Nitrous Oxide and Climate

Nitrous oxide (N20) has now joined carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane (CH4) in the climate alarm proponents’ pantheon of anthropogenic “demon” gases. In their view, increasing concentrations of these molecules are leading to unusual and unprecedented warming and will, in turn, lead to catastrophic consequences for both our ecosystems and humanity.

Countries around the world are in the process of greatly reducing or eliminating the use of nitrogen fertilizers based on heretofore poorly understood properties of nitrous oxide. Reductions of N2O emissions are being proposed in Canada by 40 to 45 percent and in the Netherlands by up to 50 percent. Sri Lanka’s complete ban on fertilizer in 2021 led to the total collapse of their primarily agricultural economy.

To provide critically needed information on N2O, the CO2 Coalition has published an important and timely paper evaluating the warming effect of the gas and its role in the nitrogen cycle.

Armed with this vital information, policymakers can now proceed to make informed decisions about the costs and benefits of mandated reductions of this beneficial molecule.

See

https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/Nitrous-Oxide-and-Climate.pdf

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Climate change: Hidden emissions in liquid gas imports threaten targets

Europe's growing reliance on liquefied natural gas (LNG) is coming at a high environmental cost, new research shows. LNG imports have soared in the wake of the Ukraine war which has limited piped supplies from Russia.

Analysis, seen by the BBC, shows that the production and transport of LNG causes up to ten times the carbon emissions compared to pipeline gas.

In the UK and Europe, worries over energy supplies have seen an unprecedented uptick in imports of LNG, a liquefied version of natural gas.

Data shows that LNG cargo import volumes were up 65% in the first nine months of this year compared to 2021.

How Liquefied Natural Gas is made: 1: Natural gas is cleaned of impurities. 2: It becomes liquid after being cooled to approx -160C. 3: It is easier and safer to transport as a liquid (reduces volume of gas by 600 times)

But according to new analysis by Norwegian research firm Rystad Energy, shared with the BBC, the making and shipping of liquid natural gas is extremely energy intensive. To make it, fossil gas is cooled in giant fridges to -160C.

As the gas liquefies, it shrinks, and becomes six hundred times smaller, making it much easier to transport.

While the emissions from burning the gas are the same whether it's piped or in liquid form, the extra energy involved in making and transporting the liquid is significant.

"For piped gas from Norway, we see around 7kg of CO2 per barrel, but for LNG imports into Europe, we estimate the average is over 70, so around 10 times lower for piped gas versus LNG," said Patrick King from Rystad.

"By the end of next year, if Russia fully turns off the gas taps, and all that additional gas needs to come from LNG sources, we will see an additional 35 million tonnes of imported upstream CO2 emissions compared to 2021."

That extra CO2 is the equivalent of adding around 16 million cars to the UK's roads for two years.

For some observers, this rush for LNG is a triumph of short-term thinking.

"The real opportunity, out of a bad situation is to put incentives in place to reduce our gas usage," said Dr Paul Balcombe, from Queen Mary University of London. He wasn't involved in this new study, but has researched LNG emissions previously.

"We need to increase energy efficiency and our renewables deployment. Rather than just looking at the really, really short-term replacement, which is LNG, we need to look at the slightly longer term, which will have way better cost implications, financial and environmental."

Environmental campaigners are worried that the current embrace of extra LNG may not be a one off. While none are currently planned for the UK, there are plans for the installation of around 20 new LNG terminals on the European continent.

"It's really scary to be honest," said Eilidh Robb, who is with Friends of the Earth Europe.

"The challenge is that to make these terminals economically viable, countries have to agree to very long contracts to bring in the gas and the terminals themselves can last up to 40 years, which means a very long lock-in effect for these fossil fuels that we are trying to get out of."

One other problem with these imports is their origin. According to Rystad, around 16% of the liquid is coming from Russia.

In buying this gas from Russia, the UK and Europe are not just helping to fund the invasion of Ukraine, but they're also making it more difficult to win the war against climate change.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-63457377

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Greta and her green-communism

Many breathed a sigh of relief when Greta Thunberg announced she was not going to attend COP 27 Climate Change meeting which is now underway at Sharm el-Sheikh in Egypt. The COP process is a ‘greenwashing scam’, she explained.

It seemed that the girl, although not even having reached the age of 20, had already emerged from the catharsis of teenage simplistic idealism. Was she having doubts about promoting a goal of dubious worth at a cost that is unknown but without a scientific breakthrough is incalculably high? Seemingly so, and that corroborated the notion that at a coming of age (historically at 21), she reached a maturity society expects of each emerging generation to take balanced judgments sufficient enough to have voting rights.

