Using a model based on US EIA data, the following costs should be contrasted the repeated official statements of “Renewables” being “9 times cheaper” than conventional power generations technologies.
Based on the Weather-Dependent "Renewables" in EU(27)+UK installations of ~650GW with annual output equivalent to ~99 GW or ~15% productivity.
The current combined extra costs in Europe of not using Gas-firing amount to ~2.7 US$ trillion or ~11.3 times more than the cost of Gas-firing.
The current combined extra costs in Europe of not using Coal-firing amount to ~2.2 US$ trillion or ~4.1 times more than the cost of Coal-firing.
The current combined extra costs in Europe of not using Nuclear power amount to ~1.6 US$ trillion or ~2.3 times more than the cost of Nuclear power.
Europe is going to find itself burning a lot more coal this winter since it has left refilling its gas storage until much too late. The UK doesn't even have coal burn as a solution any more, so it will depend on a bidding competition with Europe for LNG supply. The one card it holds is the ability to discharge LNG and supply it via the pipelines to BE and NL.
Although I normally enjoy his writing, TS article wasn’t a serious piece of work for the many reasons you discuss above. Another DT writer Ambrose E-P who is generally a bit more rigorous in his analysis has also come out in favour of Net Zero with all the zeal of the convert. I read him and I read your analysis and they are describing different realities.
Given the legal status of Net Zero, the question is how feasible it would be to amend the entire edifice of subsidies, investments and the like in the event of a change of government. I could easily envisage the legal challenges running on forever in a kind of 21st century version of “Jarndyce and Jarndyce”.
Ambrose E-P is a historian turned journalist. He is routinely discredited with facts by Paul Homewood, who, admittedly, is a retired accountant, but at least he can count. The NetZero cult has a shockingly bad record in that department.
The last time AEP got anything right AFAIK was when he was echoing the thoughts of Nouriel Roubini and Willem Buiter ahead of the Financial Crisis. He is particularly poor on energy topics, where his understanding is distinctly limited.
On your substantive question: it's certainly not easy to unwind the Net Zero programme - it has to be done with care, and in the right order to be effective and keep the lights on. It doesn't help that booby traps are being laid, such as the return of 75% of ROC costs to bills in 2029, and the underprocurement of capacity in the T-4 Capacity Market auction just announced, or the commitment to humungous spending on the grid to enable heavily subsidised exports etc.
It is important to keep highlighting the inefficiencies and costs of the policies being implemented. The more people are aware, the greater the effort on working out the detail of how to set things straight becomes in both legal/rules and engineering terms.
SW Europe and the UK has suffered an unusual period of hot, dry weather due to a stationery, blocking high pressure area. This is a weather event, not climate change due to man made emissions. To argue otherwise requires a scientific explanation of how a marginal increase in CO2 levels can cause a localised high pressure system over one small part of the planet. I await such an explanation with interest, but not much hope.
The idea of CO2 forcing climate change is a speculation not underpinned by proper science and relies heavily an simplified modeled assertions and assumptions while the actual climate system is too complex to simply catch in a series of equations. This was actually put in the IPCC's AR1.
All the 'progress' made in the last 20 years has been stacked on top of that flawed model which has become a Dogma that can't be questioned ie not scientific. Consensus politics hamper actual progress. It always has..
1. My question was about your clause "a marginal increase in CO2 levels". What do you believe the current increase per year or decade to be, and why is it "marginal"? Which sources do you believe/disbelieve and why?
2. Now you write "CO2's influence on temperature is marginal". Assuming you are familiar with the significance of carbon isotopes, etc. which of the experiments that have proved the warming effects of CO2 are faulty and why do you believe "CO2's influence on temperature is marginal"?
It reminds me of the BBC program ‘verify’. You can easily ‘verify’ the truth of something by asking ‘trusted sources’ ie sources THEY trust. That then feeds back into the system under the header ‘de-bunking’. Because people are usually ignorant about actual science, the ‘experts’ they chose tell them.
