UK: More Horror Pictures Emerge Showing Locations of Met Office “Extreme” Record Temperatures
These days the Met Office has rebadged its daily “high” temperatures as “extreme”, all the better of course to ramp up fears of heat as part of the Net Zero education process.
Last Wednesday’s “extreme” of 20.4°C was recorded at Teddington Bushy Park.
As the Google Earth photo below shows, the “extreme” temperature is helped on its way by an adjacent high wall reflecting heat onto the measuring device and a large housing development warming the nearby area.
Teddington Bushy Park is a junk class 4 station with internationally-recognised “uncertainties” of 2°C. Joke class 4 station might be a more apt description.
How anyone can think information taken at this site is suitable for scientific work that ultimately produces a global mean temperature is a mystery.
Under a classification system set by the World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) that takes account of temperature corruptions, natural and unnatural, 77.9% of Met Office sites are rated class 4 and 5 and have uncertainties of 2°C and 5°C respectively.
The Met Office does its best to explain away the poor siting of most of its UK-wide 380-strong temperature station network. Class 3 – uncertainties of 1°C – and class 4 are said to produce “valid high-quality data”, something that might be in dispute by looking at the Teddington photo.
The WMO is said by the Met Office not to preclude the use of data from super junk class 5. For its part, the WMO states that a class 5 is “where nearby obstacles create an inappropriate environment for a meteorological measurement that is intended to be representative of a wider area”.
Nearly one in three (29.2%) of the Met Office’s sites are rated super-junk 5 and from this, apparently, the Met Office can produce average temperature figures to one hundredth of a degree centigrade.
Earlier this year, a freedom of information request from the Daily Sceptic finally revealed what has been suspected for a long time, namely that the Met Office temperature measuring system is not fit for the purpose of providing accurate measurements of temperature either at specific local sites or at national and global average scale.
To date, the Met Office has not made an official statement on the growing concerns that surround its scientific work following the startling revelations. It does however produce an occasional remark that suggests it is hiding from the implications of the growing criticism.
Last June it declared the highest, pardon, the most extreme temperature so far of the summer at Chertsey, another ‘record’ that came under question when it was revealed that the measuring device at Chertsey water pumping station was surrounded by a newly-built solar farm.
This is the solar farm in question and it surrounds what appears to be the temperature measuring station. To be fair to the Met Office, Google Maps puts the station a few yards away – there are sometimes small errors in precise placing of any location.
But what is not disputed is that the site is next to a large solar farm with over 1,800 panels. Solar panels generate large amounts of heat in the nearby areas with scientists suggesting warming of 3-4°C.
Citizen journalist Ray Sanders recently tackled the Met Office on the Chertsey location and the state-funded weather service admitted it was “aware” of the solar panels near its station.
“The temperature measurements meet standards for publication and scientific use,” noted the Met Office.
Over in the United States, meteorologist Anthony Watts has spent decades investigating the temperature output of the local weather service NOAA.
He recently presented evidence to show that NOAA’s temperature data was “fatally flawed” with an astonishing 96% of 4,000 plus measuring stations corrupted by poor placement.
As in the U.K., many photos of unsuitable locations have been published. The one below from a site in Florida showing measurements taken near a bank of air conditioning units is a particular horror show.
Appearing on a recent Tom Nelson podcast, Watts was asked about the 40.3°C runway record temperature declared for 60 seconds on July 19th 2022 as jets were landing at RAF Coningsby in the U.K.
He pointed out that such events were caused by new electronic measurements that reacted to temperature change within one tenth of a second.
The previous mercury thermometers took much longer to move and would never have picked up temporary temperature movements caused by gusts of wind or passing jet aircraft.
All of these figures are collected and then adjusted and the “bottom line” is that the data have been changed to increase the warming trend.
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‘Mercury Bomb’ Theory Unravels: Missing Data And Flawed Principles Exposed
A research study by USC Dornsife College of Letters, Arts, and Sciences concluded that the concentration and volume of mercury present in Alaska’s Yukon River Basin is unusually high (see here).
The researchers contend that these high values were caused by the rapid melting of icy permafrost accumulations present along the Yukon River that are rich in mercury. They are certain that the rapid melting was caused by the dramatic increase in atmospheric temperature related to climate change.
The study’s scientists say that as our planet continues to rapidly and unnaturally warm due to climate change, it will melt massive accumulations of icy permafrost and other types of ice that are rich in mercury present in the Arctic.
Eventually, the continued release of large amounts of mercury into the Arctic could irreversibly damage or destroy the Arctic’s biological and physical environments. They have nicknamed this impending disaster the “Mercury Bomb”.
