Party Over for Alarmists as Sea Temperatures Plunge Around the World

Surface ocean temperatures are plunging rapidly around the world with scientists reported to be puzzled at the speed of the recent decline. Less puzzlement was to be found when the oceans were ‘boiling’ during the last two years. Plebs flying to Benidorm for an annual holiday and causing ‘global heating’ was a favourite explanation, although mainstream media put it in marginally more polite terms.

For almost two years, this boiling ocean trope has been a reliable standby for every alarmist spiv promoting the Net Zero insanity. But expect the scare to be parked for a while along with coral reefs, polar bears and Arctic sea ice. It is a very good bet that nobody in mainstream media is going to report the oceans are cooling at what are remarkably dramatic rates. Few fear-mongering points will be on offer for drawing attention to this inconvenient news.

Until recently, the surface sea temperature (SST) graph below showing measurements up the Arctic and down to Antarctica was rarely out of the public prints.

This year the temperature shown by the black line flatlined until April compared with the substantial rise in orange for 2023. It then fell more sharply than last year and is now 0.2°C lower.

In the Atlantic, the turnaround has been even more dramatic. Temperatures have cooled quickly since May and in the central equatorial region are up to 1°C colder than average for this time of year. The American weather service NOAA notes that the high SSTs at the start of the year were the strongest warm event since 1982. The rapid transition from warm to cold SST anomalies (current temperatures compared over a longer past trend) was said to be remarkable. “Never before in the observed record has the eastern equatorial Atlantic swung so quickly from one to another extreme event,” observes NOAA.

It is not unusual for waters in these parts of the Atlantic to cool in the summer months as seasonal southern winds drag surface waters away from the equator and expose deeper colder water. The process is called ‘upwelling’, but this year it coincided with a weakening of the trade winds which should have led to warmer anomalies. “As of now, these atmospheric conditions… are quite perplexing.” NOAA says it will need to dig deeper to reveal the exact causes of this “seemingly unusual event”.

These days we must of course welcome any outbreak of scientific head-scratching in the usually ‘settled’ climate business. Temperatures suddenly go down and scientists are seemingly clueless as to why it happens. Yet temperatures go up and it is all due to global warming and humans must return, instanter, to a pre-industrial societal and economic hellhole. In fact, scientists have little idea how a great deal of weather suddenly changes and how the sea and atmosphere warms and cools. Over 100 super-computer models are simply not up to the job of explaining natural variation in a chaotic, non-linear atmosphere. The fact that some scientists are perplexed when temperatures go down, but full of fear-mongering explanations when they go up, says it all.

It is not only in the Atlantic that surface temperatures are plunging. In the Pacific, a strong El Niño natural variation that warms the ocean and affects weather across the planet has dissipated. The higher SST anomalies recorded over the last year have fallen sharply as the latest figures below from NOAA show. The blocks record the anomaly on a rolling three-month basis with the last figure of 0.2°C referring to May, June and July 2024. As the latest figures along with records that go back much further show, recent changes in SSTs due to El Niño are nothing out of the ordinary. It is shameful how the figures have been used incessantly to whip up unnecessary alarm and anxiety around the world. Everyone from UN Secretary General Antonio ‘Global Boiling’ Guterres to GB News climate comedy turn ‘Jim’ Dale should hang their heads in shame.

The recent El Niño was powerful although the natural distortion in the centigrade anomaly record was not as large as those produced by a previous El Niño around 2015-16. Over the last 25 years, all of the global temperature boosts – apart from those retrospectively added by state-funded compilers – have occurred at around the same time as El Niño formations. Strong oscillations have been recorded in 1998, 2016 and 2024. As we have seen, alarmists have taken full advantage of the changes wrought by the latest El Niño effect, particularly the warmer ocean temperatures that have arisen. As with most natural variation, that process is being reversed – what goes up, usually comes down.

According to NOAA, SSTs in three of the four locations around the Pacific used to determine the presence of an El Niño are now below the long term trend. Temperatures have also dropped considerably in many parts of the Pacific down to 300 metres as the graph below for the central and eastern area shows.

Meanwhile, spare a thought for narrative-driven messengers such as the BBC’s Georgina Rannard. Last August she claimed that while scientists have known that the sea surface would continue to warm up because of greenhouse gas emissions, “they are still investigating exactly why temperatures have surged so far above previous years”.

What a difference a few months makes in the climate alarmism business

https://dailysceptic.org/2024/08/27/party-over-for-alarmists-as-sea-temperatures-plunge-around-the-world/

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‘Climate Change’ is Not Causing Anxiety But The Media Is

Evie Magazine, a conservative-leaning women’s publication, recently posted an article titled “Climate Change Anxiety Is A Cause For The Decline In The Birth Rate,” in which the author claims that human-caused global warming is leading to climate anxiety that misdirects its wrath at larger families

This is mostly false.

‘Climate change’ is not producing anxiety so much as false and misleading alarmist media coverage is, and blaming large families for bad weather is equally wrong.

The article begins with writer Carolyn Ferguson claiming that “last year was the hottest year on record for the world,” that the United States is somehow warming faster than the rest of the world, and that “many are feeling the effects of global warming this year.”

This is false.

The idea that any given country is heating up faster than the rest of the world has been done to death, and has been claimed for just about every single country on the planet.

It should be obvious that every place on Earth cannot be warming faster than the rest of the world.

Scientists are selecting regions and comparing them independently over different time frames, using different datasets and methods and whatever time frame is most optimal to show the most warming.

This makes these comparisons worthless.

For the United States, the Climate Reference Network stations record of high-temperature anomalies, e.g., extreme heat, has not shown an increase in those high-temperature events since the best records began in 2005. (See figure below)

According to longer-term data, heat waves in the U.S. today areless frequent and severe than they were in the 1930s, as seen below:

Likewise, as discussed in this Climate Realism post, the change in the number of days with temperatures over 95 degrees Fahrenheit has declined for the majority of the country. Only 10 U.S. states show an increasing trend.

Even looking at proxy data globally, which gives an idea of ancient temperatures, does not indicate we are in a period that can be described as ‘the hottest on record’.

Today’s temperatures according to some sources appear similar to that of the Medieval or Roman warm periods, roughly 1,000 to 2,500 years ago, respectively.

Media claims to the contrary are just propaganda.

The majority of the ‘abnormal’ warming from last year occurred in Antarctica, where temperatures remained well below freezing, but were simply “less cold” than normally occurred during certain months, particularly September.

A significant portion of last year’s heat globally was boosted primarily due to the natural El Niño cycle, which is known to bump up average temperatures for much of the globe.

This effect is easily traced in the temperature records.

This is not to say an average warming has not occurred over the past hundred-plus years, but it is not unprecedented nor is it alarming.

The Evie post proceeds to claim that aggression rises amid higher temperatures, writing “one of the most often overlooked corollaries is a rise in communal anger and aggression.”

The “heat makes people crazy” idea has been floated several times over the years, but even the article the Evie post links to admits that it’s likely heat is not the main factor in most of the studies that found aggression.

The social sciences and psychology experiments are riddled with uncontrollable variables.

Without attempting to conduct any studies, the plain fact that places like Florida and Mexico, the Bahamas, and other hot tropical locales are popular relaxation destinations seems to throw cold water on the hypothesis.

Why would anyone go someplace that makes them angrier or more aggressive for a vacation?

Discomfort can be aggravating, certainly, but it’s not just higher temperatures alone. Ferguson then gets to the claim that mental health professionals are “seeing more patients come in with symptoms of climate change anxiety, which is supposedly the root of many activists’ anger when it comes to large families.”

Climate Realism has written extensively about how misleading the ‘climate anxiety’ diagnosis is here, here, and here, for example, often shifting the blame from the true culprits.

Something like “climate anxiety” does exist – but it is a media-driven phenomenon because of the constant drumbeat of impending doom, not from any actual lived experience of warming.

Constant media coverage telling people that we are hurtling towards “global boiling,” that every weather extreme is because of you and your neighbor’s use of gasoline, including from typically conservative publications like Evie Magazine, is what’s causing anxiety in people.

While Evie is right that climate activists should not turn their ire on big, traditional families, they are wrong that climate anxiety is a legitimate phenomenon.

https://principia-scientific.com/climate-change-is-not-causing-anxiety-but-the-media-is/

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Kamala campaign flip-flops on EV mandates

A campaign official for Kamala Harris said Tuesday that it is a “lie” that the vice president Kamala Harris supports implementing an electric vehicle mandate, even though she cosponsored legislation doing exactly that in 2019.

Harris’s director of rapid response, Ammar Moussa, wrote in a campaign email ahead of Trump running mate J.D. Vance’s remarks on the economy in Michigan that the Ohio senator would “undoubtedly lie, gaslight, and try to run away from the truth.” One such lie, he cautioned, is that “Vice President Harris wants to force every American to own an electric vehicle.”

“Vice President Harris does not support an electric vehicle mandate,” Moussa claimed, before citing several news stories that argued the Biden administration only incentivized, rather than mandated, electric vehicle production by car manufacturers. The administration spent billions to build just a handful of electric vehicle chargers and introduced tax credits for electric vehicle purchases. In addition, however, the Biden administration pushed through a new tailpipe emissions rule through the Environmental Protection Agency that would force car manufacturers to significantly scale back production of gas-powered cars. “The regulation would essentially require automakers to sell more electric vehicles and hybrids by gradually tightening limits on tailpipe pollution,” the New York Times reported in March.