I am loathe to debate anybody under a certain level of expertise which i can quickly assess by asking them specific questions most of which are in regards to physics.
What you get are postulations about assertions and assumptions about mechanisms they don't fully understand. You get the answer: but experts say..Most ‘climate’ experts are rather bad or mediocre on physics, hence all the modeled stuff and ‘attribution studies’ that are several steps away from first principles. It is the reason that those pointing to something being debunkt are solely based on what they perceive are the ‘experts’.
But if you actually question real experts in private they will tell you that they base most of their assumptions/ assertions on previous ‘established’ climate scientists that they actually don't understand and in which turn the possible flaws are also undetected. So they stack everything together to form a shaky house of cards. This is all well known in other areas like pharma. Once a paper is written and never questioned it forms the basis of all the others in a stacked deck. Several investigators have gone back to original papers and discovered basic anomalies and ( numerical) mistakes. Pointing them out almost never leads to retraction because of the stacked deck built on top of that flawed original. Too much at stake. I will leave the replication crisis for another day..
I note the names of some of the sources you seem to believe, e.g. Jonathan Cohler.
Anybody who believes what he and others write can easily find it refuted in more than enough detail.
One only has to Google "Jonathan Cohler debunked" to find out he's promoting or writing trash.
And regarding that movie, Google "Climate the Movie The Cold Truth debunked"
And as it says at the end of one of the movie debunks:
"Misinformation or disinformation?
... it is hard to know if he really believes the nonsense in his film or if he is deliberately promoting disinformation about climate change. Either way, this propaganda film is pure misinformation that only the most gullible are likely to swallow."
“We’re done, bye”. I’m not going to let you off that easily.
I tried googling "Jonathan Cohler debunked" and what comes up are some articles supporting Cohler and a long list of hit pieces on Cohler from sorry climate establishment so-called fact checkers and propagandists.
It’s the same with googling "Climate the Movie The Cold Truth debunked".
The very fact that there are so many fake debunkings shows that Cohler and the movie are both spot on. You really are very gullible if you have swallowed these debunkings. I bet you didn’t even read or watch any of the material I supplied. You probably don’t do facts, logic, science or engineering.
Im old enough to remember 1976 and the catastrophic impact it had on my pocket money income when the lawnmower jobs dried up!! It was just a weather event back then and it should have taught us that storing water needed to be increased but of course we ignored it and the population has grown. Now the same environmentalists berating any use of FF will object to any new reservoirs as well but given this long dry spell could lead us into standpipes again will this finally be the wake up call we need.
I keep going on about the deep state which uses our treasonous Uniparty politicians to inflict oppressively authoritarian policies on us which we never voted for: unattainable and pointless Net Zero, the Covid “malarky” (to put it charitably), now heightened by the Fauci diary revelations that almost everything he said as self-proclaimed science supremo was untrue, mass immigration of cultural aliens, needless military conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, divisive wokery and DEI, outrageously high state debt and taxation, …
I’ve always thought of the overlords of the deep state as the anonymous, unelected policy wonks of Chatham House and the Cabinet Office, the John le Carré schemers of MI6 (who supplied fake evidence to try to impeach President Trump in the Russiagate scandal), the pinstriped bankers of the City of London, billionaire philanthropaths like George Soros and the Rockefellers who finance all the bent NGOs and media outlets and, jokingly, the WEF’s Klaus Schwab as a cat-stroking James Bond villain.
A recent article by Jordan Peterson has given me pause for thought. He quotes a recent US Gallup poll indicating that 72% of Democrats but only 6% of Republicans worry about climate change. So what if the climate change hoax is overwhelmingly a left-wing pretext to attack capitalism and deindustrialise western civilisation regardless of the social and economic cost? What if the deep state villains driving all our oppressions are not anonymous Bond villains but just loony-left socialists, aka “wolf in sheep’s clothing” Fabians (like Burnham and most of his cabinet)?
What if hard-left control freakery socialism has been the greatest drag on human progress of the past century? Admittedly this theory doesn’t fit very well on the once right-wing (supposedly) Conservatives who have imposed a good share of globalist oppressions on us.
