Dakota Access Pipeline Owner Sues Greenpeace
For $300 Million In Damages
In this newsletter:
1) Modern Warm Period Not Unprecedented, Chinese Academy Of Sciences Study Finds
Chinese Academy Of Sciences, 8 August 2017
2) Characteristics Of Temperature Change In China Over The Last 2000 Years And Spatial Patterns Of Dryness/Wetness During Cold And Warm Period
Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, August 2017
3) Dakota Access Pipeline Owner Sues Greenpeace For $300 Million In Damages
The Wall Street Journal, 23 August 2017
4) Africa To Play The Trump Card On Coal: For Poverty Alleviation
The Inspired Africa, 28 July 2017
5) BBC Claim Climate Change Is Cutting Crop Yields In Africa
Not A Lot of People Know That, 23 August 2017
6) Al Gore Documentary Called ‘Bad Science’ As Sales Plummet
Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times, 22 August 2017
7) Harry Wilkinson: Why Won’t The Government Admit The True Cost Of Renewable Energy?
CapX, 23 August 2017
Chinese Academy Of Sciences, 8 August 2017
2) Characteristics Of Temperature Change In China Over The Last 2000 Years And Spatial Patterns Of Dryness/Wetness During Cold And Warm Period
Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, August 2017
3) Dakota Access Pipeline Owner Sues Greenpeace For $300 Million In Damages
The Wall Street Journal, 23 August 2017
4) Africa To Play The Trump Card On Coal: For Poverty Alleviation
The Inspired Africa, 28 July 2017
5) BBC Claim Climate Change Is Cutting Crop Yields In Africa
Not A Lot of People Know That, 23 August 2017
6) Al Gore Documentary Called ‘Bad Science’ As Sales Plummet
Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times, 22 August 2017
7) Harry Wilkinson: Why Won’t The Government Admit The True Cost Of Renewable Energy?
CapX, 23 August 2017
Full details:
1) Modern Warm Period Not Unprecedented, Chinese Academy Of Sciences Study Finds
Chinese Academy Of Sciences, 8 August 2017
“We found four warm epochs,” says Prof. Quansheng Ge. Data show records for the periods AD 981–1100 and AD 1201–70 are comparable to the present warm period.
2,000-year temperature reconstruction in China. Credit: Yang Liu & Jingyun Zheng
A great deal of evidence relating to ancient climate variation is preserved in proxy data such as tree rings, lake sediments, ice cores, stalagmites, corals and historical documents, and these sources carry great significance in evaluating the 20th century warming in the context of the last two millennia.
Prof. GE Quansheng and his group from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, collected a large number of proxies and reconstructed a 2000-year temperature series in China with a 10-year resolution, enabling them to quantitatively reveal the characteristics of temperature change in China over a common era.
“We found four warm epochs, which were AD 1 to AD 200, AD 550 to AD 760, AD 950 to AD 1300, and the 20th century. Cold periods occurred between AD 210 and AD 350, AD 420 and AD 530, AD 780 and AD 940, and AD 1320 and AD 1900. The temperature amplitude between the warmest and coldest decades was 1.3°C,” said Prof. GE.
The team found that the most rapid warming in China occurred over AD 1870–2000, at a rate of 0.56 ± 0.42°C (100 yr)−1; however, temperatures recorded in the 20th century may not be unprecedented in the last 2000 years, as reconstruction showed records for the period from 981 to 1100, and again from 1201 to 1270, were comparable to those of the present warm period, but with an uncertainty of ±0.28°C to ±0.42°C at the 95% confidence interval. Since 1000 CE—the period covering the Medieval Climate Anomaly, Little Ice Age, and the present warm period—temperature variations over China have typically been in phase with those of the Northern Hemisphere as a whole.
They also detected some interactions between temperature variation and precipitation change. The ensemble means of dryness/wetness spatial patterns in eastern China across all centennial warm periods illustrate a tripole pattern: dry south of 25°N; wet from 25°–30°N; and dry to the north of 30°N. For all cold periods, the ensemble mean drought/flood spatial patterns showed an east to west distribution, with flooding east of 115°E and drought dominant west of 115°E, with the exception of flooding between approximately110°E and 105°E.