Even more damningly, Harris also supported an electric vehicle mandate when she serves as the junior senator from California. In April 2019, months after announcing her bid to become the 2020 Democratic presidential nominee, Harris cosponsored the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act of 2019. The bill, which was introduced by Senator Jeff Merkley and Representative Mike Levin, presented “bold plan for transitioning the United States to 100% zero-emission vehicles.”

The original version of the Zero-Emission Vehicles Act of 2019 would require 50 percent of new passenger vehicle sales to be automobiles that use zero emissions — electric or hydrogen-powered cars and trucks. The bill would require all new car sales be zero emission vehicles by 2040, according to text of the bill and a press release from Senator Merkley’s office.

The legislation gave authority to the EPA administrator to issue an “injunction on the manufacture of any passenger vehicles other than zero-emission vehicles by a vehicle manufacturer” by 2040.

Harris supported an even more aggressive version of the legislation that would ban non-zero-emission vehicles by 2035, according to an archived page of her 2020 campaign website obtained by the Washington Free Beacon.

Harris’s campaign has also claimed that she no longer supports a fracking ban and other key policies of her 2020 Democratic primary campaign. Harris herself has not walked back any of these positions or explained why and how she changed her mind so radically in just one election cycle.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/kamala-campaign-flip-flops-on-ev-mandates/

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Pulling the Plug: State Regulations Force Bankruptcy of California Solar Company

On the one hand, the state of California has decided that it shall become an all-electric, all-renewable power state by, well, for practical purposes, next Thursday.

On the other hand, the state gives utilities a massive break on how much they pay home solar generators for their excess power, leading to the just announced bankruptcy of California-based solar system installer SunPower.

Welcome to schizophrenic Sacramento.

Monday, former industry leader SunPower filed Chapter 11 and said its remaining assets will be purchased by Complete Solaria for $45 million. Complete will also take over an undisclosed amount of SunPower liabilities as part of the deal.

"For nearly 40 years, SunPower has made solar energy more accessible to Americans, driven by our mission to change the way our world is powered,” said Tom Werner, Executive Chairman at SunPower. "In light of the challenges SunPower has faced, the proposed transaction offers a significant opportunity for key parts of our business to continue our legacy under new ownership. We are working to secure long-term solutions for the remaining areas of our business, while maintaining our focus on supporting our valued employees, customers, dealers, builders, and partners."

The failure of SunPower, say industry experts, is directly related to the changes made by the California Public Utilities Commission in December, 2022. Those changes involved, in part, cutting the rate new home solar system owners would be paid for their excess power by 75%, completely eliminating the financial incentive to install new systems (much of the industry’s appeal was the ability to say that household solar would eventually pay for itself.)

That is no longer the case.

Bernadette Del Chiaro, Executive Director of the California Solar & Storage Association, acknowledged that heightened competition and internal SunPower issues played a role in the bankruptcy but that it was California’s regulatory environment that was the main cause for the company’s demise.

The CPUC has “policies that disproportionately favor monopoly utilities like PG&E at the expense of solar businesses, consumers and the environment,” Del Chiaro said.

“SunPower is the largest solar company to fall in the past year, but it is far from the only casualty. Dozens of companies have gone bankrupt or left California since the start of the “net billing tariff” in April 2023,” Del Chiaro said. “In total, 17,000 jobs have been lost, sales are down 60%, and 81% of California solar companies remain concerned about their ability to stay in business.”

The reduction in the reimbursement was made, in theory, to maintain grid reliability as homes with solar, the utilities claim, do not pay their fair share to cover the “fixed costs” of operating the statewide grid.

“All this (was) in the name of a utility lie about a so-called ‘solar cost-shift’ which scapegoats California families and businesses who embrace energy independence and clean energy,” Del Chiaro said. “The truth is, PG&E, Southern California Edison and San Diego Gas & Electric allow their spending to get out of control, ballooning their profits, and driving up electric rates.”

The utilities’ argument was similar to “why give electric cars a tax break when the use the roads as much as regular cars and don’t pay fuel taxes?”

But there is a difference – a big difference: cars do not generate power for the utility to then use and sell – solar systems do.

What the decision was actually like, though, is the incident in late 2022 which involved the state announcing its mandate that every new car sold in the state must be electric by 2025 and then – literally a few days later – asked electric car owners to not charge them because the power grid was too strained.

The millions of rooftop solar systems (including larger systems on commercial buildings and such) in the state provide about 10% of the total electricity used in California.

Considering the various electric/renewable energy mandates the state has imposed, the buckling of SunPower and the wobbliness of the entire industry could make reaching those already absurd goals impossible.

It took ten years to install the first million, five years to install the second million, and now installations are at a ten-year low,” Del Chiaro said.

It should be noted that the execrable Pacific Gas and Electric (PG&E) – even more so than the other utilities – has a direct pipeline into Sacramento regulators – some even used to work for the company – and politicians – it doles out millions, including money directly to people like First Partner Jennifer Seibel Newsom for her “films.”

PG&E (remember - the company pleaded guilty to actually killing people) to purposefully kick an evil but sadly not dead horse, has been expertly manipulating the levers of power in the capitol for more than a century (too bad they are better at that than manipulating actual power). And they - short of the Second Coming or the actual revolution – are primed to continue to do so for the next 100 years.

“Yes - A convicted felon dictates energy policy for California,” acidly noted Del Chiaro.

So, Go Electric! says the state…just don’t cost the utilities any money or any Sacramento leverage.

We’ll see how that works out.

https://thomas699.substack.com/p/pulling-the-plug

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40°C in August? Why is Australia so ridiculously hot right now?

Blaming the heat on global warming is absurd. It is mere unprovable assertion. And note that is was as hot in 1910, long before the modern industrial economy was widespread

It’s winter in Australia, but as you’ve probably noticed, the weather is unusually warm. The top temperatures over large parts of the country this weekend were well above average for this time of year.

The outback town of Oodnadatta in South Australia recorded 38.5°C on Friday and 39.4°C on Saturday — about 16°C above average. Both days were well above the state’s previous winter temperature record. In large parts of Australia, the heat is expected to persist into the coming week.

A high-pressure system is bringing this unusual heat — and it’s hanging around. So temperature records have already fallen and may continue to be broken for some towns in the next few days.

It’s no secret the world is warming. In fact 2024 is shaping up to be the hottest year on record. Climate change is upon us. Historical averages are becoming just that: a thing of the past.

That’s why this winter heat is concerning. The warming trend will continue for at least as long as we keep burning fossil fuels and polluting the atmosphere. Remember, this is only August. The heatwaves of spring and summer are only going to be hotter.

The Bureau of Meteorology was expecting many records to be broken over the weekend across several states. On Thursday, bureau meteorologist Angus Hines described:

A scorching end to winter, with widespread heat around the country in coming days, including the chance of winter records across multiple states for maximum temperature.

The amount of heat plunging into central Australia was particularly unusual, Hines said.

On Friday, temperatures across northern South Australia and southern parts of the Northern Territory were as much as 15°C above average.

Temperatures continued to soar across northern parts of Western Australia over the weekend, with over 40°C recorded at Fitzroy Crossing on Sunday. It has been 2–12°C above average from Townsville all the way down to Melbourne for several days in a row.

Bear in mind, it’s only August. As Hines said, the fire weather season hasn’t yet hit most of Australia, but the current conditions — hot, dry and sometimes windy — are bringing moderate to high fire danger across Australia. It may also bring dusty conditions to central Australia.

And for latitudes north of Sydney and Perth, most of the coming week will be warm.

What’s causing the winter warmth?

In recent days a stubborn high pressure system has sat over eastern Australia and the Tasman Sea. It has kept skies clear over much of the continent and brought northerly winds over many areas, transporting warm air to the south.

High pressure promotes warm weather — both through clearer skies that bring more sunshine and by promoting the descent of air that causes heating.

By late August, both the intensity of the sun and the length of the day have increased. So the centre of Australia can really warm up when under the right conditions.

High pressure in June can be associated with cooler conditions, because more heat is lost from the surface during those long winter nights. But that’s already less of an issue by late August.

This kind of weather setup has occurred in the past. Late-winter or early-spring heat does sometimes occur in Australia. However, this warm spell is exceptional, as highlighted by the broken temperature records across the country.

The consequences of humanity’s continued greenhouse gas emissions are clear. Australia’s winters are getting warmer overall. And winter “heatwaves” are becoming warmer.

Australia’s three warmest Augusts on record have all occurred since 2000 — and last August was the second-warmest since * 1910 *. When the right weather conditions occur for winter warmth across Australia, the temperatures are higher than a century ago.

The warmth we are experiencing now comes off the back of a recent run of global temperature records and extreme heat events across the Northern Hemisphere.

This warm spell is set to continue, with temperatures above 30°C forecast from Wednesday through to Sunday in Brisbane. The outlook for spring points to continued above-normal temperatures across the continent, but as always we will likely see both warm and cold spells at times.

Such winter warmth is exceptional and already breaking records. Climate change is already increasing the frequency and intensity of this kind of winter heat — and future warm spells will be hotter still, if humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions continue.

https://www.inkl.com/newsletters/morning-edition/news/40-c-in-august-why-is-australia-so-ridiculously-hot-right-now

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Kamala Harris Would Destroy Pennsylvania Energy Jobs

For the first time since she ascended to the top of the Democratic ticket last month, Kamala Harris is on the defensive. That’s not because members of the media have asked her a single difficult question. They haven’t. It’s not because her running mate, Tim Walz, is a radical. Although, he is. No, the reason that Kamala Harris is coming under fire is because more and more Americans are learning about her radical record, and the more they get to know her, the less they like her.