The Far Left would not have invented the climate crisis and its de-industrialising “solution”, Net Zero, it were not sabotaging our energy and destroying our industry, economy and national security. Those that believe that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are controlling the planet’s temperature and hence climate are as gullible as those who believed that King Cnut could halt the incoming tide. CO2 is a trace gas at 0.04% of the atmosphere and anthropogenic emissions are a mere 3% of the total CO2 emissions. The history of CO2 and temperature shows no correlation for the last 500m years except for the last 450,000 years when both have been exceptionally low and here the Antarctic Vostok ice core data quite clearly shows CO2 following temperature. The science of Happer & Wijngaarden, using the IPCC’s own radiative warming theory, has demonstrated that although the amount of atmospheric CO2 is tiny there is already sufficient to absorb all the planet’s emitted IR radiation that is available to it and hence adding further CO2 makes no difference. Water vapour, which is 10 to 100 times more abundant in the atmosphere than CO2 and absorbs far more of the planet’s IR radiation is the main greenhouse gas which keeps us warm at the surface and radiates excess energy to space. The climate activists haven’t yet suggested we dehydrate the atmosphere.
Probably not a popular view but I see both left and right not being serious with climate change.
The left come out with arguments that renewable energy is cheapest form of energy (which it may be in the future - but its not right now in the UK, hence the subsidies and extra tax loaded onto fossil fuel energy), that we are doing great at CO2 reductions but basing that completely off territorial emissions not consumption, that the economy is growing with the cuts but not recognising the huge current account deficits or fiscal deficits.
Elements of the right talk about climate change like it is not an issue. It looks like the world is warming, and there will be some consequence but it does feel like these are overstated for the UK at the moment.
Elements of left and right argue over the cause each individual weather event which is appears to be a fools errand. Weather forecasting is difficult.
The Telegraph has recently been bought by the German media group Axel Springer who no doubt fully back the globalist agenda. I suspect that the new owners are putting pressure on Telegraph journalists and sub-editors to toe the globalist party line on “climate change”. I’ve noticed several recent Telegraph articles all with the stupid phrase “Climate change is real” in the headline.
They use this phrase because in everyday parlance it does not mean what it seems to mean, that the climate changes all the time, but has been co-opted by the climate establishment as shorthand to mean “Man-made CO2 global warming climate change is real”!
Hannah Ritchie, as ever, has provided an excellent data driven analysis of the wildfire situation, excluding Russia The overall position is not so anomalous, but some intense peaks in W Europe offset by lower burn in Southern Europe. Obviously, this data does not allow for attribution to climate change or other causes of high fire propensity.
It's not like droughts have never happened before in England and Europe. Interestingly, the past few years resemble 13th and 17th century weather patterns. Here is a very good study on historical droughts: https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/16/1027/2020/cp-16-1027-2020.pdf
The fact that reason and physics—contrary to what the doomsday prophets claim—always prevail is illustrated, for example, by developments in China. There, 40 solar factories were recently closed, and 30% of the workforce at the five remaining factories was laid off. The FT recently reported on this. http://archive.today/Uznv9
For the benefit of any still undecided on whether or not climate change is a hoax, here’s a selection of posts which may help them decide.
The first is a Tom Nelson interview of Steve Milloy railing against the corruption of science. He has campaigned against the junk science of both the climate change hoax and the air pollution hoax via his eponymous Junk Science blog since 1996 and before. He gives an unrelenting rebuttal of the establishment’s junk science in layman friendly language: https://rumble.com/v7d5hu6-steve-milloy-416.html?e9s=src_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_o&sci=cceae0ec-1ae8-4345-804b-4a8b8070b3eb.
