None of the catastrophic climate predictions have come to pass and Ed Miliband was left out in the cold at COP30, so why are we still aiming for Net Zero?
There is one person though that should be called out for his position.
That person is Mission Head Chris Stark.
He asked for and received information via LinkedIn; concerning a no "strings attached for the UK" offer for it to manufacture, install and export a developed / laboratory tested / US Patented solid-state electric power supply that could be manufactured in the UK for:
--- the individual UK home owner / electric bill payer;
--- the individual UK fossil-based fuel purchaser (as the power supply is small enough and powerful enough to power vehicles (200 kW) - and;
--- be manufactured in the UK - for export.
But upon receiving the info - he disappeared and would not communicate - so he either knew that this new power supply, being small, lightweight, and powerful and "standalone" - it would totally upset the government's apple cart as far as the status quo is concerned:
--- because there is no Law on the books in the UK that states that a private premises owner has to use the electricity supplied by a "connected" power "seller" - they have the right to choose what power source they are going to use to power their premises.
It was suggested that it be made available through GB Energy for $0.10 per hour, or $72 a month per unit for up to 480 VDC or VAC / up to 600 Amps.
You do the math.
Also -- the power supply is the only new thing that is available for export.
What's the Labour Government going to try and sell the World -- more of the same?
All the facts and figures in the world will change nothing. All the logical arguments will have no impact. Pointing out the illogical and outright false nature of every single claim made by the Climate Change Clergy falls on deaf ears. There is only one thing that will bring this nonsense to a stop, and that is to choke off the money supply.
As long as governments continue to subsidize anything to do with 'climate' or 'carbon' or 'renewables', nothing will change. Only when the economic circumstances change, only when it becomes unprofitable for the businesses and the politicians will this stop and go away.
But you can be sure that the grifters will move on to invent the next big scam they can use to milk the government teat.
The CWG report is considered by many to be more of a political statement in support of President's Trump rollback of US environmental protection rather than a neutral evaluation to the current situation. It was not subject to credible peer reviews.
To use it as a main plank of your argument in your article weakens your position rather than reinforce it.
My business experience has been in industries where customers have a choice of going elsewhere so I take customer feedback quite seriously. It was sometimes painful but it often pointed matters we could improve upon or gives us something to reflect on.
I read your paper and I gave you opinion on how I felt after reading the paper.
The UK electorate has been disenfranchised for decades by the UK Uniparty’s ideological support for the never-validated UN IPCC hypothesis of alleged man-made CO2 global warming.
The comments under David’s posts are starting to attract climate true believers and climate propagandists. They are usually given short shrift by counter comments yet they often show no sign of any “Road to Damascus” epiphany. This is a problem because of the influence they may have elsewhere, e.g. when commenting in the Guardian or participating in Question Time!
This substack is approaching 5,000 followers. While sanity may prevail in this corner of the internet, Ofgem has authorised spending tens of billions of our future electricity bills on more grid for more more bottlenecks. Ofgem, voice of the consumer, calls suppliers 'customers'. It is clear whose interests they serve and it is not the people and businesses who consume electricity.
The 2023 Energy Act turned OFGEM into the Net Zero Delivery Body. It lost its remit to act in consumer interests back in 2010 under Miliband's Energy Act, when green interests were defined as consumer interests.
This feels like one of the weaker posts on this substack. Yes of course there have been some unduly pessimistic projections from the science community as well as some unduly optimistic ones, but pointing these out does not really address the wider warming issue, which is all too worrying from a 50 year perspective. As we know the really hard challenge is what to do about it, particularly when countries like the UK which are incurring costs in relation to decarbonisation are not getting support from the US and others. I think the debate should be about how the climate change act is interpreted / amended to reflect what others - the US, China, Europe, probably India - are doing
From a "50 year perspective"? That amounts to no perspective or context, which seems to be uniformly ignored by net zero enthusiasts. The likes of Milliband, the Met Office, the weather attribution 'specialists ' ( who fail to provide perspective), the global organisations, billionaires with Messiah complexes, have such a purposefully narrow and time-shortened analysis to support the rapid destruction of fossil fuels, to meet UN's SDGs. The 'Climate Change Act 2008' is touted chicanery, nothing more.
The world believed the science behind the link between CFCs and the ozone hole and agreed to ban them. The science turned out to be more complicated in reality.
COP30 showed that CAGW lacks credibility because no agreement was reached to treat it seriously. You should investigate why it lacks credibility, and either agree with those who find it not credible (while conceding that some climate change will occur), or who consider that adaptation is a superior strategy yo attempted terraforming in light of more realistic projections. If you still disagree, your job becomes convincing those who disagreed at COP30, or who were absent altogether.
