When Will China Devalue?

Baltic Dry Index. 337 - 08        Brent Crude 32.60
LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000.  Revised due to QE programs.

The government announced last night it was lowering the exchange rate so the Pound is now worth $2.40, down from $2.80, a cut of just over 14%.

The decision came after weeks of increasingly feverish speculation and a day in which the Bank of England spent £200m trying to shore up the pound from its gold and dollar reserves.

BBC 19 November 1967

“It does not mean that the pound here in Britain, in your pocket or purse or in your bank, has been devalued."

Prime Minister Harold Wilson.

We open with China, where the central bank is attempting to stem capital flight ahead of a widely expected Yuan devaluation later in the year, (officially denied,) attempting to stimulate a rapidly slowing economy, and adding in cash ahead of the coming lunar New Year winter holiday festival. Too little to late comes to mind. Will China use the coming holiday to get the devaluation over?

A week is a long time in politics.

Prime Minister Harold Wilson

China’s central bank makes massive cash infusion

Published: Jan 27, 2016 10:37 p.m. ET

590-billion yuan injection is most in 3 years, intended to improve liquidity

SHANGHAI — China’s central bank is putting the largest amount of cash into the financial system in nearly three years, using a weekly market operation to pre-empt a holiday-induced funding squeeze and offset rapid capital outflows.

The People’s Bank of China offered 340 billion yuan ($51.89 billion) of short-term loans, known as reverse repurchase agreements, to commercial banks in a routine money market operation Thursday.

The central bank provided 440 billion yuan via similar tools Tuesday, the first leg of its twice-a-week liquidity-management exercises.

Given the maturity of 190 billion yuan of previously issued loans, the PBOC’s net cash injection this week totals 590 billion yuan, the biggest of its kind since early February 2013, when it reached 662 billion yuan.

The move follows an aggressive pump-priming exercise by the PBOC last week, when the central bank offered more than 1.5 trillion yuan in gross short- and medium-term lending to banks.

The eye-popping liquidity injection is partly intended to satisfy typically surging demand for cash ahead of the Lunar New Year holiday that starts Feb. 7.

It also constitutes an effort to stem accelerating capital flight as investors become more nervous about the health of China’s economy, and as the country’s main stock market has lost nearly 23% since the start of this year.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/chinas-central-bank-makes-massive-cash-infusion-2016-01-27?dist=tcountdown

Elsewhere in Asia it was more of the same slowdown. Consumers all around the world seem to be tapped out, even before a negative wealth affect kicks in from the worst start to global stock markets since the 1930s.

Japan retail sales slip in December

Published: Jan 27, 2016 7:11 p.m. ET

TOKYO--Japanese retail sales fell 1.1% in December from a year earlier, reflecting the impact of lower fuel prices and showing some weakness in household demand in the world's third-largest economy.

It was the second consecutive monthly fall after a 1.1% decline in November, according to figures released Thursday by the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.

Other recent consumer spending data has painted a bleak picture. Overall household spending fell a 2.9% on year in November, according to data released last month.

The government said that retail sales were mostly flat but there was weakness in some sectors. Retail sales of fuel were down 16.3% on year. Car sales fell 2.1% on year.

On month, retail sales fell 0.2% after seasonal adjustment. Sales at large-scale retailers were flat on year, after adjustment for the change in the number of stores.

http://www.marketwatch.com/story/japan-retail-sales-slip-in-december-2016-01-27?dist=tcountdown

In America, despite the falling stock market, the Fed signalled the next rate hike could still come as soon as March. The Fed knows that stocks are still over priced and is opting to support stocks from lower values, it seems. I suspect much lower values given a continuing global commodity depression, a Chinese malinvestment bubble bursting, and a coming Yuan devaluation ahead. But I also doubt that the Fedster’s will get to hike their key interest rate in March.

Stocks fall as Fed acknowledges worry, but keeps rate hike on table

Published: Jan 27, 2016 4:21 p.m. ET

U.S. stocks fell Wednesday after the Federal Reserve left the door open to a March rate increase despite acknowledging that “economic growth slowed” since its last meeting in December.

