WILL WE EVER HAVE A VIABLE BATTERY-POWERED AIRPLANE?

This article seems to suggest not in the near future. At present it seems to be more like a pipe-dream.

Full link (as blogger still not working) : https://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2020/05/30/bbc-puff-for-duracell-airplanes/

FORECAST MODELS ENCOUNTER REALITY

This article explains very clearly the limitations of computer models, particularly in connection with coronavirus, but the same things apply to any other use, including climate. 

Here is the link in full, as for some reason blogger does not seem to be working: https://wattsupwiththat.com/2020/05/29/forecast-models-encounter-reality/ 

MORE PSEUDO-SCIENCE SCARE-MONGERING OVER SEA LEVEL RISE

Notice that this is based on a survey. Surveys are not the way science should be done.

Most Sea Level Modellers Model Catastrophes, Expert Survey Reveals
AZO Clean Tech News, 26 May 2020
 
According to the predictions of a new international study headed by the Nanyang Technological University (NTU), Singapore, the faster melting of polar ice sheets than projected earlier may lead to a nearly 1.3 m rise in the ocean levels by 2100.



Icebergs in Ilulissat Icefjord, Greenland. The melting of the ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica can have a devastating impact on the world. Image Credit: Copyright—Mark Garten/UN Photo.
 
The new study was published recently in Climate and Atmospheric Science and predicts sea-level rise considerably higher than those projected by the UN’s International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its 2014 Fifth Assessment Report, and also in a special report on oceans and the cryosphere published in September 2019.

 The researchers used a survey of opinions offered by 106 experts to estimate global mean sea-level variations under low- and high-emission conditions. Answers to open-ended questions in the survey imply that elevations in upper-end estimates emerged from the latest influential studies on the effect of the instability of marine ice-cliff on meltwater contribution to global mean sea-level rise.
 
According to Benjamin Horton, acting chair of NTU’s Asian School of the Environment and lead author of the study, under a high-emission condition, with a warming of 4.5 °C, the study predicts an increase of up to 1.3 m by 2100 and up to 5.6 m by 2300.

CLIMATE REMAINS REMARKABLY STABLE SAYS NEW REPORT

This piece refers to a new booklet by the GWPF showing how the climate is not in a crisis but in fact appears remarkably stable. No doubt these facts will not be widely reported as they are far too reassuring.

FREEDOM OF SPEECH ON CLIMATE CURTAILED IN GERMANY

This article raises some very worrying issues concerning freedom of speech in Germany on the climate issue. Let us hope that this does not spread to the UK.

NOTES ON SEA LEVEL AND CORAL ISLANDS

The following is a comment by Jonathan Scott on Not A Lot of People Know That. I thought it was so interesting that it deserved a wider airing.

Sea level is relative. Relative Sea Level is referenced by a position on land. Now the sea level indeed can and does rise AND fall but so does the land. Sea level rise and fall is eustasy and land rise and fall is isostasy. The Upper Crust of the Earth floats on a more plastic Lower Crust and Mantle. Push it down in one place and for equilibrium it will rise in another. 

All very simple and logical. The UK for example is rebounding from the ice sheet which covered a large proportion of the land mass during the first part of the current Ice Age and pushed the land in the North down. The net rebound effect today is that Scotland is rising and the South of England sinking, nothing at all to do with NET sea level rise due to increased volume of water. 

A second land movement is caused by tectonics, usually when there is an interaction at the margins of two continental tectonic plates.. 

Next comes sediment behaviour on coastal planes. A river is really an emulsion of sediment suspended in water and when the sediment is deposited finally it contains a lot of water and that water wants to get out. Where rivers meet the sea the velocity suddenly is reduced because the river collides with the sea dropping its sediment load usually to form Deltas. 

Deltas are another thing which subside all on their own. With a little help from humans they can and do subside substantially faster! . Deltas prograde out into the ocean, get slope failure and also dewater so they subside. Put some humans running around on top and sinking water wells and guess what happens, the sediments dewater all the more quickly. (The political scientists of the BBC does try it on every 6 months or so to blame the high rate at which the Mekong delta is sinking incredibly on sea level rise alone!) 

