Global warming, climate change, all these things are just a dream come true for politicians. I deal with evidence and not with frightening computer models because the seeker after truth does not put his faith in any consensus. The road to the truth is long and hard, but this is the road we must follow. People who describe the unprecedented comfort and ease of modern life as a climate disaster, in my opinion have no idea what a real problem is.
The 2022 report states that 96% of wildfires are caused by human actions. It is a simple fact that much of the Mediterranean region is a tinder box every summer, just waiting for a spark.
The European Environment Agency has not yet published its wildfire data for 2023 yet, but they did issue the final data for 2022 in October. So I have updated its graph above of burnt area for EUMEDS, the five countries listed – Portugal, Spain, France, Italy and Greece – which it has not updated since 2020.
The chart gives the lie to claims that wildfires are now much worse.
The 2022 report states that 96% of wildfires are caused by human actions. It is a simple fact that much of the Mediterranean region is a tinder box every summer, just waiting for a spark.
Provisional data for last year is, I believe, due out in April, so I’ll update then.
Three-quarters of all the North Sea’s new oil and gas projects would be rendered economically unviable under Labour’s tax proposals, industry chiefs have warned.
Increased taxes and a block on new developments could push up imports instead.
A combination of the existing windfall tax and uncertainty over a Labour government’s policies could mean “sanctioned investment across the North Sea will fall to levels not seen since the 2016 and 2020 downturns during 2024”, according to a report by analysts Wood Mackenzie. The Telegraph has the story.
The report looks at pledges set out by Ed Miliband, the shadow energy secretary, which include imposing a “proper windfall tax” that would raise the current levy by further 3pc. This would mean UK oil and gas producers would pay a total of 78pc tax on any profits.
Mr Miliband has also said a Labour government would backdate the windfall tax, halt tax breaks on new investment and halt licensing for further exploration and drilling.
The report said: “The Labour party currently has a healthy lead in the polls. But it will certainly come under pressure to define what it currently means by a “proper windfall tax”, a phrase often repeated throughout 2023.
“Our analysis shows that only a quarter of all new projects in the North Sea would be economically viable under Labour’s earlier proposals. Many operators may wait and see, unless they are confident that returns on investment can withstand further shocks.”
It comes after the Government opened up 74 areas of the UK’s North Sea and Atlantic waters for new drilling on Wednesday.
The latest government data shows that the UK still relies on oil and gas for 75pc of its total energy. The UK consumes 75bn cubic metres of gas a year (equating to the volume of 14 double decker buses per person) of which about 40pc of it from under its surrounding seas.
It also consumes about 62m tonnes of oil and oil products a year, (just under a tonne per person) and produces about 35m tonnes from the North Sea and waters off Scotland.
Ross Dornan, markets intelligence manager at Offshore Energies UK, said: “Domestic resources supply about half our needs …it is crucial that we have the most attractive investment conditions as possible to make sure that domestic production is carefully managed otherwise our reliance on imports will accelerate.”
The UN Food & Agricultural Agency has started to update its database to include 2022 numbers.
Cereal output, which includes rice, was slightly down on 2021, but is still the second highest on record.
The value of agricultural output still has not been updated for 2022, but was at a record high in 2021, based on constant prices (i.e. excluding the effects of inflation).
It’s all a very different story to the one fed to us by the media, with their lies of how extreme weather and droughts are supposedly impacting food supply.
When Amazon announced it was buying up half the output from one of Britain’s newest and biggest wind farms last week, it appeared like good news for Britain’s net zero ambitions.
Turbines will power Amazon’s expansion – but some say the output should be decarbonising UK homes.
When Amazon announced it was buying up half the output from one of Britain’s newest and biggest wind farms last week, it appeared like good news for Britain’s net zero ambitions.
The US giant committed to buying energy from Scotland’s Moray West wind farm before it was even built, bolstering its bid to power all operations with 100pc renewable energy by 2025. The Telegraph has the story.
However, amid the positivity, some industry sources claim Amazon and other global firms are embarking on an energy “power grab” that draws resources away from decarbonising Britain’s homes and businesses.
The deal completed by Amazon comes after Vodafone bought up the output from five solar farms last year, located in Norfolk, Nottinghamshire, Staffordshire, Buckinghamshire and Dorset.
Similar deals have also been struck by accountancy giant EY and Tesco, both of which have acquired energy from UK wind and solar firms.
Amazon, though, has gone further.
The tech company’s first Scottish wind farm, made up of 15 turbines on the Kintyre peninsula in Scotland, came online in 2021.
