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All Solar, Et Al, In 12 Years?

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That was a British article from the UK.
 
California Distributed Energy Incentive Program Disproportionately Benefiting Fossil Fuels

A California program designed to spur innovation in technologies for distributed generation of low-emission energy is disproportionately benefiting fossil fuels projects, primarily natural gas — and a new proposal to update the emissions threshold that determines which projects are eligible will not change that, critics of the program say.

Some 70 percent of the energy generation that has so far received rebates from California’s $83-million-a-year, ratepayer-funded Self-Generation Incentive Program (SGIP) has been fossil-fueled, according to the Sierra Club.

SGIP, administered by the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC), provides rebates for distributed energy systems installed on the customer side of the utility meter — “behind the meter” in industry parlance.

To qualify for funding, distributed energy system providers must demonstrate that their technology’s greenhouse gas emissions fall below a certain threshold, ensuring that it’s cleaner than the grid energy it will replace.

In one example cited in comments CESA and the Natural Resources Defense Council submitted jointly to the CPUC, a consumer using a distributed energy resource that adheres to the proposed GHG emissions factor could be responsible for as much as 23 percent more greenhouse gas emissions than if they were to simply stick with grid-supplied energy, which is easily on pace to achieve or surpass the existing target of 33% renewables by 2020.

Not only do fossil fuels, and natural gas fuel cells in particular, receive an outsize share of SGIP funds, but one company, Bloom Energy, has claimed more than $400 million of the $1.4 billion in total SGIP incentives, according to GreentechMedia.

Bloom's “Bloom Boxes” turn natural gas into electricity, and have been installed by many corporate giants looking to “green” their operations, from Google and eBay to FedEx and Honda and WalMart. “If the SGIP's aim was to provide several hundred million dollars to a single VC-funded fuel-cell company, then it has succeeded — by classifying fuel cells as an ‘emerging technology,’” GreentechMedia writes.

http://desmogblog.com/2015/08/16/ca...iting-fossil-fuels-regulators-propose-keep-it

It should be obvious that the public and ratepayers are being fleeced in the name of save the planet from global warming.

Change the name renewable to mean no carbon containing atoms although the carbon cycle is done by nature, man cannot be involved.
 
Cut the green crap! Cameron reveals his private view of energy taxation and orders ministers to dump the eco-charges adding £110-a-year to bills

David Cameron has ordered ministers to ditch the ‘green crap’ blamed for driving up energy bills and making business uncompetitive, it is claimed.

The Prime Minister, who once pledged to lead the ‘greenest government ever’, has publicly promised to ‘roll back’ green taxes, which add more than £110 a year to average fuel bills.

But a senior Tory source said Mr Cameron’s message in private is far blunter.

The source said: ‘He’s telling everyone, “We’ve got to get rid of all this green crap.” He’s absolutely focused on it.’

Tory high command has also privately abandoned Mr Cameron’s pre-election mantra ‘vote blue, go green’. ‘It’s vote blue, get real, now – and woe betide anyone who doesn’t get the memo,’ the source said.

The Prime Minister’s comments relate to his bid to cut fuel bills by removing green taxes, the source said. But they will horrify environmental campaigners.

The revelations come as the Prime Minister is locked in a dispute with the Lib Dems about his plan to cut the costly green levies on energy bills.

Mr Cameron wants to scrap most of the charges, which help subsidise wind farms and pay for home insulation.

The Prime Minister is understood to be pushing for a delay in the rollout of the Energy Company Obligation scheme, which adds about £60 a year to average bills.

The £1.3billion scheme, which pays for insulating the homes of the poor, has been criticised for waste and bureaucracy.

It is due to be rolled out across the country by 2015 but could now be delayed until 2017. The Tories also want to see cuts to subsidies for wind turbines and solar panels.

The Government’s green record came under attack from 41 environmental groups this week.

article-2510936-198E783300000578-795_634x380.jpg


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/art...xation-horrify-environmental-campaigners.html

Politicians say anything, do anything to get themselves elected. When the public gets hit with the cost to them directly in their energy bill they pay, it becomes GREEN CRAP!