If you do not have a grasp of the relative influence of eustasy, isostasy tectonics and sediment type and consolidation processes at the coast you cannot possibly predict forward how relative sea level will behave.

So now onto the climate poster boys, those sinking Pacific atols. These are the emotional symbols of Western man’s wickedness falsely touted by wicked people among the plethora of hand wringing activist groups. 

However, there is a lot more going on than you will ever hear from the wailing political scientists, profiteers and their chums spreading the media message, Atolls are extinct volcanoes. They form on basaltic oceanic crust over a hot spot in the Earth’s mantle. Heat causes the crust to rise and like a teenage pimple the volcano erupts and as a consequence builds up and up, in some cases forming an island. 

Now! The oceanic plates are not stationary. Some move faster than others. So the volcano is not stationary but moves relative to the hotspot. Once the volcano has moved off the hotspot three things happen, Firstly, the volcano stops erupting, secondly it begins to sink because the heat source under it is no longer there and third it begins to erode or should I say new eruptions no longer keep pace with erosion.

 In time a combination of sinking and erosion takes it down to sea level. Corals can form only in relatively shallow water. While there is an volcano with steep sides, any reefs will be small and constantly destroyed. Only when the top of the volcano is eroded away does sufficient area within the correct depth(and energy ) range permit a decent rim of coral to form.

Next comes the problem. The coral grows up towards the sunlight at a maximum rate per species controlled by several factors ( water temperature salinity, nutrients etc). Sea level is not a constant but varies up and down. The live coral wants to be as close to sea level as possible because it needs sunlight so very often it gets exposed sub-aerially and wonder of wonders bleaching occurs. 

The fact we have coral islands shows that in the recent past sea level was much higher. So back to what the atoll is doing. The atoll may sink at a similar rate to coral growth or the coral grows faster than the atoll sinks but inevitably the coral will lose the race and inevitably the island disappears below the waves. 

Not all rates of sinking atolls are the same and in some instances TODAY quite a number of islands made from coral are actually growing. As for the sinking or drowned atoll, after some time it can the be called a guyot. These can be found often hundreds of metres below sea level often with fossilised coral reefs attached to them. 

The hotspots do not emit lava constantly but like everything else in the universe they are pulsed. Because of this and because of the plate movements a volcanic island chain is formed which allows the casual observer to track the movement of the tectonic plate. 

The Hawaiian island chain is one example of a long lived hot spot at work. There are also isolated volcanic islands which are not part of a chain but represent individual short lived Mantle plumes.

So given that atolls are what they are, a complex combination of extinct sinking and eroding volcano and different coral species growing at different rates in different geographical locations on top of them, how on earth can they be used as a poster boy for NET sea level rise especially when real empirical data shows some of those poster children actually growing, except by people who will happily and wilfully deceive for profit or for power, or for both.

GOVERNMENT WINS COURT CASE AGAINST GREEN ACTIVISTS

This article explains the details. The government agreed to a new gas-fired power station, despite the Planning Inspectorate recommending it be refused on the grounds that it was against the climate change act. What has this got to do with the Planning Inspectorate I hear you ask. Exactly!

LIES AND THE WORLD HEALTH ORGANISATION

Like many other large organisations the WHO is obsessed with climate change while neglecting the real emergencies facing mankind.

Andrew Montford: Climate Change And A Pandemic Of Lies
The Conservative Woman, 18 May 2020
 
The health establishment was looking away when the coronavirus struck; it had other priorities.


 
If you look at the World Health Organisation’s list of health threats, number one is climate change. Pandemics were down in third place, behind ‘non-communicable diseases’ such as diabetes and obesity.
 