That is roughly the size of a large gas-fired power station and enough to power more than 600,000 UK homes.
This all means that Amazon’s operations, including both distribution and data centres, will become a lot greener.
Overall, the company’s carbon footprint is huge and its activities and products generated around 71 million tonnes of CO2 in 2022, although the bulk of that was produced by customers using its products.
Lindsay McQuade, director of energy at the company’s booming data centre division, Amazon Web Services (AWS), says: “Projects like Moray West will play a critical role in decarbonising Amazon’s operations and the UK grid, with this agreement demonstrating Amazon’s commitment to this ambition.”
Amazon is not alone in pursuing a corporate green energy strategy, as noted by Nathan Bennett, a director at trade body RenewableUK: “The market for renewable energy corporate power purchase agreements is growing at an extraordinary rate.
“Europe hit a record high last year with over 16 gigawatts of new renewables capacity, a 40pc increase on the year before.
“The appetite among companies is enormous, as they want to cut their electricity bills and support decarbonisation.”
For Amazon, much of that energy will be used not to decarbonise existing activities but to mitigate the company’s growth, especially that of AWS.
This business has 165 facilities around the world, each packed with power-hungry servers.
Roger Palmer speaks quietly, but with the force of knowledge and logic on the subject of global warming/climate change. Two expressions of his perspective are presented here: firstly a brief video and transcript, and secondly excerpts from his 2024 paper.
Roger Palmer speaks quietly, but with the force of knowledge and logic on the subject of global warming/climate change. Two expressions of his perspective are presented here: firstly a brief video and transcript, and secondly excerpts from his 2024 paper. Transcript in italics with my bolds and added images. H/T Raymond Inauen
1. Trust Climate History, Not Hysteria
I’m Roger Palmer, a retired engineer living in Victoria, British Columbia. Today I want to talk about climate change hysteria. The popular press is overflowing with sensational but scary headlines: the hottest day on record, sea levels are rising, climate catastrophe. It’s never been like this before, climate change is an existential threat, we are declaring a climate emergency, it’s man’s fault.
These hysterical messages are reinforced at disruptions organized by career demonstrators and professional protesters.Politicians are falling over themselves to agree with these claims and position themselves as the only viable saviors of mankind who are able to stop the climate from changing. You can’t get elected if you are perceived as being soft on climate change.
The authors of all this spurious noise unfortunately do not have a good understanding of science or the historical paleoclimatic record. These people are so arrogant and self-centered that they believe that man can control the solar system and somehow cancel the naturally occurring climate cycles, so that the earth’s climate stays just the way they want it.
Let’s start the discussion by outlining a difference between weather and climate. When a person speaks about weather they are referring to how the atmosphere is behaving over the short term hours or days and usually over a small area. The term climate refers to the statistics of weather over a defined large region over a long period of time, decades or more. the atmospheric characteristics being described include temperature, winds, moisture, clouds and precipitation.
But it is the temperature that most people seem to focus on. In the 1970s the concern was about global cooling, but it has now shifted to global warming. An example of a weather statement is: “It will be cooler and windy in downtown Ottawa tomorrow.” An example of a climate statement is: “North America will be warmer over the next two decades.”
Reliable equipment for measuring temperature has been available since the early 1800s, but unfortunately the number and placement of temperature recording stations has changed considerably over time. So it is often difficult to get a complete and consistent record for a specific area temperature history. The period preceding the 19th century must be inferred by analyzing ice cores, tree growth rings, sediments and corals. Ice cores typically from Greenland, Antarctica or the Arctic are the most commonly used proxies. And it is possible to infer temperatures from thousands or millions of years ago. It is also possible to use ice cores to estimate the historical composition of the atmosphere.
Although surface temperature is what humans actually feel on a day-to-day basis, that data can be contaminated by urban heat islands. So it is sometimes more meaningful to talk about the temperature of the troposphere, which is the lowest layer of the earth’s atmosphere about 20 kilometers thick and is where all the weather takes place; the clouds, precipitation, storms, winds etc. Temperatures in the troposphere can be directly measured by balloon-borne radiosondes or inferred from satellite radiometry.
Geological records show that the earth’s average temperature has varied cyclically for many millions of years. Sometimes it has been much hotter than today and sometimes much cooler. This graph estimates variations in temperature during the last 500 million years. The earth is approximately four and a half billion years old; predecessors of man have been on earth for about two and a half million years; and modern homo sapiens have been around for about two hundred thousand years.