California has the same problem except they put in support for the poor so that they do not bear the full weight of the GREEN CRAP!
 
Ancient cold period could provide clues about future climate change

by University of Texas at Austin

Researchers at The University of Texas at Austin have found that a well-known period of abrupt climate change 12,000 years ago occurred rapidly in northern latitudes but much more gradually in equatorial regions, a discovery that could prove important for understanding and responding to future climate change.

The research, published Sept. 2 in Nature Communications, focuses on the Younger Dryas, a cooling period that started when the North Atlantic Current, an ocean current, stopped circulating. The event caused Earth's northern hemisphere to enter into a deep chill, with temperatures in Greenland dropping by approximately 18 degrees Fahrenheit in less than a decade.

The event also caused rainfall to decrease in places as far away as the Philippines. However, whereas temperatures in Greenland responded quickly to the ocean current shutdown and subsequent reboot 1,000 years later, it took hundreds of years for rainfall in the Philippines to be affected and to recover.

"We found that the temperature in Greenland is like a small ship that you can stop and turn quickly because of the influence of sea ice in the region, while rainfall in the tropics is like a big ship that takes a long time to course correct," said Jud Partin, a research associate at the University of Texas Institute for Geophysics (UTIG) who led the study.

The changes in temperature and rainfall are linked to a common cause: the slowdown of the ocean currents in the North Atlantic, which affect climate and temperature as they move warm water from the Gulf of Mexico toward the Arctic. As the world warmed after the last ice age, glaciers melted and diluted northern seawater with freshwater. The resulting change in ocean water density disrupted the current and, in effect, the climate, causing a period of global cooling.

The event also inspired the premise of the 2004 disaster flick "The Day After Tomorrow," which exaggerates the speed and strength of the cooling by depicting the planet entering an ice age in a matter of weeks after the ocean current collapses.

Although other studies well document the changes in temperature and precipitation around the world, this new study concludes that these changes do not occur or recover at the same rate, as had been previously assumed.

Understanding the relationship between temperature and precipitation in the wake of climate change is particularly important because it previews what could happen if the planet's ice sheets continue to lose mass and add freshwater to the North Atlantic.

At a conference in Paris during July of more than 2,000 climate scientists, the potential collapse of the North Atlantic Current's circulation was identified as a possible catastrophic consequence of climate change.

"A slowdown of the ocean circulation is a double-edged sword: If we see some temperature changes associated it ... and somehow are quick to act and alleviate the change, then we have the potential to stop it before it impacts rainfall globally," Partin said. "The longer the circulation event lasts means that it will take that much longer for rainfall to recover."

The researchers discovered how rainfall in the Philippines was affected by the Younger Dryas event by analyzing minerals deposited in a stalagmite growing from the floor of a cave in Puerto Princesa Subterranean River National Park in Palawan. They found that it took more than 550 years for drought conditions to reach their full extent in the region, and about 450 years to return to pre-Younger Dryas levels after the North Atlantic Current began circulating again. The record suggests rainfall was about 25 percent lower than present levels during the cold snap.

They then compared these findings with previously published ice core data. According to these records, it took a decade or less for temperatures in Greenland to drop by approximately 18 degrees Fahrenheit once the current collapsed and about 40 years to rebound after it returned.

Partin conducted the work with UTIG Director Terry Quinn and collaborators from the National Taiwan University and the University of the Philippines-Diliman. UTIG is a research unit of The University of Texas at Austin Jackson School of Geosciences.

Computational models of the Younger Dryas temperature and precipitation also provided insight into the role of sea ice in Greenland's abrupt temperature change.

"Sea ice around Greenland acts as a 'switch,' causing that region to respond more quickly than the rest of the planet does by insulating the air from heat stored in the deep ocean," said Yuko Okumura, a UTIG research associate and a co-author on the study.

http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2015/09/150902082932.htm

  1. Glaciers are melting. Can jiggling human CO2 emissions really accomplish the task to stop glaciers from melting?
  2. No one has thought through what is going to happen: After enough ice melt changes the density of seawater, the undersea current stops circulating until the ice reforms - global cooling to the extreme, suddenly.
  3. Best be moving to the desert in the southwestern United States and avoid the rush. :)
  4. To warm the planet, burning coal year around beyond what is needed to put enough CO2 back into the atmosphere that got dissolved in cold water.
  5. How strange we humans are to think what happened 12,000 years ago can be controlled by CO2 emissions when very few humans were around. :ROFLMAO:
 
Why Did China Opt Out of the Arctic Climate Change Statement?