The general characteristics of the impacts of climatic change historically were negative in the cold periods and positive in the warm periods. For example, 25 of the 31 most prosperous periods in imperial China during the past 2000 years occurred during periods of warmth or warming. A cooling trend at the centennial scale and social economic decline run hand-in-hand. The rapid development supported by better resources and a better environment in warm periods could lead to an increase in social vulnerability when the climate turns once more to being relatively colder.
“Throughout China’s history,” Prof. GE added, “both rulers and the ruled have adopted strategies and policies to cope with climate change, as permitted by the prevailing geography and circumstances of the time.”
The study is published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
More information: Quansheng Ge et al, Characteristics of temperature change in China over the last 2000 years and spatial patterns of dryness/wetness during cold and warm periods, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1007/s00376-017-6238-8
2) Characteristics Of Temperature Change In China Over The Last 2000 Years And Spatial Patterns Of Dryness/Wetness During Cold And Warm Period
Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, August 2017, Volume 34, Issue 8, pp 941–951
Quansheng Ge et al., Chinese Academy of Sciences
Abstract
This paper presents new high-resolution proxies and paleoclimatic reconstructions for studying climate changes in China for the past 2000 years. Multi-proxy synthesized reconstructions show that temperature variation in China has exhibited significant 50–70-yr, 100–120-yr, and 200–250-yr cycles. Results also show that the amplitudes of decadal and centennial temperature variation were 1.3°C and 0.7°C, respectively, with the latter significantly correlated with long-term changes in solar radiation, especially cold periods, which correspond approximately to sunspot minima. The most rapid warming in China occurred over AD 1870–2000, at a rate of 0.56° ± 0.42°C (100 yr)−1; however, temperatures recorded in the 20th century may not be unprecedented for the last 2000 years, as data show records for the periods AD 981–1100 and AD 1201–70 are comparable to the present. The ensemble means of dryness/wetness spatial patterns in eastern China across all centennial warm periods illustrate a tripole pattern: dry south of 25°N, wet from 25°–30°N, and dry to the north of 30°N. However, for all centennial cold periods, this spatial pattern also exhibits a meridional distribution. The increase in precipitation over the monsoonal regions of China associated with the 20th century warming can primarily be attributed to a mega El Ni˜no–Southern Oscillation and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. In addition, a significant association between increasing numbers of locusts and dry/cold conditions is found in eastern China. Plague intensity also generally increases in concert with wetness in northern China, while more precipitation is likely to have a negative effect in southern China.
Full paper
3) Dakota Access Pipeline Owner Sues Greenpeace For $300 Million In Damages
The Wall Street Journal, 23 August 2017
The company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline launched an unusual legal attack Tuesday against Greenpeace International and other environmental groups, alleging that the organizations effectively ran a criminal enterprise through their protests of the project.
The suit by Energy Transfer Partners LP, filed in federal court in North Dakota under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—a law created to prosecute the mafia—represents an aggressive new front in the continuing battle over the nearly 1,200-mile pipeline. It became operational in June but remains the subject of legal challenges.
The company alleged that Greenpeace ran a “relentless campaign of lies and outright mob thuggery.” Among other things, it alleged Greenpeace and other groups solicited donations under false claims about the pipeline, threatened the company’s investors and lenders, launched cyberattacks against the company, and sought to sabotage the pipeline with serious “terrorist threats.”
Greenpeace USA General Counsel Tom Wetterer said in a statement that the suit was “not designed to seek justice, but to silence free speech through expensive, time-consuming litigation. This has now become a pattern of harassment by corporate bullies.”
The Trump administration gave a green light to the pipeline in February following months of intense opposition from Native American tribes and environmental groups. President Donald Trump made his support of the pipeline and other energy infrastructure projects a prominent part of his campaign. The line can carry as many as 570,000 barrels of oil a day from North Dakota to Illinois.