That’s especially true for Pennsylvanians, particularly those living in the energy-rich northern and western parts of the state. Why? Because Kamala Harris is the most radical anti-energy presidential candidate in American history.

In her failed 2019 presidential campaign, for example, Harris promised to completely ban fracking, telling CNN, “There's no question I'm in favor of banning fracking.” As a senator, Kamala Harris was one of the first co-sponsors of Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s extreme Green New Deal, which mandates all Americans transition to 100% clean energy within the decade. And most recently, as vice president, Harris’ administration moved to take away Americans’ gas stoves, dishwashers and gas-powered cars.

Now, Harris is running away from her record. Late last month, in a complete reversal from her previous position, the Harris campaign announced that she would not ban fracking if elected. Since then, she has been quiet about her past as a climate crusader on the campaign trail. Her campaign aides say her energy policy is “strategically ambiguous,” which is a euphemism for “flip-flopping.” And, of course, the mainstream media hasn’t bothered to ask her about this complete 180-degree turn.

The Democrats are hoping that this half-hearted pledge will placate Pennsylvania voters just enough for Kamala to squeak by in this critical swing state. But setting aside the fact that Harris’ own record indicates she is lying through her teeth and will reverse course as soon as she enters the White House, don’t voters in the Keystone State deserve more than a meager promise that the president won’t upend an industry that is critical to their economy, culture and livelihoods?

The good news is that President Donald Trump offers a better energy agenda. During his first term, Trump unleashed the power of private industry and restored America’s energy dominance by rolling back unnecessarily burdensome environmental regulations. He made us the No. 1 producer of oil in the world while reducing greenhouse gas emissions. He ended Obama’s war on coal, replacing the job-killing Clean Power Plan with the Affordable Clean Energy rule. And he led America to energy independence as U.S. energy exports passed imports for the first time in nearly 70 years—including a five-fold increase in exports of U.S. liquefied natural gas, which the Biden administration subsequently attempted to ban.

If he’s re-elected, Trump is likely to restore these policies. One of his top five priorities according to his Agenda 47 platform is to: “MAKE AMERICA THE DOMINANT ENERGY PRODUCER IN THE WORLD, BY FAR!” And his past success suggests that he is the man for the job.

That would be welcome, especially in Pennsylvania, which tops the nation in liquified natural gas production, behind only my home state of Texas. In Pennsylvania alone, the natural gas industry powers 50% of homes, contributes $44.5 billion to the economy every year, directly employs 26,000 workers, and supports an additional 300,000-plus jobs across the state, not to mention the benefit that cheap energy has on reducing inflation.

Anyone who has lived in a part of the country where energy production is an essential part of the economy—such as southern Louisiana (where I grew up) or Texas (where I raised my own family)—knows that these numbers represent more than raw economic data. They are evidence of a way of life that has been around for generations. And they are indicative of communities such as Bradford County, Pennsylvania, that represent some of the best of what America has to offer: hard work, resourcefulness and making the most of the bountiful land that God has given us.

Kamala Harris is at war with this way of life found throughout the Rust Belt. Indeed, the vice president and other politicians who begrudgingly pledge not to ban and regulate these communities into oblivion always wind up breaking that promise once they’re in office. And why wouldn’t they? They don’t believe in the dignity of these small towns, and by flip-flopping in the first place, they’ve already compromised their integrity.

By contrast, Trump was and remains a champion for Pennsylvania’s and America’s energy industry. While the media desperately try to defend Harris as she flip-flops on policy and runs away from her previous positions, Trump can simply stand on his record.

https://www.heritage.org/energy/commentary/kamala-harris-would-destroy-pennsylvania-energy-jobs

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Critiquing the Shifting Narratives in Environmental Discourse

The Yale E360 article titled “As Drylands Greening, Rising Carbon Dioxide Levels Are Fueling a Climate Conundrum” offers a clear example of the shifting narratives that have characterized environmental discourse over recent decades

While the dominant concern once centered on desertification—an issue that shaped both environmental policy and public perception—the focus has now shifted to the phenomenon of “greening.”

This greening, attributed largely to increased levels of atmospheric carbon dioxide (CO2), would seemingly be a positive development, especially in regions historically threatened by desertification.

However, the article frames this development as a new source of anxiety, reflecting a broader trend in climate discourse where any environmental change, regardless of its nature, is often depicted as a potential crisis.

Here, I critique the article’s approach, highlighting its tendency to reframe environmental phenomena to perpetuate a narrative of continuous ecological danger, frequently at the expense of scientific nuance and objectivity.

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The Transformation from Desertification to Greening
Desertification, the process by which fertile land degrades into desert, was long regarded as one of the most significant environmental threats, particularly in regions such as Sub-Saharan Africa.

It was a central concern in environmental science, policy-making, and education, where it was depicted as a looming catastrophe that could displace millions, exacerbate food insecurity, and trigger widespread social upheaval.

Yet, as the Yale E360 article discusses, recent observations indicate that many of these drylands are not succumbing to desertification but are instead experiencing increased vegetation cover—a phenomenon termed “greening.”

This change is primarily driven by the fertilization effect of rising CO2 levels, which enhances plant growth.

Intuitively, this should be welcomed, especially in arid regions where vegetation is crucial for preventing soil erosion, sustaining local agriculture, and supporting biodiversity.

However, rather than embracing this positive shift, the article portrays greening as a double-edged sword, speculating that it could lead to unintended ecological consequences, such as altered precipitation patterns or disrupted ecosystems.

This narrative shift is not merely a rebranding of environmental concerns; it reflects a deeper tendency within climate discourse to reinterpret positive environmental changes through a lens of fear and uncertainty.

The Problematic Framing of Greening as a Crisis

The Yale E360 article’s framing of greening as a “climate conundrum” illustrates a broader issue in environmental journalism and advocacy: the persistent portrayal of environmental changes as threats, regardless of their actual impact.

By casting greening as a potential crisis, the article aligns with a narrative that seems determined to maintain a state of alarm, even when the evidence suggests otherwise.

This approach is problematic for several reasons. First, it undermines the opportunity to present a balanced view of environmental changes. Greening in drylands, driven by CO2 fertilization, is not without its complexities, but it also brings undeniable benefits, such as increased agricultural productivity and improved soil stability.

In fact, in 2007 the IPCC claimed that “yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020” in Africa. As usual, they got it exactly backward.

However, these positive aspects are often overshadowed by speculative concerns about potential negative outcomes, which are frequently presented without substantial empirical evidence.

Second, this framing risks alienating the public and eroding trust in science. When every change is framed as a crisis, it creates a “boy who cried wolf” scenario, where genuine environmental threats may be met with skepticism or apathy.

The constant reframing of environmental phenomena to fit a crisis narrative can also stifle scientific debate, as dissenting views or alternative interpretations are marginalized in favor of maintaining a singular, often alarmist, perspective.

https://principia-scientific.com/critiquing-the-shifting-narratives-in-environmental-discourse/

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Evidence Shows Great Barrier Reef Grew in Waters 4C Warmer 8,000 Years Ago



In February 2022 the green billionaire-funded Carbon Brief reported that a rise of 0.3ºC in the current global temperature would kill off 99.8% of coral with the rest going as a result of another 0.5ºC of warming.

The increasingly unpopular prints are full of similar tosh, despite the fact that sub-tropical corals grow happily between 24ºC-32ºC.

Limiting global warming to 1.5ºC rather than 2ºC would likely be the difference between the complete decline of the Great Barrier Reef (GBR), reports the Guardian, quoting a United Nations report.

What decline we might ask following three stonking years of embarrassing record growth? Such great click-bait stories are endemic throughout the mainstream media – it’s just a shame about the facts.

A newly-published science paper reveals massive increases in coral on the GBR from about 8,000 to 6,000 years ago at a time when sea surface temperatures were 4ºC higher.

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The coral story, of course, is an excellent example of the numerous fear-mongering swindles being perpetrated to push the insanities of Net Zero.

Three years of record growth on the GBR – the highest in nearly 40 years of constant observation on the world’s largest Reef system – have simply been ignored by the mainstream media.

Even worse, there were attempts to deflect the excellent news this year by running a nonsense story from Nature that claimed “climate change” posed an “existential threat” to the GBR.

Temperatures at the Reef were said to be at their highest level for 400 years. All of this stuff is published when it is known that gentle and tiny rises in overall sea surface temperature are more likely to benefit coral than cause it long-term harm.

https://principia-scientific.com/evidence-shows-great-barrier-reef-grew-in-waters-4c-warmer-8000-years-ago/

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Harris’s New Strategy: Equate Fighting Climate Change With ‘Freedom’

Very reminiscent of Hegel, the founder of Leftism. He had some funny ideas about freedom too

http://jonjayray.com/hegel.html

The Harris campaign isn’t offering details on climate policy but is framing the fight to protect the environment as one of patriotism.

Vice President Kamala Harris mentioned climate change just once in her speech before the Democratic National Convention on Thursday, wrapping it into her larger campaign theme of freedom.

After attacking her Republican opponent, former President Donald J. Trump, on abortion, Ms. Harris declared that along with reproductive choice “many other fundamental freedoms are at stake” in the November election. Those include “the freedom to breathe clean air, and drink clean water and live free from the pollution that fuels the climate crisis,” she said.