You should start by recognising that the UK pursuing net zero is futile, and has not produced the leadership to convince the wider world.
Failing to achieve much progress in tackling climate change doesn't really have any implications for whether global warming is taking place or not.
It is quite correct to say that the lack of a plan and the US absence is further evidence of how difficult it is to solve it, and should arguably lead to a re-evaluation of whether the UK's current strategy in this area is the right one.
There is no real dispute over whether the world has warmed since 1750, or that mutatis mutandis (including assuming fairly constant solar output), it is likely to continue to do so for a while. There is controversy over the manipulation of the historic temperature record and the impact of UHI and poor instrument siting that has done nothing to enhance the credibility of climate science, and considerable controversy over the propaganda stance where RCP 8.5 is the default basis for alarmists, and where they ignore sound research that suggests that their crude measure of ECS is exaggerated. The poor track record of projections failing the reality test has not added to credibility, even if it provides a justification for more research money to try to do better.
China, India, most developing countries and now the USA are doing nothing to “tackle climate change” bar minor lip service, to use the Uniparty politician stock phrase.
I also had a look at your post Douglas. While some of it I agree with, I found the central contention that observed increases in atmospheric CO2 would not drive climate change unconvincing. I followed up 2 of your 3 sources for this, and one was 1970's analysis which the author himself withdrew later in the 1970's because of errors he had noted in his work, and the other was a more recent Polish piece which had also been withdrawn because of lack of rigour, peer review etc. This doesnt a very strong basis for the argument advanced.
I am responding to your suggestion earlier in the chat that I look at your post on debunking the climate change hoax. I am always keen to understand the range of points of view on a subject, and your post seemed worth reading. Apologies if it was not clear what I was referring. The specific reference was to 2 of the 3 sources that your post cited in relation to 'the establishment's climate modelling failures'; these were not sources I had previously looked at, and so I thought it worth following them up.
If we look on the bright side, China building out its electricity network with a mix of coal and renewables is a whole lot better in relation to carbon emissions than if it was using primarily coal given the massive scale of its production. It seems quite likely that its emissions will come down over the next decade - but we dont know. The US has been extremely inconsistent, and isn't even paying any kind of lip service at present. Whatvever both of these (and the other big emitters do will have a very big impact for better or for worse.
Surely a big problem is that the horse has already bolted, in the context of the UK's net zero activities.
I entirely take the point that renewables are not cheap and will become even more expensive. But there are also contracts that would be difficult to break and an argument that you have a sunk cost of building net zero machines, so you might as well use them. Moreover Milibands intentions are clear, use the next 3 years to commission so much more that the position becomes near on irreversible.I also expect the wretched government to load ever more of the renewables costs onto taxation, to hide the mess and effectively introduce yet more differential pricing.
Sure, we can eventually seek to hold the people who have made these stupid decisions accountable but how likely is that to happen? Any evidence that our ruling class allow themselves to be accountable for anything? I foresee the UK having near enough the world's highest electricity prices for as long as I live and much as I would like to see it, I don't expect to see Miliband in prison, where he belongs. And it wouldn't change the situation anyway.
We have only just got started on Net Zero spending. John Constable at REF costed the spend to date at around £220bn. That's just 2% of a bill expected to reach £10 trillion. The sooner we cancel it, the less that has to be written off.
I don't think Bjorn Lomborg has done enough work on climate science to claim that warming is a problem. I don’t claim authority but I have strong science qualifications, including research and publication in peer-reviewed literature (not in climate science), hands-on experience with models, no financial interests and the benefit of some years in the literature to co-author a book on climate and energy. https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=Rafe+Champion&i=stripbooks&crid=GZ66NWUYZ193&sprefix=rafe+champion%2Cstripbooks%2C262&ref=nb_sb_noss
We find that warming since the Little Ice Age has been unequivocally beneficial. We are still some way short of the temperature during the Roman and medieval warm periods, when life on earth for living things was the best in recorded history. That means we can enjoy a few more degrees of warming!
As for the danger of carbon dioxide, during the Little Ice Age there was barely enough to keep the plants alive. In recent times, there has been a wonderful greening, and we know that the plants will flourish and also use water more efficiently with three or four times as much CO2 in the air. That is a double benefit!
Even if you insist on worrying about warming, don’t worry about more CO2. It was only ever a minor driver of warming and due to the diminishing warming from increasing CO2, the effect played out by the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Whilst Bjorn Lomborg agrees that global warming is real and man-made and will have a serious impact, he points out that climate mitigation is ruinously expensive and therefore ineffective, whilst adaptation is not only far cheaper, mankind is familiar with most of the methods it employs.
Moreover we only spend on adaptations we actually need, not wasting money on precautionary measures that turn out to have no value, leaving us without the resource to adapt.