The Standing Rock Sioux tribe filed a lawsuit to stop the project, arguing that a reservoir crossing could contaminate their water supply, which is 70 miles downstream from the project. The lawsuit failed, but the tribe has since asked a federal court to shut down the line while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducts another environmental assessment of the project.
Energy Transfer’s lawsuit seeks at least $300 million in damages, which can be tripled under the RICO statute. The company alleged it lost revenue and investors as the project was delayed and incurred unnecessary expenses on construction.
Full story
4) Africa To Play The Trump Card On Coal: For Poverty Alleviation
The Inspired Africa, 28 July 2017
“There are more than 600 million people living in Africa without access to a national grid,” says GWPF director, Dr Benny Peiser, “This is scandalous in 2017.”
In June 2017, Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Accord on climate change, to scorn of the Left and some in his own party.
America is the only country so far to pull out, but many have yet to ratify the treaty through their home parliament: major players like Russia, Turkey, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
The Dutch have pledged not to fund coal-fired power stations overseas but haven’t ratified the Paris deal, and Holland is the world’s largest importer of US coal.
But the biggest bloc is in Africa where nearly a quarter of the 47 parties to Paris have not made it law at home, including the Congo, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
Now, Mr Trump looks set to alter how the Accord spends its Green Fund, a multi-billion-dollar purse donated by rich countries to help poorer ones lower their emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases.
Instead of wind or solar projects that rely on imported equipment, the White House wants the Green Fund to help countries like Ghana or Tanzania burn coal more cleanly to generate power and stem poverty.
Together, all the electricity plants of sub-Saharan Africa don’t produce even half the output of a single country like Japan.
In Washington, the State Department is talking about the need to increase Africa’s power supply as a way of lifting employment. And reduce the risk of young men joining militia groups or crossing to Europe; some do both.
President Obama donated $1 billion to the Paris kitty. Mr Trump will use that money –- and a veto-wielding seat on the board — to “advance American-energy interests globally”, a White House official said.
The G20 group of wealthy nations has accepted a US pledge to “work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently”. […]
Coal is where India, China, Europe and Australia get much of their power and, in the 12 months to July 2017, it was the single largest source of electricity in the United States.
Africa looks set to follow, and a British group led by a board of scientists, investors and academics, says this is vital to getting the continent off its dependence on aid.
The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) is chaired by Nigel Lawson who began his career as a journalist on the Financial Times and served as chancellor in the government of Margaret Thatcher.
He is now a member of the House of Lords.
“There are more than 600 million people living in Africa without access to a national grid,” says the Forum’s director, Dr Benny Peiser, “This is scandalous in 2017.”
Electricity, he said, means more than having lights on in the home.
“Investors cannot set up factories or even farms when electric power is absent or unreliable. It’s also vital in purifying water, running a hospital and maintaining a modern economy.”
Dr Peiser said it was easy to talk about wind or solar power in Africa, “but with limited foreign exchange, this means importing equipment and know-how to make it happen. You have to ask how logical that is when a country like Tanzania has several billion tons of coal lying in the ground.”
The GWPF advocates the use of cost-effective energy including hydro and renewables, with gas or coal burned to the cleanest possible standard, depending on local conditions.
Renewables are growing around the world, but storing solar power has proved a problem at night and during the long rainy season in places like India and equatorial Africa. And where plants have been set up using aid money, it doesn’t always benefit the locals.
Britain’s government aid arm, the Department for International Development has spent millions on East Africa’s biggest solar farm north of Kampala. But, instead of Ugandan homes joining the grid, the power is being exported to Kenya for cash.
Another aid-funded solar project near Cabora Basa dam in central Mozambique transmits the output via giant pylons to South Africa.
Donald Trump’s plan is for the World Bank to fund power stations using HELE technology. And mining coal has potential to create thousands of jobs in Africa where youth unemployment can be 60 per cent or more.
Supporters say better use of the Paris Green Fund will see more Africans on the grid, and in work.
Those against view it as irresponsible, even a betrayal, after years of negotiation led to the first comprehensive treaty on climate. And there have been protests in Washington, London and Paris, the city where the agreement first took form.