“Inflation is expected to remain low in the near term,” the Fed said in new, more cautious language, that some saw as a suggestion the central bank won’t be quick to raise interest rates again. But others saw the Fed refusing to rule out a move as early as March after paying lip service to increased global market turmoil and reiterating that it saw downside pressure on inflation as unlikely to last.

Read the text of the Federal Reserve decision to leave interest rates unchanged.

“The makers of monetary policy were not as dovish as the markets would have liked to see, although the committee did include that they are monitoring global economic and financial developments, said Steven Ricchiuto, chief economist at Mizuho Securities, in emailed comments. “However they also maintained the notion that the things keeping inflation from returning to their 2% target are transitory.”

“The result is an equity market that has little to be optimistic over,” he said.
More
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/us-stocks-set-to-open-lower-as-investors-wait-for-fed-rate-call-2016-01-27?dist=tcountdown

Feldstein says Fed should let the market fall and keep hiking rates

Published: Jan 27, 2016 9:37 a.m. ET

WASHINGTON (MarketWatch) — Martin Feldstein, a prominent Harvard economist once on many people’s short-list to lead the Federal Reserve, has a simple message for the U.S. central bank: ignore the stock market.

In an interview with MarketWatch, Feldstein said stocks are overvalued. Any signal from the U.S. central bank that it may pause from its plans to continue raising interest rates would only create the impression that there is a “Fed put” on the market. A put is an option that protects an investor from losses.

In the interview, Feldstein, now 76 and the president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research, sees a risk of higher inflation going forward. He said growing talk of a recession in the U.S. is misguided.

MarketWatch: In a column in the Wall Street Journal in August, you said this about Fed policy: “It is time to escape the unprecedented monetary policy that for a while stimulated demand – but then distorted prices and brought about the current corrections.” Can you unpack that? What is going on?
More
http://www.marketwatch.com/story/feldstein-says-fed-should-let-the-market-fall-and-keep-hiking-rates-2016-01-27?dist=tcountdown

In dying, wealth destroying, EUSSR news, add Italy to Spain and Portugal on death watch.

Italy's Banking Woes Seen Dogging Renzi After Bad-Loan Deal

January 27, 2016 — 7:30 PM GMT

Italy’s banking woes are set to plague Prime Minister Matteo Renzi for months to come after a long-sought deal with the European Union on bad debts disappointed investors.

The agreement struck with the EU allowing banks to offload soured loans after buying a government guarantee won’t clean up the financial system and revitalize lending as fast as some in the markets had hoped. Banking shares dropped on the plan, which stops well short of the cleanups organized in Spain and Ireland following the financial crisis.

“The uncertainty in the Italian banking system will persist,” said Emanuele Vizzini, who manages 3.5 billion euros ($3.8 billion) as chief investment officer at Investitori Sgr in Milan. “The deal may help banks to offload part of their bad debt, but for sure doesn’t solve the problem, in particular for the weakest banks, which may need recapitalization.”

The ills of the banking sector dogging Renzi not only threaten his reputation for managing the euro-region’s third-biggest economy, they also jeopardize bank lending and a potential boost to a fledgling recovery after a record-long recession. A rout last week drove shares of Banca Monte dei Paschi di Siena SpA and Banco Popolare SC down more than 20 percent on concern over their bad loans and capital levels in the absence of a bad-bank agreement.

‘Less Dramatic’

After a five-hour session late into Tuesday night which capped months of talks, Finance Minister Pier Carlo Padoan and EU Competition Commissioner Margrethe Vestager reached a deal on the mechanism to help banks dispose of their troubled debt.

Banks will be able to bundle their bad loans into securities for sale, while purchasing a state guarantee for the least-risky portion to make the debt more appealing to investors, the Italian Treasury said Wednesday. Addressing lawmakers in Rome, Padoan said a government guarantee under the plan won’t have any impact on public debt or the deficit.

“The agreement is a lot less dramatic than some people were expecting,” said John Raymond, an analyst at CreditSights Ltd. in London. “It will no doubt facilitate securitizations over time, but it’s not a ‘big bang’ solution that puts the banks’ asset-quality problems behind them.”

