The Cumbria Coal Mine and 180 Climate 'Science'
By Radical Media's new columnist, physicist, engineer and climate realist Brian Catt
The Cumbria Coal Mine and 180 Climate ‘Science’
By Radical Media's new columnist, physicist, engineer and climate realist Brian Catt
I would like to address the overtly delusional outcry by unknowing activists and ignorant media commentators regarding the Cumbria Coal mine. This is to emphasise the basic and general points made in my free interview for episode 21 of Maajid Nawaz’s Radical Show and elsewhere, as regards the irrational and zealous denial of natural reality by both climate activists and many politicians.
The people who promote these beliefs exhibit an almost total and deliberate avoidance of the facts and provable science. They make up totally false and unsupportable claims that anyone competent can quickly understand as false and wholly fabricated. But few do, especially the corporatist media.
180 Science - the opposite of an activist’s claim is usually true
Many, if not most, of the practical measurable assertions of activists should be immediately rejected as laughable ignorance in any developed post enlightenment society. Only the observation of reality can confirm which scientific claims are real. Models created from the guesses and presumptions of modellers, who do not understand the natural processes involved, are not real. Yet such models are presented as proven science by corporatist media.
My criticism applies equally to the case of climate change - as a mostly man made effect, Covid models used to coerce entire nations into submission, and the specifics of Cumbrian coal. Essential core foundations are denied by the climate change narrative, in what Alex Epstein calls ‘180 science’. The exact opposite is usually true.
Climate modellers have more in common with oracles, astrologers and religious cults than the hard won laws of deterministic science. These laws are proven by stringent testing and repeated and independent observations of reality under controlled conditions.
Cumbrian Coal
First let's deal with a fundamental generic reality of a developed society as regards extraction. All developed economies depend for their survival on the energy intensive extraction and refinement of many minerals from rocks, by mining and processing large quantities of rock. All our metals come this way.
No mining, no metals, no civilisation. Hunter-gathering beckons.
Given that we require mines for our civilisation, why is it better to encourage mining in usually less developed countries with less respect for the environment or the people who do the work, during and after extraction? This would then involve transportation here, at additional cost and energy use. Such a position is overtly irrational.
It is also a fiscally regressive argument, as imports must increase our balance of payments deficit while delivering no value to our economy, and create more net "emissions" - if that was in fact important.
So the basic rationale for objecting to sovereign extraction of our mineral resources makes no sense by any measure of reality, unless we are unfortunate enough to have no minerals to mine, or we have limited quantities and world markets offer plentiful supplies more cheaply. However few democratically elected politicians have the wherewithal to make such a decision, though America has as regards its own rare earth extraction.
Making Steel
The simple technical facts, easy to ascertain, are that the metallurgical (met) coal that will be extracted is not primarily for heat, or other energy generation, it is a relatively scarce and special coal that is essential to the current process of making high grade steel, used in many demanding applications. This particularly clean coal is coked before it is added to the iron ore, that is then converted to steel in a furnace. The coked coal is an essential part of that chemical process, oxidising impurities while adding pure carbon to the steel.
Suggesting hydrogen or other ways to heat the steel than met coal means you don't understand how met coal takes part in the steel making process, and are unqualified to make any meaningful assessment.
Facts of observation are of no interest to zealots. Facts are simply denied or "adjusted", such as actual records of natural change in nature, until the adjusted data appear to prove the intended deceit. But the facts here are well described in the image below.
So the coal extracted in Cumbria has nothing to do with generating energy in the sense of steam and electricity. This coal is too scarce, hence expensive, to be used for that. But our steel has to come from somewhere. Extracting such coal in the UK is obviously the most environmentally friendly, with the lowest emissions and lowest energy use per tonne.
On Hydrogen
Finally, the "new technology" gambit is a typical diversion, presumptively added to such debates to distract from the core deceits of the false claims about a contrived problem. The diversion is usually without technical merit on scrutiny. The idea that was suggested as regards an alternative regarding met coal was to use hydrogen instead.
Really? How?
The refinement process requires the coked met coal carbon in the mix to make the carbon steel. The clue is in the name. Unless there is a proven way to make high carbon, high purity steel without adding met coal? Perhaps I am mistaken, but I don't believe so, based on how the coal participates in the process, and that all changes to such carefully developed processes take a very long time to reach volume production at the quality required.