It was a novel way of framing climate change for a campaign that has sought to reclaim patriotism after decades of Republicans seeming to own the messaging around freedom. And it was a message echoed by others throughout the night, including Representative Maxwell Frost of Florida, the youngest member of Congress, who declared in a speech earlier in the evening that “fighting the climate crisis is patriotic.”

Ms. Harris has not offered any new policies for addressing climate change.

She also has talked about climate on the campaign trail far less frequently than President Joe Biden did when he ran for president. In his 2020 acceptance speech for the Democratic nomination, Mr. Biden called climate change an “existential threat” and said, “It’s not only a crisis, it’s an enormous opportunity. An opportunity for America to lead the world in clean energy and create millions of new good-paying jobs in the process.”

In a significant departure from the 2020 presidential campaign, climate groups this year haven’t pressed the Democratic nominee to be more outspoken on the issue. That may be in part because Ms. Harris appears to already have the support of voters who put climate at the top of their election priorities. A new poll of swing state voters from the Environmental Voter Project shows that younger voters, who were appearing to turn away from President Joe Biden, are more energized around Ms. Harris’s campaign.

“We know that the Harris-Walz administration will work tirelessly to ensure that all people in this country are free to breath clean air, drink clean water and live in a healthy climate,” said Tiernan Sittenfeld, the senior vice president of government affairs for the League of Conservation Voters.

Cassidy DiPaola, a spokeswoman for Fossil Free Media, a nonprofit group, said in a statement, “We’ve moved beyond simply counting mentions of climate change.” Instead, “we’re seeing climate woven throughout the convention.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/08/23/climate/kamala-harris-climate-strategy.html

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Floating Offshore Wind - A Financial Catastrophe

When it comes to looming financial and environmental catastrophes, nothing can compare to floating offshore wind. It is energy policy at its worst.

In an analysis earlier this year (WC #36), using cost estimates published by a European energy consulting firm, I estimated the total project cost for floating offshore wind off the California coast at, best case, $13.6 million per megawatt of baseload-equivalent capacity. “Capacity” is an often misunderstood word. The “nameplate capacity” of a wind turbine might be 10 megawatts, but that amount of electricity is only going to be generated when the wind is blowing and the system isn’t down for maintenance. With intermittent sources of electricity generating technologies such as wind turbines, the “yield” is what matters, and that is unlikely to ever exceed 40 percent, even offshore.

Taking into account intermittency, the U.S. Energy Information Administration estimates a construction cost of $10 million per megawatt. But that estimate is for the less expensive “fixed bottom offshore wind with monopile foundations,” and not for floating platforms. As economist Jonathan Lesser, author of “The False Promises of Offshore Wind,” shared with me via email last week, “the technology for the cabling needed to secure the turbines to the floor and the cables to carry the electricity are in their infancy. I conclude that the EIA estimate for floating turbines is, in my view, pure fantasy.” Which is to say, more than $10 million per megawatt.

Another expert I was fortunate enough to reach is Gordon Hughes, a professor of economics at the University of Edinburgh. For the last several years he has been analyzing the performance of offshore wind in the North Sea and throughout the world. Here’s what he wrote to me in a recent email:

“I don’t believe the figures given by EIA – they have no basis in actual costs and performance, they are little more than optimistic guesses generated by lobbyists. No-one knows how to build floating wind turbines with a tip height of 220 or 250 meters. The rotational forces in high winds are huge and the only way to stabilize them are to build huge concrete/steel platforms. I have no idea where they would be built on the West Coast and I doubt that towing them across the Pacific from East Asia is viable. Could they transit the Panama Canal? The point is all talk of floating wind farms off California or Oregon seems to me to be ungrounded speculation. You could build ones with a tip height of 150 meters but that would significantly reduce both the nominal capacity and capacity factor for such turbines.”

At that height, still nearly 500 feet, nameplate capacity is only 2.5 megawatts per turbine. We would have to float 10,000 of these monstrosities in order to achieve the currently planned 25 gigawatt capacity off our coast.

As acknowledged in a Cal Matters report from July 2024, “The offshore wind industry must be created almost from scratch: a new manufacturing base for the still-evolving technology; a robust and reliable supply chain; transportation networks on land and sea; specially configured ports to make, assemble and maintain the gargantuan seagoing platforms; finding and training a highly specialized workforce; building a large transmission network where none exists and beefing up those that operate now.”

Compare that to the EIA’s estimates to construct other types of electricity generating plants. A natural gas fueled electricity generating plant with 95 percent carbon capture will only cost $2.4 million per megawatt. Advanced nuclear: $7.8 million per megawatt. Small modular nuclear: $8.9 million per megawatt. Geothermal: $3.9 million per megawatt.

Imagine the scene if this abominable scheme ever comes to full fruition. To produce 25 gigawatts of capacity would require at least 2,500 wind turbines floating approximately 20 miles offshore. To have a capacity per turbine of 10 megawatts, each of them would be approximately 1,000 feet high, and each of them would have at least three tethering cables hooked to the sea floor over 4,000 feet underwater. Each of them would also need an underwater high voltage cable that would somehow connect to the onshore grid.

Offshore wind is a terrible idea. There are plenty of alternatives, including the only slightly less unpalatable option of onshore wind. But the California Energy Commission pushes forward. The rhetorical bludgeon used to silence critics and empower the special interests poised to make a killing is predictable enough. From Cal Matters, here’s a quote from one of the CEC’s five commissioners. “‘I feel the urgency to move forward swiftly,’ said energy commissioner Patty Monahan. ‘The climate crisis is upon us. Offshore wind is a real opportunity for us to move forward with clean energy.'”

Clean energy does not have to require hundreds of billions in taxpayer subsidies and utility rate increases. Clean energy should not rely on technology that isn’t ready and components that can’t be sourced. And clean energy shouldn’t destroy the environment. Invoking the “urgency” of climate change without addressing the issues of cost, technology, materials, and environmental impact is a vapid and irresponsible but all too common tactic.

Let’s assume that we industrialize some of the most pristine stretches of the California coast and foul our offshore waters with between 2,500 and 10,000 floating wind turbines. We will have 25 gigawatts of new capacity, yielding 10 gigawatts of steady power once sufficient land-based storage assets are available. That equates to 87,600 gigawatt-hours. Even at $10 million per megawatt, which is a best case estimate, the total project cost will be $100 billion. To generate the same amount of power capacity by constructing new, advanced combined cycle natural gas generating plants with sequestration of CO2 emissions would cost $25 billion. That’s four times less expensive.

https://mailchi.mp/calpolicycenter/whats-current-issue-7859004

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High Costs Delay Denmark’s North Sea Energy Island for Second Time

Denmark has been forced to delay the construction of its planned North Sea Energy Island by at least three more years due to rising costs and high interest rates.

The artificial island was designed as a hub for collecting and distributing electricity generated by offshore wind turbines.

A government minister announced the delay on Wednesday, explaining the project is intended to supply approximately three million European households with renewable energy.

Danish Energy Minister Lars Aagaard told Reuters that the projected cost of investment for the energy island exceeded DKr200bn ($29.81bn), and also required nearly DKr50bn in state funding.

He declined to comment to the US news outlet on the cost increase from the project’s initial cost projections.

In June 2023, the country announced the first delay on the energy island, explaining that the cost of the project was too expensive.

According to Aagaard, rising interest rates and the cost of raw materials led to the project no longer being economically viable.

The project was initially set to be constructed without the use of subsidies, with Denmark and Belgium funding the project due to the positive impact on both countries’ energy landscape.

However, efforts to secure additional funding have been unsuccessful and Belgian authorities have refused to provide any more money.

If the project is redesigned to include a power link to Germany, this could secure additional funding from that country but would delay completion until 2036.

According to Power Technology’s parent company, GlobalData, installed wind power capacity was 827.3GW in 2021 and is expected to achieve a CAGR of more than 9% up to 2030.

https://www.world-energy.org/article/44250.html

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Wholesale prices surge as wind and solar output falls to zero in South Australia

Wholesale electricity prices surged on Monday morning in the southern states after wind and solar output in South Australia – the grid with the highest average share of the technologies – fell to zero soon after 7am.

According to various data sources, including GPE NEMLog2, the output of wind and solar fell to zero at 7.05am, just before rooftop and large scale solar kicked in to the grid. Wind output remained very low throughout the morning.

It is not the first time wind and solar have hit zero – they did so in June last year for a brief moment, according to GPE NEMLog, but the fossil fuel generators and the growing portfolio took full advantage and pushed the wholesale price towards the newly elevated market cap of $17,500 a megawatt hour in the absence of any competition.

Most of the fossil fuel capacity switched on this morning has been in the system for years, built to back the former coal generators and to provide the balance of power needs.

There are now also four operating big batteries – Torrens Island, Hornsdale, Lake Bonney and Dalrymple North with a combined capacity of around 500 megawatts and an average of one a half hour storage. More big batteries, with longer duration, are now being built.

On Monday morning, even though ample capacity remained in the system – demand was hovering around 2 GW in the early morning compared to the grid’s demand peaks of more than 3 GW – the generators and battery owners were able to bid the wholesale price towards the peak without competition.

The generators have been achieving similar results in other state grids over the past weeks and months, including in South Australia where the state is once again at risk of breaking the cumulative price threshold of $1.57 million, which will result in an automatic price cap being imposed.

