GWPF | 11 April 2016
Earth’s Internal Heat Driving Greenland’s Ice Melt, Scientists Discover
British taxpayers have been forced to subsidise the very Chinese steel companies that are threatening 40,000 UK jobs, critics say. It comes after revelations that the European Investment Bank has given so-called “soft loans” to China of £80million as part of a climate policy intended to lower emissions. The astonishing figures include a loan of £40million to one of the world’s worst “steel dumping” culprits, the Wuhan Iron & Steel Corporation. Furious critics last night pointed out the irony that the loan was concerned with reducing the cost of power generation while one of the complaints of Tata Group is the high cost of energy associated with its steel production operation in South Wales. –Marco Giannangeli, Sunday Express, 10 April 2016
I never cease to be amazed by the capacity of self-harm by European institutions, particularly when they become embroiled in climate policy. We are not allowed to employ non-commercial support to our own industry, yet the EU has been doing exactly that for China. –Peter Lilley MP, Former Trade and Industry Secretary, Sunday Express, 10 April 2016
1) Green Madness: EU Climate Finance Subsidises Chinese Steel Industry
Sunday Express, 10 April 2016
2) Climate Change Was The Inconvenient Truth That Finally Led To Tata Steel’s UK Pullout
Scroll India, 11 April 2016
3) More Settled Science: Earth’s Internal Heat Driving Greenland’s Ice Melt, Scientists Discover
Press Trust of India, 9 April 2016
4) Despite Massive El Nino, Current Decade Still Cooler Than 2001–2010 Decade
No Tricks Zone, 9 April 2016
5) Attack On Free Speech: CEI Subpoenaed Over Global Warming Skepticism
Watts Up With That, 8 April 2016
At the time the Tatas took over Corus, steel prices were on the rise. “It was a fantastic deal for Tata,” said Peter Brannen, metals editor at Platts, a London-based organisation that covers the steel industry. “The year 2007 was when the markets boomed. But then you had the crash [of 2008].” The same year, British lawmakers passed the Climate Change Act which resolved to reduce carbon emissions drastically. A so-called “green tax” was levied on energy intensive industries to fund renewable energy projects. “What started off as a minor inconvenience has become a major problem for the industries,” said Jeremy Nicholson, the director of energy intensive users group. “The government put in place annually escalating targets for electricity and signed the UK for a target by [the year] 2020 that was extraordinarily expensive.” –Omkar Khandekar, Scroll India, 11 April 2016
Greenland sits over an area of abnormally hot mantle material that drives a widespread melting beneath the ice sheet and rapid ice flow over a distance of several hundred kilometres, a new study has found. Greenland’s lithosphere has hot depths which originate in its distant geological past and cause the island’s ice to rapidly flow and melt from below. With this anomaly, researchers from GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) could explain observations from radar and ice core drilling data that indicate a widespread melting beneath the ice sheet and increased sliding at the base of the ice that drives the rapid ice flow over a distance of 750 kilometres from the summit area of the Greenland ice sheet to the North Atlantic Ocean. —Press Trust of India, 9 April 2016
Many readers are aware of a climate bet made with alarmists Rob Honeycutt and Mr. Know-it-all, Dana Nuccitelli. The skeptics bet the current decade would be cooler or the same as last decade – using the RSS and UAH satellite data, and not the made up surface stuff from NASA. Robin’s latest calculations show that the current decade is (still) slightly cooler than the last one comprising 2001 – 2010. –Pierre Gosselin, No Tricks Zone, 9 April 2016
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has just been subpoenaed, as part of Al Gore’s Climate Witch hunt. This is a move which so blatantly reeks of McCarthyite abuse of power, even some proponents of climate action are horrified at the attack on freedom which this subpoena represents. –Eric Worrall, Watts Up With That, 8 April 2016
1) Green Madness: EU Climate Finance Subsidises Chinese Steel Industry
Sunday Express, 10 April 2016
Marco Giannangeli
British taxpayers have been forced to subsidise the very Chinese steel companies that are threatening 40,000 UK jobs, critics say
It comes after revelations that the European Investment Bank has given so-called “soft loans” to China of £80million as part of a climate policy intended to lower emissions.