But the world, says Benny Peiser, can’t always “be viewed through the lens of rich nations who have never lived a day without electricity.”
Full story
5) BBC Claim Climate Change Is Cutting Crop Yields In Africa
Not A Lot of People Know That, 23 August 2017
Paul Homewood
More lies from the BBC Today programme.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b091s7zl
At about 44 minutes, in a fairly sensible report from Kenya about improving agriculture methods is introduced with this shameless comment:
Climate change is cutting crop yields [in Africa]
The data from the UN FAOSTAT shows the opposite to be true:
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
In Kenya itself, the value of agricultural production has been at record high levels for the last two years:
Of course, these drastic increases in agricultural productivity are due to a number of factors, and trying to unravel a climate signal is well nigh impossible. Not that that will stop grant addicted climate scientists making up their own fake evidence.
Full post
6) Al Gore Documentary Called ‘Bad Science’ As Sales Plummet
Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times, 22 August 2017
It was a tough weekend for Al Gore. Not only did “An Inconvenient Sequel” continue its nosedive at the box office, but the climate change documentary also drew a scathing rebuttal from a leading climate scientist.
Climatologist Roy W. Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, released Saturday an 81-page e-book on Amazon titled “An Inconvenient Deception: How Al Gore Distorts Climate Science and Energy Policy.”
“After viewing Gore’s most recent movie, ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,’ and after reading the book version of the movie, I was more than a little astounded,” Mr. Spencer said on his blog, Global Warming. “The new movie and book are chock-full of bad science, bad policy, and factual errors.”
Mr. Spencer said the sequel, like its 2006 predecessor “An Inconvenient Truth,” implies repeatedly that naturally occurring weather episodes are the result of human-caused global warming — for example, a shot in which the former vice president stands ankle-deep in a flooded Miami street.
“That flooding is mostly a combination of (1) natural sea level rise (I show there has been no acceleration of sea level rise beyond what was already happening since the 1800s), and (2) satellite-measured sinking of the reclaimed swamps that have been built upon for over 100 years in Miami Beach,” said Mr. Spencer.
Mr. Spencer isn’t new to the warming debate — he’s a well-known climate skeptic — but there’s no disputing his credentials: He’s an award-winning former NASA senior scientist for climate studies who continues to work with NASA on the U.S. Science Team.
The author of three previously published books on climate change, Mr. Spencer said he wrote the point-by-point rebuttal in two weeks after the Aug. 4 wide release of “An Inconvenient Sequel,” which took another plunge last weekend at the box office.
The movie earned $331,007, a 59 percent drop from the previous weekend’s gross of $816,150, for a total to date of $3 million. Meanwhile, the per-screen gross plummeted from $1,468 to $644, according to Box Office Mojo.
Full story
7) Harry Wilkinson: Why Won’t The Government Admit The True Cost Of Renewable Energy?
CapX, 23 August 2017
Flexibility measures have been presented as a saving. But that is illusory
Everyone knows that renewable power is inherently unreliable, or as engineers put it: “intermittent”. Nonetheless, there is a plan in place to become ever more reliant on these technologies for our electricity supply.
This has forced the government into taking a risky bet on unproven “flexibility measures”, in a desperate attempt to try and manage this huge technical challenge.
These measures will have hefty upfront costs of up to £20 billion, but the benefits are uncertain, spread over many years and will be outweighed many times over by the cost of renewable subsidies. Once again, the government is failing to be honest about the significant costs involved in switching from fossil fuels to renewables.
The measures come in a package of 29 separate actions to be undertaken by government, the energy regulator Ofgem and industry, as part of a “Smart Systems and Flexibility Plan”, published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in July. These actions support two key objectives: offering greater incentives to businesses to develop energy storage facilities, and making it easier for businesses to be paid for reducing their energy usage when capacity margins are particularly tight.
The shift towards a greater number of small-scale energy suppliers will force the National Grid to invest far more in the transmission and distribution networks which transport power from supplier to consumer. According to Npower this will add £114 on the average domestic bill by 2020, a 124 per cent increase compared to 2007.