The market cap is there to achieve at least some semblance of normality. The cost of generation – even at peaking plants – is likely to be in the order of $300 to $600 a megawatt hour, depending on fossil fuel prices – but the new regulations allow them to bid the price up to more than $17,000/MWh.

This is ostensibly to provide incentives for new peaking plants or storage to be built in the absence of a capacity market. That is designed as reward for the rare events when the supply and demand balance is very tight, but the lack of competition means that these price caps can be manipulated on a regular basis.

Even if just one megawatt is priced at that level, it flows through to all generation. The Australian Energy Regulator has written in great detail how plant availability and ramp rates are often manipulated to push prices into a higher price band.

South Australia is particularly vulnerable because it has little competition. Two of the big batteries are owned or operated by AGL, the dominant player in the market, while the Lake Bonney battery is owned by Iberdrola, which also owns one of the peaking plants. The other is Hornsdale, which is owned by Neoen.

By the middle of the day, prices had subsided towards the marginal cost of gas generation, as rooftop and utility solar provided the bulk of supply. But the fossil fuel generators retained pricing power.

Other states had a similar story to tell. In Victoria, the output of wind and solar fell to just 2.8 MW on Sunday evening, but at 8am the prices were pushed to the market cap of $17,500/MWh, even though demand was a gigawatt short of the peaks over the previous week and the market did not come close to soaking up available supply.

In NSW the story was repeated, with generators pushing the price to $17,000 MWh, even though demand was significantly less than Sunday’s peak when the prices were just $300/MWh.

Again, it was the lack of competition in the market – nothing to do with cost of generation or even long term pricing incentives. The federal government might want to look at the bidding practices of its wholly owned Snowy Hydro, which controls much of the peaking capacity that is deployed at such times.

The one exception was Queensland, where prices remained relatively low at less than $300/MWh, and the onset of solar soon pushed prices into negative territory.

Why were the prices moderate in Queensland?

Firstly because there was enough wind in the market to add some competition – Queensland wind is not correlated to the rest of the grid – and perhaps also because that state government owns the bulk of generation, and may have found other ways of rewarding its easily excitable screen jockeys.

https://reneweconomy.com.au/wholesale-prices-surge-as-wind-and-solar-output-falls-to-zero-in-south-australia/#google_vignette

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All my main blogs below:

http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)

http://dissectleft.blogspot.com (DISSECTING LEFTISM)

http://edwatch.blogspot.com (EDUCATION WATCH)

http://pcwatch.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/ozarc.html (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

http://snorphty.blogspot.com (TONGUE-TIED)

https://immigwatch.blogspot.com (IMMIGRATION WATCH)

http://jonjayray.com/select.html (SELECT POSTS)

http://jonjayray.com/short/short.html (Subject index to my blog posts)

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The terrifying scale of the green revolution

Many have been emotionally drawn to the green revolution in the belief that renewable energy will restore our personal and community independence. According to this, by investing in green technology, Britain will gain freedom from coal barons and gouging sheikhs, and deliver a grass-roots, democratic energy system. Ed Miliband played into this on Friday when he blamed the energy price cap being raised on the ‘failed energy policy we inherited, which has left our country at the mercy of international gas markets controlled by dictators.’

Others believe green energy represents the free spirit and harmony with nature. ‘What would you rather have in your neighbourhood?’, I remember being asked in 2005. ‘A little wind turbine swirling gently in the breeze, or a nuclear power station and pylons?’

The low energy density of wind and sun means that extremely large collection devices are needed

As it is turning out, and particularly so now that Ed Miliband is back in charge of energy policy after 14 years in the wilderness, the green transition means armies of gargantuan wind turbines on land and sea; great blue-black mirror of solar panels glazing over thousands of acres of farmland; a neurotic spider’s web of grid cables criss-crossing the country; and dozens and dozens of whining substations and vast Area 51-like compounds of shipping-container sized lithium-ion batteries.

As if that were not bad enough, it transpires that in spite of all this green industrialisation we will still require nuclear and conventional gas turbine power stations. We may not use them as much, but reliability is an issue with wind and solar, and therefore generators are needed to guarantee security of supply at times when the British weather fails to deliver. ‘Who knew, except everyone?’ as the Americans say.

Still, the sheer immensity of low carbon industrialisation is coming as an unwelcome shock to those who only a few years ago would have at least passively supported wind and solar development.

There was clearly a profound misunderstanding about the physical character of renewable energy power systems. But no one should in fact be surprised. The physics of renewable energy are inescapable.

While there is a substantial quantity of energy in the wind, the thermodynamic quality of that energy is very low. It is for this reason that there are no organisms that derive their metabolic energy from wind, an extraordinary fact given its widespread availability at unthreatening temperatures. Wind energy is simply too chaotic to support life.

Solar radiation is somewhat better. Indeed, outside the earth’s atmosphere it is of fairly high quality. But on the surface of the planet and seen from the perspective of a leaf or a photovoltaic cell it is hindered by atmospheric interference, clouds and airborne dust, and critically by the rotation of the earth. Plants do derive energy from sunshine, but they are relatively simple organisms, and they do not move rapidly or have complex nervous systems.

Some aspects of these simple facts about wind and solar energy flows are intuitively obvious but the critical implications tend to escape even those well versed in physics.

The low energy density of wind and sun means that extremely large collection devices are needed – enormous wind turbines with large blades, vast areas of solar panels. It is necessarily a capital-intensive and very expensive system.

A concrete example will make this clear. The 1,400 Megawatts (MW) Sophia Offshore Wind Farm on the Dogger Bank is currently under construction and will cover an area of nearly 600 square kilometres (it would just about fit into Middlesex). It is one of many major wind installations that the government is intending to drive through in its ambition to quadruple offshore capacity. We currently produce about 15 Gigawatts (GW) of operational offshore wind power. To meet this quadrupling of capacity, we would need around 30 more Sophia Offshore wind farms.

The Sophia will use the Siemens Gamesa SG 14-222 DD, one of the largest wind turbines on the market, with a generating capacity of 14 MW. It has three blades 108m in length, each weighing 65 tonnes. The nacelle, the box containing the generator at the top of the tower, weighs 500 tonnes, which Siemens proudly describes as a lightweight machine. Compared to other brands, this may even be true.

The overall height of the turbine is 252m, only 60m short of Britain’s tallest building, the Shard. It foundations will, according to Sophia’s own publicity, be 80 to 90m in length and weigh 1,200 to 1,400 tonnes each. The total weight of each turbine – blades, nacelle, tower and foundations – is likely to be nudging towards 3,000 tonnes.

Sofia will use 100 of these structures, so we can estimate that the wind farm alone accounts for about 300,000 tonnes of industrial equipment, mostly steel, some concrete, and fibre-glass reinforced epoxy in the blades. (For reference, a Queen Elizabeth class aircraft carrier weighs a mere 65,000 tonnes.) And this is before we have taken into account the offshore substations and the cables connecting each turbine and the shoreline.

Multiply all this by 30 to meet the government’s offshore wind targets, and you arrive at nine million tons of industrial equipment for the additional offshore installations alone. For scale, recall that the UK’s total annual production of steel is only six million tons, and you can begin to appreciate the magnitude of Ed Miliband’s plans for the country. This Wind and Sun King makes Louis XIV lookhumble.

The total manufacturing mass involved in Sophia is difficult for anyone outside the project to calculate, but the order of magnitude is clear: it’s huge, and regardless of your views on its beauty, it’s certainly not going to be cheap. Sophia states that its total capital cost is in the region of £3 billion, a great deal for an asset exposed to the North Sea and likely to have a short economic lifetime.

Onshore wind farms weigh less than Sophia’s marine leviathans but are of broadly similar dimensions. The Vestas V136 4.2 MW, for example, has blades of 76m and hub heights up to 166m, giving a total overall height of over 240m. The Eiffel Tower is only 60 meters taller. These are the sorts of devices that Ed Miliband now thinks acceptable next to rural dwellings.

But relative to their size, these wind farms do not produce much energy. Sophia, for example, will produce around six Terawatt hours (TWh) per year, according to the company’s website. Although this is unlikely to be maintained over the entire lifetime of the windfarm, this is still only equivalent to about 2 per cent of total annual UK demand for electricity. Given the sheer size of Sophia that really isn’t very much – only around 0.01 TWh per square kilometre.

Solar, as predicted from theory, is slightly better, but still abysmal. Mr Miliband recently overruled the recommendations of his own planning inspectors to consent to a 500 MW photovoltaic installation on 2,500 acres (10 square kilometres) of Suffolk farmland near Newmarket. It is about 15 miles long, and comprises around one million solar panels. In spite of the site’s gross magnitude, it will generate only about 0.5 TWh of electrical energy per year. This is a very poor exchange for the energy or food that could be otherwise grown on the land.

For comparison, consider the Sizewell B nuclear power station, also in Suffolk, and running since 1995. The site occupies a land area of about 0.5 square kilometres, less than a thousandth of Sophia’s area. Still, Sizewell B generates more energy, as much as 10 TWh a year. It is, very roughly, 1,500 times more productive than the Sophia wind farm, and 300 times more productive than the Sunnica solar farm when it comes to space. On this land use basis, Sizewell C, now under construction, can plausibly claim to be 1,000 times more productive than solar and 3,000 times more so than onshore wind.