Wherever you look, you will find some of the biggest names in the public health establishment declaiming on the risks of climate change to world health. On the eve of the outbreak, the Royal Society of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene declared that we would be seeing ‘mass migration, emerging infectious diseases such as dengue and a shortage of food’. As the first people fell ill in Wuhan, the WHO announced that in ten years we would be seeing 250,000 additional deaths per year from malnutrition, malaria, diarrhoea and heat stress as a result of global warming. Epidemiologist Professor Andy Haines told readers of the Telegraph that ‘climate change is a threat to global and national security that is costing lives and livelihoods right now’.

Haines has made a career out of promoting the idea that global warming is going to bring about a public health disaster. As part of this effort, he was instrumental in setting up the Lancet Countdown, a coalition of 35 universities and UN agencies that produces a report to keep these ideas in the public eye.  In 2018 it said unequivocally that climate change ‘the biggest global health threat of the 21st century’. In current circumstances, this claim looks rather foolish, but a new forensic review of the Countdown suggests that it is actually worse than that. You cannot come away from reading Indur Goklany’s The Lancet Countdown on Climate Change: The need for context, published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, without concluding that the Countdown’s authors didn’t set out to tell the whole story. 
 
For example, Goklany observes that the Countdown’s Executive Summary makes a lot of vague insinuations that climate is causing serious public health problems. It says there are ‘downward trends in global yield potential for all major crops’ and that ‘trends in climate suitability for disease transmission are particularly concerning’. Apparently ‘the number of days suitable for Vibrio (a pathogen responsible for part of the burden of diarrhoeal disease) has doubled’ and ‘families and livelihoods are put at risk from increases in the frequency and severity of extreme weather conditions’. If that weren’t bad enough, ‘77 per cent of countries experienced an increase in daily population exposure to wildfires’.

But when you look at the dataset used by the Countdown, you uncover a very different story, and one that is unequivocal: climate-related mortality has collapsed, and is now less than half the level it was in 1990, when the dataset starts. This is nothing less than a public-health triumph.

The improvement is seen pretty much across the board, but diseases of the gut (‘enteric infections’ in the jargon) are a good example. The data shows that mortality from these conditions has more than halved over the last 30 years. But the only mention in the Countdown’s executive summary is that dark warning about the ‘number of days suitable for Vibrio’ noted above.

And what do they mean by ‘number of days suitable for’ anyway? This is a trick that is employed repeatedly in the report, namely the use of ‘proxy’ measures, when perfectly good real measures are available. So when considering hunger, the Countdown ignores crop yields, preferring to talk about falls in ‘global yield potential’. In other words, we are being told a tale about what a mathematical model tells us about food availability. But why would anyone use a mathematical model when there is hard real-world data available? Suffice it to say that food is plentiful, yields continue to rise, and hunger is almost a thing of the past outside war zones and egalitarian paradises such as North Korea and Venezuela.

We are not just winning the battle against enteric diseases and hunger. Another good example is tropical diseases, where mortality has fallen dramatically too. So once again, the Countdown resorts to a proxy measure, ‘suitability for disease transmission’, as well as adopting a Nelsonian focus on dengue, a relatively rare disease which has worsened. The executive summary fails to mention malaria at all, despite the fact that it is a much bigger killer than dengue, and despite the fact this is another healthcare war we are winning, with mortality down between 30 per cent and 67 per cent in various regions of sub-Saharan Africa.

It’s a sorry tale, and an indication of how far the vast sums of money that are available for climate change research are distorting public health research priorities, just as they are in so many fields. As we look at the destruction wrought by the pandemic, it’s hard not to wonder if people in the field should have spent less time poring over dubious unvalidated mathematical models about the spread of malaria and more about whether we had the wherewithal to respond to a major pandemic.