Other than the 'serious impact' I do as well. However, Lomberg contradicts even that contention by insisting that we should wait to respond to specific climate events rather than anticipate them. Which is precisely what mankind has done for tens of thousands of years.
Nor do I believe Matt Ridley is convinced man made climate change is a threat either. He acknowledges it merely so he can't be accused of being a 'denier', which he is anyway.
I believe Ridley once described himself as a “lukewarmer”, unspokenly for the reason you state. The GWPF/NZW crowd are the same. It seems to me that after decades of blatant climate lies and failed predictions, coupled with the other outrageous political and MSM overreaches of recent years, it’s well past the time of being scared of being called a “climate denier”. People need to take a leaf out of President Trump’s book and call it out bluntly for what it is, “a hoax”.
The problem you have here is that you still are going along with the narrative that a scientific conjecture is real world fact just because there are hundreds if not thousands of people working on it.
But science applied to the real world needs to go through verification and audit. Source data, test runs, predictions, everything gets a thorough and detailed look over.
And sadly Climate Science fails even a basic check.
The law itself is fraudulent because it does not tie the truth of real world verification to the scientific proposal. So if more assumptions are made and climate researchers get more hysterical we have to follow them?
The Water Act has reams of references to measurement uncertainties and ISO standards. The climate change act? Crickets.
I tried to raise a petition that all science used in policy was verified and audited to engineering industry standards and it was rejected because that was too vague.
This is the calibre of morons we have.
The act should be scrapped and people should be fined particularly the Met Office.
Due to the combination of wind droughts and the lack of grid-scale storage, there will never be a transition to wind and solar because these “unreliables” are not fit for purpose to power the grid.
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply, and nor did the governments which subsidised and mandated them. Possibly the worst public policy blunder on the record.
How did they miss the wind droughts in the North Sea that have been recorded for six decades on the oil and gas platforms?
And in 2012, in Australia, Anton Lang published a wind drought warning in peer-reviewed literature.
When are responsible journalists going to take the story to the public and generate a demand for a major inquiry into the incompetence, negligence or worse of the guilty parties?
In their insistence on only looking at broad averages they miss not only Dunkelflaute but also periods of unusable massive excess that cannot be economically stored and are thus wasted. Curtailment this year already exceeds 9TWh. It will now expand quadratically with increasing capacity.
Thanks. I can’t quite get my head around that graph, however it was derived! It’s easy to see that adding more and more intermittent renewables will at times result in over-supply, but won’t the hugely-expensive (tens of £billions) grid expansion mitigate against that? If not, what’s the point of it?
The derivation is simple: I took actual hourly demand over a year, and subtracted 6GW of baseload supply. The rest to be met from hourly wind (scaled by installed capacity per X axis), or CCGT when there is insufficient wind. Where wind +6GW> demand, there is a surplus. Adding up all the surpluses over the year at each level of wind capacity gives the red curve.
If there is no market for the output then building more grid doesn't help. You can get a good idea of that from this chart, where you can regard adding grid capacity as the same as adding electrolysis capacity fed from it.
The triangular shape of the surplus duration curves (what percentage of the time is the surplus greater than Y GW) for larger capacities shows the quadratic (increase in area) increase in surplus as well. Average utilisation is poor, making investment hard to justify for surpluses that have close to zero or even negative value.
It arises because increased capacity results in increases in curtailment in hours of low demand and high output which are already subject to curtailment, and the addition of more hours where supply exceeds demand as capacity increases.
I also understand that global agriculture has increased every year since records began. Although not simply down to increased atmospheric CO2, mankind is capable of feeding 9 billion people on the planet, a number we are not expected to reach until the next century (UN).
Thanks to improvements in farming methods, mechanisation, and genetic science, production per hectare has improved significantly, which frees up land for wildlife and plants. (Ridley)
"Perhaps the only wise things about the Climate Change Act were the clauses that gave a mechanism for a graceful exit. If The Science™ changes, we can change the targets."
Unfortunately David, this assumes that the authors of CCA2008 were acting in good faith. They were not. The Settled Science was set in stone long before that and the only amendments to the alarmist narrative which were to be allowed were variations on the theme: "It's worse than we thought". How do I know this? Because, almost without exception, climate change 'research' over the years has come up with endless 'scientific' justifications for communicating to policy makers that "it's worse than we thought" therefore we need to ratchet up carbon reduction measures. Polar bears, coral reefs, sea level, Arctic and Antarctic ice, extreme weather, collapse of AMOC, you name it, they have all come in for the "OMG, it's worse than even the Settled Science predicted" treatment.
