HEATING TAX ON GAS WOULD SPELL DISASTER

 London, 30 September - Boris Johnson has been warned that the government's proposed tax on home heating would almost certainly trigger a social and political disaster.

Press reports today confirm rumours in circulation for some weeks that the government is proposing to tax home heating with natural gas to support the cost of Net Zero.

This move would switch a large part of the still rising £10 billion a year subsidy cost of green electricity on to domestic natural gas supplies, which is the source of warmth for over 90% of the UK’s 26 million households.

Government is also said to be considering burdening gas consumers with other green levy costs, for example to support the use of hydrogen and electric vehicles. This comes on top of already rising gas prices.

The government expects that this huge tax burden will force households to switch to air source and ground source heat pumps, which are extremely expensive to install and likely to be ineffective in most older houses.

Dr John Constable, the GWPF energy editor, said:

“The proposed Net Zero gas tax is one of the worst energy policy ideas to come out of the government in the last decade - and it has a lot competition. Loading the Net Zero costs on to home heating would cause a dramatic increase fuel poverty and  deep and justified political resentment.

"Public trust in government competence, particularly on energy, is at an all-time low. This foolish proposal confirms those doubts. The Prime Minister needs to get a grip.”

Contact

Dr John Constable
e: john.constable@thegwpf.com 

IPCC CLIMATE CHANGE REPORT SAYS THINGS ARE BETTER THAN IN THE LAST REPORT

 Yes, unbelievably that is the finding from the new report if you read right through the hundreds of pages, according to this piece:  

Holman Jenkins Jr: The media can’t handle the climate truth (thegwpf.com)

Of course the media don't want to highlight this good news and neither do the government who are desperately trying to sell their very expensive climate change policy. The only bit that ever gets reported is the Summary for Policy Makers, which is agreed line by line by politicians. 

Here are some key findings:

The dire emissions scenario it promoted for two decades should be regarded as highly unlikely, with more plausible projections at least a third lower.

 The best estimate of the “transient climate response” this century is about 2.7 degrees. This is for a doubling of CO2, which would be from the level at 1850 of 280ppm up to 560ppm. 

UK PARLIAMENT MISLED BY THEIR OWN COMMITTEE ON THE COST OF NET ZERO

Read the report at this link:

Climate Change Committee misled Parliament about the cost of Net Zero - The Global Warming Policy Forum (thegwpf.com)

It is surely clear by now that this whole net zero policy is already causing large cost rises for the public and this is set to continue for the foreseeable future. Once the people realise this there will be a backlash against the government who will have to u-turn or get a hiding at the next election.

CHINA'S MASSIVE COAL USE HIGHLIGHTED IN THE MAIL

 Read this: China's dirtiest secret: 1,000 coal-fired power stations and climbing | Daily Mail Online

Now explain how the UK can make any meaningful difference to the world's output of CO2 let alone any effect on the climate. 

This double page spread (and then on to the following page) in our best selling daily paper is just the first in a series of articles that should make a lot of people think about why the UK and other Western governments are dead set on making us all poorer and desperately trying to convince us that it will make a difference. Read this small exerpt:

Far from carbon emissions slowing down in China, they are increasing ever more rapidly.

This is a country with a mind-boggling pace of development. Between 2011 and 2013, China used more cement than the U.S. did in the entire 20th century. It produces almost 60 per cent of the world’s steel and its oil refinery capacity has tripled since 2000.

Even though it promised last week to stop building coal power stations abroad, China continues to do just that at home. Last year, its coal-powered capacity rose by 38 gigawatts, while the rest of the world cut capacity by 17 gigawatts.

China has a further 105 gigawatts of new coal capacity in the construction pipeline — more than the entire generating capacity of the UK from all sources, including nuclear and renewables.

Last month, the Workers’ Daily reported that in coal-rich Inner Mongolia, 38 mothballed coal mines have been reopened, with an annual production of 60 million tonnes. Last year, Inner Mongolia dug up more than a billion tonnes of coal — and this did not even make it China’s biggest coal province: that honour belonged to Shanxi.

"While China obfuscates, we in Britain are cutting carbon emissions to the bone, inflicting deep harm on our economy. 

The dizzying rise in household bills, and the bankruptcy of so many gas companies, is part of the price we are paying for giving up coal in our rush towards green energy. 

As this newspaper reported last month, while we do our bit to slow climate change, it is estimated the cost of our transition to Net Zero will run into trillions of pounds.

"Yet even though Britain accounts for less than 1 per cent of global emissions — one 28th as much as China — we still treat the regime with kid gloves, arguing that China deserves leeway because it is still a ‘developing’ country.

Even the eco-protesters blocking our motorways pay no attention to the fact China is pumping out pollution on an unprecedented scale. 