ECONOMIC SLOWDOWN NOT NOTICED ON ATMOSPHERIC CO2 LEVELS

Not Even The Global Covid-19 Disaster  Will Make A Big Difference To  Atmospheric  CO2 Levels Roy Spencer, 15 May 2020 Why the current economic slowdown  won’t show up in the atmospheric CO2  record Summary: Atmospheric levels of carbon  dioxide  (CO2) continue to increase with no  sign of the  global economic slowdown in  response to the spread of COVID-19. This is  because the estimated reductions in CO2  emissions (around -11% globally  during 2020) is too small a reduction to be noticed  against  a background of large natural variability.  The reduction in economic activity would have to be  4 times larger than 11% to halt the rise in atmospheric  CO2. Changes in the atmospheric reservoir of CO2 occur  when there is an imbalance between surface sources and sinks of CO2. While the global land and ocean areas  emit approximately 30 times as much CO2 into the atmosphere as humans produce from burning of fossil  fuels, they also absorb about an equal amount of CO2.  This is the global carbon cycle, driven mostly by biological activity. There are variations in the natural carbon cycle, such as  during El Nino (more CO2 accumulation in the  atmosphere) and La Nina (more CO2 removed from the atmosphere). Greater wildfire activity releases more CO2, while major volcanic eruptions (paradoxically) lead to greater  photosynthesis from more diffuse sunlight and  extra removal of CO2 from the air. The most dramatic variations are seasonal, as the land- dominated Northern Hemisphere experiences an annual cycle of vegetation growth (CO2 removal) and decay (CO2 release). The increase in atmospheric CO2 observed since the 1950s  is most likely dominated by anthro- pogenic CO2 emissions,  which are twice as large as that needed to explain the observed rise. As I have shown before, a simple CO2 budget model driven by (1) estimates of global yearly anthro- pogenic CO2 emissions, (2) El Nino and La Nina activity, and (3) a CO2 removal rate that is proportional to how much “extra” CO2 is in the atmosphere compared to a “preferred baseline”  CO2 level, yields an excellent fit to yearly CO2 observations at Mauna Loa, Hawaii. Fig. 1. Yearly Mauna Loa, HI CO2 observations since 1959  (red) versus a simple CO2 budget model (blue). But those are yearly measurements, and we are now  interested in whether the recent global economic  slowdown is showing up in the monthly Mauna Loa CO2  data. If we remove the large seasonal  variations (driven by the seasonal growth and decay of Northern Hemisphere vegetation), we see no evidence of the economic slowdown through April, 2020. Fig. 2. Monthly CO2 data since 2015 from Mauna Loa, HI after the average seasonal cycle is statistically removed. As can be seen in Fig. 2, there are some pretty large month -to-month jumps and dips around the long-term increase (represented by the dotted line). These are probably natural variations due to fluctuations in the average seasonal variations in vegetation growth and decay, wildfire activity, and El Nino and La Nina activity (which are imperfectly  removed in the solid blue line in Fig. 2). Variations in economic activity might also be involved in these fluctuations. The point is that given the large month-to-month variations in natural CO2 sources and sinks seen in Fig. 2, it would be difficult to see a downturn in the anthropogenic source of CO2 unless it was very large (say, over 50%) and prolonged (say over a year or longer). Instead, the U.S. Energy Information Administration (EIA) estimates that the global economic slowdown this year  due to the spread of the novel coronavirus will amount to only about an 11% reduction in global CO2 emissions. This is simply too small of a decrease in CO2 emissions to show up against a background of considerable monthly and yearly natural variability in the atmospheric CO2 budget. Full post & comments

STOP SCARING YOUNG CHILDREN BY USING CLIMATE HYSTERIA - NEW GWPF VIDEO

London, 21 May: The Global Warming Policy Forum (GWPF) has called on responsible educators and journalists to stop terrifying children with exaggerated claims and worst-case predictions about the impact of global warming.

As part of Mental Health Awareness Week, the GWPF has released a short video today to raise awareness of the growing mental health crisis among young children as a result of irresponsible climate scare-mongering.

According to a recent UK survey, 20% of British children are suffering from nightmares about global warming. One of the main reasons for this deplorable development are scare tactics adopted by green campaigners, educators, commentators and broadcasters to exaggerate the impact of global warming by emphasising worst-case catastrophising.
Relentless attempts to link every extreme weather event to climate change, and dire warnings about looming mass extinctions and the end of civilisation are highly contentious but are presented to even very young children as facts.