The second is also prompted by a recent Tom Nelson interview but I’ve linked to a shorter, snappier standalone presentation. It’s by CO2 Coalition’s Johnathan Cohler who presents a set of physics papers which he says totally invalidate the climate science purveyed by the IPCC. It’s quite heavy going physics (to non-physicist me) but his most striking conclusion is that the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 that we have witnessed over the past century is not mainly due to anthropogenic consumption of hydrocarbons as the IPCC would have us believe but is almost entirely natural, as I have suspected all along, e.g. from the same steady increase during the Covid global lockdown when global emissions fell sharply: https://x.com/cohler/status/2081407310493081791?s=20.
These recent posts by Tom Nelson bring to mind the excellent documentary he produced a couple of years ago entitled “Climate the Movie, The Cold Truth”, a compilation of contributions from a number of independent scientists which expose the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science: https://rumble.com/v4k2ij6-climate-the-movie-the-cold-truth.html.
I remain agnostic here but with 8 Billion+ people and still growing the human race does need to examine its navel and be mindful of what impact its having on dear old earth. We know that fossil fuelled transportation whilst massively improved does emit a wide variety of gases that are harmful in high concentrations. So for example if cities want to mandate electrification of ground transport that's no bad thing.
I would say electrification is not a good thing if it’s done under the pretence that it can be achieved using low-ERoEI weather-dependent so-called renewables which are not at all “green” and are not even compatible with how the grid was designed to operate. We should concentrate on nuclear power, restricting gas to providing grid balancing: https://x.com/JohnLeePettim13/status/1614178348694904837?s=20.
Where the leccy comes from doesnt matter as long as its located clear of cities.
Historians will look back and despair that the country that set the world off with nuclear completely lost the ability to deliver it. Comparable with a lost civilisation.
Incidentally, the UK has still hardly got off the starting blocks on “electrification”, the establishment’s latest euphemism for thoroughly discredited “Net Zero”. If you work through the statistics in the Energy Institute’s latest Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2025 only 17% of UK total energy was supplied by electricity.
Even by your high standards, David, this is a brilliant post and one to keep for when in need of factual data to demonstrate the falsehood of the climate alarmist argument.
While Tim trades in emotion, which can be powerful for a while, reality will assert itself again, and when it does, it will be the facts that help romantics like Tim finally understand they have placed wishful thinking in front of reality.
Though I still believe a large-scale blackout, ideally in a summer month, would be the most effective way of making these people face reality.
Constant near misses to the integrity of our electrical power supply just don't register with a general population outside people like you and those who take an interest.
Just for instance, I was trying to explain to an acquaintance, who is on the Climate Alarmist team, the danger of the prolonged low-frequency event in which system frequency dropped below the normal operating range of 49.8–50.2 Hz for an extended period on June 23rd. He had no idea of what this meant and could not understand the issue, and certainly had not seen anything about this in the media!
Hence, I think a large-scale blackout would finally make many more people aware of what our NetZero policy is producing, and where it will end!
Patching the system up for a few years is actually no help to anyone.
The Telegraph writers have financial investments in green finance/tech.
Presumably you have evidence for this or you have missed the whole point of this article.
Using a model based on US EIA data, the following costs should be contrasted the repeated official statements of “Renewables” being “9 times cheaper” than conventional power generations technologies.
Based on the Weather-Dependent "Renewables" in EU(27)+UK installations of ~650GW with annual output equivalent to ~99 GW or ~15% productivity.
The current combined extra costs in Europe of not using Gas-firing amount to ~2.7 US$ trillion or ~11.3 times more than the cost of Gas-firing.
The current combined extra costs in Europe of not using Coal-firing amount to ~2.2 US$ trillion or ~4.1 times more than the cost of Coal-firing.
The current combined extra costs in Europe of not using Nuclear power amount to ~1.6 US$ trillion or ~2.3 times more than the cost of Nuclear power.
see
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/a-few-graphs-say-it-all-for-renewables/
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/the-costs-of-weather-dependent-renewables-against-conventional-power-generation/
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/comparing-power-generation-technologies/
Europe is going to find itself burning a lot more coal this winter since it has left refilling its gas storage until much too late. The UK doesn't even have coal burn as a solution any more, so it will depend on a bidding competition with Europe for LNG supply. The one card it holds is the ability to discharge LNG and supply it via the pipelines to BE and NL.
https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/2082897205027799518.html
Mother Earth fights back against the outrage against her person.
