Peeling White Paint on Weather Stations – Major ‘Cause’ of Global Warming
According to a new study, weather station data has been shown to non-climatically and erroneously record warmer-than-actual temperatures due to the steady and perpetual aging process almost universally observed in temperature gauges.
When a weather station temperature gauge’s white paint or white plastic ages and darkens, this allows more solar radiation to be absorbed by the gauge than when the gauge is bright white and new.
Within a span of just 2 to 5 years, a gauge has been observed to record maximum temperatures 0.46°C to 0.49°C warmer than in gauges that have not undergone an aging process.
This artificial warming is not corrected in modern data sets, and it builds up over time – even when the gauges are cleaned or resurfaced every few years.
If these systematic artificial warming errors were to be corrected rather than ignored, the 140-year (1880-’90 to 2010-’20) GISTEMP global warming trend plummets from the current estimate of +1.43°C down to +0.83°C, a 42% differential.
The temperature reduction can be even more pronounced – from +1.43°C down to +0.41°C – if a set of conservative assumptions (described in detail in the paper) are removed.
Interestingly, when the systematically erroneous temperature data are removed, or homogenized, at different intervals of time (2 years vs. 12 to 30 years, etc.)
The global temperature trend – indeed, the long-term global warming trend – can be shown to effectively disappear, depending on the time interval. This can be observed below, in Figure 7.
As this chart illustrates, temperature data can homogenized, or adjusted, to exhibit just about any trend or non-trend the creator of the chart intends to. Data can be bent and manipulated to show strong warming, weak warming, or even no warming over the last 140 years.
Perhaps the modern version of global warming is not nearly as unprecedented or even unusual as it is purported to be.
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Why EV Ownership Is a Ticking Time Bomb
It is now, or should be, common knowledge that electric vehicles—cars, trucks, buses, bikes, scooters—under conditions of even low humidity or water damage, are prone to catching fire, owing to the unstable nature of the lithium-ion battery
As Chris Morrison writes at The Daily Skeptic, EVs are known to explode “with the force of a bomb blasting super-heated jets of flame, melting and decomposing nearby structural materials including metal and concrete, and sending vast amounts of toxic fumes into any enclosed atmosphere.”
Jammed into underground parking garages or packed in ferries, EVs are harbingers of almost unimaginable disaster—ecological and safety menaces to which the ‘Net Zero’ fanatics among our political leadership are comatosely indifferent.
We have witnessed lethal battery explosions in South Korea and elsewhere with significant loss of life. QBE Europe reports that such fires are increasing at a worrisome rate and explains:
“Lithium-ion fires are the result of thermal runaway, where batteries start to irreversibly overheat, usually due to impact damage, over-charging or over-heating…
The resulting explosive fire incidents are significantly more energetic [than ordinary fires], causing extensive damage, and potentially injury or even death.”
They cannot be readily put out and will often re-ignite.
We read of an electric truck loaded with lithium batteries catching fire, closing down the Port of Los Angeles, Long Beach, and the Vincent Thomas Bridge.
We learn that Audi’s signature e-tron GT has been recalled multiple times over fire concerns. A massive fire at a Rivian Plant crisped over 50 vehicles. In 2022, Hurricane Ian caused 20 electric cars to catch fire “after they flooded with salt water, creating hazards for first responders.”
We have seen the damage that Hurricane Helene caused in Florida and other states, involving the volatile nature of EVs as well. According to Florida Politics, “Gov. Ron DeSantis urged owners of electric vehicles in Florida on Wednesday to drive them to higher ground to avoid them being exposed to seawater.”
A Toronto apartment complex has just banned all electric vehicles, including electric bikes, motorbikes, unicycles, hoverboards, mopeds, Segways, skateboards, and scooters, citing fire risk. These are only a few of the instances that are on record.
It is to be expected that EV advocates—government officials, industry executives, interested buyers, and committed owners—will claim that internal combustion fires far outnumber their electric competitors, which does make statistical sense.
Editor’s note: there are statistically more ICE fires than EV fires because EV’s represent only a small fraction of the total number of vehicles. If numbers were equal, EV fires would be many times more than ICE fires.
