Daily Archives: 25. August 2020
Hurricane Laura Possible CAT 3 Landfall / Coronal HOLE / Hawaii Earthquakes
Hurricane Laura Possible CAT 3 Landfall / Coronal HOLE / Hawaii Earthquakes
Two More CCGT Plants To Be Mothballed
By Paul Homewood
h/t stewgreen
Don’t say you were not warned!
Two power plants are to be put into a “dormant state of managed preservation” to allow administrators more time to recover costs for creditors.
The operating companies for Severn Power Station, Newport, and Sutton Bridge, Lincolnshire, called them in after holding company, Newport-based energy group Calon Energy, went into administration in June.
Both plants employ 68 staff combined.
A third site, Baglan Bay Power Station, Port Talbot, is unaffected.
It is part of the group but remains under the control of its directors, said administrators at KPMG.
Joint administrator Jim Tucker said: “The recent and ongoing challenges facing the UK power market mean that these power stations are currently not generating sufficient returns to continue trading effectively.
“It has therefore been determined that the power plants will be placed into a safe and dormant state of managed preservation to provide more time to explore all options in order to recover value for the group’s creditors.”
The company’s three sites all operate combined cycle gas turbines.
It had plans to build a new combined cycle gas turbine at the former Willington power station in Derbyshire.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-53895806
The two plants have a combined capacity of 1.7 GW, so represent a significant part of Britain’s CCGT base of about 30 GW. And they are not old plants either – Sutton Bridge began operations in 1999 and Severn in 2010.
Any fool could have seen this coming. Energy companies simply cannot afford to keep gas plants ticking over at such low levels of capacity, because of competition from heavily subsidised wind power.
In theory, idled capacity should be supported by Capacity Market payments, whereby the government pays for standby capacity. The price is set by auction each year.
In practice, existing generators, including coal and nuclear power stations, have hoovered up contracts at rock bottom prices. But all of the coal and most of the nuclear plants will be shut this decade, leaving a potential gap before new CCGT capacity can be built. This gap will be even more serious if other existing gas plants shut in the meantime.
via NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
August 25, 2020 at 12:12PM
No safe level of caffeine consumption for pregnant women?
That’s what a new ‘study’ claims in the ironically-named journal BMJ Evidence Based Medicine.
This is supposed to be an ‘evidence synthesis.’
What that means is that this ‘study’ a subjective review of extant (publication-biased) studies that used poor quality (self-reported) data to produce, at best, statistical noise.
Is there any biological plausibility to this claim?
No. Merely because caffeine passes the placenta does not mean it causes any harm. Mere biological effects are not harm.
The media release is below. The ‘study’ is here.
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No safe level of caffeine consumption for pregnant women and would-be mothers
Women who are pregnant or trying for a baby should consider avoiding caffeine, researchers say
BMJ
Women who are pregnant or trying to conceive should be advised to avoid caffeine because the evidence suggests that maternal caffeine consumption is associated with negative pregnancy outcomes and that there is no safe level of consumption, finds an analysis of observational studies published in BMJ Evidence Based Medicine.
Caffeine is probably the most widely consumed psychoactive substance in history, and many people, including pregnant women consume it on a daily basis.
Pregnant women have been advised that consuming a small amount of caffeine daily will not harm their baby. The UK NHS, the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists, the Dietary Guidelines for Americans and the European Food Safety Authority (EFSA) set this level at 200 mg caffeine, which approximates to roughly two cups of moderate-strength coffee per day.
This study undertook a review of current evidence on caffeine-related pregnancy outcomes, to determine whether the recommended safe level of consumption for pregnant women is soundly based.
Through database searches, Professor Jack James, of Reykjavik University, Iceland, identified 1,261 English language peer-reviewed articles linking caffeine and caffeinated beverages to pregnancy outcomes.
These were whittled down to 48 original observational studies and meta-analyses published in the past two decades reporting results for one or more of six major negative pregnancy outcomes: miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight and/or small for gestational age, preterm birth, childhood acute leukaemia, and childhood overweight and obesity.
A total of 42 separate findings were reported in 37 observational studies; of these 32 found that caffeine significantly increased risk of adverse pregnancy outcomes and 10 found no or inconclusive associations. Caffeine-related risk was reported with moderate to high levels of consistency for all pregnancy outcomes except preterm birth.