"Stanley’s claim that one third of agricultural GDP in Bangladesh appears to come from a 2022 report by the World Bank".
Shome mishtake here, shurely? - Ed.
Here's the report and the quote:
https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/feature/2022/10/31/key-highlights-country-climate-and-development-report-for-bangladesh
"By 2050, one-third of agricultural GDP may be lost due to climate variability and extreme events"
I was referring to the fact that your sentence appears ill-formed. Some words missing?
But thanks for the link. 8-)
Another super article!
Ah, I see now. Fixed.
At least you can be sure that I study every word of your golden prose… 8-)
The editorial force is still strong in this one.
Under all these shrill complaints and complacent explanations lies one simple fact.
Too many people.
The birth rate is falling dramatically across most of the world.
If it wasn't, what do you propose humanity does about a rising population? Cull the herd?
Although I normally enjoy his writing, TS article wasn’t a serious piece of work for the many reasons you discuss above. Another DT writer Ambrose E-P who is generally a bit more rigorous in his analysis has also come out in favour of Net Zero with all the zeal of the convert. I read him and I read your analysis and they are describing different realities.
Given the legal status of Net Zero, the question is how feasible it would be to amend the entire edifice of subsidies, investments and the like in the event of a change of government. I could easily envisage the legal challenges running on forever in a kind of 21st century version of “Jarndyce and Jarndyce”.
Ambrose E-P is a historian turned journalist. He is routinely discredited with facts by Paul Homewood, who, admittedly, is a retired accountant, but at least he can count. The NetZero cult has a shockingly bad record in that department.
The last time AEP got anything right AFAIK was when he was echoing the thoughts of Nouriel Roubini and Willem Buiter ahead of the Financial Crisis. He is particularly poor on energy topics, where his understanding is distinctly limited.
On your substantive question: it's certainly not easy to unwind the Net Zero programme - it has to be done with care, and in the right order to be effective and keep the lights on. It doesn't help that booby traps are being laid, such as the return of 75% of ROC costs to bills in 2029, and the underprocurement of capacity in the T-4 Capacity Market auction just announced, or the commitment to humungous spending on the grid to enable heavily subsidised exports etc.
It is important to keep highlighting the inefficiencies and costs of the policies being implemented. The more people are aware, the greater the effort on working out the detail of how to set things straight becomes in both legal/rules and engineering terms.
SW Europe and the UK has suffered an unusual period of hot, dry weather due to a stationery, blocking high pressure area. This is a weather event, not climate change due to man made emissions. To argue otherwise requires a scientific explanation of how a marginal increase in CO2 levels can cause a localised high pressure system over one small part of the planet. I await such an explanation with interest, but not much hope.
To what extent do the Mauna Loa (and other) readings represent "a marginal increase in CO2 levels"?
Most CO2 is natural.
CO2's influence on temperature is marginal.
The idea of CO2 forcing climate change is a speculation not underpinned by proper science and relies heavily an simplified modeled assertions and assumptions while the actual climate system is too complex to simply catch in a series of equations. This was actually put in the IPCC's AR1.
All the 'progress' made in the last 20 years has been stacked on top of that flawed model which has become a Dogma that can't be questioned ie not scientific. Consensus politics hamper actual progress. It always has..
1. My question was about your clause "a marginal increase in CO2 levels". What do you believe the current increase per year or decade to be, and why is it "marginal"? Which sources do you believe/disbelieve and why?
2. Now you write "CO2's influence on temperature is marginal". Assuming you are familiar with the significance of carbon isotopes, etc. which of the experiments that have proved the warming effects of CO2 are faulty and why do you believe "CO2's influence on temperature is marginal"?
It reminds me of the BBC program ‘verify’. You can easily ‘verify’ the truth of something by asking ‘trusted sources’ ie sources THEY trust. That then feeds back into the system under the header ‘de-bunking’. Because people are usually ignorant about actual science, the ‘experts’ they chose tell them.
