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All the relevant data and graphs are on a special web page.
This chapter is closed, no updates anymore!

Researchers at the MIT fusion center MIT-CFS have developed a 20 Tesla superconducting magnet, which allows to build a classical tokamak fusion reactor 40 times smaller. Their SPARC prototype is expected to start at 2025 and to be the first fusion device delivering more energy than it needs to operate (Q>1).
Remember that Luxembourg's energy minister wants to stop all research financing related to nuclear fusion!

Look also at this explaining video!

How much has the Sun influenced Northern Hemisphere temperature trends? An ongoing debate.

New and very important paper by Connolly et al. in Research in Astronomy and Astrophysics (April 2021). Read short discussion in the blog.
 

Prof. Ross McKitrick shows that the IPCC relies since more than 20 years on a statistically flawed paper when attributing global warming to GHG's (AR6 says "unequivocal")

Short easy to read version here (contains link to full paper) and version with highlighted text (by me) here.

The Problem with Climate Change Politics

Read this excellent article by Alasdair McLeod :

"But it is not widely appreciated that the process of hyping up climate change into a full-blown crisis has become the consequence of a crowd psychology rather than a pursuit of the facts."

Hockeystick redux!

Here it is again! The AR6 SPM reintroduces the ignominuous hockeystick, and cancels the Roman and Medieval Warm Periods.

Read this damning critique of Steve McIntyre on this woke SPM ! "...one surely presumes that IPCC climate scientists, who are employed full time on these topics, to be competent enough to notice things that I was able to observe in my first day or so of looking at PAGES2019. But their obtuseness never ceases to amaze. "

Read also here, here and here.

Excellent article by Prof. Pielke Jr. & Ritchie in ISSUES in Science and Technology (no.4, 2021): "...Implausible climate scenarios are also introducing errors and bias in actual policy and business decisions."
 

Excellent paper by Murphy & McKitrick showing that the cost of "climate" policies to limit global warming to 1.5°C costs more than doing nothing!
Very easy and extremely clear written paper, should be a must for every economist! No frightening maths, just crystal-clear logic.

The Peril of Politicizing Science

A marvellous, really must-read essay by Anna Krylov (Uni. Southern California, LA)

published in the Journal of Physical Chemistry (10 June 2021)

Teachers: let your students read this!

New important paper by Millstein et al. on the decline of wind and solar electricity value with increasing penetration. This is a 28 pages paper, well worth to read twice!

Above 20% of wind/solar penetration, the produced electriccity value falls by 30 to 40%.

See BLOG !
 

Climate change uncertainty in 5 minutes !
An excellent exposé by Prof. Judith Curry.

Planning for big battery storage systems for your intermittent solar and wind electricity? Beware of the huge fire risk, and read this June 2021 paper by 3 British university physics professors: "Safety of Grid Scale Lithium-ion Battery Energy Storage Systems". They write "the explosion potential and lack of engineering standards to prevent thermal runaway may put control of battery fires beyond control, experience and capabilities of local Fire and Rescue Services"

Another older comment here.

The oceans absorb much more CO2 than assumed! Read this paper (Sep.2020, Nature Communications) by Watson et al. titled "Revised estimate of ocean-atmosphere CO2 flux..." with the conclusion that "...most ocean models underestimate uptake... Some revision of the global carbon budget is required".

Supplementary information here.

TerraPower ( a Bill Gates company) and GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy will build a fast neutron reactor called "NATRIUM" (as it is cooled by liquid sodium): this is a rather small 345 MWe breeder, with a huge molten salt thermal storage which can boost power up to 500 MWe. The reactor will be built in Wyoming, probably on the site of a former coal power station.
It's interesting that a Republican state is absolutely in-line with Democrat President Biden, concerning USA's energy future. What a difference with "old Europe"!

Read this latest report by Prof. Ole Humlum; this is a report based on observations, not models! Just one sentence of this outstanding report:

"Since 1979, lower troposphere temperatures have increased over both land and oceans, but most clearly over land areas. The most straightforward explanation for this phenomenon is that much of the warming is caused by solar insolation, but there may well be several supplementary reasons, such as changes in cloud cover and land use."

As a longtime asthma sufferer I appreciate clean air; our PM Airvisual measurements contribute a bit to give us real data. But environmental questions very often have an agenda, greatly helped by poor or fraudulent statistics. Read this paper on how bad the situation is in relating heart attacks to PM 2.5 concentration. Full paper here, easier to read discussion by the authors here.

Climate Policy - When Emotion Meets Reality

Watch this very sober, clear and non emotional presentation by Prof. Ross Mc Kitrick (Guelph University), 12 May 2021.
43 minutes well spent!

"...emissions mix globally... so unilateral action is useless...policies that were too small to have an effect turned out to be too costly to implement...increasing the scale of policies pushes the costs up faster than the benefits..."
 

New large 30 pages report by Marcel Crok from CLINTEL.

Conclusion: "In any case, the message of this essay was that we are in no hurry and that panic is unwarranted. Climate change always deserves our attention, but the idea that we need to turn our energy supply upside down right now seems mainly an emotional decision."

Read this extraordinary clear and lucid comment of Prof. Judith Curry:

"This redefinition of ‘climate change’ to refer only to manmade climate change has effectively eliminated natural climate change from the public discussion on climate change....Climate change has thus become a grand narrative in which human-caused climate change has become a dominant cause of societal problems...This grand narrative misleads us to think that if we solve the problem of manmade climate change, then these other problems would also be solved"

Read also this comment by Andrew Roman.

