5:45PM 2018-12-11
Thanks Gas!
46.71%
Category: UK
50,000 Excess Winter Deaths In UK 2017/2018 – Climate Change Kills Alright
Cold Kills
“New figures from the Office of National Statistics today show that the number of excess winter deaths exceeded 50,000 the highest on record since the winter of 1975/76. Over 15,000 of these deaths will be relatable directly to a cold home. The vast majority will have multiple hospital and GP visits behind them. The figures also worryingly show a doubling in the number of male deaths under 65.
Adam Scorer, Chief Executive of NEA commented:
“Today’s excess winter death figures should be a huge shock to the system. The cost in human suffering and lost lives is a tragedy. The cost to the NHS is significant and largely avoidable.
Predictable, preventable and shameful. We seem to have accepted excess winter deaths to be as much a part of winter as darker evenings.
On top of these preventable deaths we know that many millions more people will have suffered the preventable health impacts of living in a cold and damp home, as well as resorting to harmful coping strategies.
New evidence provided by frontline workers to NEA, has revealed the top 10 unsafe fuel poverty coping strategies being used to survive winter. The regular use of older, dangerous or un-serviced heating appliances is common place, despite being potentially fatal or leading to heightened risks for nearby neighbours as a result of carbon monoxide poisoning or in extreme situations, fires and explosions. The charity says many more people are going to bed early to keep warm and using candles to save on electricity. People struggling to heat their homes are also spending their days in heated spaces such as libraries, cafes or even A&E to avoid the cold.”
Some previous blog posts on the same subject.
You can’t be a climate leader and burn trees for electricity
It appears the UK has realized that biomass (imported wood pellets) produces more CO2 than coal.
“Recently, the UK government tightened its carbon intensity requirement for any biomass-burning power plants seeking future support from its Contracts for Difference subsidy program. This was a crucial first step, as my colleague and I described in detail here.
The new emission limit is now set at 29 kg of CO2 equivalent per MWh. This effectively rules out the use of imported wood pellets for electricity production for new UK biomass plants. In justifying the change, the UK government says that “continuing to apply the existing GHG [greenhouse gas] threshold would lead to GHG emissions [for biomass electricity] significantly above the projected UK grid average.”
Translation: burning wood pellets for electricity is bad for the climate and is not part of a credible solution to decarbonizing electricity grids. Coming from the world’s largest importer of biomass, and a country that spent over $1 billion last year alone subsidizing this industry, this is a big deal.
Unfortunately this is not retroactive and DRAX keeps burning massive amountsof imported wood pellets.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m not a big fan of wind/solar. I just think it is a giant con to think wood pellets are “carbon neutral”.
Phrase of the Day: Fractured Basement
A phrase I hadn’t heard before: Fractured Basement
From inside a ship, sloshing around the 65-foot waves off the coast of the Scottish isles, he plans to poke a diamond-tipped drill-bit into the sea bed. He’ll take it past layers of once-oil-soaked sandstone rocks straight into a strata of solid granite — what geologists call the basement. Then the drill will turn sideways and hopefully intersect a bunch of naturally formed cracks. If his science is correct, there will be enough oil pooled in those cracks to make him a very rich man.
…
Hurricane’s first wells suggested oil was present, but investors needed to see if it could flow. In 2014, right as the price of crude was plummeting off a cliff, Trice drilled a kilometer-long horizontal appraisal well into the Lancaster prospect.
Almost 10,000 barrels a day spouted out of the well. That’s not spectacular, but it was encouraging enough to move forward.
…
“I basically saw this as a missing opportunity,” said Trice in a phone call in September. “The very simple philosophy is that if fractured basement works around the world why couldn’t it work in the U.K.?”
And from a different article:
In most reservoirs, oil is held in pores in sedimentary rock such as sandstone. Basement rocks, which are usually found beneath, are different because they have been buried at great depth in the Earth earlier in their history, making them denser, so oil can’t move through them. The industry never believed that it would be commercially viable to extract oil from this kind of tightly-packed rock, so it was forgotten about in the search for more conventional reservoirs, often in untouched areas.
As the core was taken from rock which was more than half a kilometre from the nearest sedimentary layer, we realised that the sand must have been washed in from above during the Cretaceous period along a network of deep fractures that also channelled oil in from rocks west of the Rona Ridge.
So, wherever you find fractures in the Rona Ridge basement which are filled with minerals and sand, you always find oil. Fractures alone are not enough – it is the minerals and porous sand that hold open the fractures for tens of millions of years.
Fifth Sunniest October in UK – 2018
Fifth sunniest October in UK
122% of average.