I am loathe to debate anybody under a certain level of expertise which i can quickly assess by asking them specific questions most of which are in regards to physics.
What you get are postulations about assertions and assumptions about mechanisms they don't fully understand. You get the answer: but experts say..Most ‘climate’ experts are rather bad or mediocre on physics, hence all the modeled stuff and ‘attribution studies’ that are several steps away from first principles. It is the reason that those pointing to something being debunkt are solely based on what they perceive are the ‘experts’.
But if you actually question real experts in private they will tell you that they base most of their assumptions/ assertions on previous ‘established’ climate scientists that they actually don't understand and in which turn the possible flaws are also undetected. So they stack everything together to form a shaky house of cards. This is all well known in other areas like pharma. Once a paper is written and never questioned it forms the basis of all the others in a stacked deck. Several investigators have gone back to original papers and discovered basic anomalies and ( numerical) mistakes. Pointing them out almost never leads to retraction because of the stacked deck built on top of that flawed original. Too much at stake. I will leave the replication crisis for another day..
Any rise, marginal or otherwise, in the Mauna Loa measurement of atmospheric CO2 is irrelevant because the rise is almost entirely natural. See the Johnathan Cohler presentation in this related comment: https://davidturver.substack.com/p/green-empire-strikes-back?r=8t7a0&utm_campaign=comment-list-share-cta&utm_medium=web&comments=true&commentId=306503889
I note the names of some of the sources you seem to believe, e.g. Jonathan Cohler.
Anybody who believes what he and others write can easily find it refuted in more than enough detail.
One only has to Google "Jonathan Cohler debunked" to find out he's promoting or writing trash.
And regarding that movie, Google "Climate the Movie The Cold Truth debunked"
And as it says at the end of one of the movie debunks:
"Misinformation or disinformation?
... it is hard to know if he really believes the nonsense in his film or if he is deliberately promoting disinformation about climate change. Either way, this propaganda film is pure misinformation that only the most gullible are likely to swallow."
We're done.
Bye
“We’re done, bye”. I’m not going to let you off that easily.
I tried googling "Jonathan Cohler debunked" and what comes up are some articles supporting Cohler and a long list of hit pieces on Cohler from sorry climate establishment so-called fact checkers and propagandists.
It’s the same with googling "Climate the Movie The Cold Truth debunked".
The very fact that there are so many fake debunkings shows that Cohler and the movie are both spot on. You really are very gullible if you have swallowed these debunkings. I bet you didn’t even read or watch any of the material I supplied. You probably don’t do facts, logic, science or engineering.
Im old enough to remember 1976 and the catastrophic impact it had on my pocket money income when the lawnmower jobs dried up!! It was just a weather event back then and it should have taught us that storing water needed to be increased but of course we ignored it and the population has grown. Now the same environmentalists berating any use of FF will object to any new reservoirs as well but given this long dry spell could lead us into standpipes again will this finally be the wake up call we need.
I keep going on about the deep state which uses our treasonous Uniparty politicians to inflict oppressively authoritarian policies on us which we never voted for: unattainable and pointless Net Zero, the Covid “malarky” (to put it charitably), now heightened by the Fauci diary revelations that almost everything he said as self-proclaimed science supremo was untrue, mass immigration of cultural aliens, needless military conflicts in Ukraine and the Middle East, divisive wokery and DEI, outrageously high state debt and taxation, …
I’ve always thought of the overlords of the deep state as the anonymous, unelected policy wonks of Chatham House and the Cabinet Office, the John le Carré schemers of MI6 (who supplied fake evidence to try to impeach President Trump in the Russiagate scandal), the pinstriped bankers of the City of London, billionaire philanthropaths like George Soros and the Rockefellers who finance all the bent NGOs and media outlets and, jokingly, the WEF’s Klaus Schwab as a cat-stroking James Bond villain.