That is typical for conventional power stations: they are small and highly productive compared to renewables. Correcting the severe physical defects of wind and solar generation requires capital equipment on the grandest of scales, and as a result the adoption of renewables results in a low productivity system which is intrinsically expensive and resource hungry compared to the fossil and nuclear alternatives.

Moreover, most of the extraction, conversion and delivery of renewables is at present manufactured by a fossil-fuelled global economy – primarily in Asia and in particular China.

But if, as the government seems to want, green equipment is produced domestically, then the costs will rise dramatically. In this case, is not even clear that there would enough of an energy return to justify the costs of a wind or solar project. The profit margin would be very thin, or even non-existent. At best, the renewable energy sector would not only be the largest consumer of its own energy output, but encompass the bulk of the British economy. Those owning green energy businesses would possess levels of relative wealth and power not seen since the gentry and aristocracy of the pre-coal economies of Europe. One imagines that this would be politically extremely controversial.

So, there is more to the industrial dystopia of wind turbines and solar farms than mere aesthetics and a counterproductive climate policy.

https://www.spectator.com.au/2024/08/the-terrifying-scale-of-the-green-revolution/

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Is there nothing the BBC won’t blame on climate change?

Since global warming first entered the public consciousness, it has been hard to avoid the impression that the BBC is more interested in persuading us to take ‘climate action’, than informing us about what might be happening with the planet.

The corporation’s bias has only worsened over the years. In 2010, the BBC’s governing body, the BBC Trust, launched a review of the ‘impartiality and accuracy of BBC science coverage’. A panel of supposed experts concluded that the science on climate change was now so clear that the state broadcaster no longer needed to grant sceptical voices equal airtime.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the BBC interpreted this advice as meaning that dissenters should be heard very rarely indeed. Today, climate naysaying is all but absent from the BBC’s output. The Beeb has abandoned any pretence that climate is still a complex, hotly debated issue. Where public discussion ought to be, we now have a wave of propaganda.

This was led chiefly by the man at the head of the BBC’s climate output, Roger Harrabin, who was its energy and environment analyst from 2004 to 2022. Harrabin’s only qualification for the role was a fervent faith in the inevitability of climate catastrophe and a Cambridge MA in English.

Needless to say, Harrabin’s lack of actual scientific knowledge led to some less-than-accurate reporting. Harrabin spread wildly misleading information about fracking, and in 2018 criticised the government for not forcing people to stop eating meat. ‘The battle over climate change’, he wrote, ‘will have to get personal’.

Harrabin was gradually replaced by Justin Rowlatt, whose PPE degree makes him marginally more qualified than his predecessor. But he is, if anything, even more fervent in his environmentalist faith. The quality of the BBC’s environment output has, as a result, got even worse.

A flavour of the problem can be had by reading ‘Tall Climate Tales from the BBC’, Paul Homewood’s annual review of the BBC’s climate coverage, published last week by Net Zero Watch, of which I am director. This covers more than 30 of the most egregious errors in the BBC’s climate reporting throughout 2023. Some of which are so absurd as to be comical.

Last year, the BBC bizarrely tried to blame climate change for causing a crocodile to bite a woman in Indonesia. A drought, the story goes, forced the woman to walk to the village watering hole instead of the one outside her home. The crocodile then attacked her en route. The major problem with this, as Homewood points out, is that droughts haven’t really got much worse in Indonesia, regardless of climate change. In fact, rainfall has been increasing there since 1950.

Similarly laughable was the claim that it’ll soon be too hot to grow hops in Kent. According to a 2023 article, climate change is threatening to ‘call time’ on the ‘Great British pint’. The BBC neglects to mention that the world’s main producer of hops, Ethiopia, is a tad bit warmer than Kent.

Examples like these abound. The BBC says that ‘aircraft turbulence is worsening with climate change’. But according to the US National Transportation Safety Board, there has been no increase in severe turbulence accidents since 1989. The BBC claims hurricanes are becoming more powerful. But the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration says there is no evidence that this is the case. The BBC went as far as to argue that a train derailment in Scotland in 2020, which killed three people, was the fault of a landslip caused by climate change. Aberdeen’s High Court subsequently ruled that it was caused by an incorrectly installed and poorly maintained drainage system.

‘Tall Climate Tales from the BBC’ only covers errors related to the climate itself, but the BBC’s coverage of climate policy, Net Zero and the energy transition is just as poor. In particular, the BBC repeatedly fails to question the mantra of ‘cheap renewables’. Remarkably, after years of renewables driving electricity prices ever upwards, the BBC still expects us to believe that deploying some more wind farms will bring them down again.

For two decades, environment correspondents have been able to ignore such awkward questions. But those times are coming to an end. The money to pay for Net Zero has all but run out and those competing demands for what little remains are becoming very insistent indeed. Meanwhile, housing and the welfare system are screaming for funds. Even our roads are in desperate need of repair.

We are hurtling towards an economic precipice. If we do hit rock bottom, people will surely ask how it was that nobody foresaw these problems. Why, they will ask, did nobody say anything? People did, of course. But the BBC, along with most of the mainstream media, has made sure the sceptical voices are never heard. Clearly, activism has almost entirely replaced journalism

https://www.spiked-online.com/2024/08/23/is-there-nothing-the-bbc-wont-blame-on-climate-change/

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A Critical Examination of the World Weather Attribution (WWA) Initiative

The World Weather Attribution (WWA) initiative, a collaborative effort among various research institutions, claims to offer scientifically rigorous assessments of the role human-induced climate change plays in individual weather events.

Their work is often touted as groundbreaking, providing what they assert is concrete evidence linking specific weather phenomena—such as heatwaves, droughts, and storms—to anthropogenic climate change.

However, a closer examination reveals significant flaws in their methodology, conflicts of interest, and an overarching agenda that raises serious questions about the scientific integrity of their work.

The Science Behind Climate Systems: Chaos and Uncertainty

At the heart of any critique of the WWA’s methodology is a fundamental understanding of climate science. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the world’s leading authority on climate science, states unequivocally in its 2001 Third Assessment Report.

“The climate system is a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”

This statement highlights the inherent complexity and unpredictability of the climate system, which is influenced by a myriad of factors, both natural and anthropogenic.

Given this complexity, the notion that any organization can accurately attribute the strength or occurrence of a specific weather event to human activity is, at best, highly speculative and, at worst, pseudoscientific.

The WWA’s attribution studies often involve running climate models with and without human influences, then comparing the results to determine the likelihood that a given event was caused or intensified by anthropogenic factors.

However, this approach fails to account for the chaotic nature of the climate system, where small changes in initial conditions can lead to vastly different outcomes.

Methodological Flaws and Questionable Assumptions
The WWA’s methodology relies heavily on climate models that are notoriously sensitive to initial conditions and often require significant assumptions to function.

https://principia-scientific.com/a-critical-examination-of-the-world-weather-attribution-wwa-initiative/

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The sun is setting the renewables ‘superpower’ fantasy of the Australian Left

Renewable energy superpower status is supposedly in Australia’s grasp now the government has given Mike Cannon-Brookes the green light to export solar power to Singapore.

Tanya Plibersek announced environmental approval for the tech billionaire’s eccentric proposal last week, taking a swipe at Peter Dutton’s “expensive nuclear fantasy that may never happen”.

By contrast, the Environment Minister would have us believe Cannon-Brookes’s plan to siliconise the NT Outback is a done deal. All that’s left to do is raise $35bn in capital, install 120 square kilometres of solar panels, build a modest 788km transmission line to Darwin, and lay a 4200km high-voltage cable on the seabed, and we’re good to go.

The Sun Cable AAPowerLink project feels like it was stolen from a Heath Robinson cartoon: a convoluted, unnecessarily elaborate, and impractical contraption designed to accomplish a mundane task. It may mark the beginning of the end of the renewable romance, the point at which the transition to wind, solar and hydropower collapses under the weight of its own absurdity.

There is increasing evidence the US has reached the point of peak renewables, as the pool of private investors shrinks and winning community approval becomes harder. Research by the Lawrence Berkley National Laboratory showed roughly one-third of utility-scale wind and solar applications submitted over the past five years were cancelled, while about half of wind and solar projects experienced significant delays.

Sky News Business Editor Ross Greenwood says Australia's largest solar farm to date has been given the “green light” by the Environment Minister Tanya Plibersek.

The US Department of Energy says the national electricity network needs to grow by 57 per cent by 2035, the equivalent of approximately 21,000 km a year. Last year’s total was around 200 km, down from just over 1000 in 2022.

Meanwhile, the challenges of grid synchronisation and storage remain unresolved, and the technical problems for offshore wind turbines, in particular, are mounting. Last week, turbine manufacturer GE Vernova announced an investigation into a blade failure in the 3.6GW Dogger Bank project in the North Sea off the coast of the UK. It is the third blade failure this year.

In July, a newly installed blade crumbled at the Vineyard Wind offshore plant, creating debris that washed up on Nantucket Island, Massachusetts. At 107 metres long and weighing 55 tonnes, they are the most enormous blades deployed commercially. The failure of three in quick succession suggests the quest to increase output by installing ever-larger blades has reached its natural limits.

Yet the imperative of expanding generating capacity is hardening. The principal driving force is not electric vehicles but the rapid growth of artificial intelligence. AI requires at least 10 times the power of conventional computing programs.

In the US, data centres account for about 2.5 per cent of power and demand could rise to 7.5 per cent by 2030, according to Boston Consulting Group. In Ireland, data processing and storage use 12 per cent of electricity produced, forcing the authorities to limit the number of connections to the grid.