Academics Baffled By 20,000 Extra Dead in UK
UN forest accounting loophole allows CO2 underreporting
The CO2 Forest Accounting Loophole
- Emissions accounting helps determine whether or not nations are on target to achieve their voluntary Paris Agreement reduction goals. Ideally, the global community’s CO2 pledges, adjusted downward over time, would, taken together, help keep the world from heating up by 1.5 degrees Celsius (2.7 degrees Fahrenheit) by 2100 from a 1900 baseline.
- But scientists are raising the alarm that this goal may already be beyond reach. One reason: a carbon accounting loophole within UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) guidelines accepting the burning of wood pellets (biomass) as a carbon neutral replacement for coal — with wood now used in many European Union and United Kingdom power plants.
- Scientists warn, however, that their research shows that replacing coal with wood pellets in power plants is not carbon neutral. That’s partly because burning wood, which is celebrated by governments as a renewable and sustainable energy resource, is less efficient than coal burning, so it actually produces more CO2 emissions than coal.
- Also, while wood burning and tree replanting over hundreds of years will end up carbon neutral, that doesn’t help right now. Over a short timeframe, at a historical moment when we require aggressive greenhouse gas reductions, wood burning is adding to global emissions. Analysts say that this loophole needs to be closed, and soon, to avoid further climate chaos.
Where I live they are generating 800MW of power using biomass.
We can’t burn our way out of the climate crisis
I don’t believe we are in a climate crisis. I think more CO2 is good for greening the planet.
I think 1C or 2C of warming over the next century would be great (even though I probably won’t be around to enjoy the warmth).
But I hate the hypocrisy of replacing coal with wood in power plants and then claiming it is renewable and green.
It ain’t green.
Burning wood produces more CO2 than coal and more particulate matter than coal.
Now … even Leonardo di Caprio (his foundation anyway) agrees with me (sort of).
“Burning trees in power plants is a vision from Mordor, not one of clean energy, but electricity generation from wood and other biomass is growing around the world, spurred on by billions in renewable energy subsidies.
Policymakers subsidize bioenergy based in part on the myth that biomass energy has low or zero carbon emissions – even though in reality, wood-burning power plants emit more CO2 than coal plants per unit energy. The treatment of bioenergy as “carbon neutral” extends to carbon trading schemes, providing an incentive for coal plants to convert to burning wood. “
…
“Bioenergy advocates often claim that CO2 pollution from wood-burning power plants doesn’t harm the climate, because biomass is sourced from “forestry residues” (tree tops and branches left over after the tree trunk is taken away for sawtimber or pulp). Since these residues would decompose and emit CO2 anyway, they argue, burning them for energy does not increase CO2 in the atmosphere.
There are two big problems with this argument. First, new wood-burning power plants being built in the EU, UK, and even Asia burn wood pellets that are largely made from whole trees, not residues. Tens of thousands of acres of forest in the U.S. and Canada, including bottomland hardwood forests that represent some of the most carbon-rich ecosystems in North America, are being cut for pellet manufacture, replacing the forest’s natural climate and carbon control infrastructure with mud flats.
Second, even when biomass is derived from forestry residues, it still has a carbon impact, because burning wood emits CO2 quickly, and letting it decompose emits CO2 slowly. “
Read the rest.
DRAX Biomass = 3 million Diesel Cars
DRAX would be a good name for a Bond villain. But its so much worse. They used to burn coal. Now they burn biomass.
And it is dirtier.
“emissions of particulates from the site [DRAX] were 897 tonnes last year compared to 382 tonnes in 2008.”
“The power station uses about seven million tonnes of biomass or wood pellets a year, much of it imported, particularly from the US”
“Last year, Drax received subsidies of £558 million for its biomass operation, a figure that is expected to rise to around £800 million this year as the third biomass unit comes on stream.”
Cause of Death: Climate-Change Alarmism
I didn’t want to post this, but this article gets it right.
It’s not climate change that kills. It’s the zealotry of those who believe they are on a Gaia-given mission to save the planet that is capable of causing economic mayhem, poverty and even death.
Meanwhile, those who should be looking after the community and our security instead waste their time and our money on pointless superficialities that are designed, like cladding, to hide their deficiencies and to make them look good.
At this stage, it seems those who lost their lives in the Grenfell fire were the victims of not one but two forms of climate-change alarmism: the fire appears to have been started by a fridge that exploded thanks to its “environmentally friendly” coolant, and the flames spread so rapidly thanks to the recently installed “green energy” cladding, designed to beautify this concrete eyesore.
If true, the coroner may as well scribble “cause of death: climate-change alarmism” on his report. “Energy efficiency” considerations prioritised over safety considerations.
sunshine hours 