A recent article by Jordan Peterson has given me pause for thought. He quotes a recent US Gallup poll indicating that 72% of Democrats but only 6% of Republicans worry about climate change. So what if the climate change hoax is overwhelmingly a left-wing pretext to attack capitalism and deindustrialise western civilisation regardless of the social and economic cost? What if the deep state villains driving all our oppressions are not anonymous Bond villains but just loony-left socialists, aka “wolf in sheep’s clothing” Fabians (like Burnham and most of his cabinet)?
What if hard-left control freakery socialism has been the greatest drag on human progress of the past century? Admittedly this theory doesn’t fit very well on the once right-wing (supposedly) Conservatives who have imposed a good share of globalist oppressions on us.
The Far Left would not have invented the climate crisis and its de-industrialising “solution”, Net Zero, it were not sabotaging our energy and destroying our industry, economy and national security. Those that believe that anthropogenic emissions of CO2 are controlling the planet’s temperature and hence climate are as gullible as those who believed that King Cnut could halt the incoming tide. CO2 is a trace gas at 0.04% of the atmosphere and anthropogenic emissions are a mere 3% of the total CO2 emissions. The history of CO2 and temperature shows no correlation for the last 500m years except for the last 450,000 years when both have been exceptionally low and here the Antarctic Vostok ice core data quite clearly shows CO2 following temperature. The science of Happer & Wijngaarden, using the IPCC’s own radiative warming theory, has demonstrated that although the amount of atmospheric CO2 is tiny there is already sufficient to absorb all the planet’s emitted IR radiation that is available to it and hence adding further CO2 makes no difference. Water vapour, which is 10 to 100 times more abundant in the atmosphere than CO2 and absorbs far more of the planet’s IR radiation is the main greenhouse gas which keeps us warm at the surface and radiates excess energy to space. The climate activists haven’t yet suggested we dehydrate the atmosphere.
Probably not a popular view but I see both left and right not being serious with climate change.
The left come out with arguments that renewable energy is cheapest form of energy (which it may be in the future - but its not right now in the UK, hence the subsidies and extra tax loaded onto fossil fuel energy), that we are doing great at CO2 reductions but basing that completely off territorial emissions not consumption, that the economy is growing with the cuts but not recognising the huge current account deficits or fiscal deficits.
Elements of the right talk about climate change like it is not an issue. It looks like the world is warming, and there will be some consequence but it does feel like these are overstated for the UK at the moment.
Elements of left and right argue over the cause each individual weather event which is appears to be a fools errand. Weather forecasting is difficult.
The Telegraph has recently been bought by the German media group Axel Springer who no doubt fully back the globalist agenda. I suspect that the new owners are putting pressure on Telegraph journalists and sub-editors to toe the globalist party line on “climate change”. I’ve noticed several recent Telegraph articles all with the stupid phrase “Climate change is real” in the headline.
They use this phrase because in everyday parlance it does not mean what it seems to mean, that the climate changes all the time, but has been co-opted by the climate establishment as shorthand to mean “Man-made CO2 global warming climate change is real”!
Hannah Ritchie, as ever, has provided an excellent data driven analysis of the wildfire situation, excluding Russia The overall position is not so anomalous, but some intense peaks in W Europe offset by lower burn in Southern Europe. Obviously, this data does not allow for attribution to climate change or other causes of high fire propensity.
https://hannahritchie.substack.com/p/europe-wildfires-2026?r=h6qd1&utm_medium=ios
It's not like droughts have never happened before in England and Europe. Interestingly, the past few years resemble 13th and 17th century weather patterns. Here is a very good study on historical droughts: https://cp.copernicus.org/articles/16/1027/2020/cp-16-1027-2020.pdf
Presentism is a scourge for rational thought.
The fact that reason and physics—contrary to what the doomsday prophets claim—always prevail is illustrated, for example, by developments in China. There, 40 solar factories were recently closed, and 30% of the workforce at the five remaining factories was laid off. The FT recently reported on this. http://archive.today/Uznv9
For the benefit of any still undecided on whether or not climate change is a hoax, here’s a selection of posts which may help them decide.