Last week, when a BBC reporter asked the group that spawned them, Extinction Rebellion, why they were not demonstrating outside the Chinese embassy, he was accused of ‘perpetuating anti-Chinese racist stereotypes’."

UK NEEDS TO U-TURN AND GET FRACKING

 Rob Lyon: Fracking could have saved us from this energy crisis

Spiked, 23 September 2021
 
The UK has vast gas reserves that Boris Johnson is refusing to exploit.

Rising prices and dwindling supplies of natural gas have sparked fears of an energy crisis. Energy bills are shooting upwards. The government is even having to step in to support the production of fertiliser – and its vital byproduct, carbon dioxide – which relies on affordable gas supplies. If only the UK had a bountiful supply of natural gas of its own…. Well, it does – but thanks to eco-warriors and spineless ministers, we’re not exploiting it.

For decades, thanks to the rich gas fields of the North Sea, the UK was self-sufficient in natural gas. But supplies have been in decline for years, down from 107.8 billion cubic metres (bcm) in 2003 to just 39.6 bcm in 2019. Now just 48 per cent of UK gas comes from the UK continental shelf, according to the government. In 2018, 72 per cent of our imports came through pipelines from Norway. Gas prices in the UK are also influenced by happenings in the wider world market, particularly the market for liquefied natural gas from Qatar and Russia.
 
Offshore gas supplies may have declined. But we could increase domestic gas production markedly if we would only take advantage of our vast, onshore shale-gas deposits. According to the Grantham Institute at the London School of Economics, estimates of UK shale-gas reserves range from 2.8 to 39.9 trillion cubic metres (tcm). In 2013, then prime minister David Cameron said that if just 10 per cent of known reserves could be extracted, it would provide the equivalent of the UK’s total gas needs for 51 years. The way to extract this gas is to replicate what the US has successfully done, by combining horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing – aka, fracking.

The trouble is that there has been a moratorium on fracking in England since November 2019 because of worries about earth tremors. Concerns intensified after a tremor in Lancashire measured 2.9 on the Richter scale. This ‘quake’, as the Guardian hyperbolically referred to it, could be felt in neighbouring towns.

What terrible catastrophe resulted? One resident of nearby Lytham St Annes, quoted by the Guardian, said there was a ‘very loud rumbling’, the ‘whole house shook’ and a ‘picture fell off a shelf’. It was ‘quite scary’, apparently. In the history of seismic events, this registered low on the Does Anybody Really Care scale.
 
As Cuadrilla, the company which ran the fracking site, pointed out, the rumble caused only a third of the ground motion that is allowed by law for construction projects. A report commissioned by the government, published in December 2020, suggested that a tremor of similar magnitude to that in Lancashire ‘may cause sparse cases of low superficial damage’.

In other words, a potentially important industry – one that might have even saved us from the current gas crisis – has been banned for relatively trivial reasons. To get things into perspective, one study found that 25 per cent of the earthquakes in the UK during the 1980s and 1990s were caused by mining. Yet the risk of tremors was never a serious consideration in determining whether mining should be allowed – and these quakes certainly didn’t inspire the kind of panic-mongering that fracking has.

Let’s be honest. The eco-protesters who have made fracking difficult in the UK are not really concerned about such minor subterranean movements. What they really want to do is to stop companies from extracting and burning fossil fuels. They will exploit any issue to scare people into rejecting gas production. And the UK government, obsessed with cutting greenhouse-gas emissions and fearful of localised protests, has bowed down to them.

Instead of being fairly self-sufficient in gas – with the lucrative possibilities of exporting our surplus, too – we have become dependent on imported sources of energy. Many commentators have been raising the alarm about this situation for years. Now we are facing big rises in energy bills both for households and for industry. While the business secretary, Kwasi Kwarteng, tweeted that the ‘security’ of our gas supply is ‘not a cause for immediate concern’, there are plenty of people who are far from reassured. A particularly cold winter, a continuing lull in wind generation or some other unforeseen circumstance could put UK energy supplies in real jeopardy.

The government should put energy prices and security at the forefront of its energy policies. Instead, we have made it impossible to make the most of an abundant energy source beneath our feet. The ban on fracking could turn out to be a very expensive mistake this winter.
 

GOVERNMENT INTERFERENCE IN THE ENERGY MARKET HAS CAUSED THE PRESENT CRISIS

 Editorial: How the Tories have fuelled Britain’s energy crisis

The Spectator, 25 September 2021
 
The Prime Minister has high hopes for the COP26 summit but he should be prepared for other countries to see, in his energy policy, an example of what not to do.

