Monday 17 January 2011

Scots wind turbine factory goes bust. Wind turbines silent as UK wind declines

   A Scottish wind turbine factory Skykon  in Campbeltown has gone into administration with the loss of over 100 jobs. Skykon is a Danish company making turbines. Looking at the UK overall, wind speeds have rapidly declined in the UK in 2010.  In fact 2010 was the least windy year since 1824 in the UK. As reported in the Sunday Telegraph ( 16 January )  Moodys the international credit rating agency has warned that low wind speeds are becoming a major issue with potential investors in wind technology. It is also reported in the Sunday Telegraph report that 2010 was the least windy year in Britain on record , the data used coming from Ofgem and the National Grid.  Wind speeds in northern Europe are controlled by the NAO(North Atlantic Oscillation).  The NAO has reached its lowest level since records began.   The Sunday Telegraph reports that Todd Crawford of Weather Services International a consultancy operated by the US Weather channel has confirmed that the NAO is at its lowest point on record.   Where does all this leave Mr Huhne the UK climate secretary who has just recently announced a £60 million subsidy from tax payers for the Thanet wind farm?  This at a time when electricity bills are escalating ,
university tuition fees have tripled and cuts in public services in the UK are increasing. If this wind programme in the UK is continued then large numbers of coal, gas and oil fired electricity plants will have to be built as back up otherwise there will be no electricity in Britain!   Germany has 20 000 wind turbines yet not one coal fired electricity plant has been de-commissoned as a result. The only people who are gaining out of this are the wind companies themselves.

Wednesday 5 January 2011

New climate paper predicts that Global Warming by 2100 will be at most one eighth of that predicted by the IPCC .

  On Recovery from the Little Ice Age is the title of a new climate paper by Dr Syun-Ichi Akasofu of the International Arctic Research Centre at the University of Alaska Fairbanks in which the author predicts that multi decadal oscillations superimposed on the natural recovery from the Little Ice Age(which ended about 1850) will mean that by 2100 the temperature will be around 0.5C+/-0.2C higher than today.  This compares with the IPCC prediction of a temperature of 4.0C+/-0.2C a factor of eight higher than that predicted by Dr Akasofu.  Published in Natural Science December 2010 vol2,no11 (1211-1224), significantly he says that as much as 83 percent of the recovery from the LIA recorded in the last century is due to natural sources. While there is a linear temperature trend from 1880 to 2000 the peaks in 1940 and again in 2000 are due to multidecadal oscillations temporarily halting the recovery. In 1940 a cooling developed which lasted until 1977 when the earth experienced the great climate shift as the oscillations reversed into a warming mode which now into the 21st century has reversed again to a cooling mode into a possible mini ice age.