Silicon Valley has long abandoned the notion it can be powered by silicon photovoltaic panels while burying stray emissions in the Amazon forests.

In April, the tech giant Amazon paid the best part of $1bn ($US650m) for a sizeable block of land next to Pennsylvania’s Susquehanna nuclear power station. It will be the site for a data centre powered by up to 480MW of carbon-free electricity delivered reliably around the clocky.

Shares in US nuclear power companies such as Consolidated Energy, Talem and Vistra have soared by between 80 per cent and 180 per cent in the past year. So-called green energy stocks, on the other hand, are static or falling, while coal is making an unexpected comeback.

In May, the Financial Times reported that the retirement dates for coal-fired power stations are being pushed back as operators become concerned about grid security. Allianz Energy has delayed the conversion of its Wisconsin plant from coal to gas for three years to 2028. Ohio-based FirstEnergy announced in February that it was scrapping its 2030 target to phase out coal, citing “resource adequacy concerns”.

The effect of AI on electricity demand was largely unanticipated at the beginning of the decade. AI chips will undoubtedly become more efficient, but there is no telling how much further the demand for AI will grow since the technology is in its infancy. Nor can we begin to guess what other power-hungry forms of technology might be developed by 2050.

What we do know, however, is that if Australia’s demand for electricity exceeds 313 TWH a year in a 2050, we’re in trouble. That’s the target the Australian Energy Market Operator has set in its updated blueprint for the great electricity transition.

As Chris Bowen points out, that’s going to take a lot solar panels and wind turbines. The Energy Minister says we need 22,000 new solar panels a day and a new 7MW wind turbine every 18 hour s just to meet our 2030 target of a mere 202 TWH. For the record, the speed of the rollout in the first two years of Labor government is less than a tenth of that.

One of the hallmarks of the anointed is an unwavering conviction in the integrity of their analysis and the effectiveness of their proposed solutions. They feel no need to hedge their bets by factoring in contingency arrangements should their predictions turn out to be wrong. Nothing in AEMO’s Integrated System Plan indicates its experts have given any thought to scaling up electricity production in line with actual demand, which may well be considerably higher than they’ve anticipated.

If they had, they would have to acknowledge that there are limits to the renewable energy frontier determined by energy density, the demand for land and the requirement for firming. The silicification of northern Australia cannot continue forever, nor can we expect to rely on China for most of the hardware and pretend there are no geopolitical consequences.

As for our nuclear-phobic Prime Minister’s dream of turning Australia into the Saudi Arabia of green hydrogen, while simultaneously sitting at the cutting edge of quantum computing, forget it. In 2006, as the shadow minister for the environment, Anthony Albanese gave a speech at the Swansea RSL on avoiding dangerous climate change.

“Why on Earth would we want to take the big health and economic risk of nuclear energy when we have a ready-made power source hovering peacefully in the sky every day?” he asked.

If Albanese doesn’t know the answer to that question 18 years later, he probably never will.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/the-sun-is-setting-on-our-renewables-superpower-fantasy/news-story/508c6864a3c659280e4926b0845ac406

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Antarctica found to have 138 Underwater Volcanoes

Which accounts for a lot of the melting caused by "global warming"

If you check out images of Antarctica today, it might seem like one long flat sheet of ice (except for the mountains and cliffs, of course). Underneath, though, it’s a whole different story

The ice over the top of everything is an average of 1.4 miles thick, but beneath it are rocky mountains, volcanoes, and canyons that have been trapped there for millions of years.

Satellite data and radar surveys have made it possible to see the topography of the bedrock with startling clarity, and we have a pretty amazing map known as BedMachine Antarctica.

The map was the culmination of years of research by 19 different institutes around the world, including NASA, the National Science Foundation, Australia’s Cooperative Research Centres Programme, the National Natural Science Foundation of China, and the British Antarctic Survey, to name a few.

Looking at it is like having X-ray vision, and the data from the map is a gold mine for scientific communities around the world.

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One of the biggest surprises the research uncovered was how huge the Denman Glacier is actually – more than 11,500 feet below sea level, making it the deepest point on continental Earth.

Professor Mathieu Morlighem, an associate professor at the University of California Irvine, issued a statement on the finding back in 2019.

“Older maps suggested a shallower canyon, but that wasn’t possibly; something was missing. With conservation of mass, by combining existing radar survey and ice motion data, we know how much ice flows through the canyon – which, by our calculations, reaches 3,500 meters below sea level, the deepest point on land.

Since it’s relatively narrow, it has to be deep to allow that much ice mass to reach the coast.”

The fact that Antarctica has volcanic tendencies also comes as a bit of a surprise to some, even though there are 138 volcanoes in West Antarctica alone.

Most are dormant, but around nine of them remain active to this day. Mount Erebus is 12,448 feet tall and is the southernmost active volcano on the planet.

https://principia-scientific.com/antarctica-found-to-have-138-underwater-volcanoes/

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Coming Clean on Clean Energy: It’s a Dirty Business

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, you are probably aware of the massive push to transition to green energy. The goal is to have wind and solar replace coal and natural gas; the electric vehicle (EV) will supposedly replace internal combustion engines. Directives are coming from the highest office in the land; the current administration has made green energy a large part of its agenda.

We are being told that these technologies are clean and will save the planet from climate change. However, these alternative forms of energy being espoused are riddled with their own problems.

Hidden behind the solar panels, wind turbines, and EV batteries are some dirty secrets that get swept under the rug and ignored by climate enthusiasts. Fossil fuels are constantly put under a microscope and condemned as an evil destructive polluter; green energy is typically put on a pedestal. Green energy, however, is not as perfect and wonderful as we are made to believe. Yet, we are putting a lot of trust into these energy sources, without considering their ramifications.

The American Consumer Institute just released a report detailing many of the environmental impacts associated with the so-called green energy forms being heavily promoted. The life cycle of all three—the wind turbine, solar panel, and EV battery—involve significant environmental consequences that should not be overlooked and need to be part of the discussion when implementing energy policies.

One of the biggest issues involved with these forms is the extraction and manufacturing processes of various critical minerals that are required for wind turbines, solar panels, and EV batteries. Many underdeveloped nations, where there’s an abundance of minerals, are at risk. The operations and procedures not only overtake land but contaminate surrounding soil and water sources. In the worst cases, this work is accomplished through slave labor.

Various toxins and other greenhouse gases are released into the atmosphere, where workers and even nearby communities are potentially affected. Landscape is tarnished and various animal habitats are shrinking and/or experiencing stress. The massive amount of land occupied by both wind and solar may never be recoverable.

China dominates the green energy supply chains, but their environmental standards are subpar. CO2 emissions associated with refineries in China are 1.5 times greater than those in the EU or U.S.

All three energy sources are also creating a huge waste problem. Since any kind of recycling is very limited on a large scale, more than 90% wind turbine blades, solar panels, and EV batteries end up in landfills. By 2050 it is predicted that used turbine blades will exceed 43 million tons of waste worldwide. Solar waste is predicted to be close to 80 million tons. And with the U.S. projecting 33 million EVs on the road by 2030, that is a lot of batteries to end up in landfills.

Ironically, the same folks who want to charge customers for every plastic bag they use at the grocery store, out of fear of single-use plastics ending up in landfills, don’t seem to have a problem with potentially toxic machinery filling that space instead.

In a penchant for trying to solve one crisis, we are creating others.

Some of the environmental impacts and hazards posed by green energy are far more detrimental than fossil fuels, and yet the latter is often dismissed. Such risks associated with green technologies should actually be an argument against vigorous pursuit of them.

Each energy source, including fossil fuels, should be considered as part of an all-of-the-above strategy for supplying the necessary energy to power homes, businesses, and the U.S. economy at large. All of them come with some degree of environmental concerns, and each should be weighed and measured—along with costs, logistics, reliability, and geopolitical factors—when developing public policy. Instead of completely trying to phase out fossil fuels, a robust and healthy energy mix ought to be established; we need a balanced approach that does not breed additional problems.

It is past time to come clean on so-called clean energy. The real-life consequences and detrimental effects of it demand more honest conversations and a thoughtful course of action.

https://www.realclearenergy.org/articles/2024/08/06/coming_clean_on_clean_energy_its_a_dirty_business_1049839.html

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Renewables will not magically make fossil fuels go away

Bjorn Lomborg

Despite much hype, the much-vaunted green energy transition away from fossil fuels isn’t happening. Achieving a meaningful shift with current policies turns out to be unaffordably costly. We need to drastically change policy direction.

Globally, we are already spending almost $US2 trillion ($2.9 trillion) annually to try to force an energy transition. Across the past decade, solar and wind energy use has increased to their highest levels. But it hasn’t reduced fossil fuels – across the same time, we have added even more fossil fuels.

Countless studies show that when societies add more renewable energy, most of it never re­places coal, gas or oil. It simply adds to energy consumption. Recent research shows that for every six units of new green energy, less than one unit displaces any fossil fuel. Analysis in the US shows that renewable energy subsidies simply lead to more overall energy being used. In other words, policies meant to boost green energy are leading to more emissions.

None of this should come as a surprise to any student of history. During the transition from wood to coal during the 1800s, overall wood use increased even while coal took over a greater percentage of energy needs. The same thing happened when we shifted from coal to oil: by 1970, oil, coal, gas and wood all delivered more energy than ever.