An example of such an investment is the recently constructed Beauly-Denny power line, which cost £820 million and cut a horrible steel swathe through the Highlands. Time and again, promoting renewables comes at the cost of protecting the environment.
A report on system flexibility by green energy consultants Carbon Trust has led to many headlines suggesting such measures will save the country up to £40 billion. This is misleading. The Government’s own policy paper reveals the saving may only be £17 billion and is spread all the way until 2050, which equates to a more modest-sounding saving of between £500m and £1bn per year on average.
But there is a bigger problem with these calculations. The supposed savings are calculated against the cost of continuing to be straight-jacketed by draconian climate change targets, but without investing any new resources in flexibility measures. An alternative approach could be much cheaper, but it would need to deviate from the inflexible stipulations of the Climate Change Act. Indeed, the cost of meeting the Act is now running at upwards of £10bn a year, and is likely to be at almost £30bn a year by 2030. Any illusory savings from flexibility measures will be dwarfed by the cost of renewable subsidies.
This is nothing more than yet another bill for hard-pressed consumers to support “clean” technology. It has been wilfully and misleadingly trumped up as a saving, by assuming that adherence to the Climate Change Act is some sort of immovable fact of life. The truth is that it is a choice, and politicians should start being upfront about the costs of that choice.
Full post
Chinese Academy Of Sciences, 8 August 2017
“We found four warm epochs,” says Prof. Quansheng Ge. Data show records for the periods AD 981–1100 and AD 1201–70 are comparable to the present warm period.
2,000-year temperature reconstruction in China. Credit: Yang Liu & Jingyun Zheng
A great deal of evidence relating to ancient climate variation is preserved in proxy data such as tree rings, lake sediments, ice cores, stalagmites, corals and historical documents, and these sources carry great significance in evaluating the 20th century warming in the context of the last two millennia.
Prof. GE Quansheng and his group from the Institute of Geographic Sciences and Natural Resources Research of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, collected a large number of proxies and reconstructed a 2000-year temperature series in China with a 10-year resolution, enabling them to quantitatively reveal the characteristics of temperature change in China over a common era.
“We found four warm epochs, which were AD 1 to AD 200, AD 550 to AD 760, AD 950 to AD 1300, and the 20th century. Cold periods occurred between AD 210 and AD 350, AD 420 and AD 530, AD 780 and AD 940, and AD 1320 and AD 1900. The temperature amplitude between the warmest and coldest decades was 1.3°C,” said Prof. GE.
The team found that the most rapid warming in China occurred over AD 1870–2000, at a rate of 0.56 ± 0.42°C (100 yr)−1; however, temperatures recorded in the 20th century may not be unprecedented in the last 2000 years, as reconstruction showed records for the period from 981 to 1100, and again from 1201 to 1270, were comparable to those of the present warm period, but with an uncertainty of ±0.28°C to ±0.42°C at the 95% confidence interval. Since 1000 CE—the period covering the Medieval Climate Anomaly, Little Ice Age, and the present warm period—temperature variations over China have typically been in phase with those of the Northern Hemisphere as a whole.
They also detected some interactions between temperature variation and precipitation change. The ensemble means of dryness/wetness spatial patterns in eastern China across all centennial warm periods illustrate a tripole pattern: dry south of 25°N; wet from 25°–30°N; and dry to the north of 30°N. For all cold periods, the ensemble mean drought/flood spatial patterns showed an east to west distribution, with flooding east of 115°E and drought dominant west of 115°E, with the exception of flooding between approximately110°E and 105°E.
The general characteristics of the impacts of climatic change historically were negative in the cold periods and positive in the warm periods. For example, 25 of the 31 most prosperous periods in imperial China during the past 2000 years occurred during periods of warmth or warming. A cooling trend at the centennial scale and social economic decline run hand-in-hand. The rapid development supported by better resources and a better environment in warm periods could lead to an increase in social vulnerability when the climate turns once more to being relatively colder.
