Doomsday Prophecies of Ancient Methane Being Released as Temperatures Rise are WRONG, say Scientists

Another bit of climate hysteria demolished by real scientists

FIle photo: © Augustin/Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Geophysique de l'Environment (LGGE)/Handout

The climate change movement has long warned that, as global temperatures rise, we run the risk of releasing vast reserves of trapped methane into the atmosphere and bringing about the end of days. New research says: probably not.

Researchers at the University of Rochester in New York studied methane emissions from a period in Earth's history which bears many similarities to our current climate, examining ice cores taken from the last period of deglaciation some 8,000 to 15,000 years ago.

By closely examining air samples extracted from these frozen ice cores, the researchers found that even if the methane in these vast stores is released, it won't actually reach our atmosphere. 

“Our data shows we don't need to be as concerned about large methane releases from large carbon reservoirs in response to future warming,” said Vasily Petrenko, a professor of Earth and environmental sciences at Rochester. “We should be more concerned about methane released from human activities." 

When carbon-based life (plants and animals) decays, the remains freeze and the carbon contained within becomes trapped in the permafrost seen across regions including vast swathes of Siberia, Alaska and northern Canada.

Later, when the water in this permafrost melts, the soil becomes waterlogged and creates the ideal breeding ground for microbes that consume the newly-thawed carbon and produce methane. 

Meanwhile, in the oceans, methane hydrates – formed under immense pressures at low temperatures – are found in sediments on the ocean floor along the subaquatic borders of the continents. If ocean temperatures rise, the current theory goes, these hydrates will destabilize and release the methane gas into the atmosphere, wreaking havoc around the globe. 

The team took ice core samples from the Earth's past to see just how much methane from these ancient deposits is actually released during periods of warming, and found that the actual amount of emissions from ancient carbon reservoirs was quite small. 

“The likelihood of these old carbon reservoirs destabilizing and creating a large positive warming feedback in the present day is also low,” said Michael Dionysus, a graduate student involved in the research.

Instead, the researchers argue that numerous natural 'buffers' actually prevent the majority of the carbon from reaching the atmosphere. 

In the case of methane hydrates, most of the greenhouse gas is dissolved and oxidized by microbes in the oceans long before it makes it to the surface. The same goes for deeper deposits of methane in permafrost, which the researchers believe are consumed by bacteria in the soil and turned into carbon dioxide. 

Methane is believed to be a far more powerful GHG than CO2, by those who believe CO2 is a GHG.

Met Office Reluctantly Admits the UK is Cooling

Electroverse

The last decade in the UK went down as the ‘second’ hottest of the past 100 years, at least according to the Met Office’s temperature dataset AND this recent article from the BBC.

But taking the Met’s politicized, warm-mongering, UHI-ignoring data as read, for arguments sake, the simple fact remains: the 2010’s have come out cooler than the 2000’s — the agency may be in control of the spin, but it hasn’t been able to fudge the findings.

Dr Mark McCarthy, from the Met Office in Exeter, said it was “a consequence of our warming climate”.

That’s right, Mark — despite this most recent decade coming out cooler than the previous one, the AGW juggernaut must keep-on rolling, your funding depends on it, doesn’t it? And even in the face of such evidence to the contrary, you can’t bring yourself to stop and ask… why, or how… the 2010’s were cooler than the 2000’s?

I was told average temperatures would rise “linearly” –always up and up and up on an endless march to catastrophe if no action was taken– as depicted by Michael Mann’s now infamous Hockey Stick. 

Now, I can buy a year or two falling out of line — local weather patterns and natural ocean current-fluctuations etc. can explain why 2018 was cooler than 2017 and 2016, for example.

But an entire decade dropping by the wayside? (It would make for a funny looking hockey stick).

No, this appears to be evidence that the sun has had its say, that its Grand Solar MAXIMUM has run its course and that its activity is now waning, likely ushering in the onset of earth’s next cooling cycle — perhaps even the next Grand Solar MINIMUM:

Furthermore, the BBC is also trying to paint 2019 as a disastrously hot year.

But the reality, again according to the Met Office’s own warm-mongering data, is that 2019 was merely the 11th warmest on record — hardly signs of an impending fiery doom.

And serving as a further indication of how hard it is for the Met to tell it’s arse from it’s elbow, I’ll leave you with this recent quote from Dr Mark McCarthy: “We are expecting to see an increase in winter rainfall, so wetter winters and drier summers — but we could still experience dry winters and wet summers.”

Bases covered — the AGW juggernaut is safe to roll-on for at least another decade. Or is it…

…natural climate cycles can scupper even the best-laid frauds.

And as the lower-latitudes continue to refreeze, as depicted by the below Total Snow Mass for the Northern Hemisphere chart, a period of GSM-induced global cooling is likely that natural climate cycle.

Prepare according — relocate if need be, and grow your own.

Solar Activity just reached a new Space Age Low

Greenland just set a new all-time Record-Low Temperature

B.C. Tricked Canadian Politicians into Believing its Carbon Tax Policy Works. It Doesn't!