Eleven studies reported on the findings of 17 meta-analyses, and in 14 of these maternal caffeine consumption was associated with increased risk for four adverse outcomes: miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight and/or small for gestational age, and childhood acute leukaemia. The three remaining meta-analyses did not find an association between maternal caffeine consumption and preterm birth.
No meta-analyses looked at the association between maternal caffeine consumption and childhood overweight and obesity, but four of five observational studies reported significant associations.
This is an observational study, so can’t establish causation, and the author points out that the results could be impacted by other confounding factors, such as recall of caffeine consumption, maternal cigarette smoking and most importantly pregnancy symptoms. Pregnancy symptoms such as nausea and vomiting in early pregnancy are predictive of a healthy pregnancy and women who experience them are likely to reduce their caffeine intake.
But he adds that the dose-responsive nature of the associations between caffeine and adverse pregnancy outcomes, and the fact some studies found no threshold below which negative outcomes were absent, supports likely causation rather than mere association.
Professor James concludes that there is “substantial cumulative evidence” of an association between maternal caffeine consumption and diverse negative pregnancy outcomes, specifically miscarriage, stillbirth, low birth weight and/or small for gestational age, childhood acute leukaemia and childhood overweight and obesity, but not preterm birth.
As a result, he adds, current health recommendations concerning caffeine consumption during pregnancy are in need of “radical revision.”
“Specifically, the cumulative scientific evidence supports pregnant women and women contemplating pregnancy being advised to avoid caffeine,” he says.
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via JunkScience.com
August 25, 2020 at 09:31AM
Google Recommends Bleach
Google recommends bleach for COVID-19:
“Unexpired household bleach will be effective against coronaviruses when properly diluted. Prepare a bleach solution by mixing 5 tablespoons (1/3 cup) bleach per gallon of water”
(2020-08-23. The browser was not in a clean configuration, but that does not matter here. )
The question “Is bleach an effective cleaning agent for the coronavirus disease?” can be understood in different ways. It seems that the text was originally on the CDC website in a section Cleaning and Disinfection for Households. But Google took that of of the original context. In the Google’s context, it looks like an advice to drink bleach. Of course, Trump is blamed for the consequences of such advice. DO NOT LISTEN TO GOOGLE! Do not drink bleach.
Google and Twitter frequently recommend drinking bleach or doing something equally dangerous, and falsely claim that such advice is endorsed by President Donald Trump. A screenshot from Twitter, 2020-06-30:
They do a lot of things like this. For example, Twitter promoted a hashtag #HydroxychloroquineCuresCancerPM (a false claim), and offered it as completion for people looking for the hashtag #Hydroxychloroquine.
In the same time, Google, Facebook, Twitter, and Microsoft continue spreading FUD (fear, uncertainty, doubt) about Hydroxychloroquine. For example, Google searches for COVID-19 return ads from WHO, which calls HCQ’s effectiveness for COVID-19 treatment and prophylaxis is a myth.
(2020-08-24. Not clean configuration)
Currently, Google and the fake news media run a campaign, falsely insinuating that Trump wants to use something called oleandrin for COVID-19. These are attempts to bury information about Hydroxychloroquine in the noise of false rumors.
(202-08-25, clean configuration)
via Science Defies Politics
August 25, 2020 at 08:40AM
Team warns negative emissions technologies may not solve alleged climate crisis
Photosynthesis: nature requires carbon dioxide
Wrong diagnosis, unworkable cures? All is not well in the strange world of climate hysteria, as its promoters flounder in the mire of their own creation. Crippling costs could sink their supposed solutions.
– – –
A team led by researchers at the University of Virginia cautions that when it comes to climate change, the world is making a bet it might not be able to cover, says Phys.org.
The team’s new paper in Nature Climate Change explores how plans to avoid the worst outcomes of a warming planet could bring their own side effects.
The handful of models the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and decisions makers around the world trust to develop strategies to meet carbon neutrality commitments all assume negative emissions technologies will be available as part of the solution.
Negative emissions technologies, often called NETs, remove carbon dioxide from the atmosphere. The three most widely studied approaches are bioenergy with carbon capture and storage, which entails growing crops for fuel, then collecting and burying the CO2 from the burned biomass; planting more forests; and direct air capture, an engineered process for separating CO2 from the air and storing it permanently, likely underground.