Here is what the earth’s temperature has been doing over the past five hundred thousand years and here is the temperature record for more recent times; the last 11, 000 years otherwise known as the Holocene era.
The earth would be a much cooler place if it did not have an atmosphere. The atmosphere contains a number of gases that warm the earth by what is called the greenhouse effect. Which is when solar radiation from the sun can easily pass through the gases to the earth, but outgoing infrared radiation from the earth’s surface is partially blocked from radiating off into space by these same gases. Further details of this mechanism are given in the references.
There are several different greenhouse gases but everyone seems to focus on just one of them: carbon dioxide known as CO2. The concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is sometimes thought to be the driver of the earth’s temperature, but the geological record shows that there has been no correlation.
The absolutely dominant greenhouse gas is water vapor. The earth’s glaciers and ice caps have grown and shrunk cyclically over time. The earth recently exited the Little Ice Age and is currently warming just as in previous cycles. There is definitely a new ice age coming, but none of us will live to experience it. We are currently in an interglacial, which is a period between ice ages.
As shown by the earlier graphs the earth’s climate is not being driven by changes in the co2 level. Indeed changes in the atmospheric CO2 concentration are probably a result of changes in the earth’s temperature as oceans and land masses release stored CO2 resulting from long-term temperature changes. As the glaciers and ice caps cyclically build and recede, there are corresponding changes in the sea level. The sea level has cyclically varied from today’s levels by as much as plus or minus 200 meters. And these fluctuations are expected to continue for thousands of years to come.
So what is causing these long-term cyclical changes in the earth’s average temperature? A recently posted youtube series entitled Paleoclimatology parts one through three gives an in-depth analysis of the factors at work. Here is a summary of just some of the main factors:
♦ Continental drifts as result of plate tectonics has caused very long-term climate changes as the ocean’s heat carrying currents have been forced to take different paths;
♦ Milankovitch cycles due to changes in the earth’s tilt, precession and orbital eccentricity and cyclical changes in the solar system’s orbital alignments have demonstrably produced corresponding changes in the earth’s climate over both the long term and the short term;
♦ Cyclical changes in the sun’s total output radiated power. cyclical changes in the sun’s output spectral distribution especially the ultraviolet component
♦ Variations in the earth’s magnetic field resulting in changes in the magnitude and position of the earth’s magnetosphere which shields us from incoming cosmic particles and the solar wind
♦ Variations in upper level bacteria which serve as nucleation sites for clouds and precipitation
♦ Changes in the earth’s average cloud cover as a result of changes in many of the factors just mentioned
♦ Changes in the earth’s upper atmospheric wind currents that are used to distribute heat energy throughout the pallet of the planet
Note that carbon dioxide concentration is not a significant cause of these natural cyclical changes. CO2 has some effect on long-term climate changes but it is not the dominant determinant of global temperature. Then why are the agitators and politicians so obsessed with this and why are they arbitrarily blaming man-made CO2 emissions from the combustion of fossil fuels as threatening disruptions to their climate nirvana?
Perhaps there’s a hidden agenda. Current proposals to decarbonize the earth by eliminating fossil fuels will have a minor effect on climate, but will cause extraordinary economic harm. Maybe the true goal of the protesters is to destroy capitalism in the western world.
CO2 is a clear odorless gas. Atmospheric CO2 levels have been much higher in the past and were sometimes much lower. CO2 is not a pollutant–it is essential to life. If the atmospheric CO2 concentration were to drop below 150 parts per million, the earth’s vegetation would not be able to survive and the earth would become a barren wasteland. There have been proposals to use large-scale geoengineering to alter the earth’s climate, such as by surrounding the earth with orbiting reflective particles or mirrors. But such schemes are fraught with political as well as technical dangers.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change known as the IPCC is often identified as the final authority when it comes to questions about the earth’s climate. However the IPCC does not conduct research; it merely reviews papers in the field. And the IPCC should not be considered as unbiased. Because when they were created by the United Nations they were specifically charged to investigate how mankind is causing the earth’s climate to change.
In other words the conclusion had already been reached that man was to blame before any investigations were performed. The IPCC is a political animal; nothing is published before it has been approved by the representatives of all the participating countries to make sure that it aligns with their governments’ objectives and policies. IPCC has published numerous forecasts of ever increasing global temperatures being driven by rising atmospheric CO2 concentrations. But these are based on incomplete and inaccurate computer models and they have all drastically overestimated the forthcoming temperature rise.
