In this newsletter:
1) Supervolcanoes won’t trigger an ice age, new research finds
Interesting Engineering, 3 March 2024
2) 'The science is settled by 12 to 4': Panel of scientists vote down the ‘Anthropocene’
The New York Times, 5 March 2024
3) Patrick Brown: When science journals become activists
The Liberal Patriot, 4 March 2024
4) EVs lose market share across Europe in January
Fleet News, 6 March 2024
5) German conservatives call for reversing combustion engine car ban in draft EU election programme
Clean Energy Wire, 5 March 2024
6) ‘Most UK homes reject EVs and solar power over cost concerns’
Energy Live News, 5 March 2024
7) Households pay after Highland wind farms earn £68 million for nothing
Press & Journal, 4 March 2024
8) Population is not being told the true cost of Net Zero, warns former World Bank economist
The Daily Sceptic, 6 March 2024
9) Capell Aris: Should we abandon electricity generation using gas?
Net Zero Watch, 6 March 2024
10) And finally: What will happen if Donald Trump wins the US election in 2024?
The Times, 6 March 2024
Full details:
1) Supervolcanoes won’t trigger an ice age, new research finds
Interesting Engineering, 3 March 2024
Decades of scientific speculation have painted super volcanic eruptions as potential extinction-level events. However, new research suggests that even the most monstrous of eruptions wouldn’t quite lead to such frigid scenarios.
Indonesia’s Toba volcano: An explosive past
Around 74,000 years ago, Indonesia’s Toba volcano unleashed a huge eruption that made modern volcanic events look like mere firecrackers. It was 1,000 times stronger than the 1980 Mount St. Helens eruption. The eruption sent a huge plume of ash and gas into the atmosphere, covering much of the globe in a thick layer of debris.
But how it impacted Earth’s climate afterward remains a lingering mystery. While experts agree on some cooling effects, just how severe the aftermath gets much murkier, with estimates ranging from a few degrees drop to a potential ice age.
New simulations by NASA and Columbia University scientists offer a more reassuring picture. Their study shows that even a super-eruption like Toba would likely cause a global temperature decline of only about 2.7 degrees Fahrenheit (1.5 degrees Celsius), far from a civilization-ending catastrophe. So why the tempered outcomes?
“The relatively modest temperature changes we found most compatible with the evidence could explain why no single super-eruption has produced firm evidence of global-scale catastrophe for humans or ecosystems,” said lead author Zachary McGraw, a researcher at NASA GISS and Columbia University.
Full story
2) 'The science is settled by 12 to 4': Panel of scientists vote down the ‘Anthropocene’
The New York Times, 5 March 2024
A panel of experts voted down a proposal to officially declare the start of a new interval of geologic time, one defined by humanity’s changes to the planet.
The Triassic was the dawn of the dinosaurs. The Paleogene saw the rise of mammals. The Pleistocene included the last ice ages.
Is it time to mark humankind’s transformation of the planet with its own chapter in Earth history, the “Anthropocene,” or the human age?
Not yet, scientists have decided, after a debate that has spanned nearly 15 years. Or the blink of an eye, depending on how you look at it.
A committee of roughly two dozen scholars has, by a large majority, voted down a proposal to declare the start of the Anthropocene, a newly created epoch of geologic time, according to an internal announcement of the voting results seen by The New York Times.
By geologists’ current timeline of Earth’s 4.6-billion-year history, our world right now is in the Holocene, which began 11,700 years ago with the most recent retreat of the great glaciers. Amending the chronology to say we had moved on to the Anthropocene would represent an acknowledgment that recent, human-induced changes to geological conditions had been profound enough to bring the Holocene to a close.
The declaration would shape terminology in textbooks, research articles and museums worldwide. It would guide scientists in their understanding of our still-unfolding present for generations, perhaps even millenniums, to come.
In the end, though, the members of the committee that voted on the Anthropocene over the past month were not only weighing how consequential this period had been for the planet. They also had to consider when, precisely, it began.