I am also certain that CCA2008 was authored in bad faith simply because of what it does NOT say. The provision for amendment of the 2050 target is written into law ONLY on the basis that "scientific knowledge" changes, NOT specifically the scientific data or evidence. So even IF the hard data and evidence changes (which it has), this doesn't necessarily imply that "scientific knowledge" about the existential threat of global warming changes, it means only that the data and evidence must be interpreted differently in order to preserve the alarmist narrative. Exhibit A: when there was much hoohah about the (unexpected) Pause in global warming 1998-2015 (acknowledged even by the UK Met Office, plus the IPCC and hundreds of scientific papers), the entire machinery of the alarmist academic establishment was brought to bear in initially dismissing the unexpected Pause by recalibrating it as expected! Then they set about actually erasing it (by statistical sleight of hand and by 'adjustments' of global temperature data) and then memory-holing The Pause, hence now it is virtually unheard of in the scientific literature. Job done.
However, the legislation empowers the Secretary of State to make the decision, not the green blob. They doubtless thought that the Uniparty majority for climate action was unassailable, and that they would control the appointments. They also thought they were empowering the setting of tougher targets without substantive debate - and indeed, they were correct about that.
I can see that the blob will try to fight back through judicial appeal, which needs to be carefully managed. Courts would struggle with understanding real science, and therefore be inclined to rely on a balance of opinion (I.e. the consensus). However, a proper public examination of science would clearly give them conniptions. The economics and basis of the carbon budgets are easier to attack. Rejection of carbon budgets provides the perfect excuse to appoint a red team to take over at the CCC, a process eased by referring back to its long history of personal benefit from the policies it promoted. Deben's consultancy, "BECCS" Heaton being on the board at Drax, Baroness Brown, Director at Ørsted, etc. The replacements need to have good credibility and knowledge, but their job would be to identify and overturn the wrongthink, ending by recommending the CCC be wound up and the CCA repealed. Public examination of some of the evidence produced by consultant subcontractors like Aurora, Pÿorÿ, etc. would also help.
Meanwhile resetting the target to a much lower value helps with getting on and amending and repealing other legislation that actually decides what happens from day to day. Start with the Energy Act 2023 that has allowed OFGEM as Net Zero Delivery Body and NESO as planner to DESNZ and the CCC to conspire in approving the massive grid investments we have seen announced just recently.
The original CCA2008 2050 target was 80%. Theresa May reset it to 100% (Net Zero) in 2019 with no debate in Parliament and zero evidence that "scientific knowledge" had changed to justify the more stringent target. The CCA2008 is a profoundly undemocratic piece of legislation which demonstrably does NOT require science, data or evidence to justify the imposition of its legally binding carbon emission reductions targets. It should be repealed immediately by any incoming government which is not in thrall to the Blob.
The UN cooked up the Net Zero hoax. This was obvious in 2019 when the UN IPCC published their desperate 1.5°C Special Report, launched because their prior 2°C target was too slow-burn for Net Zero weaponising. This is because it takes about 25 years (too long to wait) for a rise of 0.5°C according to the UN IPCC (pseudo)-science of CO2 global warming.
It isn't the Climate Change Act that dictates what we do for energy supply. That is covered by many other pieces of legislation both preceding and succeeding it. Repeal of the CCA unwinds none of that legislation, and will not be a straightforward process with a House of Lords eager to resist. Waiting until you can get it through them twice would impose unnecessary delay on the really important measures. A new SI neutralising the CCA can be done quickly, and the CCC can be used to provide a narrative to reject its alarmist past using the red team. You could add show trials of e.g. Rowlatt and Harrabin for false propaganda to taste. It's quite important to shift public opinion by giving the public a means to come to their senses, even if only slowly and one by one.
There is one person though that should be called out for his position.
That person is Mission Head Chris Stark.
He asked for and received information via LinkedIn; concerning a no "strings attached for the UK" offer for it to manufacture, install and export a developed / laboratory tested / US Patented solid-state electric power supply that could be manufactured in the UK for:
--- the individual UK home owner / electric bill payer;
--- the individual UK fossil-based fuel purchaser (as the power supply is small enough and powerful enough to power vehicles (200 kW) - and;
--- be manufactured in the UK - for export.
But upon receiving the info - he disappeared and would not communicate - so he either knew that this new power supply, being small, lightweight, and powerful and "standalone" - it would totally upset the government's apple cart as far as the status quo is concerned:
--- because there is no Law on the books in the UK that states that a private premises owner has to use the electricity supplied by a "connected" power "seller" - they have the right to choose what power source they are going to use to power their premises.
It was suggested that it be made available through GB Energy for $0.10 per hour, or $72 a month per unit for up to 480 VDC or VAC / up to 600 Amps.
You do the math.
Also -- the power supply is the only new thing that is available for export.
What's the Labour Government going to try and sell the World -- more of the same?
