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.
A £14m taxpayer-funded scheme to deploy a fleet of hydrogen-fuelled delivery trucks across the South East has collapsed just five months after it was launched.
Hydrogen-fuelled trucks scheme scrapped as companies reluctant to commit to vehicles
A £14m taxpayer-funded scheme to deploy a fleet of hydrogen-fuelled delivery trucks across the South East has collapsed just five months after it was launched. The Telegraph has the story.
Under the HyHaul scheme set up by Heidi Alexander, the Transport Secretary, three hydrogen refuelling stations were to be set up along the M4 – supplying a fleet of 30 lorries delivering to factories and stores.
However, millions of pounds of taxpayer cash now hang in the balance after the project was scrapped owing to reluctance among trucking companies to commit to the vehicles.
The collapse of HyHaul is just the latest of several hydrogen schemes recently abandoned as hype around the net zero fuel fades.
The oil giant shelved the plans earlier this month after it clashed with separate plans backed by Sir Keir Starmer to construct the largest data centre in Europe.
The Government has also abandoned its hydrogen towns scheme under which whole communities would have seen natural gas blended with or replaced by hydrogen.
Chris Jackson, chairman of HyHaul, said: “The problem is very clear. Customers weren’t willing to sign and weren’t willing to pay. So the question now for the Government and for the industry is, how do you solve that?
“If there is going to be a future role for hydrogen in transport, it will have to be driven by industry feeling that they need to invest in it as a zero-emission technology.
“Because with HyHaul the energy industry and government came forward with money and a product, and despite the Road Haulage Association telling us that customers wanted it, the trucking firms didn’t buy it.”
From mainstream fuel to niche status
The HyHaul scheme is part of a wider government strategy to use hydrogen to store and carry energy produced by wind, solar or from natural gas.
It dates back to 2021 when Boris Johnson’s government published its Hydrogen Strategy suggesting that wind and solar farms would eventually make so much of the gas that it would supply over a third of UK energy by 2050.
Mr Miliband was due to publish a revised version of the strategy this month, now postponed till 2026, which is expected to abandon all production targets – relegating hydrogen from mainstream fuel to niche status.
OK maybe they have more than 30 members. But it was a cold morning, so looks like most of them stayed home.
Extinction Rebellion protest criticises inaction over 1.5C climate change protest
Story by Rosie Shead
Extinction Rebellion protesters have targeted several sites in central London in a dramatic warning about global warming targets being missed.
Members of the campaign group gathered outside 55 Tufton Street in Westminster on Saturday morning holding signs reading “1.5 is dead” and “tell the truth”, calling for urgent action to limit the risk of rising temperatures
The office includes the headquarters of the Global Warming Policy Foundation, a think tank that aims to combat what it sees as harmful climate policies
Demonstrators hung a pink sign on the door of the Tufton Street building that read “a better world is possible”, and threw black confetti
I’m sure the Global Warming Policy Foundation are quaking in their boots to have so many climate radicals show up at their door.
On a serious note, this is a far cry from the mass climate protests of old. But I guess years of skyrocketing green energy prices, and more interesting crisis such as the Ukraine war, have all taken their toll on the green faith.
Correction (EW): The protestors hung a “Pink sign”, not a “Ping sign”.
A rate proceeding is the mechanism by which a utility goes before a regulatory body, in our case the New York Public Service Commission, seeking to increase the rates charged to consumers. Our purpose in the proceeding has been to object to and disrupt having the ratepayers charged for the building of infrastructure in pursuit of the futile and infeasible “climate” goals of our deluded politicians.
If you have been following this blog closely, you know that I have been participating, along with two excellent colleagues, in the rate proceeding of our local utility, Con Edison. A rate proceeding is the mechanism by which a utility goes before a regulatory body, in our case the New York Public Service Commission, seeking to increase the rates charged to consumers. Our purpose in the proceeding has been to object to and disrupt having the ratepayers charged for the building of infrastructure in pursuit of the futile and infeasible “climate” goals of our deluded politicians.
One of the rules of these things is that anybody with a genuine interest in the outcome can “intervene” if they want, and participate as a party in the proceedings. That’s how we got ourselves in on the action. And by the same mechanism, multiple parties advocating for the utopian future of “renewable” and “zero emissions” energy also joined up. Among the green energy advocates in the mix were the Environmental Defense Fund, the Natural Resources Defense Council, and the Alliance for a Green Economy. And then there was the New York City government, which wants to present itself as an advocate for low consumer rates, but at the same time has enacted its own mandate for electric building heat that can only be implemented with the support of some expensive new infrastructure to be built by Con Edison.
When last we visited this subject on November 28, a lengthy settlement process of about 6 months had just concluded with a document of close to 300 pages called the “Joint Proposal” (JP) of the settling parties. Nearly all of the parties had signed on, with the main exception being my own little group. The JP was filed on November 5 as number 183 on the docket of the proceeding; and on November 6 a “Summary of Joint Proposal,” 6 pages long, was filed as number 185 on the docket. Among those signing on to the JP were all of the environmental groups, and also New York City, along with Con Edison itself, and the Staff of the Department of Public Service. On November 26, my two colleagues and myself filed an Objection, number 214 on the docket, which was discussed in the November 28 post.