This study has ignited heated discussions concerning what steps we should take to avert this impending environmental disaster. Here we provide evidence showing the “Mercury Bomb” Theory didn’t include all the relevant data, observations, and information, raising doubts about the foundational principles of the theory.
1. The study was performed in the Alaska part of the Yukon River. This river flows west across Alaska and empties into the Bering Sea. The problem is that the Bering Sea is the northern extent of the Pacific Ocean and not part of the Arctic Ocean. Stating that the Yukon River’s mercury affects the entire Arctic is misleading.
2. The Yukon River and its encompassing basin is approximately 2,900 miles long, 2 miles wide, and has an area of 5,800 cubic miles which makes it the third largest river in the United States just behind the Missouri and Mississippi Rivers.
The study samples were collected at two small areas along the river, which were then used to determine the entire river’s mercury concentration.
It is impossible to have confidence that two samples taken across this huge river basin could reflect the average or variations in mercury concentration.
3. The Arctic’s atmospheric temperature has been characterized as extremely high due to climate change. Data shows that this is not true for Alaska.
Alaska’s atmospheric temperature was far cooler than the atmosphere above the Arctic Ocean from October 2021 to September 2022 (Figure 2 and here).
Its atmospheric temperature was below freezing in 2012, 1971, and 1975. Concluding that climate change is the only force that is presently and has historically melted abnormal amounts of glacial and river ice does not coincide with the data.
4. The Alaska part of the Yukon River lies atop a large area of unusually hot bedrock/rock layers (see here). The heat flow from these bedrocks is melting the river’s permafrost—not climate change.
5. There are approximately twenty mercury mines located in the Yukon River and Kuskokwim River Basins region (Figure 3). Mercury mining in this region began in 1884, so it is difficult to know the exact number or distribution of mines.
However, one thing is certain. The mine’s waste rock and sand were dumped into areas adjacent to the Yukon and Kuskokwim. Periods of flooding on most rivers can occur many times a month or in a year.
The same is true for the Yukon River and Kuskokwim River Basin regions. These floods alter the amount of mercy present in previously sampled locations making it near impossible to have confidence that the new samples can be used to establish reliable trends of mercury concentrations or volumes.
There is another problem. Rivers that are of high volume and flow rate are prone to continuously altering the location of sands laterally and downstream.
Figure 3 outlines in red the region that has very high concentrations of mercury in Alaska. However, within this region, there are small areas that have extremely high concentrations of mercury. These areas coincide with the position of the mercury mines.
It makes sense that the miners would choose small areas with extremely high mercury concentrations. As is true of many all-metal mines, the extremely high concentration areas were created by geological features such as faults, ancient rock layers, ancient upflows of lava, and volcanic eruptions.
6. Large amounts of mercury emitted from land and ocean geological features into the Arctic have been greatly underestimated and not included in models that assess the environmental problems currently attributed to anthropogenic actions. Here are a few examples of these geological features and their location in the Arctic.
7. Greenland concentration of natural mercury. “Unlike polluted rivers in other parts of the world, contaminated by industrial activity, the researchers believe the Greenland mercury is coming from natural sources.
If it were coming from human pollution, then the snow on top of the ice sheet should also be full of mercury—yet previous studies have shown it’s comparatively clean. Instead, the scientists believe the meltwater mercury is probably leaching out of the bedrock beneath the ice.
“Mercury concentration in the meltwater rivers was at least an order of magnitude higher than the concentrations found in ordinary rivers across the Arctic.
These concentrations became slightly diluted by the time they flowed out into the fjords—but were still higher than expected, the researchers say. “Even after mingling with the salty water, the levels in the fjords remained about an order of magnitude higher than the mercury levels found in most open ocean waters”. (see here and here).
Greenland’s Kvananefjid Mine (see here) is located along the pristine coast of southwest Greenland (Figure 4 and see here). Rocks in this area are proven to be rich in mercury, radioactive uranium, and phosphate.
This mine area was close to opening because it had one of the largest accumulations of radioactive uranium in the world. Indigenous native tribes in the area protested and the opening of the mine was not allowed. The news is that the mine will soon open.
Having worked in an open pit/land surface mine as a geologist for two summers, I learned that open pit mining, which the new owners will do, is an extremely messy business.
So, the mercury and the phosphorus in the mined rocks and in the reservoir built to hold mine waste will likely leak into the oceans and bays especially when mining operations end.
Currently, mine operators are no longer responsible for maintaining waste reservoirs or other parts of the mine area.
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More Solar Silliness In The New York Times
Hyping solar energy is one of America’s most renewable resources. For instance, in 1978, Ralph Nader declared that “everything will be solar in 30 years.” In 1979, President Jimmy Carter declared the US needed to capture more energy from the sun because of “inevitable shortages of fossil fuels.”
