice levels that have dropped in the summer have rebounded in the winter.
But this year — during what is currently winter in Antarctica — scientists have confirmed that the ice is not re-forming, leaving long stretches of the Antarctic coastline bare.
What’s happening?
According to physical oceanographer Edward Doddridge, this is the first time an event like this has been observed, the ABC reports — and it’s extremely unlikely to have happened on its own.
“To say unprecedented isn’t strong enough,” Doddridge told the ABC. “This is a five-sigma event. … Which means that if nothing had changed, we’d expect to see a winter like this about once every 7.5 million years. … There are people saying it could be natural variability … but it’s very unlikely.”
According to Doddridge and others, the most likely cause is human activity. People create air pollution through activities like burning fuel, and that pollution traps heat on our planet, heating up the atmosphere and the ocean. Some combination of warmer water and higher-energy weather patterns is likely what’s melting the ice, scientists told the ABC.
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UK’s ‘broken’ energy system revealed as firms set to make £1.7bn in profit from customers
Britain’s energy suppliers are set to rake in a massive £1.74bn in profits from hard-pressed customers’ bills over the next 12 months, according to a shock new report.
It comes as a separate study found that regulator Ofgem’s energy price cap is preventing customers from accessing lower tariffs, harming competition and boosting inflation.
Rishi Sunak’s government has indicated it is unlikely to step in again to protect Britons still struggling with their energy bills – dismissing the idea of another subsidised price guarantee.
However, despite the ongoing cost of living crisis, UK energy companies will be allowed to increase the amount they make from customers on variable-rate tariffs.
Suppliers have seen the annual profit they make from the average customer on a variable tariff rise from £27 in 2017 to £130 in early 2023, according to Warm This Winter – a coalition of anti-poverty and green groups.
The gas and electricity giants will make £1.74bn profit from variable customers alone in the year ahead, according to the report, produced in partnership with the Future Energy Associates (FEA) analysts.
Simon Francis, coordinator of the End Fuel Poverty campaign, said the report “shines a light on the murky depths of Britain’s broken energy system”.
Calling for the Sunak government to introduce a “social tariff” to guarantee an affordable rate for low-income families, Mr Francis added: “Without a fundamental overhaul of the energy grid and energy tariffs, households will continue to lose out while suppliers will profit.”
The figure does not include fixed-rate tariffs – or profits made through allowances for Covid debt and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, which helped contribute to the enormous profits announced by British Gas and Scottish Power last month.
Ofgem recently raised how much gas and electricity suppliers could claim from hard-hit households to make up for costs incurred from both the pandemic and Ukraine war.
Since October 2022, energy firms have added an average of £41 a year to each bill as a “wholesale cost adjustment” to cover the extra costs of Vladimir Putin’s invasion.
And since April this year they also added an average of £12 a year in “Covid true up allowance” to cover the costs of bad debt which mounted up during the pandemic.
Last month British Gas announced record profits of £970m for the first six months of 2023, while Scottish Power made £576m in profit during the same period.
Labour condemned the “windfalls of war being pocketed by oil and gas companies”, while the Liberal Democrats said energy companies were being allowed to “rake in extraordinary profits while millions of families struggle”.
Suppliers are also set to make an increasing amount of profit from so-called EBIT (earnings before interest and taxes) and headroom allowances in the energy price cap set by Ofgem.
While household energy bills are set to rise again before falling back only slightly next year, the regulator said it will allow the permitted profit margin further to rise from 1.9 per cent of EBIT to 2.4 per cent from later in 2023.
Tessa Khan, director of the anti-fossil fuel group Uplift, part of the Warm This Winter campaign, said: “The government seems to think the energy crisis has gone away, but for millions of households this winter will be as hard as the last.”
She added: “For energy companies to be pocketing this money, when bills are still twice what they were and so many people are being pushed into energy debt, is completely unacceptable.”
Energy secretary Grant Shapps has indicated that the government is unlikely to revive the energy price guarantee, which kept the average bill at £2,500 a year over the winter, after it ended in June.
It comes as a new report from centre-right think tank the Centre for Policy Studies (CPS) said the energy cap has gone “far beyond” its original purpose of providing protection for customers to become a “de facto regulated market price”.