Since that post, the Public Service Commission assigned three of its Administrative Law Judges to conduct a public hearing for any objectors to cross-examine witnesses. In advance of the hearing, my colleagues and I asked for a breakout of which of Con Edison’s costs approved in the JP were in support of “climate” goals like building and vehicle electrification; but the Company responded only with an objection and declined to break out Climate Act-related costs. The hearing was then held on December 3. And after the hearing, the parties were given until December 12 to file a post-hearing brief. Our brief is number 227 on the docket.
The problem for the supporters of the settlement, principally Con Edison and the Public Service Department Staff, was that they had admitted in the documentation that the JP contained “funding” for the “climate” goals. This is a quote from the Summary of Joint Proposal:
The Joint Proposal contains numerous provisions that are intended to further New York State’s ability to meet the goals of the CLCPA [Climate Act], including provisions or funding that will:
enhance the electric system in anticipation of transportation and building electrification; . . .
facilitate the clean energy transition
As also pointed out in our November 26 Objection, the State had admitted in a letter submitted in a court proceeding in August 2025 that the mandates of New York’s Climate Act had now become “infeasible,” and would impose “extraordinary and damaging costs” that would be “unaffordable” for consumers. These admissions gave us the opportunity in our final brief to point out the crazy box into which the parties had built themselves. Some excerpts:
The Summary of Joint Proposal would not have said that there was “funding” in the JP for these [“climate”-related] matters if there was no funding. And yet all of the witnesses for both Staff and the Company resolutely refused to provide any quantification or breakout of the amount of funding at issue. The Independent Intervenors made a clear record by asking for this breakout both in discovery, and also on cross-examination, and they had explicitly signaled in their pre-hearing Statement in Opposition that they intended to ask about this topic. And yet of 21 witnesses who appeared, none would address this topic on the merits.
A fair inference is that DPS finds itself caught in a whipsaw between on the one hand activists who insist on approving spending to pursue the CLCPA goals no matter how expensive or infeasible, and on the other hand Con Edison ratepayers (among them two of the Independent Intervenors) who are squeezed by rising costs and think that rate increases should be minimized. So Staff has adopted the strategy of approving excess costs to appease the activists and then agreeing with the Company to hide and conceal those costs from the broader public to minimize the blowback. This strategy is not legitimate and should not be countenanced by either the ALJs or the Commission.
At this point the matter goes to the ALJ’s to make a decision. And then it goes on to the full Public Service Commission for final approval and implementation. After that, we will have the opportunity in a court proceeding to make a public splash about the efforts of Con Edison and the Department of Public Service to engage in futile “climate” spending and hide the amounts from the public.
A bitter row has broken out following Dr Roy Spencer’s backing of the UK Met Office’s controversial temperature record amid accusations of Met Office bias and poorly sited weather stations.
A bitter row has broken out following Dr Roy Spencer’s backing of the UK Met Office’s controversial temperature record amid accusations of Met Office bias and poorly sited weather stations.
Dr Spencer asserts that his simple bias reduction modelling of daily high (Tmax) and low (Tmin) UK summer temperatures over the last 65 years produces variations in average temperature “essentially identical” to those published by the Met Office. But there are those who point out that coming to the same conclusion by using two different ways to measure the same faulty data doesn’t alter the fact the data are faulty in the first place.
Ray Sanders, who has undertaken a forensic examination of almost all the Met Office’s 400-plus nationwide temperature measuring sites, is unimpressed, calling Spencer’s findings, “a load of twaddle”. Speaking to the Daily Sceptic, he added: “The whole point is that you can torture numbers as much as you want, but if they were no damn good in the first place, they will never get any better.”
His criticism strikes at the heart of Dr Spencer’s work. Spencer argues that a measuring station can be placed in a non-natural, anomalously warm urban environment, but as long as that environment stays the same over time, “it can probably still be used for climate change monitoring”. He went on to state that it “might be” that there has been little additional urban heat warming in London over the last 200 years, something that seems highly unlikely given that the city has grown in the period from a low-rise centre with numerous surrounding small villages to a major metropolitan area full of everything from tall glass buildings to airports. Sanders says that Dr Spencer’s opinions on UHIs (Urban Heat Islands) are “risible”. Simply saying things were bad in the past so they can be compared to now – with the caveat of ‘if things haven’t changed’ – is irrelevant, he states.
Spencer’s model starts with a baseline of three sets of data from sites that are said to have a 126-year continuous temperature measuring record. They are the Central England Temperature Series (CET), a group of three stations, Armagh and Stornoway Airport. This is the first problem. The CET has shown a number of station changes in that period, while the Stornoway record was compiled at another site nearly three miles away until its re-location to the Airport in 1968. Spencer’s high/low calculations go back to 1960 so the Stornoway move, unhelpfully not identified by the Met Office, will likely affect his figures.