The arrangement may induce banks to dispose of their higher-quality troubled loans, while keeping the lowest-quality bad debt, said Gianluca Ziglio, a strategist at Sunrise Brokers LLP in London. The sale is likely to force them to recognize losses because the loans will probably be sold at lower prices than the value recorded in banks’ accounts.

It will take time to get the program up and running, delaying the benefits to the banks and the economy. “It could take a year to get somewhere on bad loans, and various moving parts could make it go sour," said Wolfango Piccoli, co-president of Teneo Intelligence in London. 

More
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/italy-s-banking-woes-seen-dogging-renzi-after-bad-loan-deal

Finally.

Oil's Drop Makes It Cheaper to Fill Up in Houston Than Abu Dhabi

January 27, 2016 — 10:57 AM GMT

Drivers in the U.S. oil hub of Houston can fill their tanks for less than the cost in Abu Dhabi and Dubai for the first time since 2008 as falling crude prices push Middle East exporters to cut government fuel subsidies.

The price of the cheapest grade in the United Arab Emirates, of which Abu Dhabi is the capital, is 1.51 dirhams per liter ($1.55 a gallon) for January, according to the country’s Ministry of Energy. That compares with $1.32 a gallon for the lowest regular fuel in Houston, data compiled by GasBuddy.com show. Houston drivers haven’t paid less on average than Abu Dhabi pump prices since 2008, according to the data. Dubai is the second-largest emirate in the U.A.E. which has the same fuel prices nationwide.

Benchmark Brent crude prices have dropped 16 percent this year after declining in each of the past three years. That’s cutting pump prices for drivers across the U.S., while having the opposite effect in Persian Gulf countries, which supply about a fifth of the world’s oil. Saudi Arabia, the U.A.E., Qatar, Oman and Bahrain have reduced or eliminated fuel subsidies over the past six months.

The U.A.E. pumped 2.94 million barrels a day last month, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Texas produced 3.5 million barrels a day in October, according to the latest available data from the U.S. Energy Information Administration.

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/oil-s-drop-makes-it-cheaper-to-fill-up-in-houston-than-abu-dhabi

"As fewer and fewer people have confidence in paper as a store of value, the price of gold will continue to rise. The history of fiat money is little more than a register of monetary follies and inflations. Our present age merely affords another entry in this dismal register."

Hans F. Sennholz

At the Comex silver depositories Wednesday final figures were: Registered 36.13 Moz, Eligible 120.74 Moz, Total 156.87 Moz. 

Crooks and Scoundrels Corner

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

Today, “the Donald” takes on Brussels. If he doesn’t win POTUS perhaps he might like to head up the UK Independence Party (UKIP.)

Donald Trump Brands Brussels a ‘Hellhole,’ Alienating More of Europe

January 27, 2016 — 1:08 PM GMT

First he upset the French, then he angered the British, now Donald Trump is facing ridicule from the heart of the European Union after referring to Brussels as a “hellhole.”

The remark made during an interview with Fox News triggered a wave of ironic Twitter postings on Wednesday, with many Brussels residents using the #hellhole hashtag alongside beautiful views of the Belgian capital’s ancient streets and parks, or of its renowned cuisine and artisan beer.

“You go to Brussels. I was in Brussels a long time ago -- 20 years ago -- so beautiful, everything’s so beautiful. It’s like living in a hellhole right now,” Trump said in the interview. The Republican presidential candidate, who has pledged to build a wall along the U.S. border with Mexico to prevent illegal entry and demanded a ban on Muslims coming into the U.S., also bemoaned the lack of assimilation in European cities.

One Twitter user mocked the comments by appearing to doctor the Wikipedia entry for Dante’s “Inferno” so that it read that the Fourth Circle of Hell, after limbo, lust and gluttony, was in fact Brussels.

To be sure, Trump has form on slamming Europe’s immigration policies. In October, he criticized German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s open-door commitment on CBS’s “Face the Nation.”