In their enthusiasm to advance their political agenda, green campaigners have deliberately and cynically used children's fears as a political weapon that has been turned against them and their well-being.

"Anyone who cares about the mental health of children should demand that they are protected from apocalyptic doom-mongers and their political agenda," GWPF Director Benny Peiser said. 

PETITION FOR UK RESIDENTS TO ASK GOVERNMENT TO SCRAP NET ZERO CO2 POLICY

This new petition calls for a referendum on the UK government's policy to reduce CO2 emissions to net zero by 2050. Please sign up and pass the message on. 

This link does not seem to work so here it is in full:
https://petition.parliament.uk/petitions/300316 

HOW THE GOVERNMENT LOST THE PLOT ON COVID-19 - JUST LIKE CLIMATE CHANGE

The following article is a slightly précised version of an article by Lord Sumption, a former High Court judge in the Sunday Times on 17 May 2020. I found it a very compelling piece and its conclusions can be applied widely, including to climate change.

The lesson of Covid-19 is brutally simple and applies generally to public regulation. Free people make mistakes and willingly take risks. If we hold politicians responsible for everything that goes wrong, they will take away our liberty so that nothing can go wrong. They will do this not for our protection against risk, but for their own protection against criticism.

The lockdown was originally justified as a temporary measure to protect the NHS by spreading infections over a longer period, to allow time for the critical care capacity to catch up. It was never much of a rationale. The NHS is there to protect us not the other way round. 

How could this measure justify depriving the entire UK population of its liberty, pushing us into the worst recession in 3 hundred years, destroying millions of jobs and hundreds of thousands of businesses, piling up private and public debt on a crippling scale and undermining the education of our children?

Since the PM's broadcast last Sunday the lockdown has found a new rationale. The government has dropped "Protect the NHS" from its slogan. The reason is clear from the paper it published the following day. The NHS is not at risk. This is partly because the government has done an outstanding job in increasing intensive care capacity, and partly because the threat to the NHS was always overstated. The critical care capacity of the NHS has nearly doubled since January, even without the 4000 or more additional beds in seven temporary Nightingale hospitals.

Around the top of the spike in infections, on April 10, 41% of NHS general acute beds were empty. Only 51% of these were occupied by a Covid-19 patient. The current figure is 20%. The nightingale hospitals stand empty. These are government figures.

Today the lockdown is only about shielding us from the risk of infection. This raises serious questions about our relationship with the state. It should be our business to say what risks we will take with our own health. The usual answer is that by going out we may infect other people, but that no longer works as an excuse for coercion. Those who want to avoid infection can isolate themselves voluntarily. They will be no worse off than they are under the current compulsory regime.

We now know that Covid-19 is likely to be with us long term, so unless it plans to keep the lockdown permanently, it is only putting off the moment when we have to face the risk anyway. The PM told the House of Commons on Monday that his new plan was workable because the British would use their common sense. So why not allow them to do so by leaving the decisions to them?

Instead we are resorting to law, which because it requires exact definition, will always cover many things that are perfectly harmless. Thus it was ok to go for a walk in the park, but not to sunbathe. It is ok to drive to the Lake District, but not to visit your second home. It is ok to meet one person, but not two. This kind of thing is arbitrary and absurd. It discredits the law as well as those who make it.

So how has the government ended up in this unsustainable position? The answer is that having originally embarked on a sensible policy that would have avoided a lockdown, it did a U-turn on the afternoon of March 23, without thinking of the wider implications. It was in a blind panic provoked by Professor Neil Ferguson's "reasonable worst case" of 510,000 deaths. Quite apart from the fact that a worst case is by definition an unlikely one, few scientists now support this figure.