The astonishing figures include a loan of £40million to one of the world’s worst “steel dumping” culprits, the Wuhan Iron & Steel Corporation.
To add insult to injury Wuhun, the world’s eighth largest steel producer, boasts the Chinese state as its main shareholder. Wuhun is such a prolific steel dumper that it has now been especially targeted by the European Commission, which wants to slap it with 36.6 per cent tariffs.
Just five years ago, however, EU bankers decided to lend it €50million (£40million) to put towards a €207million (£167million) Euro Combined Cycle Plant.
The loan was paid out under the China Climate Change Framework Loan II. The money is supposed to persuade the steel giants to invest in lower emission technology.
Furious critics last night pointed out the irony that the loan was concerned with reducing the cost of power generation while one of the complaints of Tata Group is the high cost of energy associated with its steel production operation in South Wales.
Others asked whether Wuhan would have been in a position to dump steel so aggressively if their energy costs had been higher.
Another Chinese beneficiary of British tax pounds was the Shaogang Songshan plant in Guangdong which, in 2008, received €35million (£30million) in EIB funding in the interests of “improving energy efficiency”.
Former Environment Secretary John Redwood said last night: “This is another example of how British people do not want to see their money spent.
“The EU is supposed to be careful who it lends money to, and lending to a foreign government in order to create competition to British industry is not what we had in mind.”
Simon Boyd, director of Reid Steel and South-west chairman of Business for Britain, said: “We have been exporting British expertise to 140 countries around the world for almost a hundred years, so we know a thing or two about exports.
“This is insane. Already, thanks to our EU membership, we’ve lost control of our trade policy and lack any ability to support the competitiveness of our steel industry.
“Now we learn that the EU has been making loans to state-owned Chinese steel makers, who are then able to sell below cost back into the EU and our UK government has been powerless to intervene as it should have done due to the EU state-aid rules.
“We hand £350million a week to Brussels, that’s money we should spend on our priorities, not Chinese steel.”
Former Trade and Industry Secretary Peter Lilley added: “I never cease to be amazed by the capacity of self-harm by European institutions, particularly when they become embroiled in climate policy.
“We are not allowed to employ noncommercial support to our own industry, yet the EU has been doing exactly that for China.”
UKIP MEP for Rotherham and Scunthorpe Jane Collins said it was “disgraceful” that taxpayers money had been given to put British steelworkers out of employment.
2) Climate Change Was The Inconvenient Truth That Finally Led To Tata Steel’s UK Pullout
Scroll India, 11 April 2016
Omkar Khandekar
Green taxes went from being a minor inconvenience to a major problem – and China stepped in and reaped the benefits.
[…] With China being the largest steel producer and a global player, its impact on Tata’s market didn’t come as a surprise. However, the acknowledgement about energy prices reopened an old wound that the energy-intensive industries had been nursing for close to a decade.
Global warming
At the time the Tatas took over Corus, steel prices were on the rise. “It was a fantastic deal for Tata,” said Peter Brannen, metals editor at Platts, a London-based organisation that covers the steel industry. “The year 2007 was when the markets boomed. But then you had the crash [of 2008].”
The financial crisis of 2008 severely affected the fortunes of the Indian conglomerate. With many European countries going bankrupt, demand for steel nosedived.
The same year, British lawmakers passed the Climate Change Act which resolved to reduce carbon emissions drastically. One of the key provisions of the Act was paving way for renewable energy projects like windmills to take over electricity production. A so-called “green tax” was levied on energy intensive industries to fund such projects. It was mandatory for these industries to pay a certain amount for each unit of carbon emissions.