Alas, this proved to be too sanguine as Greta’s true position emerged.

First, she announced that her foundation was to finance several like-minded people to attend the jamboree in Egypt, an act which rather undermines her declaration about the worth of the meeting.

Secondly, she released her new book which is a compendium of about a hundred of the world’s most radical left-wing writers. In announcing the book, she declared ‘normal’ was already a crisis and continued:

‘What we refer to as normal is an extreme system built on the exploitation of people and the planet. It is a system defined by colonialism, imperialism, oppression, and genocide by the so-called global North to accumulate wealth that still shapes our current world order.’

Her stated goal is to overthrow ‘the whole capitalist system’, which she says is responsible for ‘imperialism, oppression, genocide and racist, oppressive extractionism’. There is no likelihood that she is hitting the hammer on the nail by using oppressive extractionism to describe the use of African child labour to mine for cobalt and other materials vital for the ‘energy transition’ to renewables.

She is ranting against the system which, while creating many billionaires, has trebled the average living standards across the globe since 1950. And, far from being a north-south divide, we see those countries formerly defined as being the heartland of the oppressed, colonised, and exploited ‘South’ – India, Indonesia, Vietnam, China – growing much faster than the countries defined as the ‘North’. Indeed, former ‘South’ countries: Taiwan, Singapore, and South Korea (not to mention Middle East oil states) now have living standards at least comparable to those for the majority of countries defined as being ‘North’.

Greta Thunberg is deluded by apocalyptic preachings and canalized via an extreme form of climate alarmism into a revolutionary whose ideology seeks to the overthrow of the system of governance and the global economic principles without which we would live in severe discomfort if not abject poverty. But many see insights and a forward program in her statements while irrational climate fear is prevalent among western nations’ youth.

20th century mass movement for Peace and Unilateral Nuclear Disarmament, like the modern green movement, included many malcontents seeking radical transformations of the economy. They too were fueled by slogans like Net Zero! Stop Coal! Solar not Nuclear! – slogans that were unaccompanied by realistic plan to accomplish the stated goals in a way that is in any sense affordable. For Australia to achieve Net Zero for electricity alone, in addition to the outlays for wind/solar and the quadrupling of transmission costs, would require 25 Snowy 2.0’s. That’s the equivalent in terms of battery costs of three times today’s annual Gross Domestic Product; this is for a system that would be immeasurably less reliable than the one we are being urged to discard.

However, aside from revolutionary communism, 20th century mass movements did not have leadership cadres including billionaires like George Soros, the World Economic Forum’s Klaus Schwab, and perhaps the UN’s Secretary General Antonio Guterres as well as Greta Thunberg, who openly promote replacing the system that has underpinned the present period of unprecedented global affluence.

Although the Climate Change movement, with its green energy solution, has similarities to the revolutionary ideals of socialism in seeking to replace the market system, it has some fundamental differences. The socialism of yesteryear was designed to replace what was deemed to be an anarchic system of production said to be accompanied by great waste because it depended upon private property and a market system that failed to orchestrate the disparate views of individuals and the different production potentialities.

20th century socialism was envisaged and sold as a means of making those states adopting it richer and more egalitarian. Yesteryear’s promoters of revolutionary communism and socialism, once in power, spectacularly failed to achieve these goals in the 20th century and, in attempting to avoid the failures, brought unprecedented curtailment of individual liberties.

Woke greens seek to use those same mechanisms of socialism, not to grow economies but to achieve other, less materialistic, targets. Adopting central planning and regulatory measures is a proven route to making us all poorer – and this is a goal of the more radical elements within the Net Zero movement and one that is regarded, at least in principle, as acceptable collateral damage by the movement at large.

At least by the standards and goals of the green leadership, greening of energy systems would not be considered a policy failure if it is accompanied by a marked reduction in living standards. This is unlikely to be the view of those who unthinkingly are attracted to their broad goals. Many of the supporters of forcing the replacement of coal and gas by wind/solar, attracted to superficialities, like the sun-and-wind-are-free, accept claims that renewable power is cheaper than that from fossil fuels.

Experience proves otherwise…

https://www.spectator.com.au/2022/11/greta-and-her-green-communism/

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The evidence is not ‘in’

The attack on fossil fuels has brought us closer to a dystopian world where fuel is a scarce and valuable currency.

It has been a spectacularly successful campaign to effectively brainwash people (those who were/are susceptible) into believing the premise that the planet was warming dangerously – because we were burning fossil fuels to generate our energy. The fear this scenario generated fuelled the campaign.

The scenario has been funnelled through what appeared to be credible scientific processes. Like the IPCC, whose scientific-looking front hides a politically driven engine room.