“Frankly, look, Europe’s going to have to handle it,” he said. “But they’re going to have riots in Germany. What’s happening in Germany, I always thought Merkel was, like, this great leader. What she’s done in Germany is insane. It’s insane.”

Trump’s comments came after it emerged that several people connected with the terrorist attacks on Paris in November lived in the Belgian capital. Authorities placed Brussels on virtual lockdown for a few days later that month, closing schools, suspending the public-transport network and ordering bars to shut as police warned of an imminent attack.

More

http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-27/trump-hellhole-attack-on-belgium-elicits-patriotic-reaction

"Those entrapped by the herd instinct are drowned in the deluges of history. But there are always the few who observe, reason, and take precautions, and thus escape the flood. For these few gold has been the asset of last resort."

Antony C. Sutton

Solar  & Related Update.

With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this new section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21^st century onwards? DC? A quantum computer next?

Graphene ‘foam’ to unlock new applications in collaborative R&D venture

By Helen Knight 26th January 2016 11:57 am

Manchester and Abu Dhabi Universities are to collaborate on a graphene-containing 3D foam which could enhance the matertial’s properties in sensors, electrical components and other devices

The use of graphene in batteries, composites, micro-sensors and ion-exchange membranes will all be investigated as part of a new collaborative research program.

The program, which will bring together researchers at Manchester University and the Masdar Institute of Science and Technology in Abu Dhabi, will focus on three projects covering the use of graphene and two dimensional materials in a range of applications.

In one of the projects, researchers from both organisations will develop low-cost ink-jet printing techniques for building micro-sensors designed to operate in the challenging environments found in high temperature energy and military applications.

Meanwhile, a separate team will investigate the benefits of using graphene-based ion exchange membranes in water desalination.

Finally, researchers will attempt to develop low-density graphene nanocomposite foams for use in batteries and supercapacitors, and to stiffen composite materials.

The advantage of using a 2D material like graphene in battery electrodes, for example, is that it has a very high surface area, and yet is only one atom thick, according to Prof Brian Derby at Manchester University, who is a member of the research team.

“But in order for the material to be useful, the atom-thick layers have to be packaged in a 3D object,” he said.

So the researchers are attempting to build foams out of graphene, he said. “We’re trying to develop ways of packaging these materials so that they assemble in space, but hold their surface area as much as possible.”

The team also hopes to develop composites in which very fine flakes of graphene are dispersed within a polymer matrix. This should allow for the efficient transfer of stress from the polymer to the graphene flakes, creating a stronger, but still workable composite, said Derby.

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/graphene-foam-to-unlock-new-applications-in-collaborative-rd-venture/ 

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished December

DJIA: +18 Down. NASDAQ: +110 Down. SP500: +36 Down. 

Winners and Losers.

Baltic Dry Index. 345 - 09        Brent Crude 31.60

LIR Gold Target in 2019: $30,000.  Revised due to QE programs.

"We're going to win so much -- win after win after win -- that you're going to be begging me: 'Please, Mr. President, let us lose once or twice. We can't stand it any more.' And I'm going to say: 'No way. We're going to keep winning. We're never going to lose. We're never, ever going to lose."

Donald Trump. January 10 2016. Reno Speech.

Today reall life snakes and ladders. If “The Donald” makes it all the way to POTUS, global life looks likely to be different and interesting all at the same time. Telling all the rest of the world you’re all going to be losers, losers, losers, under my Presidency, is a novel, untried way, in international diplomacy. A least when Mitt Romney wrote off people in 2012, in his biggest election gaffe, it was only in writing off about 150 million poor Americans, some of whose votes it tyrned out he actually needed, rather than writing off over 6.5 billion rest of the worlder’s, some whose help POTUS Trump might one day need. As Romney’s unorthodox strategy went, it went over like a lead balloon with US voters. Hopefully a POTUS Trump will find a little more success with the rest of the world. 

“There are 47 percent of the people who will vote for the president no matter what. All right, there are 47 percent who are with him, who are dependent upon government, who believe that they are victims, who believe the government has a responsibility to care for them, who believe that they are entitled to health care, to food, to housing, to you name it. My job is not to worry about those people. I’ll never convince them they should take personal responsibility and care for their lives.'”