“Throughout China’s history,” Prof. GE added, “both rulers and the ruled have adopted strategies and policies to cope with climate change, as permitted by the prevailing geography and circumstances of the time.”
The study is published in Advances in Atmospheric Sciences.
More information: Quansheng Ge et al, Characteristics of temperature change in China over the last 2000 years and spatial patterns of dryness/wetness during cold and warm periods, Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (2017). DOI: 10.1007/s00376-017-6238-8
2) Characteristics Of Temperature Change In China Over The Last 2000 Years And Spatial Patterns Of Dryness/Wetness During Cold And Warm Period
Advances in Atmospheric Sciences, August 2017, Volume 34, Issue 8, pp 941–951
Quansheng Ge et al., Chinese Academy of Sciences
Abstract
Full paper
The Wall Street Journal, 23 August 2017
The company behind the Dakota Access Pipeline launched an unusual legal attack Tuesday against Greenpeace International and other environmental groups, alleging that the organizations effectively ran a criminal enterprise through their protests of the project.
The suit by Energy Transfer Partners LP, filed in federal court in North Dakota under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations Act—a law created to prosecute the mafia—represents an aggressive new front in the continuing battle over the nearly 1,200-mile pipeline. It became operational in June but remains the subject of legal challenges.
The company alleged that Greenpeace ran a “relentless campaign of lies and outright mob thuggery.” Among other things, it alleged Greenpeace and other groups solicited donations under false claims about the pipeline, threatened the company’s investors and lenders, launched cyberattacks against the company, and sought to sabotage the pipeline with serious “terrorist threats.”
Greenpeace USA General Counsel Tom Wetterer said in a statement that the suit was “not designed to seek justice, but to silence free speech through expensive, time-consuming litigation. This has now become a pattern of harassment by corporate bullies.”
The Trump administration gave a green light to the pipeline in February following months of intense opposition from Native American tribes and environmental groups. President Donald Trump made his support of the pipeline and other energy infrastructure projects a prominent part of his campaign. The line can carry as many as 570,000 barrels of oil a day from North Dakota to Illinois.
The Standing Rock Sioux tribe filed a lawsuit to stop the project, arguing that a reservoir crossing could contaminate their water supply, which is 70 miles downstream from the project. The lawsuit failed, but the tribe has since asked a federal court to shut down the line while the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers conducts another environmental assessment of the project.
Energy Transfer’s lawsuit seeks at least $300 million in damages, which can be tripled under the RICO statute. The company alleged it lost revenue and investors as the project was delayed and incurred unnecessary expenses on construction.
Full story
4) Africa To Play The Trump Card On Coal: For Poverty Alleviation
The Inspired Africa, 28 July 2017
“There are more than 600 million people living in Africa without access to a national grid,” says GWPF director, Dr Benny Peiser, “This is scandalous in 2017.”
In June 2017, Donald Trump withdrew from the Paris Accord on climate change, to scorn of the Left and some in his own party.
America is the only country so far to pull out, but many have yet to ratify the treaty through their home parliament: major players like Russia, Turkey, Switzerland and the Czech Republic.
The Dutch have pledged not to fund coal-fired power stations overseas but haven’t ratified the Paris deal, and Holland is the world’s largest importer of US coal.
But the biggest bloc is in Africa where nearly a quarter of the 47 parties to Paris have not made it law at home, including the Congo, Tanzania, Zimbabwe and Mozambique.
Now, Mr Trump looks set to alter how the Accord spends its Green Fund, a multi-billion-dollar purse donated by rich countries to help poorer ones lower their emission of carbon dioxide (CO2) and other gases.
Instead of wind or solar projects that rely on imported equipment, the White House wants the Green Fund to help countries like Ghana or Tanzania burn coal more cleanly to generate power and stem poverty.
Together, all the electricity plants of sub-Saharan Africa don’t produce even half the output of a single country like Japan.
In Washington, the State Department is talking about the need to increase Africa’s power supply as a way of lifting employment. And reduce the risk of young men joining militia groups or crossing to Europe; some do both.