All the facts and figures in the world will change nothing. All the logical arguments will have no impact. Pointing out the illogical and outright false nature of every single claim made by the Climate Change Clergy falls on deaf ears. There is only one thing that will bring this nonsense to a stop, and that is to choke off the money supply.
As long as governments continue to subsidize anything to do with 'climate' or 'carbon' or 'renewables', nothing will change. Only when the economic circumstances change, only when it becomes unprofitable for the businesses and the politicians will this stop and go away.
But you can be sure that the grifters will move on to invent the next big scam they can use to milk the government teat.
Here's a short clip from a recent Kathryn Porter interview exposing civil service ideological bias as it applies to Net Zero: https://x.com/james_freeman__/status/1997619919027077240.
The CWG report is considered by many to be more of a political statement in support of President's Trump rollback of US environmental protection rather than a neutral evaluation to the current situation. It was not subject to credible peer reviews.
To use it as a main plank of your argument in your article weakens your position rather than reinforce it.
It was subject to open review. What do you think they got wrong.
And my reference to it amounts to one paragraph in a 2,500 word article, so hardly the main plank.
My business experience has been in industries where customers have a choice of going elsewhere so I take customer feedback quite seriously. It was sometimes painful but it often pointed matters we could improve upon or gives us something to reflect on.
I read your paper and I gave you opinion on how I felt after reading the paper.
The UK electorate has been disenfranchised for decades by the UK Uniparty’s ideological support for the never-validated UN IPCC hypothesis of alleged man-made CO2 global warming.
The comments under David’s posts are starting to attract climate true believers and climate propagandists. They are usually given short shrift by counter comments yet they often show no sign of any “Road to Damascus” epiphany. This is a problem because of the influence they may have elsewhere, e.g. when commenting in the Guardian or participating in Question Time!
An excellent analysis of the neuroses currently afflicting the country is given by blogger Spaceman Spiff in his latest post. The comments are very insightful, with the top comment referring to the problem of “true believers”. My own here: https://open.substack.com/pub/abysspostcard/p/britain-is-a-neurocracy?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=185227203.
''It is time to follow the science and ditch Net Zero.''
- Indeed and on that note is the reality we face based on dealing with the real conspiracy theorists of our time?
conspiracy theory;
''Hypothetical speculation that is untrue or outlandish.''
https://biologyphenom.substack.com/p/newreportheat-impacts-on-health-in?utm_source=publication-search
This substack is approaching 5,000 followers. While sanity may prevail in this corner of the internet, Ofgem has authorised spending tens of billions of our future electricity bills on more grid for more more bottlenecks. Ofgem, voice of the consumer, calls suppliers 'customers'. It is clear whose interests they serve and it is not the people and businesses who consume electricity.
The 2023 Energy Act turned OFGEM into the Net Zero Delivery Body. It lost its remit to act in consumer interests back in 2010 under Miliband's Energy Act, when green interests were defined as consumer interests.
David - Are you able to deny the concerns of 80 plus scientists?
https://www.npr.org/2025/09/02/nx-s1-5521384/energy-report-scientists-climate-change
Their concerns are not addressed by the self-immolation of the UK in pursuit of its Net Zero programme.
This feels like one of the weaker posts on this substack. Yes of course there have been some unduly pessimistic projections from the science community as well as some unduly optimistic ones, but pointing these out does not really address the wider warming issue, which is all too worrying from a 50 year perspective. As we know the really hard challenge is what to do about it, particularly when countries like the UK which are incurring costs in relation to decarbonisation are not getting support from the US and others. I think the debate should be about how the climate change act is interpreted / amended to reflect what others - the US, China, Europe, probably India - are doing
From a "50 year perspective"? That amounts to no perspective or context, which seems to be uniformly ignored by net zero enthusiasts. The likes of Milliband, the Met Office, the weather attribution 'specialists ' ( who fail to provide perspective), the global organisations, billionaires with Messiah complexes, have such a purposefully narrow and time-shortened analysis to support the rapid destruction of fossil fuels, to meet UN's SDGs. The 'Climate Change Act 2008' is touted chicanery, nothing more.
The world believed the science behind the link between CFCs and the ozone hole and agreed to ban them. The science turned out to be more complicated in reality.
COP30 showed that CAGW lacks credibility because no agreement was reached to treat it seriously. You should investigate why it lacks credibility, and either agree with those who find it not credible (while conceding that some climate change will occur), or who consider that adaptation is a superior strategy yo attempted terraforming in light of more realistic projections. If you still disagree, your job becomes convincing those who disagreed at COP30, or who were absent altogether.
You should start by recognising that the UK pursuing net zero is futile, and has not produced the leadership to convince the wider world.
There are 2 different points here.