Mitt Romney 2012.

Hedge funds betting against China eye 'Soros moment'

Tue Jan 26, 2016 9:57am EST

A handful of mainly U.S.-based macro hedge funds have led bets against China's yuan since late last year and the coming weeks should tell how right they are in predicting a devaluation of between 20 and 50 percent.

Since at least last September, Texas-based Corriente Partners, which made hundreds of millions of dollars foreseeing Europe's debt crisis, has been accumulating tailored "low delta" options - essentially bets with long odds - that provide for an up to 50 percent fall in the yuan.

The firm reckons rush by domestic savers and businesses to withdraw money from China will prove too strong for authorities to resist and control, even with $3.3 trillion in FX reserves, the biggest ever accumulated.

London-based Omni Macro Fund has been betting against the yuan since the start of 2014. Several London-based traders said U.S. funds, including the $4.6 billion Moore Capital Macro Fund, have also swung behind the move.

Data from Citi, meanwhile, shows leveraged funds have taken money off the table since offshore rates hit 6.76 yuan per dollar three weeks ago.

Many players say that whether outflows resume in earnest after the Chinese New Year break in the second week of February should show whether funds are right to expect more dramatic declines.

That has prompted comparisons with the victories of George Soros-led funds over European governments in the early 1990s. Chinese state media on Tuesday warned Soros and other "vicious" speculators against betting on yuan falls.

"China has an opportunity now to allow a very sharp devaluation. The wise move would be to do it quickly," Corriente chief Mark Hart said on Real Vision TV this month.

"If they wait to see if things change, they will be doing it increasingly from a position of weakness. That's how you invite the speculators. Every month that they hemorrhage cash, people look at it and say, 'well now if they weren't able to defend the currency last month, now they're even weaker'."

---- Derivatives traders say large bets have been placed in the options market on the yuan reaching 8.0 per dollar and data shows a raft of strikes between 7.20 and 7.60. The big division is over pace and scale.

Corriente and Omni both say if China continues to resist, it may be forced this year into a large one-off devaluation as reserves dwindle.

That points to buying low delta, out of the money options, which pay out on moves towards the target price.

More

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-forex-hedgefunds-idUSKCN0V41VG

Blue skies over Beijing? Decaying suburbs bear cost as China cuts pollution

Tue Jan 26, 2016 6:52am EST

On the outskirts of Beijing, the disused factories of Chaomidian show the impact of China's drive to shut down thousands of small firms causing big pollution. Amid scrapheaps and idle machinery, the community has clean air these days - and no jobs.

After a three-year campaign, China's push to cut smog appears to be paying off, whatever the localised cost, just as economic growth weakens to its slowest pace in 25 years. Chinese cities saw an average 10 percent drop in key pollutants last year, according to Greenpeace.

While a World Health Organization report in 2014 found 13 of the world's 20 dirtiest cities were in India, a still smog-bound Beijing issued its first pollution "red alerts" last month. Soon after, the capital said it would shut down 2,500 more small firms this year, leaving communities like Chaomidian, in the southwest suburb of Fangshan, in the firing line.

Beijing doesn't issue comprehensive lists of the firms it has shut down to combat pollution, but Reuters research shows those already closed include Ding Kai Yuan Co among others in Chaomidian, home to about 2,000 people. The coal-burning brick works was shut in late 2014, 170 workers were laid off, and the manager left behind to watch over the ghost factory says she is still waiting for nearly half a million dollars in compensation.

"I'm 53 years old, I grew up in this village," said Han Fengge. "Right now, I don't have the ability to re-start such a big investment from scratch, so all I can do is wait," said Han.

The city has promised compensation to firms closed on pollution grounds. Nationwide, China has earmarked 17 trillion yuan ($2.6 trillion) for investment in overall environmental protection between 2016 and 2020, Xinhua, the state news agency, reported in December.

---- "No matter what measures Beijing takes inside its own city, it cannot effectively eliminate its own pollution, as a huge source of it comes from coal-fuel and industrial emissions outside of Beijing," said Ma Jun, director of the Institute of Public and Environmental Affairs.