In 2011, in the New York Times, Paul Krugman claimed we are “on the cusp of an energy transformation driven by the rapidly falling cost of solar power.” In 2015, presidential candidate Hillary Clinton pledged that if elected president, she would oversee the installation of 500 million solar panels.
In 2021, the Department of Energy released a study that claimed solar “has the potential to power 40% of the nation’s electricity by 2035.” That’s a mighty big claim. Last year, solar accounted for about 5% of US electricity production. Furthermore, solar only provided about 2.2 exajoules of primary energy to the US economy out of 94.2 EJ used. The DOE also claimed solar could reach 45% of US electricity production by 2050. (That same year, President Joe Biden declared that climate change poses “an existential threat to our lives.”)
The solar hype continued last month in the pages of the New York Times with an article by David Wallace-Wells headlined, “What Will We Do With Our Free Power?” The nut graf of Wallace-Wells’ article appeared near the end when he claimed, “the exploding scale and disappearing cost of solar do mean that the energy game will now be played according to some pretty different ground rules.”
Before going further, a disclosure is in order. I understand the economics of solar. About eight years ago, we had 8.2 kilowatts of solar capacity installed on the roof of our house. Why? We got three different subsidies to do so. We now produce about 12 megawatt-hours of electricity per year and have cut our annual electricity bill in half. Further, that was the second solar system we installed on our home here in Austin. We got fat subsidies for the first system, too.
Back to Wallace-Wells. He is correct in reporting that solar capacity is growing. Last year in the US, solar capacity grew nearly four times faster than wind capacity. Solar grew by 24.8 gigawatts, while wind capacity grew by 6.3 GW. Further, due to its higher power density, solar will continue to grow faster, both here in the US and around the world. Wallace-Wells goes on to repeat the same shopworn arguments we’ve been hearing for nearly 50 years: solar is getting cheaper, capacity is growing, sunshine is free, and therefore, it really is different this time. He writes:
Because the sun can be simply counted on to rise every day, you don’t need to pay in any ongoing way for a commodity input, like oil or gas, to keep the system humming — only to set it up initially to manage and endure the novel challenges of drawing reliable energy from the giant fireball 94 million miles away. And over the next decade, even that all-in cost is expected to fall in half again. Negative electricity prices, in which consumers are actually paid to consume electricity, are already a recurring feature in the world’s mature markets.
He continued:
Though it seems like a line from starry-eyed science fiction, the dream of electricity “too cheap to meter” arose first in the giddy early days of nuclear power, the phrase coined by the midcentury atomic advocate Lewis Strauss...And it is easy to get carried away with the gauzy utopian possibilities of energy both functionally infinite and effectively free.
But there ain’t nothing free about solar or any other form of energy, and there never will be. For as long as humans have been on this planet, our most fundamental quest hasn’t changed. We seek more energy so we can convert it into more useful power — computing power, motive power, cooking power, cooling power — so that we can do more productive work. That’s what we humans are about. Yes, we may have dubbed our species homo sapiens, but we are, in reality, homo faber. And that making and doing requires ever-increasing amounts of power.
Wallace-Wells can cheer until my PV panels are destroyed by the next hail storm, but he might consider resting on his pom poms for a moment to report on what’s happening in the marketplace. As seen above, solar prices aren’t falling. They are rising. In July, consulting firm LevelTen Energy reported that prices for solar power purchase agreements rose 3% during the second quarter and that solar prices have nearly doubled since 2020. LevelTen said the price surge reflects “the development challenges that are collectively placing upward pressure on solar PPA prices across North American markets.” It continued, saying the challenges include:
Long interconnection queues and permitting difficulties. But in recent months, additional uncertainties have been introduced through the expansion of tariffs on Chinese PV components as well as a new investigation into allegations of duty circumvention and dumping practices from PV component producers in Southwest Asia. These events illustrate a trade law environment that is growing increasingly challenging for solar developers in the United States.
Wallace-Wells barely mentions China in his article. But trade laws are casting big clouds over the solar sector. Three years ago, the Biden Administration issued sanctions against multiple Chinese companies due to their connections with Uyghur slave labor.
In May, in “Shanghaied,” I published the graphic above. Remarkably, six different agencies of the federal government are saying the Chinese government is carrying out genocide in Xinjiang, the province that produces some 45% of the world’s solar-grade polysilicon. Given that reality, it’s not surprising that solar cheerleaders like Wallace-Wells, Bill McKibben, and others don’t want to talk about their favorite industry’s near-total reliance on Chinese supply chains.