By the definition that an earlier panel of experts spent nearly a decade and a half debating and crafting, the Anthropocene started in the mid-20th century, when nuclear bomb tests scattered radioactive fallout across our world. To several members of the scientific committee that considered the panel’s proposal in recent weeks, this definition was too limited, too awkwardly recent, to be a fitting signpost of Homo sapiens’s reshaping of planet Earth. […]
Hours after the voting results were circulated within the committee early Tuesday, some members said they were surprised at the margin of votes against the Anthropocene proposal compared with those in favor: 12 to four, with two abstentions. (Another three committee members neither voted nor formally abstained.)
Even so, it was unclear on Tuesday whether the results stood as a conclusive rejection or whether they might still be challenged or appealed. In an email to The Times, the committee’s chair, Jan A. Zalasiewicz, said there were “some procedural issues to consider” but declined to discuss them further. Dr. Zalasiewicz, a geologist at the University of Leicester, has expressed support for canonizing the Anthropocene.
This question of how to situate our time in the narrative arc of Earth history has thrust the rarefied world of geological timekeepers into an unfamiliar limelight.
The grandly named chapters of our planet’s history are governed by a body of scientists, the International Union of Geological Sciences. The organization uses rigorous criteria to decide when each chapter started and which characteristics defined it. The aim is to uphold common global standards for expressing the planet’s history.
Geoscientists don’t deny our era stands out within that long history. Radionuclides from nuclear tests. Plastics and industrial ash. Concrete and metal pollutants. Rapid greenhouse warming. Sharply increased species extinctions. These and other products of modern civilization are leaving unmistakable remnants in the mineral record, particularly since the mid-20th century.
Still, to qualify for its own entry on the geologic time scale, the Anthropocene would have to be defined in a very particular way, one that would meet the needs of geologists and not necessarily those of the anthropologists, artists and others who are already using the term.
Full story
see also David Whitehouse: The Anthropocene is not about climate change
3) Patrick Brown: When science journals become activists
The Liberal Patriot, 4 March 2024
Spinning climate data to fit a policy agenda undermines public faith in science.
Public trust in many mainstream publications continues to consistently decline. Part of the reason for this seems to be that media outlets cater more and more to the ideological tastes of specific groups, sacrificing their credibility to a wider audience in the process. I have criticized the New York Times, for example, for exaggerating the impacts of climate change, but this type of criticism may be in vain if they are covering climate exactly how their audience wants them to.
It is in a media environment like this, however, that we desperately need reputable sources of scientific information. Sources that will avoid the same temptation to cater to their audiences and prioritize dispassionate reporting of facts instead.
Nature magazine has a reputation as one of the most reliable sources of information on earth. Their publication has a section of peer-reviewed articles as well as softer sections dedicated to science news and the like. I have criticized the landscape surrounding high-impact peer-reviewed scientific studies published in places like Nature, but I won't elaborate on that here. Here, I want to bring attention to Nature’s science news section. Sadly, this section now appears to be engaged in similar levels of spin on climate information as outlets like The New York Times.
Two recent articles serve to illustrate the point.
The first is titled:
Surge in extreme forest fires fuels global emissions. Climate change and human activities have led to more frequent and intense forest blazes over the past two decades.
The second is titled:
Climate change is also a health crisis—these graphics explain why…Rising temperatures increase the spread of infectious diseases, claim lives, and drive food insecurity.
Between these two news articles, we have four claims: one on wildfires, one on infectious disease, one on deaths, and one on food security. Let’s scrutinize each claim one by one.
Are wildfires and their carbon emissions increasing?
The title and subtitle of the first article conveys the impression that global wildfire activity is increasing, which in turn increases CO2 emissions from wildfires. This idea is also communicated several times in the text of the article (emphasis added):
“Global forest fires emitted 33.9 billion tonnes of carbon dioxide between 2001 and 2022…Driving the emissions spike was the growing frequency of extreme forest-fire events.”