Most of the companies that have been, and will be closed, are comparatively small, and metropolitan Beijing's economy as a whole won't be seriously squeezed. Yet small and medium-sized enterprises account for about 60 percent of China's GDP, leaving questions over how closures will affect future growth potential.

More

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-china-pollution-idUSKCN0V40GY

Finally, gold continues flowing from the west to the east. What does China know that we don’t?

China's gold imports via Hong Kong rebound in 2015

Tue Jan 26, 2016 4:21am EST

Jan 26 China's net gold imports via main conduit Hong Kong rebounded to nearly 862 tonnes in 2015, data showed on Tuesday, as weak prices lifted the appetite of the world's top consumer in December.

China's net gold imports rose to 861.7 tonnes last year from 813.1 tonnes in 2014, according to data emailed to Reuters by the Hong Kong Census and Statistics Department.

Net imports in December jumped to 129.266 tonnes from 79.003 tonnes in November, the data showed.

http://www.reuters.com/article/china-gold-imports-idUSP9N12N014

To NASCAR fans, mocking a group of fans wearing plastic ponchos, “I like those fancy raincoats you bought. Really sprung for the big bucks.” Also, trying to everyman it, Romney said, “I have some great friends who are Nascar team owners.”

At the Comex silver depositories Tuesday final figures were: Registered 36.12 Moz, Eligible 120.05 Moz, Total 156.18 Moz. 

Crooks and Scoundrels Corner

The bent, the seriously bent, and the totally doubled over.

Today, more news on the new age religion of man-made global warming.

The difference between stupidity and genius is that genius has its limits.

Albert Einstein

The Climate Snow Job

A blizzard! The hottest year ever! More signs that global warming and its extreme effects are beyond debate, right? Not even close.

By Patrick J. Michaels Jan. 24, 2016 2:45 p.m. ET

An East Coast blizzard howling, global temperatures peaking, the desert Southwest flooding, drought-stricken California drying up—surely there’s a common thread tying together this “extreme” weather. There is. But it has little to do with what recent headlines have been saying about the hottest year ever. It is called business as usual.

Surface temperatures are indeed increasing slightly: They’ve been going up, in fits and starts, for more than 150 years, or since a miserably cold and pestilential period known as the Little Ice Age. Before carbon dioxide from economic activity could have warmed us up, temperatures rose three-quarters of a degree Fahrenheit between 1910 and World War II. They then cooled down a bit, only to warm again from the mid-1970s to the late ’90s, about the same amount as earlier in the century.

Whether temperatures have warmed much since then depends on what you look at. Until last June, most scientists acknowledged that warming reached a peak in the late 1990s, and since then had plateaued in a “hiatus.” There are about 60 different explanations for this in the refereed literature.

That changed last summer, when the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) decided to overhaul its data, throwing out satellite-sensed sea-surface temperatures since the late 1970s and instead relying on, among other sources, readings taken from the cooling-water-intake tubes of oceangoing vessels. The scientific literature is replete with articles about the large measurement errors that accrue in this data owing to the fact that a ship’s infrastructure conducts heat, absorbs a tremendous amount of the sun’s energy, and vessels’ intake tubes are at different ocean depths. See, for instance, John J. Kennedy’s “A review of uncertainty in in situ measurements and data sets of sea surface temperature,” published Jan. 24, 2014, by the journal Reviews of Geophysics.

NOAA’s alteration of its measurement standard and other changes produced a result that could have been predicted: a marginally significant warming trend in the data over the past several years, erasing the temperature plateau that vexed climate alarmists have found difficult to explain. Yet the increase remains far below what had been expected.

It is nonetheless true that 2015 shows the highest average surface temperature in the 160-year global history since reliable records started being available, with or without the “hiatus.” But that is also not very surprising. Early in 2015, a massive El Niño broke out. These quasiperiodic reversals of Pacific trade winds and deep-ocean currents are well-documented but poorly understood. They suppress the normally massive upwelling of cold water off South America that spreads across the ocean (and is the reason that Lima may be the most pleasant equatorial city on the planet). The Pacific reversal releases massive amounts of heat, and therefore surface temperature spikes. El Niño years in a warm plateau usually set a global-temperature record. What happened this year also happened with the last big one, in 1998.