The current CET portfolio includes two CIMO Class 4 site with international unnatural ‘uncertainties’ of 2°C, a junk classification also shared by Armagh and Stornoway. In addition, Paul Homewood has discovered that the Met Office has retrospectively cooled the near past and boosted CET readings from the last 20 years. Sanders has done considerable research on all the junk stations and dismisses them as “truly crap sites of incredible bad provenance”. For good measure, he notes that the Armagh weather station used to be housed in a metal box bolted to the side of a building by a first floor window.
Once he has established his initial baseline, Spencer incrementally adds further stations which adjusts the overall composite average. Each time a station is introduced he adds or subtracts its average difference (the bias) over the overlapping years until it lines up with the baseline. Further and better particulars can be obtained from his original article here. This method assumes long-term biases at each station stay mostly the same over time and using that assumption seems to produce the same warming trends as the Met Office. The uncharitable thought, ‘garbage in, garbage out’ springs immediately to mind.
Something that does not seem to have been considered in Spencer’s work is the effect of the change over the last few decades of measuring devices from liquid in glass manual thermometers to automatic electronic systems. This is a largely unaddressed issue in meteorological science but it is highlighted in recent work compiled by Dr Eric Huxter. Looking at the daily Tmax published by the Met Office throughout last May, he found that on average about 0.89°C was added to the maximum recording by temporary and most likely unnatural blips that would not have been picked up by slower-reacting glass bulb devices. Dr Huxter has told the Daily Sceptic that he is confident that electronic devices are biased to recording higher Tmax temperatures, especially given siting issues.
Since the Met Office picks up its daily Tmax from the one minute record, one way to remove some of the distortion would be to average the high over a longer period. Thus the national record declared at RAF Coningsby on July 19th 2022 at 3.12pm falls from a 60-second spike of 40.3°C to a five-minute average of 39.96°C. Over 10 minutes, a possible time frame for movement in liquid in glass bulb thermometers, the fall is 0.5°C. Still hot of course, but not BBC-ready ‘record’ headline hot.
Dr Roy Spencer is a brilliant sceptical scientist who is behind the valuable UAH satellite temperature record – an uncorrupted series that since 1979 shows less global warming than (frequently-adjusted) global surface datasets. He is one of the authors of the excellent climate report published recently by the US Department of Energy that has helped push back the notion of ‘settled’ political science. He is also an authority on urban heat island corruption. In a recent peer-reviewed paper with fellow Energy Department report author Professor John Christy it was calculated that the UHI effect accounted for about 22% of the observed summer warming across all US stations since 1895. For some of the suburban and urban locations – stations that Ray Sanders might refer to as “crap” – the UHI warming bias was no less than 65%.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor. Follow him on X.
I would like to wish all my readers a very Happy Christmas and a prosperous, sceptical New Year. I am enormously encouraged by all the support you give me during the year and the fantastic contributions that some of you make when you respond to the publication. Your input often leads me to think harder and sometimes follow up leads that I had not previously considered. Such support and contributions are a great help to those of us who labour at the copy face. Thank you.
Not much, really. Just a whole lot of waste and false hopes with massive government intervention to create a wind/solar/battery bubble. The subtitle of the CLIMATEWire piece said much: “The blockbuster climate deal made history a decade ago. But its record at taming climate change is spotty. “
Not much, really. Just a whole lot of waste and false hopes with massive government intervention to create a wind/solar/battery bubble. The subtitle of the CLIMATEWire piece said much: “The blockbuster climate deal made history a decade ago. But its record at taming climate change is spotty. “
But if the agreement identified the dangers, it has not resulted in lasting action to solve them — at least, not yet.
Yet the COP30 climate talks last month showed that a fractured and divided world is unable to find consensus on phasing out fossil fuels — the main source of rising temperatures — a decade after nations signed an agreement to do just that.
… carbon pollution from fossil fuels reached a record 38.1 billion tonnes this year…. While many countries are cutting pollution from their energy systems, it’s not enough to offset rapid growth in global energy demand, the analysis found…..
… the ambitious 1.5-degree goal is gone, said Pierre Friedlingstein, a climate researcher at the University of Exeter…. “The issue is it’s been 10 years after Paris and we’re still showing slow progress.”
Before COP30 convened last month in Brazil, more than 100 countries had missed multiple deadlines to submit their latest plans to cut emissions. More nations submitted them over the course of the conference, but many weren’t aligned with the Paris temperature targets.
But the gap between what [developing] countries need and receive is wide…. Getting the finance flowing where it’s needed is a major challenge.
The article contains a lot of overoptimism and false hope. The anti-CO2 proponents have to do that, particularly at this precarious time. But there are cracks in the narrative, as the above quotations show.
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