“Xu and her colleagues found that the growth in emissions had been mostly fuelled by an uptick in infernos on the edge of rainforests between latitudes of 5 and 20º S and in boreal forests above 45º N.”
“The increased numbers of forest fires was partially driven by the frequent heatwaves and droughts caused by climate change”
The article also goes on to raise the concern of a self-reinforcing feedback loop:“In turn, the CO2 emitted by forest fires contributes to global warming, creating a feedback loop between the two.”
There are, of course, many positive and negative feedback loops in the climate system (i.e., responses to warming that either amplify or counteract the initial warming). The relative sizes of these feedback loops are systematically documented in synthesis reports like those from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. According to the IPCC, the CO2 feedback associated with fires is very small relative to other feedbacks. To put it in perspective, it is only about three percent as large as the water vapor feedback (as the atmosphere warms, it can “hold” more water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas, that further enhances warming). Thus, a self-perpetuating cycle of warming leading to more fires and more CO2 emissions is not exactly at the top of our list of concerns.
Second, and more importantly, despite what is communicated in the article, global CO2 emissions from wildfires are not actually increasing!
The Nature article covers a recent non-peer-reviewed report by the Chinese Academy of Sciences that contains one figure on changes in wildfire CO2 emissions over time (with emissions separated by region):
Independently, the most well-known estimate of CO2 emissions from wildfires comes from the Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS), Global Fire Assimilation System (GFAS). This estimate shows a decrease in global wildfire carbon emissions over its record (dating back to 2003):
This reduction in carbon emissions is also in line with a long-term observed decrease in the annual amount of global land area burned by wildfires:
Since all these numbers seem to contradict what is communicated in the Nature article, I emailed the author to get some clarification. She told me that:
“Based on my interview with Xu Wenru, a co-author (of the Chinese Academy of Sciences report), extreme forest fires became more frequent over the past 22 years in areas prone to forest fires (on the edge of rainforests between 5 and 20º S and in boreal forests above 45º N), and their CO2 emissions increased rapidly.”
But this amounts to saying that CO2 emissions from wildfires are increasing…where CO2 emissions from wildfires are increasing. And it completely leaves out the important context that global CO2 emissions from wildfires are decreasing.
Full post
4) EVs lose market share across Europe in January
Fleet News, 6 March 2024
Electric vehicles (EVs) accounted for 12% of all new cars registered across Europe, last month, marking a decline in market share to levels not seen for 12 months.
Data from Jato Dynamics shows more than 1.01 million cars were registered in the first month of 2024, marking an 11% increase in new car sales.
EV volumes rose 29%, year-on-year, but the increase wasn't enough to continue the market share growth achieved in 2023.
August 2023 delivered the strongest penetration of EV sales, last year, where they accounted for 22% of all newly registered cars.
Felipe Munoz, global analyst at JATO Dynamics, said: “While interest in electric vehicles remains strong among consumers and fleets, these vehicles are no longer enjoying the same growth rate seen over the last year and a half. It is clear that a lack of affordable models alongside regulatory uncertainty continues to have an impact on mass adoption across Europe.”
Full story
5) German conservatives call for reversing combustion engine car ban in draft EU election programme
Clean Energy Wire, 5 March 2024
Germany's alliance of centre-right conservative parties CDU/CSU is aiming to reverse the ban on new combustion engine cars from 2035, which the EU decided on last year, according to a draft manifesto for the upcoming EU elections.
"We want to abolish the ban on combustion engines and preserve Germany's cutting-edge combustion engine technology and develop it further in a technology-neutral way," reads the draft seen by Clean Energy Wire. Synthetic fuels would play a central role in this. Together, the Christian Democratic Union of former chancellor Angela Merkel and its sister party from Bavaria — the Christian Social Union — currently provide the biggest share of German members in the European Parliament and are also leading polls for the elections on 9 June. The parties also support nuclear energy, as they have voiced at the national level in recent months. "For us, the energy mix includes all renewable energies as well as nuclear power – we cannot do without this option at present," says the draft.