Failing to achieve much progress in tackling climate change doesn't really have any implications for whether global warming is taking place or not.
It is quite correct to say that the lack of a plan and the US absence is further evidence of how difficult it is to solve it, and should arguably lead to a re-evaluation of whether the UK's current strategy in this area is the right one.
There is no real dispute over whether the world has warmed since 1750, or that mutatis mutandis (including assuming fairly constant solar output), it is likely to continue to do so for a while. There is controversy over the manipulation of the historic temperature record and the impact of UHI and poor instrument siting that has done nothing to enhance the credibility of climate science, and considerable controversy over the propaganda stance where RCP 8.5 is the default basis for alarmists, and where they ignore sound research that suggests that their crude measure of ECS is exaggerated. The poor track record of projections failing the reality test has not added to credibility, even if it provides a justification for more research money to try to do better.
China, India, most developing countries and now the USA are doing nothing to “tackle climate change” bar minor lip service, to use the Uniparty politician stock phrase.
What “wider warming issue” which you claim is “all too worrying from a 50-year perspective”? We have had no discernible man-made global warming over the last 25 years as I posted in an earlier comment on this thread: https://open.substack.com/pub/davidturver/p/follow-science-ditch-net-zero?utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=185132023
I refer you to my post “Debunking the climate change hoax” and defy you to rebut it: https://metatron.substack.com/p/debunking-the-climate-change-hoax.
I also had a look at your post Douglas. While some of it I agree with, I found the central contention that observed increases in atmospheric CO2 would not drive climate change unconvincing. I followed up 2 of your 3 sources for this, and one was 1970's analysis which the author himself withdrew later in the 1970's because of errors he had noted in his work, and the other was a more recent Polish piece which had also been withdrawn because of lack of rigour, peer review etc. This doesnt a very strong basis for the argument advanced.
What a weak, grammatically incorrect comment. I’ve no idea what you are alluding to.
I am responding to your suggestion earlier in the chat that I look at your post on debunking the climate change hoax. I am always keen to understand the range of points of view on a subject, and your post seemed worth reading. Apologies if it was not clear what I was referring. The specific reference was to 2 of the 3 sources that your post cited in relation to 'the establishment's climate modelling failures'; these were not sources I had previously looked at, and so I thought it worth following them up.
If we look on the bright side, China building out its electricity network with a mix of coal and renewables is a whole lot better in relation to carbon emissions than if it was using primarily coal given the massive scale of its production. It seems quite likely that its emissions will come down over the next decade - but we dont know. The US has been extremely inconsistent, and isn't even paying any kind of lip service at present. Whatvever both of these (and the other big emitters do will have a very big impact for better or for worse.
Surely a big problem is that the horse has already bolted, in the context of the UK's net zero activities.
I entirely take the point that renewables are not cheap and will become even more expensive. But there are also contracts that would be difficult to break and an argument that you have a sunk cost of building net zero machines, so you might as well use them. Moreover Milibands intentions are clear, use the next 3 years to commission so much more that the position becomes near on irreversible.I also expect the wretched government to load ever more of the renewables costs onto taxation, to hide the mess and effectively introduce yet more differential pricing.
Sure, we can eventually seek to hold the people who have made these stupid decisions accountable but how likely is that to happen? Any evidence that our ruling class allow themselves to be accountable for anything? I foresee the UK having near enough the world's highest electricity prices for as long as I live and much as I would like to see it, I don't expect to see Miliband in prison, where he belongs. And it wouldn't change the situation anyway.
We have only just got started on Net Zero spending. John Constable at REF costed the spend to date at around £220bn. That's just 2% of a bill expected to reach £10 trillion. The sooner we cancel it, the less that has to be written off.
I don't think Bjorn Lomborg has done enough work on climate science to claim that warming is a problem. I don’t claim authority but I have strong science qualifications, including research and publication in peer-reviewed literature (not in climate science), hands-on experience with models, no financial interests and the benefit of some years in the literature to co-author a book on climate and energy. https://www.amazon.com.au/s?k=Rafe+Champion&i=stripbooks&crid=GZ66NWUYZ193&sprefix=rafe+champion%2Cstripbooks%2C262&ref=nb_sb_noss
We find that warming since the Little Ice Age has been unequivocally beneficial. We are still some way short of the temperature during the Roman and medieval warm periods, when life on earth for living things was the best in recorded history. That means we can enjoy a few more degrees of warming!
As for the danger of carbon dioxide, during the Little Ice Age there was barely enough to keep the plants alive. In recent times, there has been a wonderful greening, and we know that the plants will flourish and also use water more efficiently with three or four times as much CO2 in the air. That is a double benefit!
