Rough Winds in May

Yesterday as much rain fell on South Wales in a day as normally falls in the month of May. Unseasonably cold temperatures make the British Isles rather unpleasant now; hail has fallen upon some and in London rough winds have shaken those buds brave enough to appear, even though their appearance has been delayed by the cold weather until now. Snow has fallen in Devon, once called the British Riviera in May.  Centrica, owner of British gas, has sold 20% more gas to households in the past six months than it usually sells over the same period in past years.

400 Parts Per Million and Rising

Those who measure the atmospheric carbon dioxide at Mauna Loa have recorded in March 2013 a monthly average concentration of 397.34 parts per million compared with  394.45 ppm which was recorded in March 2012.  The April figures are not yet our but in May the average concentration exceeded 400 ppm, which level of concentration the earth has not experienced for more than 5 million years. It is, in my view, certain that the atmospheric carbon dioxide concentration will average more than 400 ppm by the end of this year.

We are, as humans, moving into a new place.

http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/#mlo

Good at Boasting Bad at Emission Reduction

The government of the United Kingdom have boasted that in the past twenty years the UK has cut its emissions of greenhouse gases by 25%. The government is very good at boasting boasters are invariably liars.

What Goes Around Comes Around

Our economic woes and the odd act of terrorism have distracted us from the fact that the weather in many places in the world is playing unusual tricks. In the United States of America, Illinois, Michigan, Missouri, Mississippi, Indiana and Iowa have suffered from record levels of rainfall. Properties that never suffered from flooding have flooded, people have been evacuated from their homes and five people so far have died as a result of the severe flooding, which has reached the state where it can properly be called a severe weather event. If the USA were not rich and well organised, many more people would have died.

Burning the Unburnable

The London School of Economics and NGO Carbon Tracker made the news when they found that fossil fuel exploration companies spent £440 billion in 2012 looking for oil, gas and coal. They postulated that if this continues for ten years (reasonably likely in my view) the oil gas and coal found could not be burnt if governments adhere to their fossil fuel emission targets (unlikely in my view). The study points out that if the level of global warming was restricted to three degrees as opposed to the present two degrees, much of the fossil fuel found would be unburnable because of the three degree global warming target.

This study does not show that investors in fossil fuel companies are being misled because they are putting their savings into businesses that will be forced to fail because of the world’s global warming targets; this study shows that investors know that governments of the world will not stick to their global warming targets. The short term chase for money takes precedence over everything on our planet, even our planet.

Desperately Trying to Become a Cuckoo

If it were lawful for a multinational corporation to make money by breeding people in order to kill them and processing bones from specially bred humans fattened on special diets into expensive products, they would do so. If such a venture were profitable there would be many investors whose money would finance such venture. If the venture was very profitable and brought some poorly paid employment to a section of their governed, the business would be protected by governments and there would be many people (provided that they were not victims or likely to be victims of such ventures) who would be capable of expounding rational and wonderful arguments why such venture should be permitted. There would also be fine rules about corporate governance and spellbinding rhetoric as to the importance of these ventures.

Will EDF Get its Subsidy?

EDF the energy giant has already spent, it says, more than a million pounds every day to keep the project at Hinkley Point where it wants to build a nuclear power plant, viable. It does not want a subsidy. It wants a forty year commitment from the UK government to buy or underwrite the price it will get from the energy generated from the yet to build nuclear plant. It wants a price guarantee of £100 per mWh for 40 years. This is significantly higher than the price guarantee that the UK government gives to producers of electricity from wind power, where they pay out around £80 per mWh for 15 years, not 40 years.

Emissions Trading – a triumph of hope over reality

The European Union’s Emissions Trading Scheme was doomed from the start. I have always held that you cannot use the devices of the casino to reduce emissions. You can tax emissions, making them more costly to produce and creating an incentive to encourage ways of using clean renewable emissions, but to set up a system where emission producers can speculate on the price of carbon dioxide, which is a commodity that no one wants and no one can use, as a way of reducing carbon dioxide emissions, will make no difference to the amount of greenhouse gas emissions that are produced.

Hiding a Hare in a Field of Wheat

British Farmers, notoriously famous for always complaining, have plenty to complain about right now. They have suffered what virtually amounts to eighteen months of winter, find soil conditions very cold. Grass, which is a crop for dairy farmers much needed to feed cattle, and wheat, a crop for grain farmers, much needed to give us our daily bread, should be growing well in early April.

In order to grow well these crops need soil temperatures of about 6⁰ Celsius to have their growth spurts. Most soils in Britain in April right now have soil temperatures of 2⁰ Celsius and this means the grass and the wheat are barely growing. You cannot hide a hare in a field of wheat this April nor do you need to get your lawn mower out of its winter hibernation.

These conditions have been caused by weather. All over the world farmers are experiencing very different weather conditions than those they expect and than those that have applied for many generations. The weather is telling us something about the climate and the way the climate is changing. We should listen to what it tells us. A hare cannot hide today in any British field of wheat, nor can people hide from the weather that warns us of things to come.

The Renewable Heat Incentive

It is just not possible to run a renewable heat business in the United Kingdom.  Government politicians Mr Greg Barker and Mr Ed Davey who are in charge of renewable heat policies simply cannot be trusted to tell the truth when they publish a plan and they certainly cannot be trusted to stick to their announcement. You cannot simply believe anything that the Department of Energy and Climate Change publishes on its website about its plans for the Renewable Heat Incentive.