Under the current government coalition of Social Democrats (SPD), Green Party and the Free Democrats (FDP), Germany had opposed the introduction of a ban on new combustion engine cars from 2035. The FDP insisted on a role for cars which would only use so-called e-fuels, made from renewable electricity and carbon. The government gave up its last-minute resistance to the ban for a promise by the European Commission that a carve-out for such cars would be worked on.
Full post
6) ‘Most UK homes reject EVs and solar power over cost concerns’
Energy Live News, 5 March 2024
Nearly 62% of UK households resist adopting electric cars and solar power due to financial constraints, with cost being a significant barrier.
The upfront price difference, according to the Society of Motor Manufacturers and Traders, contributes to this reluctance.
According to a new survey by Cadent, almost two-thirds of households are struggling financially to maintain sustainability, leading to reluctance to adopt solar panel installations and transition to more fuel-efficient heating systems.
Despite the acknowledgement of environmental sustainability importance by a majority (53%), managing bills remains the priority, resulting in the adoption of cost-saving measures over sustainable practices.
Full story
7) Households pay after Highland wind farms earn £68 million for nothing
Press & Journal, 4 March 2024
New figures also reveal more than £275m was paid to keep Scottish turbines still during 2023.
Static wind turbines in the Highlands cost consumers nearly £68 million in 2023.
They accounted for more than one-quarter of all Scottish wind farms receiving “constraint” payments for zero energy output, new figures show.
According to the Renewable Energy Foundation (REF), a lion’s share of such payments to UK wind energy suppliers found its way north of the border last year.
Of the £307.2m total for the whole of Britain, the National Grid Electricity System Operator (National Grid ESO) paid a record £275.3m to a total of 86 Scottish generators.
The Highlands led the pay-out league in terms of wind farm numbers, with 22 sites across the region getting payments totalling £67.8m.
Top of the constraint payments league table in the area is SSE Renewables’ 66-turbine Stronelairg wind farm, near Fort Augustus, which received nearly £11.6m.
Full story
8) Population is not being told the true cost of Net Zero, warns former World Bank economist
The Daily Sceptic, 6 March 2024
Squeezing domestic consumption, in other words making the already squeezed poor even poorer by removing all their remaining luxuries in life (older cars, cheap foreign holidays, meat), is the only realistic way to fund the enormous sums required for the Net Zero energy transition.
Bankrupt, blackout Britain where the ever-expanding ranks of the poor get clobbered, open borders place intolerable burdens on public spending and services, the rich spivs get richer backing heavily-subsidised energy white elephants – and those of a certain age look back to the good old days of the 1970s. That isn’t quite how Professor Gordon Hughes spells it out in his excellent new report that crunches the energy transition numbers of the collectivist Net Zero project, but it might be considered a fair summation of reading between the lines.
The insanity of Net Zero becomes clearer by the day. The idea that hydrocarbons – a natural resource whose use from medicines to reliable energy is ubiquitous in modern industrial society – can be removed within less than 30 years is ridiculous. In his report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Hughes concerns himself with the transition from hydrocarbons to ‘green’ technologies such as wind and solar. Forget all the politically-inspired low-ball figures of transition, he is suggesting. Looking at you, Climate Change Committee. It is likely that the amount of new investment needed for the transition will be a minimum of 5% of gross domestic product for the next 20 years, and might exceed 7.5%. Gordon Hughes is a former World Bank economist, and is Professor of Economics at the University of Edinburgh.
There is no chance of borrowing such an “astronomical” amount, notes Hughes, and the only viable way to raise the cash for new capital expenditure would be a two decades-long reduction in private consumption of up to 10%. “Such a shock has never occurred in the last century outside war, and even then never for more than a decade,” he notes.
