Oldgateboatdriver
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G2G, don't you know that snow, like cereal, is sold by weight - not by volume. [
In my younger days, there was a girl at a place called Sassy's....recceguy said:.... 'eight gigatons ...' Now I'm sitting here wondering what that would look like.
Journeyman said:In my younger days, there was a girl at a place called Sassy's....
/inappropriate :bowdown:
Journeyman said:How did I know that the 'older guys'.... probably with their own memories of Sassy's.... would likely 'weigh' in. ;D
:tempertantrum: :tantrum: anic:GAP said:Contrary to the self image......you are one too.....
This collective act of make-believe is devastating our environment and our budgets
Christopher Booker 28 JANUARY 2017 • 3:44PM
The oddest thing about the political crisis gripping Northern Ireland was what triggered it. In 2012, under an EU ruling that burning wood was “carbon neutral”, the Northern Irish government, led by Arlene Foster and Martin McGuinness, adopted a “green” scheme introduced by the UK the previous year, the Renewable Heat Incentive (RHI), offering lavish subsidies to businesses to use wood chips to heat their premises.
RHI was launched in Belfast without any control over how the money was spent. When businesses discovered that they could be paid £160 for every £100 they spent on wood, so many signed up, even using it to heat empty buildings, that, by 2020, it was estimated, the bill to UK taxpayers could have risen to £1 billion.
But this is only one of the countless unforeseen consequences of that obsession which has long held our politicians in its grip: the belief that, to “save the planet”, we must replace the fossil fuels on which our entire way of life rests with new sources of supposedly “carbon-free” renewable energy.
We are committed to spending almost unlimited sums on subsidising ways we can tap into “clean, green” energy. Yet scarcely a week goes by without one of these schemes being revealed to be making a mockery of the purpose for which they were set up.
Each new example is shocking enough. But when we put them all together we see just how far this relentless drive to “decarbonise” is based on a colossal act of collective make-believe. Here are some examples.
1. The “Renewable Heat” Fiasco
Northern Ireland is only the most publicised instance of the absurdities created by the Renewable Heat Incentive. When in 2014 the Government extended this scheme to domestic premises, many owners of large houses across Britain realised that the more they kept their boilers running, even in summer, the more profit from the taxpayer-funded subsidy they could make. Since 2013 our bill for all this has been soaring so fast that, within four years, according to the Office for Budget Responsibility, it will have totalled nearly £5 billion.
One consequence is that Britain is now burning more wood than at any time since the industrial revolution (hence inter alia last week’s first-ever ”Very High Pollution Alert” in London). Just as disturbing have been revelations of where much of the fuel to feed this subsidy bonanza comes from. Alarming pictures have shown the appalling damage being done to some of our most treasured ancient woodlands, even including a Cheshire estate owned by the National Trust.
2. The “Biomass” Farce
On a much grander scale is the sad story of Drax in Yorkshire: until recently the largest, cleanest and most modern coal-fired power station in Europe, supplying 8 per cent of Britain’s electricity. When in 2010 fossil-fuel power stations began to be squeezed by George Osborne’s “carbon tax”, intended to make them increasingly uneconomical, Drax decided to spend £700 million on converting its giant boilers to “biomass”, burning wood. For the three already converted, instead of being “carbon-taxed”, Drax now receives a whopping subsidy under the “renewable obligation” worth nearly £500 million a year.
But what has made this really shocking is that most of the 7.5 million tons of wood Drax uses each year is being shipped from the south-eastern states of America, where 4,600 square miles of forest are annually being felled, to be turned into wood pellets for burning 4,000 miles away in Yorkshire. Scientific studies have shown not just that much of this is virgin forest, uniquely rich in wildlife, but that, far from saving CO2, the whole process, including production and transporting of the pellets, has been estimated to result in emissions actually much higher than if Drax was still only burning coal.
3. The “waste into gas” threat
More controversy has lately been spiralling around another subsidy bonanza, again under the RHI and costing taxpayers £216 million a year. Developers have rushed to build nearly 100 giant “anaerobic digesters”: massive industrial plants in the countryside, designed to supply methane to the national gas grid made from food waste and crops such as maize, now specially grown on hundreds of thousands of acres formerly producing food to eat.
A particular concern for those living near these unsightly operations is not just their smell and the thousands of vehicle movements needed to bring in their fuel, but the growing list of pollution incidents from leaks of toxic ammonia, killing farm animals and wildlife. Investigations are currently underway into whether a spillage which killed more than 1,000 fish in one of Britain’s best-loved salmon and trout rivers, the Teifi, came from one such site.....
RADOPSIGOPACISSOP said:It's really funny reading through this giant loop of people caught in a false consensus effect.
16 of the hottest 17 years on record have occurred since 2001, average ocean temps are rising (0.17C since 1969 on average), arctic ice is declining (and I know people will be quick to cherry pick a recent stat showing an up tick in arctic ice in certain, however the trend analysis needs to be looked at, and it's been an average of 2.5% decline per decade for sea ice area. And news stats show the decline is picking up again, with 287 gigaton loss per year in GL, and a 125 gigaton loss in Antarctica ) and CO2 levels are nearly 40% higher than they were in 1950, and nearly 33% higher than the highest historical prior to the industrial revolution).
But, fine, you guys have created here a self licking ice cream cone where you can all reassure and cross support a opinion you feel more comfortable with and keep searching for cherry picked data points taken out of context to confirm the opinion you've already established.
RADOPSIGOPACISSOP said:It's really funny reading through this giant loop of people caught in a false consensus effect.
RADOPSIGOPACISSOP said:16 of the hottest 17 years on record have occurred since 2001
RADOPSIGOPACISSOP said:I know people will be quick to cherry pick
RADOPSIGOPACISSOP said:a recent stat showing an up tick in arctic ice in certain, however the trend analysis needs to be looked at, and it's been an average of 2.5% decline per decade for sea ice area. And news stats show the decline is picking up again, with 287 gigaton loss per year in GL, and a 125 gigaton loss in Antarctica )
RADOPSIGOPACISSOP said:and CO2 levels are nearly 40% higher than they were in 1950, and nearly 33% higher than the highest historical prior to the industrial revolution).
RADOPSIGOPACISSOP said:But, fine, you guys have created here a self licking ice cream cone where you can all reassure and cross support a opinion you feel more comfortable with and keep searching for cherry picked data points taken out of context to confirm the opinion you've already established.