Britain is caught in an energy crisis of the government’s own making. It is true that gas prices have spiked all over the world — but Britain is suffering more than most. Energy suppliers are going out of business, thanks to the government’s price cap. Even fertiliser companies are going bust, with serious knock-on effects for the food industry: the British Meat Processors Association says shortages could hit within a fortnight.

The trigger for this crisis has been the sudden surge in demand for gas as the global economy recovers from the Covid lockdowns. Gas prices have doubled in the United States, for example. In Britain, however, prices are five times higher. Why? Because America exploited fracking technology and capitalised on its huge inland gas reserves. Britain passed up the fracking opportunity, in spite of vast reserves found in Lancashire and Yorkshire. We are living with the consequences.

While the UK government is right to phase out the burning of coal (easily the dirtiest form of energy, emitting around twice as much carbon dioxide as gas plants), it is also running down our gas infrastructure without providing a viable alternative. In 2017, the Rough storage facility off the Yorkshire coast, which accounted for two-thirds of our gas capacity, was closed and not replaced.

Every country has gas reserves in the event of widespread shortages. France has 14 weeks’ worth, Germany has eight weeks, Italy has 11 weeks, while Britain has just four days. That is virtually no buffer at all when a supply crisis strikes.

There is plenty that can go wrong with gas: a fire knocked out a major power cable linking Britain with France last week, for example. Britain’s reserve hope now lies in shipments of liquified shale gas produced abroad — supplies of which are currently being diverted to Asia, where demand is strongest.

Renewables can produce impressive quantities of energy. Yet Britain has created a huge wind and solar sector without overcoming the obvious problem: how to store the energy generated on sunny and windy days so it can be used on still and overcast ones. It is unfortunate that the surge in global gas prices has coincided with a period of light winds over Britain, but that should have been anticipated. Many observers outside government saw the problem coming.

Today Britain presents itself as a great example to other nations when it comes to handling energy policy and tackling climate change. Indeed, Boris Johnson has spent this week in New York asking why so few countries have followed Britain in making a legally binding commitment to hit net zero carbon emissions by 2050. The polite answer is that countries also have a duty to secure affordable energy for their citizens. When the COP26 summit convenes in Glasgow in a few weeks’ time, Britain could be in the middle of an energy crisis. The UK government might have to bail out almost-bankrupt fossil-fuel companies in a desperate attempt to keep the lights on. That would hardly be a great advertisement to the world.

For years it has suited ministers to accuse energy companies of overcharging their customers because it has helped divert attention from another reason for rising bills: green energy subsidies and other social levies, which, according to Ofgem, account for 25p in every £1 charged on domestic electricity bills. And as is now clear, with several of the smaller energy companies going bust or on the point of doing so, it has long been a cut-throat market where challenger companies have tried to compete by insuring themselves against price spikes.

Like the banks who lent long and borrowed short, the folly of this has come to a head. But the problem has been hugely exacerbated by the energy price cap which, while popular with the public, has prevented energy companies from raising prices in response to a sharp increase in wholesale prices. The government is doing with failing energy companies what it did with failing banks: bailing them out with taxpayers’ money, thereby ensuring that they will repeat their reckless behaviour.

Much as the government would love to be able to deliver secure energy supplies and low prices in tandem with zero carbon emissions, the technology simply does not yet exist to make it possible. The Tories, ever keen to capture the green zeitgeist, had the chance to establish energy security — or diversity of supply. They did neither, and went all-out for decarbonisation instead. We are now seeing the consequences.

Energy security and economic growth should be the first priorities. As things stand, they are treated as an afterthought. We have caught a glimpse of the results this week. The Prime Minister has high hopes for the COP26 summit but he should be prepared for other countries to see, in his energy policy, an example of what not to do.
 
 

FRIGID WINTER NIGHTMARE FOR ENERGY PRICES

  Citi isn’t ruling out natural gas at $100 in a frigid winter

Bloomberg, 23 September 2021
 
Citigroup Inc. more than doubled its Asian and European natural gas forecasts for next quarter and said prices could surge to as high as $100 per million British thermal units in the event of a particularly cold winter.

Liquefied natural gas prices are skyrocketing as seasonally low European inventories, booming Chinese demand and supply constraints from Russia to Nigeria lead to a bidding war for the power generation feedstock before the northern hemisphere winter. Japan-Korea marker prices have jumped almost 50% so far this month to near $30 per mmBtu, while in Europe LNG is up around 40% to close to $25. Price gains in the U.S. have been more subdued.

Average prices next quarter will be moderately higher than current levels in Citi’s base case, the bank said in the note. However, there are likely to be price spikes and if unusually cold weather boosts demand and hurricanes in the U.S. Gulf of Mexico disrupt supplies, cargoes could trade in the $100 per mmBtu range, or $580 a barrel in oil-equivalent terms, it said.