These computer models ignore or inadequately account for many factors, including clouds and solar variations. It is claimed that 97 % of scientists agree that man-made emissions of CO2 are having significant negative effects on the earth’s climate. However consensus is not a valid way to conduct scientific research. Group think is a major problem in this field. Remember Galileo was able to prove that the earth orbited the sun rather than the other way around. But public opinion and the church forced him to recant his findings. Consensus overruled scientific evidence just like it appears to be doing today.
The earth is getting warmer and it will continue to do sountil the temperature trend reverses sometime in the future and we head into the next ice age. Mankind needs to recognize that we are an observer of naturally occurring climate cycles. There is very little that we can do to stop, change or influence these cycles. The best thing that man can do is learn to adapt to these natural cycles. Stop wasting our money and damaging our economy on futile and inefficient schemes to reduce man’s CO2 emissions, appearing to be trying to thwart what are perfectly natural cyclical changes of the earth’s climate.
Learn to live with these changes. Mankind has to adapt. Have a nice day and enjoy the warmth while we have it. Here are links to references providing more details on many of these points
As mentioned above, many governments have decided to pursue the goal of becoming “Net Zero” by 2050 (or possibly later). This means that they want all CO2 emitted by man’s activities either to be eliminated or somehow compensated for by 2050 in the belief that this will slow the current rise in global temperatures, and limit the rise to 1.5°C above pre-industrial levels.
As discussed in previous sections, CO2 concentration is not the primary driver of global temperature, and indeed, rising CO2 levels might actually be a result of warming due to entirely natural factors. Despite the dubious scientific justification, politicians and special-interest groups have embraced the “Net Zero” battle cry, and are falling over themselves with announcements, proclamations, and protests as they attempt to destroy the world’s economy.
The concept of Net Zero is that any continuing emissions of CO2 need to be “offset” by actions to remove the same amount of CO2 from the atmosphere. These “offsets” could be the planting of trees that absorb CO2, or they could involve operating actual equipment that removes CO2 from the atmosphere, and then sequesters it in a safe storage facility (this is called CCS, which stands for Carbon Capture and Sequestration). A marketplace has now developed whereby “carbon credits” are bought and sold, and some rather flimsy schemes have been created.
As an example of how ludicrous this churning process is, consider the example of the DRAX power plant that is located in the U.K. This power plant was built in 1974, and burned coal to generate electricity (in a conventional steam turbine system). Starting in 2013, this power plant was converted to burn compressed wood pellets. The pellets are manufactured in Canada, and shipped to the UK from the port of Prince Rupert, BC. The pellets were originally supposed to use scrap wood left over from existing logging operations, but demand eventually required that trees be specifically grown to feed the process. It was claimed that the entire process (growing trees, converting the wood to pellets, transporting them between continents, and then burning them in a thermal power plant) was “sustainable”, because new trees were planted to replace those that were cut down!
Direct Carbon Capture(DCC)
There are several companies developing technology and equipment for actually extracting (“capturing”) CO2 from the air. The CO2 is then stored (“sequestered”) either as a gas, or converted to some other form. The justification for doing this is that governments and agencies mistakenly believe that CO2 emissions from human activities is causing the world to warm, and that not only must these emissions stop, but some of the CO2 must be removed in order to lower the concentration in the atmosphere, thereby supposedly preventing future temperature rises.
The processes used for DCC are complex, and require large amounts of energy to operate. It is claimed that the energy will come from “sustainable” sources (hydro, solar, wind, nuclear), so the whole process will help a country reach the goal of “net zero”. Funding for these projects effectively comes from selling “carbon credits”, because governments have inadvisably placed a dollar value on CO2. If these proposed projects go ahead, the scale and costs involved will be enormous. And remember, lowering the CO2 concentration in the atmosphere by 1 ppm will only potentially reduce the temperature by between 9 and 15 thousandths of a degree C!
Energy and Transortation
As part of the charge toward the Holy Grail of “Net Zero”, the entire transportation infrastructure is being forced to dispense with the burning of fossil fuels. Governments apply so-called “Carbon Taxes” on the sale of hydrocarbon fuels, and the tax rates are methodically being increased as time goes by, in an effort to get users to switch to another type of energy.
Oil has been a major energy source for over two centuries. It has a high energy density (ie: a small and light weight amount of the substance has the potential to create a large amount of energy). A few decades ago, there was worldwide concern that we were running out of these fuels and only had a limited supply, but new exploration/extraction techniques, combined with more efficient energy use have allayed those concerns.