China’s decision sends a worrying signal that U.S.-China tensions will impact climate change negotiations.

On Sunday and Monday, foreign ministers and other international leaders met in Anchorage, Alaska to attend the Conference on Global Leadership in the Arctic: Cooperation, Innovation, Engagement, and Resilience (GLACIER). The State Department described the meeting as “focused on changes in the Arctic and global implications of those changes, climate resilience and adaptation planning, and strengthening coordination on Arctic issues.”

The United States is currently the chair of the Arctic Council, a grouping of the eight Arctic States (Canada, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Russia, Sweden, and the United States) plus a dozen states with permanent observers status, including China, India, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore. The U.S. made it clear that the GLACIER conference was not an official Arctic Council event, but said the meetings would “focus attention on the challenges and opportunities that the Arctic Council intends to address.”

As a sign of the importance the United States placed on the Alaska forum, President Barack Obama attended. He used the conference as a platform for urging swifter action to combat climate change. “Climate change is no longer some far-off problem; it is happening here, it is happening now,” Obama said. “We’re not acting fast enough.”

He also used his speech to focus attention on the need for a global agreement to be reached at this year’s UN climate meeting in Paris: “This year, in Paris has to be the year that the world finally reaches an agreement to protect the one planet that we’ve got while we still can.”

After the conference, the representatives of the Arctic Council members signed a joint statement affirming “our commitment to take urgent action to slow the pace of warming in the Arctic.” The Arctic states were joined by 10 of the 12 Arctic Council permanent observers – with China and India as the holdouts.

Most of the joint statement contained a litany of climate change-related issues already seen in the Arctic, including statistics on melting glaciers and ice sheets and warming temperatures, as well as the impact on Arctic communities. In terms of state commitments, however, there wasn’t much to see. The signatories affirmed a “strong determination … to achieve a successful, ambitious outcome at the international climate negotiations in December in Paris this year”; acknowledged the importance of reducing black carbon (soot) and methane emissions; and called for “additional research” on how climate change is impacting the Arctic.

According to CCTV America, China said that it needed more time to review the document before signing. But RT had a different take, saying that China and India “opted not to sign the document” because “reducing emissions entails huge expenditure and loss of economic effectiveness.” (RT also said that Russia had decided not to sign, contradicting other reports).

Beijing’s decision to abstain from the joint statement on climate change in the Arctic suggests that it viewed the statement as being in conflict with its Arctic interests, potentially setting the stage for later arguments in the Arctic Council itself about how to balance environmental protection with resource extraction and other development activities.

China’s reaction to the GLACIER conference also sends a worrisome signal about U.S.-China cooperation on climate change. In addition to refusing to sign the statement, China sent a relatively low-level representative. Former Chinese Ambassador to Norway Tang Guoqiang, billed as a “special representative” to China’s foreign minister, headed the delegation from Beijing; most other countries sent either minister-level or deputy-minister-level officials (Russia was another exception, sending only its ambassador to the United States to the event).

http://thediplomat.com/2015/09/why-did-china-opt-out-of-the-arctic-climate-change-statement/

Once again, Obama gets snubbed. Methane seeps are occurring naturally all over the world but the Arctic is beginning to boil with methane gushing out of the ground and the Arctic sea. Lets see if reducing human CO2 emissions can fix that.
 
Thank you. You solidify my stance on "green" energy.

Greenland Climate: Now vs. Then, Part I. Temperatures

Although there has been a considerable temperature increase during the last decade (1995 to 2005) a similar increase and at a faster rate occurred during the early part of the 20th century (1920 to 1930) when carbon dioxide or other greenhouse gases could not be a cause. The Greenland warming of 1920 to 1930 demonstrates that a high concentration of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases is not a necessary condition for period of warming to arise. The observed 1995–2005 temperature increase seems to be within a natural variability of Greenland climate.