President Obama donated $1 billion to the Paris kitty. Mr Trump will use that money –- and a veto-wielding seat on the board — to “advance American-energy interests globally”, a White House official said.
The G20 group of wealthy nations has accepted a US pledge to “work closely with other countries to help them access and use fossil fuels more cleanly and efficiently”. […]
Coal is where India, China, Europe and Australia get much of their power and, in the 12 months to July 2017, it was the single largest source of electricity in the United States.
Africa looks set to follow, and a British group led by a board of scientists, investors and academics, says this is vital to getting the continent off its dependence on aid.
The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) is chaired by Nigel Lawson who began his career as a journalist on the Financial Times and served as chancellor in the government of Margaret Thatcher.
He is now a member of the House of Lords.
“There are more than 600 million people living in Africa without access to a national grid,” says the Forum’s director, Dr Benny Peiser, “This is scandalous in 2017.”
Electricity, he said, means more than having lights on in the home.
“Investors cannot set up factories or even farms when electric power is absent or unreliable. It’s also vital in purifying water, running a hospital and maintaining a modern economy.”
Dr Peiser said it was easy to talk about wind or solar power in Africa, “but with limited foreign exchange, this means importing equipment and know-how to make it happen. You have to ask how logical that is when a country like Tanzania has several billion tons of coal lying in the ground.”
The GWPF advocates the use of cost-effective energy including hydro and renewables, with gas or coal burned to the cleanest possible standard, depending on local conditions.
Renewables are growing around the world, but storing solar power has proved a problem at night and during the long rainy season in places like India and equatorial Africa. And where plants have been set up using aid money, it doesn’t always benefit the locals.
Britain’s government aid arm, the Department for International Development has spent millions on East Africa’s biggest solar farm north of Kampala. But, instead of Ugandan homes joining the grid, the power is being exported to Kenya for cash.
Another aid-funded solar project near Cabora Basa dam in central Mozambique transmits the output via giant pylons to South Africa.
Donald Trump’s plan is for the World Bank to fund power stations using HELE technology. And mining coal has potential to create thousands of jobs in Africa where youth unemployment can be 60 per cent or more.
Supporters say better use of the Paris Green Fund will see more Africans on the grid, and in work.
Those against view it as irresponsible, even a betrayal, after years of negotiation led to the first comprehensive treaty on climate. And there have been protests in Washington, London and Paris, the city where the agreement first took form.
But the world, says Benny Peiser, can’t always “be viewed through the lens of rich nations who have never lived a day without electricity.”
Full story
5) BBC Claim Climate Change Is Cutting Crop Yields In Africa
Not A Lot of People Know That, 23 August 2017
Paul Homewood
More lies from the BBC Today programme.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b091s7zl
At about 44 minutes, in a fairly sensible report from Kenya about improving agriculture methods is introduced with this shameless comment:
Climate change is cutting crop yields [in Africa]
The data from the UN FAOSTAT shows the opposite to be true:
http://www.fao.org/faostat/en/#compare
In Kenya itself, the value of agricultural production has been at record high levels for the last two years:
Of course, these drastic increases in agricultural productivity are due to a number of factors, and trying to unravel a climate signal is well nigh impossible. Not that that will stop grant addicted climate scientists making up their own fake evidence.
Full post
6) Al Gore Documentary Called ‘Bad Science’ As Sales Plummet
Valerie Richardson - The Washington Times, 22 August 2017
It was a tough weekend for Al Gore. Not only did “An Inconvenient Sequel” continue its nosedive at the box office, but the climate change documentary also drew a scathing rebuttal from a leading climate scientist.
Climatologist Roy W. Spencer, principal research scientist at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, released Saturday an 81-page e-book on Amazon titled “An Inconvenient Deception: How Al Gore Distorts Climate Science and Energy Policy.”
“After viewing Gore’s most recent movie, ‘An Inconvenient Sequel: Truth to Power,’ and after reading the book version of the movie, I was more than a little astounded,” Mr. Spencer said on his blog, Global Warming. “The new movie and book are chock-full of bad science, bad policy, and factual errors.”