Fossil fuels are converted to energy by the process of combustion. Almost 40% of the material’s potential energy is extracted in modern gasoline or diesel engines, and almost 55% in modern combined-cycle gas-fired power plants. The remaining energy is turned into waste heat. In building heating applications, the fossil fuel is burned to directly create heat: this process can have efficiencies of over 95%. All of these combustion processes generate CO2, and this is the main focus of politicians, scientists, and environmentalists, despite evidence (as outlined earlier) that climate change is not being primarily driven by increases in CO2 concentration.
Wind turbines and solar cells have received most of the publicity in recent years as large arrays of these devices have been installed around the world. The biggest problem is the intermittent nature of their output. To compensate for this, excess generating capacity has to be installed, and very large energy storage devices (batteries, pumped water, etc) have to be included to ensure a reliable source of supply. If electricity is produced by techniques (such as hydro, solar, wind, or nuclear) that do not emit any greenhouse gases, there is strong political motivation to convert existing consumers of fossil fuels to use electricity as their energy source. Transportation has been a major user of fossil fuels, and the sector is highly visible to the public, so there is considerable pressure to electrify it.
Fossil fuels are an ideal way to power mobile devices (especially road vehicles, aircraft, and ships): the energy density (KW-h per Kg) is very high, and it is easy to quickly refuel as required. There has been much development in electrical technology for road vehicles, but the major problem has been the availability of electrical energy storage devices (primarily batteries) that are small and light enough to fit into the vehicle, and that have sufficient capacity to provide decent range between charges. The energy density (KW-h per Kg) of modern Li-ion batteries is about 2% that of gasoline or diesel fuel. Some electric cars have met with market success, but battery technology needs to develop a major increase in battery energy density before they are considered viable for mainstream applications, and then the problem will be one of installing enough charging infrastructure to allow for unimpeded travel without the drivers suffering from “range anxiety”.
Ships, highway trucks and airliners pose their own problems, and are unlikely to be weaned off of fossil fuels for some time to come. These applications need energy storage devices that have much higher density (both by volume and by weight) than batteries – the use of hydrogen (produced by electrolysis of water) and fuel cells is being vigorously pursued. Hydrogen can also be burned directly in modified jet engines or even reciprocating engines, but hydrogen has storage issues that need to be addressed.
Hydrogen’s energy density (KW-h per Kg) is quite high, but it occupies a large volume, so must be stored at very high pressures if storage tanks are to be kept to a reasonable size. Hydrogen can also be stored in a liquid form, but the extremely low cryogenic temperatures required (-253°C) present significant challenges.
If it were possible to convert all power generation, heating, and transportation applications to non fossil fuel technology, it would be possible to reduce the total amount of man-made CO2 emissions by over 50%, but this would have a negligible effect on global temperature. It would of course still be required to extract oil and natural gas from the ground for the manufacture of synthetic materials, plastics, asphalt, lubricants, and pharmaceuticals.
Summary and Conclusions
The material reviewed so far in this paper confirms that there are a large number of factors that affect the earth’s climate. Many of these are poorly understood by man, and there are some factors that probably haven’t even been discovered yet. A number of conclusions can be taken away from the information presented so far in this document:
a) Climate change is a naturally-occurring, cyclic phenomena, and it has been going on for millions of years. b) Climate change is primarily driven by changes in the energy of the sun that impinges on the earth. The dominant factors driving this are variations in the sun (total output power, spectral distribution, sunspot cycles) Milankovitch Cycles, variations in ocean currents (ENSO, PDO, and AMO). Other factors include the effect of varying cosmic particle influx and high altitude bacteria, causing changes in cloud cover. c) The primary greenhouse gas is water vapour. The effect of atmospheric CO2 on global temperature change is much less. Because of the non-linear effect of CO2 concentration, increases beyond the current level will have a decreasing effect on the earth’s climate. d) Man-made CO2 does have a minor effect on global temperature changes, but it is not the dominant factor. A reduction of man-made CO2 emissions would have a negligible effect on global temperature. e) Man’s understanding of the various climate-influencing factors is very limited. f) Climate models are not effective at forecasting future long-term global temperatures. g) There is very little that mankind can do to affect global temperature change. It does not make sense to introduce regulations that will have a negative impact on Western economies in a pointless attempt to change the natural rate of global climate change. h) Mankind will have to learn to adapt to future climate changes. If mankind is still around in a few thousand years, they will then have to adapt to global cooling and glaciations!
Any legislative efforts to limit man-made carbon dioxide emissions at the local, regional, provincial, or federal levels may be well-intended, but are ultimately futile, and potentially dangerous. These efforts will harm the economy, waste resources, and not significantly affect the naturally-occurring cyclic climatic changes.