Humans have an unquenchable thirst for affordable energy, which is required for every aspect of modern life. In the past half-century, the energy we get from oil and coal has again doubled, hydro power has tripled and gas has quadrupled – and we have experienced an explosion in the use of nuclear, solar and wind.

The whole world – and the average person – has never had more energy available.

The grand plan underpinning today’s green energy transition mostly insists that pushing heavily subsidised renewables everywhere will magically make fossil fuels go away. But a recent study concluded that talk of a transition is misleading. During every previous addition of a new energy source, the researchers found, it has been “entirely unprecedented for these additions to cause a sustained decline in the use of established energy sources”.

What causes us to change our relative use of energy? One study investigated 14 shifts that have taken place across the past five centuries, such as when farmers went from ploughing fields with animals to fossil fuel-powered tractors. The main driver has always been that the new energy service is better or cheaper.

Solar and wind fail on both counts. They are not better because, unlike fossil fuels that can produce electricity whenever we need it, they can produce energy only according to the vagaries of daylight and weather. This means they are not cheaper, either. At best they are cheaper only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing at just the right speed. The rest of the time they are mostly useless and infinitely costly.

When we factor in the cost of just four hours of storage, wind and solar energy solutions become uncompetitive compared with fossil fuels. Achieving a real, sustainable transition to solar or wind would require orders of magnitude more storage, making these options incredibly unaffordable.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese says the government has approved Australia’s “biggest renewable energy project ever”.
Moreover, solar and wind address only a small part of a vast challenge. They are almost entirely deployed in the electricity sector, which makes up just one-fifth of all global energy use. We still struggle to find green solutions for most transport and we haven’t even begun with the vast energy needs of heating, manufacturing or agriculture. We are all but ignoring the hardest and most crucial sectors such as steel, cement, plastics and fertiliser.

Little wonder then that, for all the talk of the world undergoing an energy transition, even the Biden administration finds that while renewable energy sources will increase dramatically worldwide up to 2050, oil, gas and coal will all keep increasing, too.

On this trajectory, we will never achieve an energy transition away from fossil fuels. This would require vastly more subsidies for solar and wind, as well as for batteries and hydrogen, and for us all to accept less efficient technologies for important needs like steel and fertiliser. But on top of that, a true transition also would require politicians to impose heavy taxes on fossil fuels to make them less desirable. McKinsey estimates the direct price tag to achieve a real transition at more than $US5 trillion annually. This splurge would slow economic growth, making the real cost five times higher. Annual costs for people living in rich countries could be higher than $US13,000 a person per year. Voters won’t agree to that pain.

The only realistic way to achieve a transition is to vastly improve green energy alternatives. This means more investment in green energy research and development. Innovation is needed in wind and solar, but also in storage, nuclear energy and many other possible solutions. Bringing alternative energy costs below the price of fossil fuels is the only way that green solutions can be implemented globally, and not just by the elite in a few climate-concerned, wealthy countries.

When politicians tell you the green transition is here and we need to get on board, they are really just asking voters to support them throwing more good money after bad. We need to be much smarter.

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/commentary/renewables-will-not-magically-make-fossil-fuels-go-away/news-story/c7d1c03d8b016f1a6b4dc5d947dc0cb1

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Japan fuels U.S. LNG boom even as climate targets and impacts loom

And LNG is a "Fossil fuel"

Manning Rollerson turned down a $20,000 offer in 2016 for the land he inherited from his grandmother in the East End, a historically Black neighborhood in Freeport, Texas, designated as a “negro district” in 1930.

After Rollerson refused to sell, Port Freeport, the government body responsible for the town’s harbor on the Gulf Coast of the United States, claimed eminent domain and took over his and other people’s land to expand its facilities. This was in part to accommodate the shipping of liquefied natural gas from the Freeport LNG export terminal that opened nearby in 2019.

LNG is a fossil fuel made by cooling natural gas to reduce its volume and make transportation easier and safer. Like giant seaborne camels, formidable ships fitted with bulging tanks depart from Freeport and four other Gulf Coast terminals to bring LNG to the world, including Japan.

Now, empty plots lie where houses and businesses once stood in the East End. “The city’s dead,” as Rollerson puts it.

Until 2016, the U.S. was sending virtually none of the fuel abroad, but a fracking bonanza, a price spike following Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine and growing demand in Asia are among the factors that have led to a surge in exports. Last year, the U.S. was the biggest supplier of LNG traded internationally, trumping Qatar.

“The value of an LNG cargo trading, say from the U.S. to Asia, went from essentially zero in (mid 2020) to over $200 million” after the start of the Ukraine war, says Sam Reynolds, LNG and gas research lead at the U.S.-based Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA).

Critical to the future of gas is a country that has very little of it. For over half a century, Japan has been a constant and sizable buyer of LNG, and its government, banks and energy companies have played a key role in continued investment in related infrastructure, including along the U.S. Gulf Coast.

That comes even as debate grows over just how big a role gas should play in the energy transition — both globally and in Japan — that is needed to avert far worse impacts of climate change than the world has already witnessed. And more immediately, residents of communities around these U.S. LNG facilities — in Freeport and elsewhere — have complained of the negative impact on their health, livelihoods and environment.

That puts a significant responsibility on Japan’s shoulders.

“Japanese companies have signed contracts to buy from six massive U.S. LNG projects,” including Freeport LNG, says Reynolds. “This may not sound like a big number, but they are really key players in getting this U.S. LNG off the ground.”

A Japan-fueled boom

In January, the frantic U.S. LNG expansion prompted the administration of U.S. President Joe Biden to temporarily pause new export facilities that have not already been approved, giving the Department of Energy time to update its criteria. Legal battles over the pause are ongoing, but in practice the approval of projects covered by the moratorium are not expected in the near term.

The move has been hailed by climate campaigners and decried by Republicans, industry players and countries like Japan, with economy minister Ken Saito expressing concern that the pause could threaten Japan’s energy security.

Gas accounts for about one-fifth of Japan’s energy supply, making it the third-largest source after oil and coal, and it is used for 33% — the biggest share — of electricity generation. Most of this is imported as LNG.

Indeed, Japan is the world’s second-biggest buyer of LNG — surpassed by China only in recent years — and Jera, Japan’s largest power generator, is one of the companies that imports the most LNG globally. Although Australia is Japan’s No. 1 supplier, reliance on the U.S. is growing.

Japan imported 5.5 million metric tons of American LNG last year — only 8% of total purchases, but 34% more than the previous year — and a lot of Japanese public and private money is flooding into this sector. Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group (MUFG), Mizuho and Sumitomo Mitsui Banking Corp. (SMBC) are the first, second and third biggest financiers of LNG export projects in the U.S., respectively, having each invested anywhere between $10.7 billion and $13.8 billion since 2012.

Furthermore, Japanese companies such as energy firms Jera and Osaka Gas and trading houses Mitsubishi Corp. and Mitsui own shares in U.S. facilities, including Freeport LNG. They also have agreements to purchase large amounts of future LNG output — for example, Jera has signed on to buy 1 million tons of fuel per year from Calcasieu Pass 2, a planned export terminal in Louisiana where Calcasieu Pass LNG already operates.

But CP2, as the planned facility is known, has been stalled by the U.S. export freeze, as has Lake Charles LNG in the Louisiana town of the same name, in which Kyushu Electric Power is considering buying a 10% stake, potentially using a government loan.

Japanese public agencies have been instrumental in funding American LNG projects, enticing Japanese corporate buyers and investors and providing them with insurance. For example, the Japan Bank for International Cooperation and Nippon Export and Investment Insurance spent billions to fund the construction of Freeport LNG and Cameron LNG in Louisiana.

Jera, MUFG, Mizuho and SMBC all declined to comment for this article.

Gulf Coast LNG is attractive because it offers an alternative to major suppliers like Australia and Qatar and because U.S. deals offer flexibility where others don’t, says Anne-Sophie Corbeau, global research scholar at Columbia University’s Center on Global Energy Policy. American contracts are not bound by destination restrictions, so the LNG can be used or resold anywhere without profit-sharing arrangements.

Even before Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the economy ministry had requested that Japanese companies transact 100 million tons per year of LNG by the fiscal year beginning April 2030 — a target that has already been met, says Masahiro Naka, deputy director of the Energy Resources Development Division at the ministry’s Agency for Natural Resources and Energy.

However, Finance Ministry data shows domestic demand contracted by 8% last year, while it is expected to shrink by one-third by 2030, according to IEEFA. The economy ministry estimates that Japan will import 56 million tons of LNG per year by fiscal 2030 based on its energy strategy — that is, if the government’s targets for nuclear and renewable energy activation are reached, Naka says, hinting that imports could remain higher.

Japan’s choice to buy more LNG than it uses now and in the future is underpinned by the need for a “flexible amount” to respond to fluctuations, Naka says. The fuel not used at home, currently about one-third of the total, is instead sold to South and Southeast Asian countries such as Bangladesh, Thailand and Vietnam.

The Japanese government is strongly promoting gas usage in that region, including through initiatives such as the Asia Zero Emission Community.

“(Japan) have a very large fleet of existing coal and natural gas plants, decades and decades dominating trade in these commodities, technical expertise at all levels,” Reynolds says. “I don't think it's too far of a stretch to say that this strategy is designed to maintain dominance in (these) markets.”

https://www.japantimes.co.jp/environment/2024/08/11/japan-us-lng-projects/

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