Scottish summers not doing anything they haven’t done for 800 years already

Gotta love a long unbroken proxy.

Scientists looked at 44 pines sites across the Scottish Highlands and used their tree rings to create a continuous temperature series for the last 810 years. Showing admirable restraint, they did not paste on adjusted thermometer records to create a hockey stick effect. Instead we can see that Scottish summers were just as warm in the 1300s, the 1280s and around 1500 as well.

The rate of warming is not unprecedented. The temperature is not unusual. But thermometers don’t tell the same story as the tree rings in the last 50 years. They both can’t be right. Either the tree rings are always unreliable thermometers or the thermometers are placed near ice cream trucks and adjusted up-the-kazoo?

Thanks to CO2Science:

Rydval et al. extended “the previously published Scottish dendroclimatic record (Hughes et al., 1984) by nearly 500 years,” in order to create an 810-year-long proxy over the period AD 1200-2010. The reconstruction was derived from a network of 44 Scots pine (Pinus Sylvestris) sites across the Scottish Highlands from both living and subfossil samples that correlated well with summer (July-August) temperatures.

In placing the most recent warming of the instrumental […]

August 27th, 2018 | Tags: , , | Category: Global Warming, UK | Print This Post Print This Post | |

UK Government hides its own graphic comparing Nuclear to Wind and solar

Is this a 2013 Streisand-Effect finalist?

The UK has decided to build its first new nuclear power plant in 20 years. The UK Department of Energy & Climate Change posted this graphic below in a News Story probably to help justify why it really did make sense to go nuclear rather than renewable. The Renewable Energy Association called it “unhelpful”, and lo, it disappeared from gov.uk.

Credit goes to Emily Gosden’s Tweet, and Will Heaven‘s Blog. Hat tip to Colin.

 

(Click to enlarge to see the fine print)

The fine print (edited out in the small copy here) says that Hickley Point C “is estimated to be equal to around 7% of UK electricity consumption in 2025 and enough to power nearly 6 million homes.” About onshore wind, the fine print reads: “The footprint will depend on the location and turbine technology deployed. DECC estimates the footprint could be between 160,000 and 490,000 acres“. That’s quite some error margin.

How many National Parks does one nuclear plant save then?

It’s a good representation of just how much of the Earths surface we have to give up if we want to live off renewables at the moment. So who […]

October 26th, 2013 | Tags: , , , , | Category: Global Warming, Nuclear Power, Renewable, UK, Wind Power | Print This Post Print This Post | |
 
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