“The trouble is, nobody has tried these technologies at the demonstration scale, much less at the massive levels necessary to offset current CO2 emissions,” said Andres Clarens, a professor in UVA Engineering’s Department of Engineering Systems and Environment and associate director of UVA’s pan-University Environmental Resilience Institute.
The institute partially funded the research leading to the Nature Climate Change paper.
“Our paper quantifies their costs so we can have an honest conversation about it before we start doing this on a large scale,” Clarens said.
Since the Paris Agreement to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius, hammered out by world leaders in 2015, a growing number of corporations such as BP and many institutions and governments—including UVA and Virginia—have committed to reaching zero carbon emissions in the next few decades.
Full article here.
via Tallbloke’s Talkshop
August 25, 2020 at 07:12AM
AUSTRALIA RECORDS ITS MOST SNOWFALL EVER OUTSIDE OF AN ALPINE AREA
Hundreds of snow-chasers recently descended on the town of Oberon, New South Wales (NSW), but have since drawn an angry rebuke from the local Gestapo for breaking COVID social distancing rules.
Antarctic air reaching Australia’s south east triggered snowfall down to low-lying regions across several states over the weekend and into Monday, with many people temporarily escaping house-arrest to enjoy the “once-in-a-15-year” event.
Some were more successful than others:
The town of Oberon received a record-breaking 20 cm (8 inches) of global warming goodness, the highest 24-hour snow total ever recorded outside of an Aussie alpine region. Traffic, predictably, was soon bumper-to-bumper through Hampton as tourists descended on Oberon to enjoy the snow–much to the chagrin of the local sheep. One Oberon resident reportedly bleated: “Let’s all go mingle with people from hot spots then risk taking something home. It will be so worth it.” And another jumbuck added: “I wonder what part of STAY AT HOME do all those idiots not understand.”
Oberon, which is located in NSW’s Blue Mountains, was an area under threat from bushfires last year, and Hollywood reliably informed me that the area would never see a drop of moisture again and that all the wallabies were burnt to a crisp:
Further south from the Blue Mountains, Goulburn, and Canberra also saw snow, which created a stunning white mountain backdrop for Parliament House in the nation’s capital on Sunday morning. A few rogue snowflakes even landed on Parliament House, according to the Bureau of Meteorology.
A healthy metre (3.3 feet) accumulated in a number of ski resorts, namely Perisher, Thredbo, and Hotham, visible in the below BOM tweet:
The freezing weather event –which saw snow fall across some areas lower than 300 m (984 feet) above sea level for the first time in 15 years– will persist over the next few days, at least.
The COLD TIMES are returning, the mid-latitudes are REFREEZING, in line with historically low solar activity, cloud-nucleating Cosmic Rays, and a meridional jet stream flow. Even NASA appears to agree, if you read between the lines, with their forecast for this upcoming solar cycle (25) seeing it as “the weakest of the past 200 years,” with the agency correlating previous solar shutdowns to prolonged periods of global cooling here.
Don’t fall for bogus, warm-mongering political agendas.
Prepare for the COLD— learn the facts, relocate if need be, and grow your own.
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Grand Solar Minimum + Pole Shift
Huge Snowfalls across Eastern Australia as Antarctic Air takes charge
The post Australia Records its most Snowfall EVER outside of an Alpine Area appeared first on Electroverse.
Big Oil Asset Write-Downs Are Not The End Of The Oil Age
Charles Rotter / 8 mins ago August 25, 2020
Guest post by Tilak Doshi, originally published at Forbes.
Climate change activists have long lobbied for divestment from fossil fuel-producing companies. They have largely failed in this quest. This year, the steep falls in the value of the large oil and gas companies, however, occurred with a rapidity that astonished market watchers. Within weeks, the coronavirus pandemic and the oil market-share battle between Saudi Arabia and Russia launched after the collapse of the OPEC+ talks in early March led to unprecedented falls in Big Oil equity.
The S&P Global Oil Index, measuring the performance of 120 of the largest, publicly-traded companies engaged in oil & gas fell by 45% in the month to March 18th when Brent crude was trading at $25/barrel. ExxonMobil, the bluest of blue chips fell 54% in that period while Shell, another Big Oil bellwether, fell 45%.
In mid-June, BP was among the first of the oil majors to announce its intention to write down the value of its assets by up to $17.5 billion after cutting its long term oil forecast (to 2050) from $70/barrel to $55. This was followed a couple of weeks later by another European oil major, Royal Dutch Shell, which reported its plans to write-down its asset base by $22 billion after a similar lowering of its long term oil price forecast.