The glacier acceleration observed during the 1996–2005 period has probably occurred previously. There should have been the same or more extensive acceleration during the 1920–1930 warming as well as during the Medieval Warm period in Greenland when Greenland temperatures were generally higher than today.

There are copious indications that recent conditions in Greenland do not represent an aberrant fluctuation in the region’s climate. Instead, conditions currently lie within the known limits of natural variations.

http://www.worldclimatereport.com/i...land-climate-now-vs-then-part-i-temperatures/

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Volcanic Eruptions Slow Down Global Warming: Study

London: Volcanic eruptions may have slowed down global warming by injecting particulates into the atmosphere, according to a study.

Volcanic aerosols have acted during the last 10 years as a natural umbrella to slow down global temperature increase from greenhouse gases, researchers said.

Although global concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has continuously increased over the past decade, the mean global surface temperature has not followed the same path.

A team of international researchers, including Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT) scientists, have now found an explanation for this slowing down in global warming.

The incoming solar radiation in the years 2008-2011 was twice as much reflected by volcanic aerosol particles in the lowest part of the stratosphere than previously thought, researchers found.

According to the study led by the University of Lund, Sweden, the cooling effect due to volcanic eruptions was clearly underestimated by climate models used for the last Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report.

Since more frequent volcanic eruptions and the subsequent cooling effect are only temporary, the rise of Earth's temperature will speed up again, researchers said.

The reason is the still continuously increasing greenhouse gas concentration, they said.

In the first decade of the 21st century, the average surface temperature over the northern mid-latitude continents did increase only slightly.

This effect can be now explained by the study on volcanic aerosol particles in the atmosphere.

The study uses data from the tropopause region up to 35 km altitude.

The tropopause region is a transition layer between the underlying wet weather layer with its clouds (troposphere) and the dry and cloud-free layer above (stratosphere).

"Overall our results emphasise that even smaller volcanic eruptions are more important for the Earth's climate than expected," researchers said.

The study was published in the journal Nature Communications.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/pol...atch-live-Final-Labour-leadership-debate.html

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Solar Radiation Management: The Future of Environmentalism

Measures to reduce greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions have long dominated public discourse about responses to man-made climate change. However, major institutional and political hurdles dim future prospects for controlling emissions. While adaptation to climate change can accomplish much, flawed institutions are likely to limit its efficacy; but there could be a solution: solar radiation management (SRM), say Lee Lane, of the Hudson Institute, and J. Eric Bickel, of the University of Texas at Austin.

SRM would seek to enhance and manage physical processes that currently reflect sunlight back into space. For example, most researchers have envisioned implementing this concept by adding to the layer of sulfuric acid that is already present in the lower stratosphere.

All else remaining equal, global mean temperatures would fall even though GHG levels would not; the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates that physical processes such as these already offset about 40 percent of global warming.

Recent technical developments have advanced our understanding of important aspects of SRM. First, the regional impacts of SRM will be variable and these differences are likely to become a source of disagreement regarding SRM deployment. Second, given the uncertainties about SRM technologies, there is a pressing need for research and development funding. Third, in contrast to GHG control, SRM may offer a cost-effective way of managing the risk of crossing climate tipping points.

The economic benefits of a successful SRM program would flow from a reduction in climate damages owing to warming and a reduction in economic damage caused by GHG controls. Determining the optimal amount of GHG controls to implement in the presence of SRM is an ongoing research effort. The incentives for using SRM appear to be stronger than those for GHG control. Much analysis has used this valid point to conjecture that SRM would be too easy to employ.

This fear is largely misguided. Global power politics militate against any state bidding for sole control of an SRM system. While SRM remains a speculative option, a workable SRM system could offer a highly useful backup and supplement to current policy options. Source: Lee Lane and J. Eric Bickel, "Solar Radiation Management an Evolving Climate Policy Option," American Enterprise Institute, May 2013. - See more at: http://www.ncpa.org/sub/dpd/index.php?Article_ID=23249#sthash.r1GZSXpU.dpuf

Uhmmmm,

Would that make solar panels less effective if instituted?

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