There is significantly more of one than of the other. According to various reports (e.g., International Energy Agency, Regie de l’énergie du Canada, etc.), EVs make up anywhere from only five percent to 18 percent of the market, depending on the country.
In any case, it is a sales number that is now markedly declining as consumers and major companies are turning off EVs.
As I have previously pointed out, Ford Motors is backing away from EVs and reconditioning an EV plant to build high-demand Super Duty trucks. Nissan’s EV earnings dropped 99% in the first quarter of the year.
General Motors delayed (perhaps indefinitely) the new Buick EV and a new electric truck factory. Hertz Global Holdings is selling off 20,000 EVs from its fleet. The Financial Post reports that Volkswagen has cut EV output in Germany as demand craters.
Indeed, The Telegraph reports that Germany suffered a “spectacular 70pc drop in electric car sales.” EV automobile manufacturer Stellantis has laid off thousands of Michigan workers. Italy has called for a review of the European Union’s coming internal combustion car ban, claiming that the “absurd” policy was ideologically driven and ignored the realities of the market.
But even if this were not so, EVs would continue to pose a much greater danger than ICE vehicles. I have only seldom heard of a gas-powered vehicle aflame, yet EV fires seem to be a regular event, giving off clouds of toxic emissions and burning almost uncontrollably.
They are a source of ecological havoc whose effects will grow increasingly evident despite government mandates and media silence.
Although I have written about the EV hazard on several occasions for this site and others, the issue’s implications recently came home to me with renewed force. Embarking on one of the myriad ferries that ply between Vancouver, the Sunshine Coast, and the Gulf Islands, I noticed a late-model EV among the hundreds of cars, trucks, and tankers making the crossing.
There were certainly more, but one was enough to get me thinking. A single “thermal event” would cause a near-unquenchable fire, release volumes of toxic emissions, and set off explosions in the confined hold of the ship that would likely result in its foundering and the death of many passengers from fire, poisonous fumes, and drowning.
This was a nightmare vision that I sensed would one day translate into the real world. I also knew that very few of the officials in charge of the ferry service would accept the very real possibility of such a cataclysm.
If such an event should occur, denial and subterfuge would be the response. The cause would have to be located elsewhere. The combination of inertia and vested interest, bureaucratic sluggishness, and profiteering avarice would constitute nothing less than criminal indifference.
I was encouraged to read that the Norwegian shipping firm Havila Kystruten, which operates car ferries around the coast of Norway, has banned the transportation of electric, hybrid, and hydrogen vehicles. And with good reason.
Neil Dalus of the freight insurer TT Club points out:
“During a lithium battery thermal runaway event… significant amounts of vapour can be produced in many common supply chain scenarios, including ships’ holds and warehouses.”
The potential toxic effects, as noted, can be and have been fatal. “Drivers, stevedores, ships’ crews and first responders attempting to control the blazes encounter what might appear to be smoke but is in fact a mix of toxic gases, generated quickly and in large volumes.”
The freight insurer warns that the failure of these batteries can occur “with such speed that there is typically no time to react.”
Such disasters may not be as improbable as we may have thought. They are just waiting to happen. Mike Gallagher, CEO of Ports Australia, warns of the ferocity of such fires:
“You can’t put them out. So you can imagine it on the street if you can’t put them out, imagine them on a vessel out at sea or in a port.”
In 2022, the Felicity Ace, a large cargo vessel carrying 4,000 cars, including EVs, not-so mysteriously caught fire and sunk. In July 2023, the Dutch vessel Freemantle Highway, with a cargo of 3,783 vehicles, including 498 EVs, burst into flames, the fire starting “in the battery of an electric car,” according to a crewman.
The National Transportation Safety Board has also advised of the inherent risks. EVs are ticking time bombs.
Of course, engineers and technicians are working to improve the safety co-efficient of the lithium battery, but success is years in the future—if at all. Moreover, the electrical grid cannot sustain the drain on its capacity, which in itself is enough to put paid to so ill-advised a project.
Whatever way we look at it, the EV revolution is premature and appears destined to failure.
One should keep in mind that many professional firms and the media will almost always gloss over the danger and the lethal radius of these fires in the same way that “fact-checkers” almost always manipulate rather than check the facts.