So the statements made that hydrogen can replace coked met coal make no chemical or energy sense. They may be misquoted, or the executive involved does not understand his own process, or is angling to harvest some regressive hydrogen generation subsidies to lower his costs at our expense, or was misquoted by a journalist.
Hydrogen is very expensive to separate from what it is combined with. That process uses as much energy as it later creates, so hydrogen delivers close to net zero value as a fuel. Hydrogen as a fuel is inherently expensive for this reason. It does not occur naturally. It is certainly not economic for basic heating applications, unless some excessive and pointless subsidies are on offer at taxpayers expense. This is what gets the attention of corrupt businessmen, who will take the levies enforced upon tax-payers knowing the idea to be regressive, but preferring easy money for them and their cynical investors, by bad law.
Pure hydrogen would have to be separated on site, or liquefied for transport and stored, with more energy wasted. Which energy source will separate the hydrogen from whatever it is currently attached to? Expensive wind farms when the wind blows, for example? Simply not what a steel foundry can be compromised by, it needs serious energy to meet demand, on demand, 24/7. The only real alternative to fossil energy, which includes electricity generated using mainly gas, is electricity generated using nuclear energy.
On Nuclear
Modern infrastructure, machines, weapons, vehicles, all need high-grade carbon steel, which must be made somewhere. Concrete and steel make our core infrastructure and buildings possible. They use a lot of energy and can't be wished away by delusional beliefs without destroying the core structure of our developed economy.
Perhaps most important, the steel from this coal will forge the most important structures in our nuclear transition: pressurised water containers of the nuclear fission cores for next generation nuclear power stations. 180 degree science strikes again. Why would they want to compromise this most effective and cheapest transition to low carbon energy production?
Of course, destruction of our developed economy is part of their plan, economic reversal in the West is the goal of Agenda 21, that activists promote, and the Western nations unknowing, populist, arts graduate politicians undertook to follow at Rio on 1992.
It is overtly clear, in this and many other examples, that following UN policy in energy use, created in the name of climate change, is a wholly regressive exercise in futility, as the change is not a problem and the snake oil subsidy fuelled remedies cannot deliver.
Climate Change
In particular, we know these claims were knowingly made without merit as regards human contribution to the observed climate change. Climate change was, and is, small. It is mostly natural and not what their pseudo science models claimed it would be. Their models have been proven wrong by 30 years of observations by the best satellite instrumentation, the most pervasive and consistent atmospheric temperature records that humanity has ever had, so far.
Climate action is thus not grounded in deliverable, established science, it is a fantasy, created in a computer model, programmed by a quasi religious and political cult, with no proven nor provable basis in the hard science and data of energy and engineering it is designed to control, for political ends, not climate or economic.
The stated goal is to end the access of the mass of people in developed countries to the prosperity they enjoy from using cheap plentiful energy - in transport, heating and manufacturing. Hence return them to manual labour, travel with no vehicles, reversing the modern developed life style and freedoms such technologies make possible for the masses, excepting the elites making the laws.
The method is to tax or ban the most efficient hence cost effective energy use that can deliver whatever function is required best by law. Instead, less useful and cost effective ‘solutions’ are forced on people as if they were now the best there is. They are not. They are regressive on every practical measure of cost and benefit.
The measured facts of the natural world do not support the climate catastrophes claimed by hysterical politicians. It simply is not happening, per their own scientists. After 30 years of satellite observations there is no evidence for more than a possible but small effect on natural cyclic change, which remains well within the natural range, rate and period of the now very well observed past.
We know this very well from the new science of proxy data measurement that allows us to go back well beyond direct readings. We know what is normal, for millions of years into the past, and hence that unnatural warming has not happened, and is still not happening.
Temperatures now are still below the levels they reached during the very similar 1998 and 2016 El Niños, after 24 years of insignificant variability within the natural range of variability of planetary climate of the Millennia. Still not close to the Holocene optimum warming of 3,000 yrs ago, cooling since.
The most recent warming has now slowed to nearly a halt since 1998. Nothing more than historically natural climate variability has been observed in the record, since direct records began, and were compared to the proxy records of change in geological time.
There is literally nothing to see here.
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