The United Kingdom was praised across the world for becoming the first country to put in place a legally binding act to counter the climate change, although an attempt to replicate the same at the Copenhagen Climate Summit in 2009 failed. At its home turf, however, it was facing resistance from industrialists who saw the act as a threat to their profits and in some cases, economic sustainability.
“What started off as a minor inconvenience has become a major problem for the industries,” said Jeremy Nicholson, the director of energy intensive users group. “The government put in place annually escalating targets for electricity and signed the UK for a target by [the year] 2020 that was extraordinarily expensive.”
According to World Steel Association, electricity accounts for between 20% and 40% of the manufacturing costs. EUIG suggests that the UK steelmakers pay £80-90/MWh (between Rs 7,500 to 8,500/MWh). About £34/MWh (an equivalent of Rs 3,200/MWh) is owing to the “green taxes”. To make matters worse, the UK doesn’t have a nationalised energy sector and its industries pay among the highest of costs for electricity compared to its European and Chinese counterparts.
3) More Settled Science: Earth’s Internal Heat Driving Greenland’s Ice Melt, Scientists Discover
Press Trust of India, 9 April 2016
Greenland sits over an area of abnormally hot mantle material that drives a widespread melting beneath the ice sheet and rapid ice flow over a distance of several hundred kilometres, a new study has found.
Conceptual view of the interplay between the mantle and the Greenland Ice Sheet across the plume track (graphics: A. Petrunin, GFZ).
Greenland’s lithosphere has hot depths which originate in its distant geological past and cause the island’s ice to rapidly flow and melt from below.
An anomaly zone crosses Greenland from west to east where present-day flow of heat from the Earth’s interior is elevated.
With this anomaly, researchers from GFZ German Research Centre for Geosciences (GFZ) could explain observations from radar and ice core drilling data that indicate a widespread melting beneath the ice sheet and increased sliding at the base of the ice that drives the rapid ice flow over a distance of 750 kilometres from the summit area of the Greenland ice sheet to the North Atlantic Ocean.
Present-day location of the Iceland plume and zones of the mantle plume-induced thinning of the lithosphere and active melting at the ice base (graphics: A. Petrunin, GFZ)
The North Atlantic Ocean is an area of active plate tectonics. Between 80 and 35 million years ago tectonic processes moved Greenland over an area of abnormally hot mantle material that still today is responsible for the volcanic activity of Iceland, researchers said.
The mantle material heated and thinned Greenland at depth producing a strong geothermal anomaly that spans a quarter of the land area of Greenland, they said.
![Predicted GF at 5[thinsp]km below the bedrock surface.](http://www.nature.com/ngeo/journal/vaop/ncurrent/carousel/ngeo2689-f1.jpg)
Predicted geothermal flux at 5 km below the bedrock surface; image @NatureGeosci
This ancient and long-lived source of heat has created a region where subglacial meltwater is abundant, lubricating the base of the ice and making it flow rapidly.
The study indicates that about a half of the ice in north-central Greenland is resting on a thawed bed and that the meltwater is routed to the ocean through a dense hydrological network beneath the ice.
For the first time, researchers have been able to prove strong coupling between processes deep in the Earth’s interior with the flow dynamics and subglacial hydrology of large ice sheets.
“The geothermal anomaly which resulted from the Icelandic mantle-plume tens of millions of years ago is an important motor for today’s hydrology under the ice sheet and for the high flow-rate of the ice,” said Irina Rogozhina from GHZ.
“This, in turn, broadly influences the dynamic behaviour of ice masses and must be included in studies of the future response to climate change,” said Rogozhina.
4) Despite Massive El Nino, Current Decade Still Cooler Than 2001–2010 Decade
No Tricks Zone, 9 April 2016
Pierre Gosselin
Will Upcoming La Nina Decide The ‘Decadal Global Climate Bet’?
Fellow climate blogger Robin Pittwood at the New Zealand-based Kiwi Thinker here brings us up-to-date on how the current 2011 – 2020 decade is doing temperature-wise.