The first is a Tom Nelson interview of Steve Milloy railing against the corruption of science. He has campaigned against the junk science of both the climate change hoax and the air pollution hoax via his eponymous Junk Science blog since 1996 and before. He gives an unrelenting rebuttal of the establishment’s junk science in layman friendly language: https://rumble.com/v7d5hu6-steve-milloy-416.html?e9s=src_v1_s%2Csrc_v1_s_o&sci=cceae0ec-1ae8-4345-804b-4a8b8070b3eb.
The second is also prompted by a recent Tom Nelson interview but I’ve linked to a shorter, snappier standalone presentation. It’s by CO2 Coalition’s Johnathan Cohler who presents a set of physics papers which he says totally invalidate the climate science purveyed by the IPCC. It’s quite heavy going physics (to non-physicist me) but his most striking conclusion is that the steady increase in atmospheric CO2 that we have witnessed over the past century is not mainly due to anthropogenic consumption of hydrocarbons as the IPCC would have us believe but is almost entirely natural, as I have suspected all along, e.g. from the same steady increase during the Covid global lockdown when global emissions fell sharply: https://x.com/cohler/status/2081407310493081791?s=20.
These recent posts by Tom Nelson bring to mind the excellent documentary he produced a couple of years ago entitled “Climate the Movie, The Cold Truth”, a compilation of contributions from a number of independent scientists which expose the climate alarm as an invented scare without any basis in science: https://rumble.com/v4k2ij6-climate-the-movie-the-cold-truth.html.
I remain agnostic here but with 8 Billion+ people and still growing the human race does need to examine its navel and be mindful of what impact its having on dear old earth. We know that fossil fuelled transportation whilst massively improved does emit a wide variety of gases that are harmful in high concentrations. So for example if cities want to mandate electrification of ground transport that's no bad thing.
I would say electrification is not a good thing if it’s done under the pretence that it can be achieved using low-ERoEI weather-dependent so-called renewables which are not at all “green” and are not even compatible with how the grid was designed to operate. We should concentrate on nuclear power, restricting gas to providing grid balancing: https://x.com/JohnLeePettim13/status/1614178348694904837?s=20.
The transition to renewables “is a globalist suicide pact”, another Tom Nelson interview: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r9Cas6gMQ1s.
Where the leccy comes from doesnt matter as long as its located clear of cities.
Historians will look back and despair that the country that set the world off with nuclear completely lost the ability to deliver it. Comparable with a lost civilisation.
Incidentally, the UK has still hardly got off the starting blocks on “electrification”, the establishment’s latest euphemism for thoroughly discredited “Net Zero”. If you work through the statistics in the Energy Institute’s latest Statistical Review of World Energy, in 2025 only 17% of UK total energy was supplied by electricity.
Even by your high standards, David, this is a brilliant post and one to keep for when in need of factual data to demonstrate the falsehood of the climate alarmist argument.
While Tim trades in emotion, which can be powerful for a while, reality will assert itself again, and when it does, it will be the facts that help romantics like Tim finally understand they have placed wishful thinking in front of reality.
Though I still believe a large-scale blackout, ideally in a summer month, would be the most effective way of making these people face reality.
Constant near misses to the integrity of our electrical power supply just don't register with a general population outside people like you and those who take an interest.
Just for instance, I was trying to explain to an acquaintance, who is on the Climate Alarmist team, the danger of the prolonged low-frequency event in which system frequency dropped below the normal operating range of 49.8–50.2 Hz for an extended period on June 23rd. He had no idea of what this meant and could not understand the issue, and certainly had not seen anything about this in the media!
Hence, I think a large-scale blackout would finally make many more people aware of what our NetZero policy is producing, and where it will end!
Patching the system up for a few years is actually no help to anyone.
I agree.
Well, let's start the experiment by truely make electricy ruled by the free market as proposed. No subsidies, no help from the state.
We all know how that is going to turn out..