So I was writing a scene earlier today, based upon the idea of a solar powered still producing ethanol for fuel. By the power of teh internet, I have found that it is possible, and that people have already built there own- Making Alcohol Fuel With a Solar Still – Renewable Energy – MOTHER EARTH NEWS.
Some of UKIP’s brightest stars are so stupid that they’re beyond parody. Roger Helmer, UKIP MEP for the East Midlands, thinks he has the answer to climate change.
Temperates drop during a short solar eclipse. It's the Sun that drives the climate!
— Roger Helmer (@RogerHelmerMEP) March 20, 2015
I guess Roger locks himself in an insulated room with a massive heater as soon as sunset comes around, because otherwise he’d turn into some sort of grotesque purple ice sculpture. How do he and his colleague who thinks burning fossil fuels is the only thing keeping plants alive muster the intelligence to even get on the train to Brussels?
Not bad, considering I just walked up to the next landing and took a photo through a very grimy window. As some folk had suggested, cloud cover did a good job of shielding the glare.
According to UKIP, or, at least, the UKIP member who should know, there were no plants before the Industrial Revolution happened. This is not a joke, this really is a statement in the European parliament by UKIP’s agriculture spokesman Stuart Agnew MEP.
Yes, in UKIP land, if we cut human carbon emissions to zero (we can hope), then all the plants will die. Because, obviously, the only carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is the excess we’re pumping into it to screw it up.
The ‘but plants need CO2!’ argument is a very old, very dumb climate change denialist meme. Maybe Stuart Agnew really is dumb enough to have fallen for it, or maybe he’s craven enough to take the carbon industry money for repeating it and thinks UKIP voters are too stupid to see through it. Either way, he’s too stupid to keep his job. Sadly, we can’t vote him out in May’s elections, but we can try to keep UKIP out of the House of Commons.
Don’t vote moron.
(via Vox Political/Pride’s Purge)
I like the sound of this plan- creating tidal lagoons to generate electricity. Previous tidal power proposals included stringing a barrier all the way across the Severn, which was just too big and destructive a plan to be taken seriously (which is probably why it appealed to politicians desperate to pretend they were serious about renewable power).
There are six lagoons planned, including one in West Cumbria, but I don’t remember the coastline of my youth well enough to guess where they’d put it.
Australia is set to warm faster than anywhere else on Earth. Time to pull on the leather armour and fire up the last of the V8 Interceptors.
Fascinating stuff.
Obviously climate change isn’t happening. The year on year temperature rises are all caused by, erm…….
Could somebody with access kindly slap all the politicians who are being paid to be in denial, and kick the Koch brothers where it rhymes, until they shut up and let the rest of us do something about the disaster they’ve created and nurtured.
According to NOAA’s records, this is the 38th consecutive August and 354th consecutive month with a global average temperature above the 20th century average
Barclays recently downgraded the entire U.S. electric utilities sector to "underweight" on the threat posed by widespread adoption of solar-storage. These systems allow homeowners to use rooftop solar panels and a battery to cut all but the figurative emergency backup cord to their local electric grid, putting a severe strain on an industry that has been a defacto monopoly.
via How Solar Will Destroy The Power Companies – Business Insider.
On Sunday, Germany’s impressive streak of renewable energy milestones continued, with renewable energy generation surging to a record portion — nearly 75 percent — of the country’s overall electricity demand by midday. With wind and solar in particular filling such a huge portion of the country’s power demand, electricity prices actually dipped into the negative for much of the afternoon, according to Renewables International.
In the first quarter of 2014, renewable energy sources met a record 27 percent of the country’s electricity demand, thanks to additional installations and favorable weather. “Renewable generators produced 40.2 billion kilowatt-hours of electricity, up from 35.7 billion kilowatt-hours in the same period last year,” Bloomberg reported. Much of the country’s renewable energy growth has occurred in the past decade and, as a point of comparison, Germany’s 27 percent is double the approximately 13 percent of U.S. electricity supply powered by renewables as of November 2013.
Observers say the records will keep coming as Germany continues its Energiewende, or energy transformation, which aims to power the country almost entirely on renewable sources by 2050.
Germany Sets New Record, Generating 74 Percent Of Power Needs From Renewable Energy | ThinkProgress.
How to have a statistically balanced debate on climate change.
Community energy schemes sound brilliant. The country needs more money pumped into supporting them, but as they take money away from big businesses, that may take quite a fight.
Clean energy, generated locally. Surplus energy sold back to the grid. Residents free to invest as little as £250, and promised an annual return of 5%. Further profits placed in a community benefit fund to pay for local facilities or energy saving technologies for local people in fuel poverty. Britain’s community renewable sector is tiny but it is growing. More than 40 community schemes currently offer just 66MW of installed capacity but there is another 200MW of community energy in development.
Large-scale human engineering of the Earth’s climate to prevent catastrophic global warming would not only be ineffective but would have severe unintended side effects and could not be safely stopped, a comparison of five proposed methods has concluded.
Yes, Lord Lawson, this weather probably is the result of climate change. Do shut up.
The US is freezing.The UK is flooding. Alaska and Scandinavia are unusually warm. And, most remarkably, all of that has been going on for roughly the entire winter. It’s not just unusual weather; it’s consistently unusual.
A few years back, researchers suggested that strange weather in the temperate regions of the Northern Hemisphere might be a consequence of changes taking place in the Arctic. Now, with a few years of additional data, some researchers are arguing that we have detected clear signs that Arctic warming is driving our weird weather.
Santa’s revenge: Arctic ice may be putting US in a long, deep freeze | Ars Technica.
He may look more like a house elf, but John Redwood MP is that far too common online animal- a troll. In particular, he’s a climate change denying troll. Fantasising about what he was going to say whilst debating the floods with George Monbiot, he trotted out enough tired old lies that anyone playing climate change denier bingo would have shouted “House!” before they were even half way through. From “It’s cold in winter!” to “But weather forecasters get tomorrow’s forecasts wrong sometimes!”, they’re all there. The post is like a retirement home for debunked talking points.
Not only is Redwood wrong about climate change, he’s tilting at the wrong windmill. Asked about the direct causes of this year’s floods, George Monbiot is more likely to repeat his strongly argued, coherent and intelligent attack on the failings of the Common Agriculture Policy and subsidy-seeking farmers from last month.
The question is, does John Redwood really believe in his rambling collection of outdated arguments, or is he so cynically arrogant that he thinks the electorate is too stupid to see through them? He’s a politician, so I suspect it’s the latter.
The puzzling part is that among the scientists whose job is to study these matters, there is no disagreement that rising carbon emissions have altered the climate.
So continually debating it, as if both sides are equally valid, makes as much sense as saying: “Now for sport. In the Winter Olympics the ski jumping final takes place today, but first I’m going to talk to Bill, who says there can’t be any ski jumping because gravity doesn’t exist.”
Much of southern England is underwater thanks to a record-breaking deluge that has fallen over two months. More than 5000 homes have flooded in the Thames valley and Somerset. Many of the people affected complain that rivers should have been dredged to allow the water to escape faster. But hydrologists say dredging alone would have made little difference. The only way is to manage entire catchment areas, or in the case of Somerset, perhaps build an artificial lagoon.
via Dredging would not have stopped massive UK floods – environment – 10 February 2014 – New Scientist.