Global average surface temperature in 2015 popped up by a bit more than a quarter of a degree Fahrenheit compared with the previous year. In 1998 the temperature rose by slightly less than a quarter-degree from 1997.

When the Pacific circulation returns to its more customary mode, all that suppressed cold water will surge to the surface with a vengeance, and global temperatures will drop. Temperatures in 1999 were nearly three-tenths of a degree lower than in 1998, and a similar change should occur this time around, though it might not fit so neatly into a calendar year. Often the compensatory cooling, known as La Niña, is larger than the El Niño warming.

---- Instead of relying on debatable surface-temperature information, consider instead readings in the free 
atmosphere (technically, the lower troposphere) taken by two independent sensors: satellite sounders and weather balloons. As has been shown repeatedly by University of Alabama climate scientist John Christy, since late 1978 (when the satellite record begins), the rate of warming in the satellite-sensed data is barely a third of what it was supposed to have been, according to the large family of global climate models now in existence. Balloon data, averaged over the four extant data sets, shows the same.

It is therefore probably prudent to cut by 50% the modeled temperature forecasts for the rest of this century. Doing so would mean that the world—without any political effort at all—won’t warm by the dreaded 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit by 2100 that the United Nations regards as the climate apocalypse.

More

http://www.wsj.com/articles/the-climate-snow-job-1453664732

Only two things are infinite, the universe and human stupidity, and I'm not sure about the former.

Albert Einstein. 

Solar  & Related Update.

With events happening fast in the development of solar power and graphene, I’ve added this new section. Updates as they get reported. Is converting sunlight to usable cheap AC or DC energy mankind’s future from the 21^st century onwards? DC? A quantum computer next?

Japan Building World's Largest Floating Solar Power Plant

By John Boyd Posted 25 Jan 2016 | 19:00 GMT

Kyocera Corp. has come up with a smart way to build and deploy solar power plants without gobbling up precious agricultural land in space-challenged Japan: build the plants on freshwater dams and lakes.

The concept isn’t exactly new. Ciel et Terre, based in Lille, France, began pioneering the idea there in 2006. And in 2007, Far Niente, a Napa Valley wine producer, began operating a small floating solar-power generation system installed on a pond to cut energy costs and to avoid destroying valuable vine acreage.

Kyocera TCL Solar and joint-venture partner Century Tokyo Leasing Corp. (working together with Ciel et Terre) already have three sizable water-based installations in operation near the city of Kobe, in the island of Honshu’s Hyogo Prefecture. Now they’ve begun constructing what they claim is the world’s largest floating solar plant, in Chiba, near Tokyo.

The 13.7-megawatt power station, being built for Chiba Prefecture’s Public Enterprise Agency, is located on the Yamakura Dam reservoir, 75 kilometers east of the capital. It will consist of some 51,000 Kyocera solar modules covering an area of 180,000 square meters, and will generate an estimated 16,170 megawatt-hours annually. That is “enough electricity to power approximately 4,970 typical households,” says Kyocera. That capacity is sufficient to offset 8,170 tons of carbon dioxide emissions a year, the amount put into the atmosphere by consuming 19,000 barrels of oil.

Three substations will collect the generated current, which is to be integrated and fed into Tokyo Electric Power Company’s (TEPCO) 154-kilovolt grid lines.

The mounting platform is supplied by Ciel et Terre. The support modules making up the platform use no metal; recyclable, high-density polyethylene resistant to corrosion and the sun’s ultraviolet rays is the material of choice. In addition to helping conserve land space and requiring no excavation work, these floating installations, Ciel et Terre says, reduce water evaporation, slow the growth of algae, and do not impact water quality.

More

http://spectrum.ieee.org/energywise/energy/renewables/japan-building-worlds-largest-floating-solar-power-plant

Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.

Albert Einstein

The monthly Coppock Indicators finished December

DJIA: +18 Down. NASDAQ: +110 Down. SP500: +36 Down.