Recent polling in the U.S. has shown that the desire of a majority of citizens to pay for Net Zero barely stretches to more than the ‘chump’ change in their back pockets. “Commitment to the energy transition is a classic ‘luxury belief’ held most strongly by those who are sufficiently well-off not to worry about the costs… Indeed at least some of those who promote the transition most strongly are among those who expect to gain from the business opportunities.” On this latter point, Hughes was possibly recalling the recent activities of rising media star Dale Vince (£110 million in wind subsidies to date, and counting).
Politicians sometimes blather about the pioneering role taken by European countries in Net Zero. Hughes points out that leaders in China and India are not fools. “Posturing about targets that are patently not achievable and might be economically ruinous is unlikely to convince anyone, although most will be too polite to point this out,” he observed.
Writing a foreword, Lord Frost identified a make-believe world inhabited by Net Zero proponents where it is claimed costs will magically come down, new technologies will somehow be invented and promised green growth will pay for everything. “But they never give any evidence for believing this – and, where we can check what they say, for example in the real costs of wind power, we can see that these cost reductions are simply not happening,” he said.
On the immigration front, Hughes notes a 1% increase in the British population every year. He notes that 4% of GDP must be invested every year in new (not replacement) capital per head. Of course nothing like this is being spent and capital per head is falling rapidly. “Just maintaining the amounts of capital per head will eat up an amount of investment equivalent to that required for the energy transition,” he states.
Squeezing domestic consumption, in other words making the already squeezed poor even poorer by removing all their remaining luxuries in life (older cars, cheap foreign holidays, meat), is the only realistic way to fund the enormous sums required for the Net Zero energy transition.
Full story
9) Capell Aris: Should we abandon electricity generation using gas?
Net Zero Watch, 6 March 2024
A recent article (Are Labour sleepwalking to energy disaster?) showed that the UK’s capacity of combined-cycle gas turbine generators (CCGTs) is declining, and that by 2030 will have fallen to 12 GW; it will disappear in the next decade.
We are reliant on CCGTs to cover times when intermittent, renewable output is low, and to ensure grid stability. We will therefore need to build more CCGTs, but this is an attractive option, since CCGT plants are cheap and quick to build.
There was one noteworthy addition to the CCGT fleet in 2023: Keadby 2. Its performance is remarkable, boasting an efficiency of 63% – compared to the 46% of the retiring CCGTs. It was cheap and quick to build (see Table 1). The carbon dioxide emissions of the old CCGT fleet was 365 g/kWh but ‘Keadby’ CCGTs could decrease that to 260 g/kWh – 30% lower. Keadby 2 has great flexibility in the fuel it can burn. There will be changes in output power and efficiency between different fuels, but it can burn gas from offshore gas fields or fracked gas. It can also burn syngas which can be extracted from UK coal, increasing our fuel security.
Replacing old CCGTs with higher efficiency ones has other advantages. The existing site can be reused, including the operational, secure connection to the electricity grid. Building 30 GW of CCGTs on existing sites would cost less than £15bn. There are further benefits of reusing the CCGT sites. The cooling water system will be in place and only has to be reworked for the new plant. The small team that managed and operated the old CCGT can move across to the new. There will already be road access to the site capable of handling heavy loads.
The photographs below show how much simpler construction of the power station was compared to an offshore wind turbine. Contrast the delivery of the single Siemens SGT5-9000 590 MW gas-turbine for Keadby 2 with the installation methods of one wind-turbine (perhaps 8–10 MW) offshore.
Cut our carbon dioxide emissions by improving efficiency?
The last hundred years has seen a remarkable change in the way electrical energy is produced and distributed. Most generation was coal-fired up to 1960, but the stations increased in size and the operating temperature, to a point where the standard installation was a 660-MW steam turbine. By the same year, electricity was delivered over a UK-wide transmission and distribution grid designed to reduce transmission losses and to create multiple paths to secure supply. The world’s first nuclear generator opened in 1956. Our first CCGT power station opened in 1996, opening the way to large-scale generation from gas plants with higher efficiencies than coal-fired station.