Stranded Resources and Climate Change Concerns
The campaign to scare fossil fuel investors about “stranded resources” has followed two tracks. This first argues as to what should be done. Citing “consensus science” (an oxymoron), climate change models purportedly linking carbon dioxide emissions with “climate risk” are used to calculate the necessary cuts in oil, gas and coal production. Hence BlackRock, the world’s largest asset manager warned in 2015 that “the majority of fossil fuel reserves will need to be left in the ground” if global warming is not to exceed 2 degrees C. Along the same lines, consultants for the OECD asserted that “vast quantities of resource reserves will need to remain underground in order to stabilize the climate”.
The second track poses the question of what would likely happen under current trends. In this view, technological progress in energy efficiency and renewable energy combined with climate policies pursued by governments around the world will lead to substantial falls in demand for fossil fuels. A Financial Timescolumn, for instance, pointed out that the pursuit of climate change policies would “evaporate” a third of the current value of the big oil and gas companies. If countries met their Paris Agreement commitments and kept to the “no more than 2o C above pre-industrial levels” target, 50% of all coal, oil and gas resources would be “stranded” and, by definition, have zero value. If the stricter 1.5o C maximum is aimed for, then 80% of the world’s fossil fuels would be stranded.
Why are model-based climate risk “assessments” not reflected in the value of fossil fuel companies? Are those countless investors, big and small and of varying levels of sophistication, who put up risk capital for fossil fuel companies myopic, unaware of the losses they face? One does not need to be a particularly savvy investor to be wary of betting against the large liquid oil, gas and coal markets on the basis of academic climate modellers and the research departments of multilateral agencies such as the OECD or the World Bank prognosticating on long run scenarios.
The events of the past few months show that decades of “consensus science” and anti-fossil fuel campaigning in the boardrooms and shareholder meetings of publicly-listed companies in the US and Europe could not achieve what a ‘black swan’ turn of events has wrought. On 6th March, Russia’s refused to agree with OPEC’s (essentially Saudi-led) proposal to further cut oil production in response to the demand destruction that Covid-19 was expected to cause. Riyadh’s response – steep discounts to their selling prices and intentions to massively increase exports — caused a rout in oil prices. Brent crude fell from around $60/barrel in mid-February to below $20 several weeks later. After the OPEC+ agreement in April that led to unprecedented cutbacks in oil production, prices have stabilized to around $40 – $45/barrel since June.
Fossil fuel divestment campaigners might be elated by the drastic drop in the share prices of the big oil and gas companies. But it was the Wuhan virus rather than the Paris Agreement that caused this. The value of “stranded resources” was defined by the simultaneous demand (the Covid-19 lockdowns) and supply (the Saudi-Russia market-share battle) shocks, not by expert long run climate change forecasters. And it wasn’t divestment but a rapid destruction of value, along with global assets across the board, as the world economy faces a recession this year which is likely to be far worse than the one experienced during the global financial crisis.
Oil and Gas Will Remain Important for Developing Countries
Low oil and gas prices will now be an established feature of global capital markets for some time to come. While the economic impact of the twin shocks in the oil universe have been severe, much depends on how fast the global pandemic is contained. The faster economies re-emerge from the pandemic lockdowns, the quicker and stronger the recovery in oil and gas demand. But whatever the rate of demand recovery for fossil fuels, it won’t change the fact that we live in an age of ample oil (and gas and coal).
In the 5 year period to 2019, developing countries accounted for three quarters of global oil demand growth and the Asian developing countries accounted for over 70%. As the developing world, especially the rapidly-growing populous economies of Asia, emerge out of the coronavirus pandemic lockdowns, access to cheap fossil fuels will be critical over the next few decades. Coal, oil and gas have powered urbanization, industrialization and agricultural productivity, and have led to improvements in the standards of living for the vast majority of the global population.
For the hundreds of millions of people that have newly emerged from poverty in recent decades and are beginning to enjoy the fruits of economic growth and technological progress across Asia, Africa and Latin America – among the greatest achievements in human history – demanding that the global use of fossil fuels be curtailed would be unacceptable. Wishing for a premature end to the Age of Oil (and gas and coal) will do humanity irreparable harm.
CDC’s Race Against Time