It cost an extra $6 to fill my Honda Accord.

By 2030 it may be an extra $16, and by 2050 - $50 extra.

'Revenue neutral' carbon tax is not an accounting exercise for B.C. families.

It’s an expensive reality

Special to Financial Post
Kris Sims, CTF

While Prime Minister Justin Trudeau’s government gets set to force a federal carbon tax on all of Canada’s provinces and territories, taxpayers across the country deserve to know what happened in the country’s carbon-tax test case, British Columbia.

The Trojan horse of the carbon tax was wheeled into the B.C. public square in 2008 with the government’s promise that it would somehow cost average people nothing and would be “revenue neutral.” But, that turned out to be a cautionary tale for the ages.

For years, the carbon-tax cheerleaders continued to laud the fee that’s been tacked on to carbon-emitting goods and services, urging the rest of the country to follow suit. It was touted as a magical formula that would somehow protect the environment and lower taxes all at once. Visions of hydrogen-powered buses and solar cars danced in the heads of the green bean counters. “Revenue neutral” they all sang.

The reality of government, however, is always duller and grift-ier than that. The current B.C. government has dropped the term “revenue neutral” altogether and now calls the carbon tax a “tool.”

Before the charade was abandoned entirely, this is what “revenue neutral” meant for the B.C. carbon tax: In 2016–17 the provincial government raked in $1.2 billion in the carbon tax from taxpayers. The amount is listed on page 68 in the budget document as a frame entitled: “Revenue Neutral Carbon Tax Plan.” Then, the government scraped together 17 sundry tax credits and stuffed them into the carbon-tax frame, making the tax sum balance out to zero. Abracadabra: “revenue neutral.” That’s all it meant.

It was a crass puppet show. Every provincial and federal budget includes tax credits for things like home renovations, children’s fitness programs, film incentives, and business training tax credits. In B.C., however, there is an uncommon carbon tax taken from people, so these very common credits were just repackaged to make the tax appear neutral on paper. As a senior B.C. government official admitted during last year’s budget lockup, “this was always just an accounting exercise.”

The carbon tax is not an accounting exercise for B.C. families. It’s an expensive reality for any Canadian subjected to it.

To fill up an average Toyota Camry with a 70-litre fuel tank costs $6 in carbon tax

Under the federal formula at $35 per tonne, the carbon tax costs a lot of money at the gas station, approximately 8.55 cents per litre of gasoline with the GST tacked onto it (because, of course, they have to tax the tax), and 10.06 cents per litre for diesel with the GST. 

To fill up an average Toyota Camry with a 70-litre fuel tank costs $6 in carbon tax. A Dodge Ram pick-up truck costs more than $10 in carbon tax and a Ford Super Duty Diesel costs more than $17 per fill up. For tractor-trailer trucks, it costs $45 in carbon taxes to fill up just one of those cylinder tanks with diesel. Canadians bought more than 40 billion litres of gasoline and more than 16 billion litres of diesel fuel in 2016. Multiply that volume by the carbon tax per litre and the government haul is crystal clear.

And note, as I have been saying for some time - everything that moves will go up in price, not just gas and diesel.

It gets worse, though, because even with the carbon tax costing Canadians billions of dollars, it’s still not reducing emissions, according to environmentalists leading the carbon-tax charge. In January, the Sierra Club reported on the B.C. experiment: “emissions were higher in 2015 than in 2010 and have risen in four of the last five years. B.C.’s latest emissions data mark years of failure to reduce emissions by more than a token amount.” 

If taking billions of dollars away from Canadians doesn’t reduce emissions, then, what is the point of this forced carbon tax?

When the forced federal carbon tax is set at $50 per tonne in 2022, that means that gasoline will have a carbon tax of 11.63 cents per litre. Will that be enough? Not according to the Environment Canada bureaucrats who told Environment Minister Catherine McKenna that the country needs a carbon tax of $100 per tonne by 2020 and a tax of $300 per tonne by 2050 to meet the government’s promises under the Paris climate agreement. That would be 23 cents per litre on gas in 2020 and then 70 cents per litre by 2050 — about $50 extra in today’s money to fill up the family sedan.

People need to use oil and gas. The carbon tax doesn’t make people “reduce their use” of this modern lifeblood, it just costs them a lot of money while not stopping the emissions. Our economy and our modern way of life depend on oil and gas. We use them to run our power stations, till our soil, plant our food, mine our minerals, mill our wood, heat our greenhouses, manufacture all of our goods and haul those goods and food to market.

We use oil and gas products to travel to school, work and the beach. Planes, automobiles and transit buses all use oil and gas, and they were manufactured and shipped to us using oil and gas. All of these actions of everyday life depend upon the miracle of hydrocarbons, so, the carbon tax is a tax on everything.

Carbon taxes don’t just make gasoline more expensive, they make life much more expensive.

And low and middle-income families end up paying far more as a percentage of their income than wealthy people. We have the most beautiful province in the world and we won't be able to afford to go anywhere to see it. Neither will the Americans come to see it as gas prices are becoming prohibitive.