Even if you insist on worrying about warming, don’t worry about more CO2. It was only ever a minor driver of warming and due to the diminishing warming from increasing CO2, the effect played out by the time of the Industrial Revolution.
Whilst Bjorn Lomborg agrees that global warming is real and man-made and will have a serious impact, he points out that climate mitigation is ruinously expensive and therefore ineffective, whilst adaptation is not only far cheaper, mankind is familiar with most of the methods it employs.
Moreover we only spend on adaptations we actually need, not wasting money on precautionary measures that turn out to have no value, leaving us without the resource to adapt.
I agree with Lomborg
Other than the 'serious impact' I do as well. However, Lomberg contradicts even that contention by insisting that we should wait to respond to specific climate events rather than anticipate them. Which is precisely what mankind has done for tens of thousands of years.
Nor do I believe Matt Ridley is convinced man made climate change is a threat either. He acknowledges it merely so he can't be accused of being a 'denier', which he is anyway.
I believe Ridley once described himself as a “lukewarmer”, unspokenly for the reason you state. The GWPF/NZW crowd are the same. It seems to me that after decades of blatant climate lies and failed predictions, coupled with the other outrageous political and MSM overreaches of recent years, it’s well past the time of being scared of being called a “climate denier”. People need to take a leaf out of President Trump’s book and call it out bluntly for what it is, “a hoax”.
The problem you have here is that you still are going along with the narrative that a scientific conjecture is real world fact just because there are hundreds if not thousands of people working on it.
But science applied to the real world needs to go through verification and audit. Source data, test runs, predictions, everything gets a thorough and detailed look over.
And sadly Climate Science fails even a basic check.
The law itself is fraudulent because it does not tie the truth of real world verification to the scientific proposal. So if more assumptions are made and climate researchers get more hysterical we have to follow them?
The Water Act has reams of references to measurement uncertainties and ISO standards. The climate change act? Crickets.
I tried to raise a petition that all science used in policy was verified and audited to engineering industry standards and it was rejected because that was too vague.
This is the calibre of morons we have.
The act should be scrapped and people should be fined particularly the Met Office.
Due to the combination of wind droughts and the lack of grid-scale storage, there will never be a transition to wind and solar because these “unreliables” are not fit for purpose to power the grid.
Dirt farmers are alert to the threat of rain droughts, but the wind farmers never checked the reliability of the wind supply, and nor did the governments which subsidised and mandated them. Possibly the worst public policy blunder on the record.
How did they miss the wind droughts in the North Sea that have been recorded for six decades on the oil and gas platforms?
https://www.conservativewoman.co.uk/a-curious-tale-of-the-north-sea-winds/
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/the-sinister-threat-of-wind-droughts
And in 2012, in Australia, Anton Lang published a wind drought warning in peer-reviewed literature.
When are responsible journalists going to take the story to the public and generate a demand for a major inquiry into the incompetence, negligence or worse of the guilty parties?
https://rafechampion.substack.com/p/memo-to-journalists
In their insistence on only looking at broad averages they miss not only Dunkelflaute but also periods of unusable massive excess that cannot be economically stored and are thus wasted. Curtailment this year already exceeds 9TWh. It will now expand quadratically with increasing capacity.
Wow, quadratically! Do you have a formula for that?
The form is
Curtailment = α(capacity - ~25GW)”2 for 25<capacity<~50GW.
https://i0.wp.com/wattsupwiththat.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/WInd-Curtailment-vs-capacity-1725664049.9688.png
Thanks. I can’t quite get my head around that graph, however it was derived! It’s easy to see that adding more and more intermittent renewables will at times result in over-supply, but won’t the hugely-expensive (tens of £billions) grid expansion mitigate against that? If not, what’s the point of it?
The derivation is simple: I took actual hourly demand over a year, and subtracted 6GW of baseload supply. The rest to be met from hourly wind (scaled by installed capacity per X axis), or CCGT when there is insufficient wind. Where wind +6GW> demand, there is a surplus. Adding up all the surpluses over the year at each level of wind capacity gives the red curve.
If there is no market for the output then building more grid doesn't help. You can get a good idea of that from this chart, where you can regard adding grid capacity as the same as adding electrolysis capacity fed from it.
https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/nZM72/1/
The triangular shape of the surplus duration curves (what percentage of the time is the surplus greater than Y GW) for larger capacities shows the quadratic (increase in area) increase in surplus as well. Average utilisation is poor, making investment hard to justify for surpluses that have close to zero or even negative value.
It arises because increased capacity results in increases in curtailment in hours of low demand and high output which are already subject to curtailment, and the addition of more hours where supply exceeds demand as capacity increases.
I also understand that global agriculture has increased every year since records began. Although not simply down to increased atmospheric CO2, mankind is capable of feeding 9 billion people on the planet, a number we are not expected to reach until the next century (UN).