This progression produced two important benefits: by 2000 the price of electricity had fallen from 25p/kWh in 1921 to 2.2p kWh – a ratio of nearly 12:1. Carbon dioxide emissions from generation fell from 3,500g/kWh to 520g/kWh – a ratio of nearly 7:1.
The benefits of improved generation efficiency. Emissions of CO2 decrease and prices fall…until renewables arrive.
From 2005 there has been a steady addition of renewable generation: 15 GW onshore wind turbines, 15 GW offshore, and 13 GW solar, and even 2.6 GW of wood-burning.
The introduction of renewables from 2005 to 2023 reduced carbon dioxide emissions to 200g/kWh – halving the 2005 level. Over the same period, however, electricity prices rose to 32p/kWh – a factor of nearly nine. Domestic electricity prices have never been this high before. This is almost the highest price for electricity in Europe. The price rise tracks declining coal and gas generation and increasing solar and wind generation between 2015 and 2024 (bar the intervention of the Ukraine war in the last few years) .
Most renewable generation is from wind. Its production is variable: over the last four years it has has varied from 29 to 32.5% of nameplate capacity. It is very intermittent: in 2021 the production for May to August was only 19% of nameplate capacity; over that same period, most of Europe was also experiencing low wind speeds. Solar generation is only significant between April and October.
We have relied on our CCGT generators to cover these shortcomings and to ensure the security of our grid, but it is now reaching the point where most of the remaining capacity will be retired by 2035, and all of it by 2040.
The surge of renewable generation construction has trebled household electricity bills treble since 2010. There is no cheap, emission-free solution that will mitigate the intermittency of this generation.
A 10–15-year programme of building modern CCGTs would do much to reduce costs to all consumers, and at the same time make meaningful reductions in the UK’s carbon dioxide emissions (Table 2). This could reduce costs and provide a low-emissions solution to the intermittency of our renewable generators. This proposal would make no call to expand the national grid, saving ~£50 billion to 2030, per-unit emissions would continue to fall (by 60g/kWh), and prices would fall.
Capell Aris is a retired power systems engineer, and the author of several papers for Net Zero Watch and the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
10) And finally: What will happen if Donald Trump wins the US election in 2024?
The Times, 6 March 2024
Donald Trump has gone back to the policy focus that launched him into the presidency in 2016 by placing immigration at the heart of his 2024 campaign.
He is also vowing to recreate the low-inflation economy of his first term to woo voters angry at the steep rises in prices and interest rates during President Biden’s four years in the White House.
Unlike his failed 2020 re-election campaign, when he did not even have a manifesto, Trump, 77, has set out numerous policy plans that give voters a real taste of his ambitions for a second term. […]
Energy and the environment
Trump summed up his approach to energy with a slogan: “Drill, baby, drill.”
This means tax breaks for oil, gas and coal companies, and opening up public lands for energy exploitation.
He plans to ask Congress to repeal much of Biden’s $369 billion Inflation Reduction Act, the largest climate measure in history, including incentives for clean energy projects and electric vehicles.
He would pull the US back out of the Paris agreement to cut emissions, after Biden reversed Trump’s original withdrawal.
His Agenda47 website adds: “Trump will immediately stop all Joe Biden policies that distort energy markets, limit consumer choice, and drive up costs on consumers, including insane wind subsidies, and DoE [Department of Environment] and EPA [Environmental Protection Agency] regulations that prevent Americans from buying incandescent lightbulbs, gas stoves, quality dishwashers and shower heads, and much more.”
Targets for electric vehicle use will be scrapped and Trump will also end “Biden’s insane fuel economy standards that will cost the auto industry an estimated $200 billion and raise the average cost of vehicles by more than $1,000”.
Full story
The London-based Net Zero Watch is a campaign group set up to highlight and discuss the serious implications of expensive and poorly considered climate change policies. The Net Zero Watch newsletter is prepared by Director Dr Benny Peiser - for more information, please visit the website at www.netzerowatch.com.
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