Another Report Reluctantly Admits that 'Green' Energy is a Disastrous Flop - Financial Post

The naive and dishonest claims by Green Energy,

along with the climate hysteria, leads Canada to 

trash fossil fuel energy systems much too prematurely

The report confirms what should have been obvious from the start: the more “variable” wind and solar are introduced into any electricity system, the more they make it both more expensive and less reliable.David McNew/AFP/Getty Images

Peter Foster, FP

Amid hundreds of graphs, charts and tables in the latest World Energy Outlook (WEO) released last week by the International Energy Agency, there is one fundamental piece of information that you have to work out for yourself: the percentage of total global primary energy demand provided by wind and solar. The answer is 1.1 per cent. The policy mountains have laboured and brought forth not just a mouse, but — as the report reluctantly acknowledges — an enormously disruptive mouse.

The International Energy Agency (IEA) has in recent years become an increasingly schizophrenic organization. As both a source of energy information and a shill for the UN’s climate-focused sustainable development agenda, it has to talk up the “transition to a low-carbon future” while simultaneously reporting that it’s not happening. But it will!

This report should be profoundly embarrassing to the Liberal government of Justin Trudeau, which has virtue-signalled itself to the front of a parade that is going nowhere, although it can certainly claim genuine leadership in the more forceful route to transition: killing the fossil fuel industry by edict.

The WEO report, yet again, projects that global fossil fuel use — and related emissions — will grow out to 2040, as oil, gas and coal continue to dominate the energy picture. But it also struggles to put a positive spin on wind and solar. Solar had a “record-setting” year in 2017. The Chinese solar business is “booming.” New wind and solar additions “outpaced those of fossil fuels in 2017, driven by policy support and declining costs.

“Policy support” means subsidies worth hundreds of millions of dollars. As for declining costs, solar is at least twice as expensive a generator as coal and almost twice as expensive as gas.

Finally, and most significantly, the report confirms what should have been obvious from the start: the more “variable” wind and solar are introduced into any electricity system, the more they make it both more expensive and less reliable.

The term Variable Renewable Energy, VRE, could more accurately be described as Unreliable Renewable Energy, URE, due to the terribly obvious fact that the sun doesn’t shine at night, and sometimes not during the day either, while the wind doesn’t always blow. Thus the more that wind and solar are part of your system, the more technical contortions they demand from backup power and the structure of the grid. The efficient part of the system has to twist itself into a technical pretzel to accommodate the inefficient part. Accommodating unreliability has led to outright perversity. The widespread adoption of wind and solar under Germany’s Energiewende (“energy transition”) has resulted in rising overall emissions, mainly from coal-fired backup facilities. Meanwhile the green Godot is battery storage, which is always on the point of turning up, but never quite does. Still, the IEA has a scenario for that: “What if battery storage becomes really cheap?”

Supply isn’t the only area where expensive and unreliable wind and solar need to be accommodated. There is also “demand flexibility.” This includes having solar panels installed on your roof, or adopting — or being forced to adopt — “smart meters,” which can monitor a household’s electricity usage in minute-by-minute detail. According to the report, “The spreading of rooftop solar PV (photovoltaics) and the falling costs of digital technologies, combined with affordable wind and solar power options, are creating a host of new opportunities that enable consumers to take a more active role in meeting their own energy needs.”

But wind and solar are not “affordable,” and few people want to take a “more active role” in meeting their energy needs (That is, unless they are being heavily “policy supported” to stick solar panels on their roofs). They just want to flip a switch.

As for smart meters, the IEA notes that many countries “have successfully rolled out smart meters on a large scale, such as Canada, Denmark, Finland, Italy, Norway, Spain and Sweden.” Would such success be like the smart meter program in Ontario, which was panned by provincial auditor Bonnie Lysyk for costing an extra billion dollars and not working as advertised, while several thousand meters were found to represent a fire hazard?

Although it mentions nothing of the absurdities attached to Ontario’s Green Energy Act, the WEO report confirms that Canada has the most stringent emissions pricing program in the world, at least out to 2025, at $35 a tonne (in 2017 U.S. dollars), thus cementing its competitive disadvantage. Others, such as the EU and Korea, are prepared to make marginally more self-damaging commitments out to 2040 (at US$43 and US$44 respectively), but these levels nowhere near approach that allegedly required by the beyond-fantasy “Sustainable Development Scenario,” which, for developed countries, is US$63 in 2025 and US$140 in 2040. In fact, those figures, like most of the IEA’s projections, are not worth a solar fig.

The Sustainable Development Scenario not only solves the climate issue, but also takes care of universal access to modern energy and air pollution, too. Even more amazing, it achieves all this via imposing swathes of expensive and unreliable energy, but without the slightest impact on economic growth. How? By simply assuming so.

The report’s solution to policy mayhem is inevitably to call for more — and more complex — policy. “Can an integrated approach spur faster action?” it asks. Since governments have screwed up so badly, might they screw up less if they try to do much more?

At least they are assured of firm support from the IEA.