For the summer season, there are 26 models exhibiting warmer trends than the observations, and only 1 model with a weaker warming trend. The satellite tropospheric temperature trend is weakest of all.
Updated through 2023, here is a comparison of the “USA48” annual surface air temperature trend as computed by NOAA (+0.27 deg. C/decade, blue bar) to those in the CMIP6 climate models for the same time period and region (red bars). Following Gavin Schmidt’s concern that not all CMIP6 models should be included in such comparisons, I am only including those models having equilibrium climate sensitivities in the IPCC’s “highly likely” range of 2 to 5 deg. C for a doubling of atmospheric CO2.
Approximately 6 times as many models (23) have more warming than the NOAA observations than those having cooler trends (4). The model trends average 42% warmer than the observed temperature trends. As I allude to in the graph, there is evidence that the NOAA thermometer-based observations have a warm bias due to little-to-no adjustment for the Urban Heat Island effect, but our latest estimate of that bias (now in review at Journal of Applied Meteorology and Climatology) suggests the UHI effect in the U.S. has been rather small since about 1960.
Note I have also included our UAH lower tropospheric trend, even though I do not expect as good agreement between tropospheric and surface temperature trends in a regional area like the U.S. as for global, hemispheric, or tropical average trends. Theoretically, the tropospheric warming should be a little stronger than surface warming, but that depends upon how much positive water vapor feedback actually exists in nature (It is certainly positive in the atmospheric boundary layer where surface evaporation dominates, but it’s not obviously positive in the free-troposphere where precipitation efficiency changes with warming are largely unknown. I believe this is why there is little to no observational evidence of a tropical “hot spot” as predicted by models).
If we now switch to a comparison for just the summer months (June, July, August), the discrepancy between climate model and observed warming trends is larger, with the model trends averaging 59% warmer than the observations:
For the summer season, there are 26 models exhibiting warmer trends than the observations, and only 1 model with a weaker warming trend. The satellite tropospheric temperature trend is weakest of all.
Given that “global warming” is a greater concern in the summer, these results further demonstrate that the climate models depended upon for public policy should not be believed when it comes to their global warming projections.
Ofgem said it was investigating the alleged behaviour and has asked the Energy System Operator (ESO) to look into the matter.
Energy regulator Ofgem is investigating the claims that wind farms may have incorrectly added close to £51m to taxpayer bills since 2018.
A Bloomberg report found that 40 out of 121 studied projects overstated their output by ten per cent on average and one-sixth (27) wind farms were found to be overstating by at least 20 per cent. The CityAM has the story.
Ofgem said it was investigating the alleged behaviour and has asked the Energy System Operator (ESO) to look into the matter.
“Ofgem will work closely with the ESO to consider all the facts and if it finds evidence of egregious action or market abuse, enforcement action will follow,” the spokesperson told City A.M.
“We will continue to work to protect market integrity and the best interests of consumers, as demonstrated by the recent cases we have concluded against generators who charged excessive prices behind transmission constraints.”
The report has reached government ears and parliamentary under-secretary of state for nuclear and networks Andrew Bowie said in response to its findings: “It is completely unacceptable to overcharge for people’s bills.
“British energy generators must operate at the highest standards,” he added.
Bloomberg caveated its report saying that while it is “impossible to determine precisely how much bill payers have had to pay due to such overstatements, but by assuming a similar rate of overestimation during the times that those 40 farms were paid to stop generating, consumers would have overpaid an estimated £51m ($65m) since 2018”.
Most importantly there is opportunity to call it out now, with all the evidence that is being presented at the defamation trial of Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg.
Hello Old Friend, we’re here in [Washington] DC, you’ve been mentioned fondly by Mark [Steyn] in the court and I was remembering your kindness to us …
Ann is in DC, with her partner Phelim McAleer, covering Michael Mann’s defamation trial against Mark Steyn; because Mark called the unfortunate hockey stick chart, that has become the cross of climate change delusion, a fraud. Yes. A fraud.
While it may have been difficult for Conservative politicians, and others, to call it out as such (as fraud) at the time this nonsense historical temperature reconstruction was first published – in the journal Nature back in 1998. There was an opportunity to do exactly this after the publication of emails between leading climate scientists as part of the Climategate saga. Most importantly there is opportunity to call it out now, with all the evidence that is being presented at the defamation trial of Mark Steyn and Rand Simberg.