The report urges the government to move “from a wartime to a peacetime regulatory regime” by abolishing the regulator’s cap and returning to a retail market “with competition at its heart”.
It also backed calls for stronger protections against fuel poverty – such as a social tariff for households spending an excessive proportion of their income on energy bills.
“Utility firms are being actively discouraged from offering new, more affordable deals to customers because of state interventions in the energy market. Competition has all but disappeared, meaning prices are being kept high, further contributing to measured inflation,” said CPS energy and environment researcher Dillon Smith.
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/business/energy-bills-profits-british-gas-b2388968.html
**************************************************Plastic-eating fungi could help take a bite out of Earth's rampant pollution crisis, study suggests
In the forest, certain fungi attach to trees and fallen logs to break down and digest the carbon within their wood before releasing it as carbon dioxide. But when their preferred meal isn't available, these wood-decaying fungi can chow down on plastic instead, according to a new study published July 26 in the journal PLOS One.
White-rot fungi can break down lignin — an extremely strong organic polymer that helps give wood its rigidity — by using enzymes, which are proteins that accelerate the chemical reactions that take place within cells.
"We were thinking, if these fungi can decay these decay-resistant hardwoods, and lignin particularly … they have some weapons with them to decay some other polymers as well," such as polyethylene, or plastic, study co-author Renuka Attanayake, a plant pathology professor at the University of Kelaniya in Sri Lanka, told Live Science.
For their study, the researchers isolated 50 fungal samples from decaying hardwoods found in the Dimbulagala dry zone forest reserve in central Sri Lanka. Then, they divided the samples into two main experimental conditions: a dish with low-density polyethylene (a type of plastic), and a dish with both the plastic and wood. After 45 days, it was clear that the fungi consistently preferred wood to plastic, but in both experimental setups, particularly the dish with just plastic, the fungi broke down the polyethylene.
"We think that these organisms are metabolically flexible, I would say, and this may be an evolutionary advantage," Attanayake said. "[The fungi] had to survive in the environment utilizing whatever available."
Though the scientists don't yet know how the chemical pathways in the fungi change when they eat polyethylene, they do know that the white rot used some oxidizing enzymes to break down both the wood and the plastic.
To date, more than 430 species of fungi and bacteria have been found to break down plastic, according to Royal Botanical Gardens Kew in London. Scientists believe that identifying and replicating the enzymes these microorganisms secrete to degrade plastic could eventually help remove some of the 400 million tons of plastic waste produced each year, which often sits in landfills or overflows into the ocean rather than being recycled.
This new study is a "tiny baby step" toward understanding how fungi could help tackle plastic pollution, Attanayake said. First, though, scientists must see how wood-decaying fungi fare in different conditions, such as landfills, and whether they pose a threat to native trees. However, "under restricted conditions we may be able to utilize this thing one day, but a lot more research has to be done before that," she added.
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Environment can’t afford cost to save the planet
JUDITH SLOAN
It is slowly dawning on more people that destroying the environment to save the environment doesn’t really make any sense. The people living in rural and regional Australia have known this for some time, but more city folk are waking up to the fact that the process of decarbonisation imposes some hefty costs that are not evenly distributed.
Absent any zealous devotion to net zero by 2050, and recognising that the world’s top emitters are not on board – think here particularly China, but there are others – it’s hard to warm to the vision of Alan Finkel, former chief scientist. “Think forests of wind farms carpeting hills and cliffs from sea to sky. Think endless arrays of solar panels disappearing like a mirage into the desert. What we have now has to be scaled up by a factor of 20.”
While we might forgive him for his flowery prose – he is a scientist, after all – the harsh reality is that many of us are not keen to see our landscapes plundered and ruined by the intrusion of monstrous turbines measuring up to 250 metres in height (nearly three times the height of the Statue of Liberty) and fields of unattractive solar panels generating unwanted ambient heat for the surrounding district.
Would the residents of the seats of Kooyong, Warringah or Wentworth be happy to have their parks, empty land and adjoining water ways – perhaps some big backyards? – handed over to mainly overseas-owned renewable energy developers to construct intrusive and sometimes noisy installations in the quest of decarbonisation?
We all know the answer to that question. But the members for these seats (and others) are more than happy to impose the external costs on their country cousins and create unfortunate divisions within previously harmonious rural communities.