(November 14, 2010: Ottmar Edenhofer, then co-chair of IPCC Working Group III, is quoted by the Zuricher Zeitung: ‘Climate policy has almost nothing to do anymore with environmental protection, says the German economist and IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer. The next world climate summit in Cancun is actually an economy summit during which the distribution of the world’s resources will be negotiated.’)

Created with the objective of generating fear (with help from self-interest driven high priests like Al Gore), it is also the body that ‘keeps us safe’ from the danger, by urging limits on our fossil fuel burning. The ‘evidence’ used is modelling: the dark art that has been discredited for models being wrong every single time.

The tsunami of often dicey scientific data (eg Michael Mann’s widely criticised hockey stick graph, East Anglia ‘ClimateGate’ scandal, Australia’s temperature record ‘homogenised’ by BOM) was so successful that the fear of emissions has been absorbed. It is now accepted as fact. Nobody bothers to scrutinise the claims, check the data. Ask for evidence that our fossil fuel emissions drive global warming. They don’t. The evidence that they don’t is overwhelming and can be easily found in the geologist’s handbook. But nobody bothers to look.

The claim that man-made emissions are threatening the planet’s very existence – we have about 8 years left, apparently – is extraordinary. There is certainly no evidence for anything of the sort. As the late and great Carl Sagan said, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence…

Instead of evidence, the climate scenario relies solely on generating fear. The media has been seduced by this ‘movement’ partly because it is such easy drama copy. ‘The end is nigh’ is a better seller than ‘The end is not nigh’. Of course now, three decades later, the big drama story would be that it has all been a. ‘Climate change is a hoax’.

But my point in this article is not about climate change but about the need for evidence. Beware the risks that come from politicians promising to keep us safe. Keep us safe from global warming by banning fossil fuel emissions. Keep us safe from Covid death by banning everything we hold dear. Keeping us safe from Covid was a strategy taken straight out of the climate playbook: minimal evidence, lots of scary messaging. Like closing schools, not to really protect the children but to send a message, for example. ‘Keeping you safe’ is the mantra that could answer any probing question and shield our politicians’ bad policies from scrutiny.

It is my sad task to put much of the blame on the many journalists who have allowed partisanship to blind them to their professional responsibilities. That is, to ask questions – good probing questions. On the subject of climate policies, I don’t recallever seeing or hearing a question seeking evidence that led to a policy decision. It has just been taken for granted that the alarmist claims are valid. They’re not.

During the peak Covid years, evidence underpinning the ‘health advice’ – that drove those crazy, undemocratic orders, mandates, police brutality and lockdowns – is still in secret folders somewhere, hidden from scrutiny. Remember the daily feast of assertions about risks that are now revealed as having been false, whereas it was the decisions made that posed the real danger. Now, we see the extent of the catastrophe caused, and are seeking answers.

Imagine the catastrophe – or catastrophes – that could arise due to our failure to demand evidence for the dangerous climate change scenario. Many people, including it seems our politicians, think that such evidence has been provided: ‘the science is settled’.

In the nine years researching the subject, the one thing that I have consistently come across is the opposite of that sentiment: the deep uncertainty among scientists about how our climate works. It is a vastly complex phenomenon with multiple moving parts, impervious to modelling. Yet it is modelling that has been used as ‘evidence’ to forecast the warming that will extinguish entire species. But if we keep asking the great Greta how to save the world from species-killing ‘climate change’, we can’t expect anything but hot air.

Had we insisted on scientific evidence to show how CO2 drives warming, we would have heard from geologists that natural variability – warming and cooling, ice age/no ice age – has occurred for millennia? Carbon dioxide, we would have been relieved to discover, does not drive warming, much less man-made carbon dioxide, a mere trace gas in the atmosphere. Climate alarm would never have taken hold. Children would not be crying from fear of a fried planet.

Evidence found through the scientific method is in short supply. We really must insist on politicians refraining from making assertions that cannot be supported by evidence. Dear colleagues in the media: please always ask for it. Don’t wait until a catastrophe forces us to look in the rear-view mirror in regret. Like with Covid.

Perhaps we are seeing the beginning one such major catastrophe as climate change alarmism meets war in Ukraine. The war threatens food supplies, misguided climate-fear-driven energy policies have created fuel shortages … and you can bet it will all be Putin’s fault that millions starve or freeze to death. If only our leaders had been sceptical of alarmist claims and insisted on evidence.

https://spectator.com.au/2022/11/the-evidence-is-not-in/

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My other blogs. Main ones below

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

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

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

http://australian-politics.blogspot.com (AUSTRALIAN POLITICS)

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

http://jonjayray.com/blogall.html More blogs

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