FOIA is a recognised shorthand for Freedom of Information Act. Legislation by this name has existed in the USA since 1966, Australia since 1982 and the UK legislation was introduced in 2000. It was climate scientists at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, conspiring to evade the UK FOIA that inspired Climategate, with Mr FOIA, as the ‘whistle blower’ likes to calls himself, releasing over 220,000 documents and emails beginning in November 2009.
In an email sometime later he explained:
The circus was about to arrive in Copenhagen. Later on it could be too late.
By circus he is referring to a get together of governments from around the world, under the direction of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). He wanted to let it be known that leading climate scientists at that very meeting, knew that key supporting evidence was unreliable; that the famous hockey stick chart had been created by using Mike’s trick.
Indeed, by providing public access to emails and documents from leading climate scientists, Mr FOIA exposed how tricks, adjustments, and corrections, were routinely applied to climate data to support the propaganda of the largely government-funded (with your taxes) global warming industry.
An interpretation of the chart, and what this data looks like before and after Michael Mann’s trick is applied, was shown in court, in Washington DC last week. As part of the defence of Mark Steyn’s co-accused, Rand Simberg.
It stars Prof. Richard Muller from UC Berkely explaining to his students why Michael Mann used the ‘apple and banana’ combination and how deceitful it is to boot. You can watch the YouTube here:
Muller does not show or refer to apples and bananas. But Mark Steyn does quote me in his 2015 book using this analogy with reference to the hockey stick chart.
Ann and Phelim are in DC to support Mark, specifically they have started a new podcast series, it is entitled ‘Climate Change on Trial’ – all about this trial, which is very much focused on the hockey stick of climate science and its veracity, or lack of.
Their podcast is working its way up the charts in the science category, at #2 in the UK.
Ann and I both consider this rather an achievement, especially given it questions so much that the English King believes so hard in, that it suggests he would do well to be less ‘certain’ about the veracity of the hockey stick.
I’m paraphrasing the first witness for the defence, Abraham Wyner, a statistician who spent some time explaining the concept of ‘uncertainty’ along with ‘p hacking’.
As Ann says in their most recent episode, they do more than feed us popcorn, at this circus, we even get to learn something about statistics.
So, given most of my readers are interested in politics and science, consider clicking across, subscribe, and leave a review, after you have listened to some episodes. They are all good, and different.
I always like the last episode that I listened to best, which is Episode 11, Mann & [Judith] Curry. And I look forward to the next one, including to hear the banter between Ann and Phelim.
There is lot of nastiness in each episode not between my friends, but from the climate scientists and I’m finding it cathartic.
The extent to which mainstream climate scientists block the work of those they disagree with, and then ridicule them. That is something that needs to be publicly acknowledged, least this sad situation continues forever, or more likely until everyone shuts up and bows down to the authority of Michael Mann and the IPCC or those who only marginally disagree with them, including Judith Curry. Yes. Curry. While a witness for Simberg, and a good one at that, in the end Curry is part of the problem, she and her electric car.
We know from the Climategate emails that there was terrible abuse of process through the 1990s. I have firsthand experience of it still happening twenty years later.
Getting the dozen or so papers published on our new technique for better rainfall forecasts using artificial intelligence (AI) to mine historical data for climate cycles and patterns was not easy. But John Abbot and I persisted, and now this research is part of the official record in so much as it has been published in some of the best peer-reviewed journals in climate science.
Every time we tried to publish on temperatures, it was an ordeal. We got two minor publications through, and I will eventually triumph with Rutherglen, Darwin, and Mildura. The unpublished Mildura manuscripts include lots and lots of temperature data that the Bureau, well they now claim none of this data exists.
Anyone would think it unbelievable, that the Australian Bureau of Meteorology could obfuscate for so long on the existence of the parallel data sets that would enable some comparison of the temperature measurements from electronic probes versus mercury thermometers. This data needs to be analysed if we are to have confidence in the instrumental record going forward. This is a key point that mainstream climate scientists and sceptics alike are so far mostly ignoring. It has not been mentioned in this trial. I discuss some of the associated issues in Part 2, of this series, entitled ‘Climate Scientists More Generally, and Boris Kelly Gerreyn More Specifically’.
You will perhaps be more sympathetic to what I have had to endure, after you hear the extent of the shenanigan by way of the evidence in the Mark Steyn versus Michael Mann trial. When I eventually get the Mildura data published, and when I eventually get to tell my story, you might believe me because it is all just an extension of the continuing malfeasance within mainstream climate science, as unbelievable as it will all seem. Indeed, sometimes fact is more unbelievable than fiction.