It is worth going through some facts here because facts are often missing in the emotional debate about saving the planet. The first thing to note is the large amount of land needed to accommodate renewable energy relative to high-energy-density fossil fuels and nuclear energy. For every megawatt hour produced, wind needs seven times more land than coal-fired plants and 10 times more than gas-fired plants, for example.
The second is the low-capacity efficiency of both wind and solar. The average output of wind installations is just over one-third of the nameplate capacities; it’s one-quarter for solar. This is an important point because the proponents of new renewable energy projects often quote the nameplate capacities and then spuriously claim they will power a given number of thousands of homes while ignoring the necessary and costly in-fill and back-up sources of electricity generation.
Another important point is the life cycles of renewable energy installations and how these compare with coal/gas plants and nuclear. The lifespan of onshore turbines ranges from 15 to 25 years; it’s shorter for offshore ones. Solar panels don’t generally last more than 20 years and their efficiency falls every year. There is virtually no scope to recycle either turbines or solar panels, which raises the tricky issue of their ultimate disposal. Coal, gas and nuclear plants can last five decades or longer.
One feature of the renewable energy landscape Finkel missed in his florid description is the kilometre upon kilometre of new transmission lines required to hook up wind and solar installations to the grid. Think here huge steel pylons up to 100 metres in height requiring easements of up to 50 metres on each side.
The point here is that no one would regard these unsightly new transmission lines weaving their way through agricultural land, national parks and regional communities as enhancing the environment. They may also constitute an extra fire risk. For those affected, it is a perfectly rational response to oppose their construction, to seek alternative paths or to advocate for underground transmission.
We know the good burghers of Kooyong, Warringah and Wentworth would do so. Attempting to bribe those affected with substantial annual annuities – they are currently more than $200,000 per kilometre – runs the risk of dividing communities as those who miss out on any compensation can still be adversely impacted.
The potential environmental damage caused by renewable energy projects has been highlighted by number of recent cases. A proposed wind farm north of Point Fairy in western Victoria has been approved subject to strict restrictions, including reducing the number of turbines from 59 to 18. This is because of the sensitive nature of the land for nesting brolgas and bent-wing bats. Construction will also be banned from July through to November. In all likelihood, this project will now not proceed.
A wind project on Robbins Island off the northwest coast of Tasmania has been approved to operate for only seven months of the year because of the threat to the orange-bellied parrots that live on the island. Again, this project is unlikely to go ahead.
Much controversy surrounds the Chalumbin wind farm development in far north Queensland where large tracts of land – up to 1200 hectares – will be cleared adjacent to a World Heritage-listed rainforest, west of Cairns. An earlier small-scale wind farm has resulted in a number of disused turbines simply rusting on the land. It’s hard to square this development with genuine concern for the environment, particularly as there are serious doubts about the windiness of the area.
Just in case you think offshore turbines are the solution to this dilemma, the reality is very different. Turbines as far out as 10 to 15 kilometres from the coast can still be seen from land. Again, the rational response from those who live nearby, including retired sea-changers, is to oppose these developments. Moreover, there is mounting evidence these turbines, which require enormous amounts of concrete to fix them in place, can interfere with marine life, including migrating whales.
The opposition to offshore wind farms may prove to be irrelevant as the economics of these projects massively deteriorate. The large Swedish renewable energy firm, Vattenfall, has recently stopped two major projects – one in the UK – citing higher inflation and capital costs. The huge losses incurred by the wind division of Siemen Energy are also noteworthy. The only way offshore projects will proceed in Australia is if the operators are given even more subsidies than are currently on the table, which will translate into even higher consumer prices.
It is now crunch time for Energy Minister Chris Bowen and a number of state governments. It’s clear the dream of more renewable energy, lower emissions and lower electricity prices is unattainable, if it ever was. The ditching of the Marinus Link between Tasmania and Victoria has finally put paid to the vision of the Apple Isle being the battery of the nation; indeed, it is now running short of power itself.
Plan B can’t come quickly enough, including the nuclear option – think of the environment.
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My other blogs. Main ones below
http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM )
http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)
http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)
http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)
http://snorphty.blogspot.com/ (TONGUE-TIED)
http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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