Mathias SCHMIDT and Marc LINDER have written an intersecting paper in Frontiers in Energy Research (link) how to use excess PV electricity in summer to get heat storage for the house during the winter. They use the exothermic reaction of calcium oxide --> calcium hydroxide, and find that an overall storage efficiency of nearly 96% would be possible, with a manageable volume of this low-cost material.
The 12 pages paper is relatively easy to read!
 

Climate Emergency... not so fast!

Excellent, very clear and sober article by two world-renowned physicists : Richard Lindzen, MIT, and William Happer, Princeton.

A French translation is here.

Read also this article of Dr. Roy Spencer: An Earth Day Reminder: "Global Warming" is Only ~50% of What Models Predict.

Excerpt: "Yes, more CO2 must produce some warming. But the amount of warming makes all the difference to global energy policies. Seldom is the public ever informed of these glaring discrepancies between basic science and what politicians and pop-scientists tell us."

Saving the Planet...

Watch George Carlin's humorous presentation, and bring a few laugh's into these depressing times! (YouTube, 8 minutes)

Full text of the report "An Assessment of the Sustainability of Nuclear Power for the EU Taxonomy Consultation 2019"
"The state of public and political discussion around nuclear energy rarely reflects the factual state of things. Emotions like fear take hold, even though from a statistical and scientific point of view, there is less to fear from nuclear energy than from practically any other energy source..."

Read also the BLOG

What we need to know about the pace of decarbonization.

Read this excellent policy brief by Prof. Vaclav Smil (Uni. of Manitoba) and reflect on this sentence, that says it all:

"Designing hypothetical roadmaps outlining complete elimination of fossil carbon from the global energy supply by 2050 is nothing but an exercise in wishful thinking that ignores fundamental physical realities."

Read the new UNSCEAR report on the health consequences of the Fukushima accident:
"increased body of evidence that the observed thyroid cancers are not attributable to radiation exposure... no health effects in emergency and recovery workers... average doses of evacuees less than 6mSv" (the average dose in Luxembourg is about 3 to 5 mSv,  without any medical usage as X-Rays, thyroid or heart screening...)

Comments here.

Discussion of a new paper by Rode&Fischbeck (Carnegie Mellon) titled "The risk of communicating extreme climate forecasts".

"...When it comes to climate change, the authors advise "thinking small." That is, focusing on making predictions that are less grandiose and shorter in term."

(the full text of the paper is pay-walled)

 

"Die Energiewende ist gescheitert".

Read this caustic article (in German) by Dr. Björn Peters (a physicist) at the Umwelt-Watchblog. "Die Energiewende ist also an ihren eigenen Zielsetzungen und ihrer eigenen Metrik gescheitert, nicht auf Basis der Verleumdungen ihrer Gegner".
 

About 800 scientists have written a letter to Biden, von der Leyen and al., asking them to stop using forests as biomass (wrongly considered carbon neutral in the EU). Among the signaturies is Jean-Pascal van Ipersele from Uni. Louvain, , former IPCC vice-president!
" ... governments must end subsidies and other incentives that today exist for the burning of wood whether from their forests or others. TheEuropean Union needs to stop treating the burning of biomass as carbon neutral".
 

Read this optimistic report from Indur Goklany (Assistant Director, US. Dept. of Interior) which shows the abyss separating reality and perception (using only public available data).
In these times of gloom and doom, finally a report which should enhance our confidence for a better future!
 

for going to net zero in 2050, if actual fuel consumption would not increase and would be replaced by "renewables" in 2050

Build two 2.1 GW nuclear stations every week up to 2050

or

Build 1000 Wind Turbines every day and one 2.1 GW nuclear station every week up to 2050

or

Build 500km² area of solar panels and one 2.1 GW nuclear station every week up to 2050

(free adapted from here, very conservative numbers)

Clintel has a new Press Release titled  "adaptation much more profitable than mitigation".

They write that "one dollar invested in adaptation yields about 4 dollar in benefits" whereas (according to B. Lomborg) "one dollar spent for mitigation leads only to 11 cent benefit".

Especially telling is the graph (click for full scale) which shows that the deaths from climate related catastrophic events decreased spectacularly since 1920, whereas the non-climate catastrophe death toll remains more or less constant.

Nicola Scafetta (Uni. Naples) published a very interesting open-access paper on the contamination of land-temperature measurements by the UHI (Urban Heat Island) effect (Springer, Climate Dynamics). Click here for the full paper. He concludes that the ubiquitous CMIP5 climate models may overestimate global warming since 1940 by up to 40% !

Distorting the view of our climate future: The misuse and abuse of climate pathways and scenarios

Very interesting new  paper by Roger Pielke Jr. (University of Colorado)and  Justin Ritchie (University of British Columbia):
"... much of the climate research community is presently off-track from scientific coherence and policy-relevance. Attempts to address scenario misuse within the community have thus far not worked. The result has been the widespread production of myopic or misleading perspectives on future climate change and climate policy"

"..the hegemony of the IPCC has become a source of myopia, rather than enlightment"

Attention: the paper is paywalled!

One of the best long-time temperature series is the Central England Temperature series, called CET. It goes back to about 1650 (read more on it's history here).
This series does not show any dangerous or disturbing warming at all!
The little warming (1.2°C) begins with the end of the Little Ice Age (LIA) after the 1850's. You may remember that the LIA was a general colder period!

Read more here!

For the last day of annus horribilis 2020 let's look at a heartwarming picture showing that Luxembourg's global share of annual CO2eq emissions dropped by more than 80% since 1950. Don't be a grinch, take this with a big smile into the year 2021, which we all wish to be a better one!

PS: read here 10 predictions of climate-doom that went wrong!

Read here parts 1, 2, 3, 4 and the last part 5.
 

An absolute ***must view***!