After John Abbot and I did get our second research paper concerning temperatures and artificial intelligence (AI) – demonstrating how AI can be used to distinguish natural versus human-caused climate change – published by the Elsevier journal, GeoResJ back in 2017 (vol 14), Gavin Schmidt (a mate of Michael Mann’s) launched an attack including to get this paper retracted.
Schmidt worked hard, including at Twitter. Alas, these few years later and our paper is still standing, so to speak, which is more than what Mark Steyn can do at the moment, and the journal that published us has since been closed down. I am sorry that Mark Steyn has had three heart attacks this last year and is now defending himself and from a wheel chair. I am sorry that the journal GeoResJ no longer publishes real science, because it can no longer publish anything.
There should be much more acknowledgment of the toll all of this can take on individuals, on the foot soldiers in this war against what Mr FOIA referred to as the ‘hole digging and filling in’.
I have explained the significance of our very technical research as published in volume 14 of GeoResJ in an article for The Spectator online. The late Christian Kerr told me at the time it was their most viewed article at Flat White that year – in 2017.
You can still read the piece at The Spectator online, entitled ‘Big Data Finds the Medieval Warm Period – No Denial Here’. The Spectator still exists as a publication, that is something I am also grateful for. Thank you Rowan Dean for all your efforts.
A longer defence of our GeoResJ paper, that Schmidt attempted to have destroyed, is at Climatelab.com, the website for my company ClimateLab Pty Ltd..
With this new podcast series produced by Ann and Phelim entitled ‘Climate change on trial’, as I listen along, I know that this is being broadcast publicly: that the ‘whole world’ is hearing how brazen and nasty mainstream climate scientists can be. And I’m feeling a burden lifted, even if much of it is ugly. Sharing the ugly can somehow make it less personal, any good therapist will affirm that as truth.
I have often been told, by those who could better support my work with John Abbot, that it is all very technical and difficult to understand. Even that I am not a very good communicator, and so they promote the work of Judith Curry instead, even though she is just rehashing the problems we already known about with General Circulation Models. They just rehash what we already know to be hopeless, rather than attempting to understand the solution by way of a new tool, that John Abbot and I are offering.
It was in 2015 that Mark Steyn published ‘A Disgrace to the Profession’ that sets out in very plain English – Mark is not a scientist but rather a radio and television presenter, and expert on the history of musical theatre – how absurd a centre piece of one of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assessment reports really is. Of course, I’m back referring to the hockey stick now.
We need to abandon this absurd historical reconstruction, along with General Circulation Models, if are to ever understand climate change and move to better systems for forecasting droughts and floods.
Steyn quotes me on page 55 of his 2015 book, and a witness in the trial has made the very same observation. Dr Abraham Wyner a statistician from the University of Pennsylvania explains that the shaft of the ‘hockey stick’ is not of the same stuff as the handle of this infamous temperature reconstruction.
Mark Steyn thought my explanation very clear. Quoting from my blog, he wrote back in 2015, she found Mann’s famous graph an ‘unlikely proposition’. In 2013, I suggested it was analogous to ‘sticking an apple on the end of a banana’.
I began these scribbles with mention of a text I got from Ann, and the word kindness.
You can show your kindness in a very practical way by clicking across to their donation page. Send them some money, as a show of appreciation for all their efforts so far.
Show your kindness to Mark Steyn and also Ann and Phelim by making a Donation, LINK HERE.
POSTSCRIPT
It was a long time ago, 2006, that I travelled with Ann and Phelim, helping to promote their first documentary film, ‘Mine Your Own Business’. That was after I raised a good amount of money to bring them to Australia, and successfully booked their film into theatres in Hobart, Perth, Sydney and Melbourne. I really wanted them to be well supported, that is the kindness Ann remembers.
And as Phelim McAleer explained during that tour:
The film [Mine Your Own Business], in its essence, is not really at all a story about mining, but rather, it is a story about human rights. The human right to a job, the human right to have your children educated, the human right to see your child reach their first birthday.
It is my very favourite film of all times – about the human experience, and totally politically incorrect. In that regard, it is much like this Mark Steyn defamation trial.
Against the odds, Ness won in what was the longest running criminal trial in Indonesia. Here’s hoping that Mark Steyn wins. It could be all over very soon.
Richard Ness won his trial in an Indonesia Court. And then did something very brave, flanked by his two sons he walked out the front of the court house and down a street lined by angry protesters. I shall always remember his determination, and also the bravery of his two sons. Not to forget that the Indonesian Judges hearing the trial made their decisions based on the available evidence, defying the politics.
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