The government terrified people into submission by giving the impression that Covid-19 was dangerous for everyone. It is not. In the vast majority of cases it attacks people with serious vulnerabilities. By most estimates, between 0.5% and 0.75% of infected persons die. Of those, 87% are over 65 and at least 90% have multiple causes only one of which is Covid-19, according to the Office for National Statistics. The death rate for those under 50 is tiny. For the overwhelming majority the symptoms are mild, yet Matt Hancock inferred that by going we could die in the high point of government hype.

Lockdown is now all about protecting timid politicians backs, terrified of being blamed for deaths on their watch, but it is a wicked thing they are doing.

My thought is that there a number of parallels here with climate change. We have government that has made fantastic claims of the risk of climate change based on extreme results from computer models, and in doing so has penned itself into a corner with a hugely expensive policy of decarbonisation. They are now having to agree with the most extreme climate groups such as Extinction Rebellion. The only way out would be to admit they were wrong, something that governments never do voluntarily.  

       

GREEN MOVEMENT'S ROTTEN CORE EXPOSED IN NEW VIDEO

•

The Tesla battery alone weighs 800kg—that’s nearly a ton—equivalent to ten

passengers (an average petrol engine + fuel weighs about 140kg).

•

Every  servicing  garage  will  be  compelled  to  buy  a  completely  new  suite  of

tools, lifts, ramps etc. under electrical safety regulations for EVs.

•  Death from exposure. In winter, travelling, say, over the Yorkshire moors in a

blizzard  at  night,  you  are  likely  to  die.  The  car  ‘dies’,  as  battery  power  drops

due to the cold. There is now no heating. You freeze inside, you freeze outside

trying to find help. Petrol and diesel cars do not have this problem.

7

•

As  most  of  the  numpties,  who  think  electric  cars  are  viable,  live  in  towns  the

above  point  doubtless  passes  them  by,  but  the  huge  potential  for  traffic

clogging  due  to  ‘dead’  electric  vehicles  has  not  been  considered

8

,  nor  has  the

issue  of  time  to  recharge.  Currently  an  average  petrol  car  takes  about  five

minutes  to  fill  up  with  petrol,  pay  and  depart.  If  an  electric  car  takes  a

minimum  of  75  minutes  to  recharge  (five 

hours

  is  more  likely),  either  the

queues  are  going  to  be  astronomical

9

  and  the  time  wasted  ditto  (

see  also  note

4.

)  or  there  will  need  to  be  nearly 

five  million

  charge  points  installed  at  an

estimated roll out cost of £20 billion.

The  BBC  took  an  electric  car  from  London  to  Edinburgh.  It  took  three

days, slower than a stagecoach. People sometimes need to get to places quickly!

In case anyone thinks that there is a miracle battery just over the horizon,

•

The Tesla battery alone weighs 800kg—that’s nearly a ton—equivalent to ten

passengers (an average petrol engine + fuel weighs about 140kg).

•

Every  servicing  garage  will  be  compelled  to  buy  a  completely  new  suite  of

tools, lifts, ramps etc. under electrical safety regulations for EVs.

•  Death from exposure. In winter, travelling, say, over the Yorkshire moors in a

blizzard  at  night,  you  are  likely  to  die.  The  car  ‘dies’,  as  battery  power  drops

due to the cold. There is now no heating. You freeze inside, you freeze outside

trying to find help. Petrol and diesel cars do not have this problem.

7

•

As  most  of  the  numpties,  who  think  electric  cars  are  viable,  live  in  towns  the

above  point  doubtless  passes  them  by,  but  the  huge  potential  for  traffic

clogging  due  to  ‘dead’  electric  vehicles  has  not  been  considered

8

,  nor  has  the

issue  of  time  to  recharge.  Currently  an  average  petrol  car  takes  about  five

minutes  to  fill  up  with  petrol,  pay  and  depart.  If  an  electric  car  takes  a

minimum  of  75  minutes  to  recharge  (five 

hours

  is  more  likely),  either  the

queues  are  going  to  be  astronomical

9

  and  the  time  wasted  ditto  (

see  also  note

4.