Believe them at your peril. The risk factor is not susceptible to standard data analysis.
Indeed, the purring statistical distributions we find all over the Net with respect to the comparative dangers of driving an EV and an ICE vehicle, assuring us we have no need to worry about EVs, depend on a selective approach to weak or imperfect data arrays.
The statistical apparatus that is usually brought to bear upon the events in question is not only starved of appropriate data but is meant to distort our perception of the situation. It cannot accommodate the scalene and empirical properties of certain sorts of phenomena—in this instance, what we might refer to as “crisis events.”
One EV fire can sink a ship; the damage is incalculably greater than any number of regular vehicles can give rise to. How do we compute so disproportionate a probability?
We are dealing with a category error. One apple, so to speak, may be far more septic than innumerable oranges. As the old saw goes, “Do not put your faith in what statistics say until you have carefully considered what they do not say.”
“Companies flourish in a free market economy not by serving bureaucrats but consumers, the true ‘bosses,” writes Jonathan Miltimore at The Epoch Times, condemning the “hamfisted” misallocation of government resources.
“Fortunately, the centrally planned EV Revolution now appears dead in the water, or at least in full retreat.” One hopes he is right.
Although governments everywhere continue to push for increased “adoption,” the time has plainly arrived to end EV mandates, wasteful government subsidies and incentives, and the political, corporate and media propaganda campaigns leading to the inevitable economic, ecological and life-threatening debacles everyone will come to regret.
The time is now, before the treasury collapses and the fatalities begin to mount up.
https://principia-scientific.com/why-ev-ownership-is-a-ticking-time-bomb/
*************************************************Expert Calls Out VP Debate Moderators’ Climate Lies
Climate alarmists, despite what CBS debate moderators asserted, “can't demonstrate that emissions are really having any effects on anything other than maybe they're helping the planet get greener, which means there's more life,” Junk Science’s Steve Milloy told PJ Media.
The CBS vice presidential debate moderators, Norah O’Donnell and Margaret Brennan, tried to tie Hurricane Helene to “climate change” and pressured both Republican JD Vance and Democrat Tim Walz to endorse government climate action. But “the notion that this is a man-made or -enhanced or -caused weather event is just without a foundation,” Milloy explained.
Milloy, a Senior E&E Institute Legal Fellow and former Trump EPA Transition Team Member, insisted that there’s “been no increase in strong hurricanes. There's been no increase in the frequency of hurricanes. The sort of storm that hit the Big Bend of Florida has happened before.” Indeed, as of Jan. 2023, data indicated major hurricanes were becoming less frequent.
In terms of “observational data,” Milloy continued, the theory that “emissions have somehow warmed the ocean water is completely faulty, because it's physically impossible for the atmosphere to warm the ocean. So it's impossible for emissions to warm the ocean.” While Helene “may be a record weather event … that's not really going to be unexpected, because we've been through a pretty extraordinary past year, which is not explainable by emissions. It was an El Nino year. There are other factors.” Helene wasn’t caused or intensified by human actions.
Alarmists assert storms are “made more likely by climate change. I have no idea what they're talking about,” Milloy told me. “Storms have always happened. They always will happen. The ocean water … has warmed recently. But once again, the atmosphere cannot warm the ocean.” Rather, “the primary warmer of the ocean is the sun, and the other is [that] water can be warmed from beneath. That's probably how El Nino has developed. So both of these things are natural, have nothing to do with humans.”
Milloy cited an “ironic” article he found from last year saying people were moving to Asheville, NC, which has since been devastated by Helene, “because they thought it would be … safe climate wise. And of course, you know, climate is a ridiculous reason to do anything. They should have been thinking about the weather.” After all, “those mountains get storms,” Milloy pointed out, “it's a flood-prone area. And this time they got a really big one, and no one was ready for it, because I guess they're imagining that emissions are a problem.”
When you make decisions based on what climate alarmists say, disaster is sure to follow; not a single climate doom prophecy has come true in many decades.
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Organizations that manage, coordinate and monitor electricity service for 156 million Americans across 30 states are warning that the Biden-Harris administration’s power plant rule will be catastrophic for the nation’s grid
Four regional trade organizations (RTO), as they’re called, recently filed an amicus brief, also known as a friend of the court brief, in support of a multi-state lawsuit against the EPA over the rule.