Thanks to improvements in farming methods, mechanisation, and genetic science, production per hectare has improved significantly, which frees up land for wildlife and plants. (Ridley)
"Perhaps the only wise things about the Climate Change Act were the clauses that gave a mechanism for a graceful exit. If The Science™ changes, we can change the targets."
Unfortunately David, this assumes that the authors of CCA2008 were acting in good faith. They were not. The Settled Science was set in stone long before that and the only amendments to the alarmist narrative which were to be allowed were variations on the theme: "It's worse than we thought". How do I know this? Because, almost without exception, climate change 'research' over the years has come up with endless 'scientific' justifications for communicating to policy makers that "it's worse than we thought" therefore we need to ratchet up carbon reduction measures. Polar bears, coral reefs, sea level, Arctic and Antarctic ice, extreme weather, collapse of AMOC, you name it, they have all come in for the "OMG, it's worse than even the Settled Science predicted" treatment.
I am also certain that CCA2008 was authored in bad faith simply because of what it does NOT say. The provision for amendment of the 2050 target is written into law ONLY on the basis that "scientific knowledge" changes, NOT specifically the scientific data or evidence. So even IF the hard data and evidence changes (which it has), this doesn't necessarily imply that "scientific knowledge" about the existential threat of global warming changes, it means only that the data and evidence must be interpreted differently in order to preserve the alarmist narrative. Exhibit A: when there was much hoohah about the (unexpected) Pause in global warming 1998-2015 (acknowledged even by the UK Met Office, plus the IPCC and hundreds of scientific papers), the entire machinery of the alarmist academic establishment was brought to bear in initially dismissing the unexpected Pause by recalibrating it as expected! Then they set about actually erasing it (by statistical sleight of hand and by 'adjustments' of global temperature data) and then memory-holing The Pause, hence now it is virtually unheard of in the scientific literature. Job done.
However, the legislation empowers the Secretary of State to make the decision, not the green blob. They doubtless thought that the Uniparty majority for climate action was unassailable, and that they would control the appointments. They also thought they were empowering the setting of tougher targets without substantive debate - and indeed, they were correct about that.
I can see that the blob will try to fight back through judicial appeal, which needs to be carefully managed. Courts would struggle with understanding real science, and therefore be inclined to rely on a balance of opinion (I.e. the consensus). However, a proper public examination of science would clearly give them conniptions. The economics and basis of the carbon budgets are easier to attack. Rejection of carbon budgets provides the perfect excuse to appoint a red team to take over at the CCC, a process eased by referring back to its long history of personal benefit from the policies it promoted. Deben's consultancy, "BECCS" Heaton being on the board at Drax, Baroness Brown, Director at Ørsted, etc. The replacements need to have good credibility and knowledge, but their job would be to identify and overturn the wrongthink, ending by recommending the CCC be wound up and the CCA repealed. Public examination of some of the evidence produced by consultant subcontractors like Aurora, Pÿorÿ, etc. would also help.
Meanwhile resetting the target to a much lower value helps with getting on and amending and repealing other legislation that actually decides what happens from day to day. Start with the Energy Act 2023 that has allowed OFGEM as Net Zero Delivery Body and NESO as planner to DESNZ and the CCC to conspire in approving the massive grid investments we have seen announced just recently.
The original CCA2008 2050 target was 80%. Theresa May reset it to 100% (Net Zero) in 2019 with no debate in Parliament and zero evidence that "scientific knowledge" had changed to justify the more stringent target. The CCA2008 is a profoundly undemocratic piece of legislation which demonstrably does NOT require science, data or evidence to justify the imposition of its legally binding carbon emission reductions targets. It should be repealed immediately by any incoming government which is not in thrall to the Blob.
The UN cooked up the Net Zero hoax. This was obvious in 2019 when the UN IPCC published their desperate 1.5°C Special Report, launched because their prior 2°C target was too slow-burn for Net Zero weaponising. This is because it takes about 25 years (too long to wait) for a rise of 0.5°C according to the UN IPCC (pseudo)-science of CO2 global warming.
It isn't the Climate Change Act that dictates what we do for energy supply. That is covered by many other pieces of legislation both preceding and succeeding it. Repeal of the CCA unwinds none of that legislation, and will not be a straightforward process with a House of Lords eager to resist. Waiting until you can get it through them twice would impose unnecessary delay on the really important measures. A new SI neutralising the CCA can be done quickly, and the CCC can be used to provide a narrative to reject its alarmist past using the red team. You could add show trials of e.g. Rowlatt and Harrabin for false propaganda to taste. It's quite important to shift public opinion by giving the public a means to come to their senses, even if only slowly and one by one.