)  or  there  will  need  to  be  nearly 

five  million

  charge  points  installed  at  an

estimated roll out cost of £20 billion.

The  BBC  took  an  electric  car  from  London  to  Edinburgh.  It  took  three

days, slower than a stagecoach. People sometimes need to get to places quickly!

In case anyone thinks that there is a miracle battery just over the horizon,

•

The Tesla battery alone weighs 800kg—that’s nearly a ton—equivalent to ten

passengers (an average petrol engine + fuel weighs about 140kg).

•

Every  servicing  garage  will  be  compelled  to  buy  a  completely  new  suite  of

tools, lifts, ramps etc. under electrical safety regulations for EVs.

•  Death from exposure. In winter, travelling, say, over the Yorkshire moors in a

blizzard  at  night,  you  are  likely  to  die.  The  car  ‘dies’,  as  battery  power  drops

due to the cold. There is now no heating. You freeze inside, you freeze outside

trying to find help. Petrol and diesel cars do not have this problem.

7

•

As  most  of  the  numpties,  who  think  electric  cars  are  viable,  live  in  towns  the

above  point  doubtless  passes  them  by,  but  the  huge  potential  for  traffic

clogging  due  to  ‘dead’  electric  vehicles  has  not  been  considered

8

,  nor  has  the

issue  of  time  to  recharge.  Currently  an  average  petrol  car  takes  about  five

minutes  to  fill  up  with  petrol,  pay  and  depart.  If  an  electric  car  takes  a

minimum  of  75  minutes  to  recharge  (five 

hours

  is  more  likely),  either  the

queues  are  going  to  be  astronomical

9

  and  the  time  wasted  ditto  (

see  also  note

4.

)  or  there  will  need  to  be  nearly 

five  million

  charge  points  installed  at  an

estimated roll out cost of £20 billion.

The  BBC  took  an  electric  car  from  London  to  Edinburgh.  It  took  three

days, slower than a stagecoach. People sometimes need to get to places quickly!

In case anyone thinks that there is a miracle battery just over the horizon,

•

The Tesla battery alone weighs 800kg—that’s nearly a ton—equivalent to ten

passengers (an average petrol engine + fuel weighs about 140kg).

•

Every  servicing  garage  will  be  compelled  to  buy  a  completely  new  suite  of

tools, lifts, ramps etc. under electrical safety regulations for EVs.

•  Death from exposure. In winter, travelling, say, over the Yorkshire moors in a

blizzard  at  night,  you  are  likely  to  die.  The  car  ‘dies’,  as  battery  power  drops

due to the cold. There is now no heating. You freeze inside, you freeze outside

trying to find help. Petrol and diesel cars do not have this problem.

7

•

As  most  of  the  numpties,  who  think  electric  cars  are  viable,  live  in  towns  the

above  point  doubtless  passes  them  by,  but  the  huge  potential  for  traffic

clogging  due  to  ‘dead’  electric  vehicles  has  not  been  considered

8

,  nor  has  the

issue  of  time  to  recharge.  Currently  an  average  petrol  car  takes  about  five

minutes  to  fill  up  with  petrol,  pay  and  depart.  If  an  electric  car  takes  a

minimum  of  75  minutes  to  recharge  (five 

hours

  is  more  likely),  either  the

queues  are  going  to  be  astronomical

9

  and  the  time  wasted  ditto  (

see  also  note

4.

)  or  there  will  need  to  be  nearly 

five  million

  charge  points  installed  at  an

estimated roll out cost of £20 billion.

The  BBC  took  an  electric  car  from  London  to  Edinburgh.  It  took  three

days, slower than a stagecoach. People sometimes need to get to places quickly!

In case anyone thinks that there is a miracle battery just over the horizon,

Here is an excellent short video which highlights the contradiction at the heart of the green movement, namely that it is funded by the very people that it opposes - the billionaires who run the major banks and fossil fuel companies.