The EPA released the rules in April. They require coal-fired power plants that will be operating past 2039 to begin implementing carbon-capture technologies in just eight years. New gas-fired power plants will also need to add the technologies, with those operating 40% of their annual capacity or more to add carbon capture starting in 2032.
Isaac Orr and Mitch Rolling, co-founder and researchers with Always On Energy Research, performed an analysis on behalf of the North Dakota Transmission Authority on the impacts the rules would have on the Midcontinent Independent Systems Operator (MISO), an RTO that covers a swath of the center of the U.S.
The researchers say they found a number of problems. The EPA grossly overestimated the ability of intermittent wind and solar to deliver reliable electricity during peak demand periods, according to the analysis, and it also found the agency didn’t perform any reliability analysis on the rules. The result would be blackouts lasting days in some cases.
The RTOs’ amicus brief points out these same problems. It argues that the EPA’s timeline is too short. The requirements for compliance assume feasibility of carbon capture technology that has not been “adequately demonstrated,” the RTOs explain, and the rules would result in vast retirements of coal-fired power plants while preventing investments in baseload generators, such as natural gas-fired power plants, to replace the lost capacity. The RTOs also noted that the EPA performed no reliability operational assessments. Baseload generation refers to the minimum level of constant power supply that a utility or power grid must produce to meet the continuous and consistent demand for electricity.
“It would be absolutely devastating for the grid,” Rolling told Just the News.
Rolling and Orr reached out to several regulatory attorneys, and none of them were aware of another situation in which RTOs filed an amicus brief asking the court to remand regulations back to the agency. The fact the RTOs intervened in the case suggests that they are especially concerned about the rules.
Supporters of the rules, such as the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC), argue the rules are necessary to achieve net-zero by 2050. The target is a key goal for anti-fossil fuel advocates, because they say it would limit global warming to 1.5 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The criticisms the EPA’s rules have received suggest the goal isn’t achievable without serious threats to the reliability of the nation’s grid. Net zero means cutting carbon emissions to a small amount of residual emissions that can be absorbed and durably stored by nature and other carbon dioxide removal measures, leaving zero in the atmosphere.
Rolling said that many grid engineers and planners know that eliminating thermal units — coal- and gas-fired power plants — on the time scale that achieving net zero by 2050 would result in frequent and lasting blackouts. He said, however, there’s a reluctance to be too vocal about it. The industries that contribute to the U.S. electricity supply are interconnected, and there’s pressure to maintain harmony and cooperation, to not rock the boat so to speak, which is a feature of many industries and organizations.
“So they don't say things out in the open, that maybe they should,” Rolling said.
The 2019 blackouts in California, the deadly Texas blackouts in the 2021 Winter Storm Uri, and the Christmas 2022 blackouts in the Southeast, Rolling said, should have been a wakeup call for the country that there are growing risks to our electricity grid. So far, they haven’t deterred the net-zero by 2050 advocates from their agenda.
Rolling said that RTOs and utilities have traditionally been policy takers, as opposed to policy makers. This is leaving a lot of the policymaking up to people who are not as knowledgeable or concerned about the impacts policies can have on the nation’s electricity supply.
“At a certain point, you can't be policy takers. You have to get in the mix of policy. These are the people that know this best. They know their regions the best. They know what their system needs to maintain reliability, and the EPA should listen to them,” Rolling said.
So far, the EPA doesn’t appear to be willing to do that. In its response to the arguments of the plaintiffs, the EPA defended its rule and its authority to enact it. The agency defended carbon capture, pointing to projects the agency claims were successful, and insisted the technology is financially viable. Rolling said he’s talked to engineers that tell him the technology is still in its infancy, but the EPA is trying to force it into primetime.
“We're jumping off a cliff and we're hoping to create the parachute while we're in the air,” Rolling said.
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http://jonjayray.com/covidwatch.html (COVID WATCH)
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https://westpsychol.blogspot.com (POLITICAL CORRECTNESS WATCH -- new site)
https://john-ray.blogspot.com/ (FOOD & HEALTH SKEPTIC -- revived)
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Jim Hansen and his twin
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