Wallace-Wells also ignores the vast disparity in solar deployment around the world. He claims, “by some ways of tabulating, solar power is already cheaper than all other new sources of electricity for something like 95 percent of the world.” And what are those ways of tabulating? He doesn’t say. That begs the question: if solar is so cheap, why isn’t Africa using more solar? As seen in the graphic above, the unfortunate answer is that solar is still mainly used in wealthy places. That helps explain why California, a state with 39 million people, is generating twice as much electricity from solar as Africa, even though the African continent has roughly 36 times more people than the Golden State.
By now, it should be clear that Wallace-Wells cares more about the narrative about solar than marketplace realities. Speaking of the market, as seen above, the growth in natural gas-fired generation has swamped the increase in solar since 2015.
As seen above, that growth continued last year when gas-fired generation grew by 115 terawatt-hours while solar increased by 21 TWh. Put another way, gas-fired generation grew five times faster than solar last year.
A final point, and it’s one that I’ve made before. California has added more solar than any other state in the country. And as it has added more solar, electricity prices in California have increased at an alarming rate. As I pointed out last month in “Kamala America?” in absolute and percentage terms, California’s electricity prices have surged more than any other state in the country since 2008 when then-governor Arnold Schwarzenegger issued a mandate for renewable energy.
https://robertbryce.substack.com/p/more-solar-silliness-in-the-new-york
********************************************************Crushing Coal Under the Regulatory Steamroller
The Environmental Protection Agency received another well-warranted slap on the hand last week. In a 2-1 decision, the U.S. Court of Appeals ruled that the EPA had overstepped its authority in its latest attempt to regulate emissions that cross state lines. As one of the judges succinctly put it, “[W]e conclude that the EPA has transgressed statutory boundaries.”
This is by no means the first time the courts have told the EPA that its penchant for heavy-handed regulation is out of order. Earlier this year, the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia rejected the EPA’s attempt to retroactively veto a Clean Water Act permit issued by the Army Corps of Engineers — in 2007. The court labeled the EPA’s interpretation of the rule as “unreasonable.”
But the series of unfavorable (to the agency) rulings has done nothing to reverse the federal government’s penchant for hang-the-cost regulations. And that has real-world consequences. The regulatory onslaught on coal, for example, is killing the industry and burdening American consumers with artificially high energy costs.
A host of federal agencies are proposing and implementing new rules that will increase the costs of mining coal, building new plants (although new carbon-dioxide regulations make that next to impossible) and operating existing plants — all for questionable or minimal environmental or public health benefit.
Of course, the regulators promise tremendous benefits. For instance, the EPA claims its mercury and air toxics rule would produce $53 billion to $140 billion in annual benefits. Yet that figure includes “co-benefits” that are supposed to be realized under existing regulations. The benefits to be derived from the rule’s mercury reductions would — by the EPA’s own reckoning — amount to at most $6 million, a fraction of the estimated $10 billion in compliance costs.
But the new regulations are already producing very real — and undesirable — consequences. Ohio’s FirstEnergy Corp. announced that it will close six coal facilities because of the new environmental regulations. A Georgia utility recently retracted funding for a permit application, citing the EPA’s air-quality rules. That’s home-grown energy capacity — present and future — down the tubes.
Since energy is needed to produce, transport and run virtually everything used in modern work and play, these insensitive regulations will drive up prices for virtually all goods and services — including, ironically, basics such as heating and air conditioning, that are critical to public health. Worse, these rising costs inevitably siphon away resources that could be devoted to activities that truly would improve America’s public health.
Undoubtedly, the abundance of natural-gas production resulting from horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing has cushioned the blows the administration is raining down upon America’s energy economy. Fuel-switching for economic reasons is sensible. There’s certainly no reason the U.S. should continue to mine coal or build coal-fired power plants just for the sake of using coal. But there’s also no reason why the federal government should artificially reduce coal’s role in energy production by creating an environment that makes a decline in coal production inevitable.
And the higher energy prices are coming, too. PJM Interconnection, which manages the electricity grid for 13 states and the District of Columbia, held its capacity auction to determine the amount of electricity necessary to meet expected demand. According to PJM, capacity auction prices for 2015 were higher “because of retirements of existing coal-fired generation resulting largely from environmental regulations which go into effect in 2015.”
For decades, coal has literally been the rock that has powered America with cheap, reliable energy. At current consumption rates, coal can provide enough electricity to fuel our nation for the next 500 years. Yet the current regulatory regime seems intent on penalizing and punishing traditional forms of energy, while simultaneously subsidizing and guaranteeing a market for its preferred (albeit as yet non-economical) alternative sources.
The recent U.S. Court of Appeals ruling is a welcome recognition that the EPA’s unelected bureaucrats have gone too far. But Congress must also step up to the plate and reform federal policies and regulations to enable the market — not politicians and bureaucrats — to determine the role of coal in U.S. electricity generation.
https://www.heritage.org/climate/commentary/crushing-coal-under-the-regulatory-steamroller
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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