Many readers are aware of a climate bet made with alarmists Rob Honeycutt and Mr. Know-it-all, Dana Nuccitelli. The skeptics bet the current decade would be cooler or the same as last decade – using the RSS and UAH satellite data, and not the made up surface stuff from NASA.
Robin’s latest calculations show that the current decade is (still) slightly cooler than the last one comprising 2001 – 2010.
Of course, as expected, the recent El Nino event closed the gap and will probably even push the current decade to be a bit warmer in the months ahead. The question that remains now is just how strong will the upcoming La Nina be? Will it be strong enough to send the global temperature downward over the next couple of years 2017 – 2019, similar to what we saw back in 2008?
Right now there are a number of indications that this is precisely what is going to happen.
5) Attack On Free Speech: CEI Subpoenaed Over Global Warming Skepticism
Watts Up With That, 8 April 2016
Eric Worrall
The Competitive Enterprise Institute has just been subpoenaed, as part of Al Gore’s Climate Witch hunt. This is a move which so blatantly reeks of McCarthyite abuse of power, even some proponents of climate action are horrified at the attack on freedom which this subpoena represents.
The following is the statement of the Competitive Enterprise Institute;
CEI Fights Subpoena to Silence Debate on Climate Change
The Competitive Enterprise Institute (CEI) today denounced a subpoena from Attorney General Claude E. Walker of the U.S. Virgin Islands that attempts to unearth a decade of the organization’s materials and work on climate change policy. This is the latest effort in an intimidation campaign to criminalize speech and research on the climate debate, led by New York Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and former Vice President Al Gore.
“CEI will vigorously fight to quash this subpoena. It is an affront to our First Amendment rights of free speech and association for Attorney General Walker to bring such intimidating demands against a nonprofit group,” said CEI General Counsel Sam Kazman. “If Walker and his allies succeed, the real victims will be all Americans, whose access to affordable energy will be hit by one costly regulation after another, while scientific and policy debates are wiped out one subpoena at a time.”
The subpoena requests a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information. It demands that CEI produce these materials from 20 years ago, from 1997-2007, by April 30, 2016.
On March 30, 2016, Attorney General Schneiderman, former Vice President Al Gore, and attorneys general from Massachusetts, Virginia, Connecticut, Maryland, Vermont, as well as Attorney General Walker, held a press conference in New York City to announce “an unprecedented coalition of top law enforcement officials committed to aggressively protecting and building upon the recent progress the United States has made in combating climate change.” Schneiderman said that the group, calling itself “AGs United for Clean Power,” will address climate change by threatening criminal investigations and charges against companies, policy organizations, scientists, and others who disagree with its members’ climate policy agenda.
CEI has long been a champion of sound climate change policy, and opposed previous attempts to use McCarthy-style tactics by officials aiming to limit discussions between nonprofit policy groups and the private sector regarding federal policies. CEI is being represented in this matter by attorneys Andrew M. Grossman and David B. Rivkin, Jr., who recently founded the Free Speech in Science Project to defend First Amendment rights against government abuses.
Source: https://cei.org/content/cei-fights-subpoena-silence-debate-climate-change
The text of the subpoena is here.
Here is a response from Bloomberg, which frequently takes a pro climate action position;
Subpoenaed Into Silence on Global Warming
The Competitive Enterprise Institute is getting subpoenaed by the attorney general of the U.S. Virgin Islands to cough up its communications regarding climate change. The scope of the subpoena is quite broad, covering the period from 1997 to 2007, and includes, according to CEI, “a decade’s worth of communications, emails, statements, drafts, and other documents regarding CEI’s work on climate change and energy policy, including private donor information.”
My first reaction to this news was “Um, wut?” CEI has long denied humans’ role in global warming, and I have fairly substantial disagreements with CEI on the issue. However, when last I checked, it was not a criminal matter to disagree with me. It’s a pity, I grant you, but there it is; the law’s the law.