Mr. Spencer said the sequel, like its 2006 predecessor “An Inconvenient Truth,” implies repeatedly that naturally occurring weather episodes are the result of human-caused global warming — for example, a shot in which the former vice president stands ankle-deep in a flooded Miami street.
“That flooding is mostly a combination of (1) natural sea level rise (I show there has been no acceleration of sea level rise beyond what was already happening since the 1800s), and (2) satellite-measured sinking of the reclaimed swamps that have been built upon for over 100 years in Miami Beach,” said Mr. Spencer.
Mr. Spencer isn’t new to the warming debate — he’s a well-known climate skeptic — but there’s no disputing his credentials: He’s an award-winning former NASA senior scientist for climate studies who continues to work with NASA on the U.S. Science Team.
The author of three previously published books on climate change, Mr. Spencer said he wrote the point-by-point rebuttal in two weeks after the Aug. 4 wide release of “An Inconvenient Sequel,” which took another plunge last weekend at the box office.
The movie earned $331,007, a 59 percent drop from the previous weekend’s gross of $816,150, for a total to date of $3 million. Meanwhile, the per-screen gross plummeted from $1,468 to $644, according to Box Office Mojo.
Full story
7) Harry Wilkinson: Why Won’t The Government Admit The True Cost Of Renewable Energy?
CapX, 23 August 2017
Flexibility measures have been presented as a saving. But that is illusory
Everyone knows that renewable power is inherently unreliable, or as engineers put it: “intermittent”. Nonetheless, there is a plan in place to become ever more reliant on these technologies for our electricity supply.
This has forced the government into taking a risky bet on unproven “flexibility measures”, in a desperate attempt to try and manage this huge technical challenge.
These measures will have hefty upfront costs of up to £20 billion, but the benefits are uncertain, spread over many years and will be outweighed many times over by the cost of renewable subsidies. Once again, the government is failing to be honest about the significant costs involved in switching from fossil fuels to renewables.
The measures come in a package of 29 separate actions to be undertaken by government, the energy regulator Ofgem and industry, as part of a “Smart Systems and Flexibility Plan”, published by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy in July. These actions support two key objectives: offering greater incentives to businesses to develop energy storage facilities, and making it easier for businesses to be paid for reducing their energy usage when capacity margins are particularly tight.
The shift towards a greater number of small-scale energy suppliers will force the National Grid to invest far more in the transmission and distribution networks which transport power from supplier to consumer. According to Npower this will add £114 on the average domestic bill by 2020, a 124 per cent increase compared to 2007.
An example of such an investment is the recently constructed Beauly-Denny power line, which cost £820 million and cut a horrible steel swathe through the Highlands. Time and again, promoting renewables comes at the cost of protecting the environment.
A report on system flexibility by green energy consultants Carbon Trust has led to many headlines suggesting such measures will save the country up to £40 billion. This is misleading. The Government’s own policy paper reveals the saving may only be £17 billion and is spread all the way until 2050, which equates to a more modest-sounding saving of between £500m and £1bn per year on average.
But there is a bigger problem with these calculations. The supposed savings are calculated against the cost of continuing to be straight-jacketed by draconian climate change targets, but without investing any new resources in flexibility measures. An alternative approach could be much cheaper, but it would need to deviate from the inflexible stipulations of the Climate Change Act. Indeed, the cost of meeting the Act is now running at upwards of £10bn a year, and is likely to be at almost £30bn a year by 2030. Any illusory savings from flexibility measures will be dwarfed by the cost of renewable subsidies.
This is nothing more than yet another bill for hard-pressed consumers to support “clean” technology. It has been wilfully and misleadingly trumped up as a saving, by assuming that adherence to the Climate Change Act is some sort of immovable fact of life. The truth is that it is a choice, and politicians should start being upfront about the costs of that choice.
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The London-based Global Warming Policy Forum is a world leading think tank on global warming policy issues. The GWPF newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.thegwpf.com.
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