Full story

ARCTIC SEA ICE DECLINE EXAGGERATED

Any day now the Arctic sea-ice will cease melting and start to refreeze as the brief boreal summer draws to a close. It’s been a cool and stormy summer in those parts and this year’s sea-ice minimum will be one of the highest of the past decade at around 4.73 million sq km which is greater than in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2012, 2011, 2008 and 2007.

Putting the Arctic sea-ice variability into a longer perspective few realise that during the early 20th century the Arctic experienced a period of remarkable warming which is not well understood. Aizawa et al reporting in Geophysical Research Letters use what they call a “state-of-the-art” climate model that appears to successfully reproduce the warming event using internal climate variability and the influences of the Sun and volcanoes, in doing so it casts light on the balance of the effects on the region today.

Looking on the longer term Helama et al in Climate Dynamics 2021 note that Holocene climate variability is punctuated by episodic climatic events such as the Little Ice Age (LIA) predating the industrial-era warming. Their dates and causes are controversial. Even more crucially they add, it is uncertain whether earlier events represent climatic regimes similar to the LIA. So they analyse a new 7500-year long palaeoclimate record tailored to detect LIA-like climatic regimes from northern European tree-ring data.

As well as the actual 17th Century LIA, they found many 100–800 year periods with cold temperatures combined with clear sky conditions from 540 CE, 1670 BCE, 3240 BCE and 5450 BCE onwards. In total these LIA-like regimes covered 20% of the study period. They notes that the ongoing decline in Arctic sea-ice extent is mirrored in their data which shows reversal of LIA-like conditions since the late nineteenth century.

So in a real sense the Arctic sea-ice extent is an emblem of climate change and the various forces contributing to it. Today, as the well-defined ice edge that stretches along most of the Russian side of the Arctic Ocean starts to freeze, the only certain thing is the oncoming cold and dark.

Feedback: David.Whitehouse@thegwpf.com

TIME TO DECLARE AN "ENERGY EMERGENCY"

 This is what is more like an emergency:

Power mad: This devastating audit lays bare the costly errors  | Daily Mail Online

An emergency is something which is about to cause devastation in the immediate future, not in hundreds of years time.

MEDIEVAL WARM PERIOD ERASED BY IPCC NEW REPORT

 

IPCC 6th Climate Report: Who Deleted The Medieval Warm Period? Tracks Lead To University Of Bern

2 weeks ago

 

Guest Blogger

 

153 Comments

From the NoTricksZone

By P Gosselin on 2. September 2021

Science scandal: What follows is an excellent overview of how the Medieval Warm Period was once again disappeared from the latest IPCC climate report.

===========================================

Who Erased The Medieval Warm Period?

Written by: a Die kalte Sonne scientist/IPCC 6th report reviewer
(Translation, edited and subheadings by P. Gosselin and slightly amended by me )

The latest UN report distorts climate history. The tracks lead to Bern, Switzerland.

In the Middle Ages, it was similarly warm in Switzerland and other parts of Central Europe as it is today. The so-called Medieval Warm Period (MWP) is scientifically well documented in the region: Between 800 and 1300 A.D., many Alpine glaciers shrank dramatically and some were even shorter than today. The tree line shifted upward. Permafrost thawed in high alpine regions that are still firmly in the grip of ice today. Warm temperatures are also clearly evidenced by tree rings, pollen, chironomid fossils, and other geological reconstruction methods.

Controversial temperature curve

It was once assumed that the medieval warmth might be a regional, North Atlantic phenomenon. However, it has now been shown clearly that the warm phase also occurred in many other regions of the world, for example, on the Antarctic Peninsula, in the Andes, in North America, in the Arctic, in the Mediterranean, in East Africa, China and New Zealand.

Peer-reviewed: Medieval Warm Period global

Together with professional colleagues, we at Die kalte Sonne have evaluated many hundreds of case studies from around the world in recent years and published the syntheses continent by continent in peer-reviewed journals.

Three of the publications have been cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in its recently published 6th Assessment of the Climate report. The medieval warmth was then followed globally by a precipitous drop in temperature. During the Little Ice Age, 1450-1850, the climate cooled to the coldest temperature level of the entire last ten thousand years. 

Taping the hockey stick back together

In the new IPCC report, you will find it very difficult to find it.  In the summary intended for politicians, a controversial temperature curve is prominently displayed right at the beginning, giving the impression that there were only minimal pre-industrial climate changes in the last two millennia.  With the onset of industrialization around 1850, the curve then rockets upward by more than one degree. This mode of representation is also known as the “hockey stick”: The climatically supposedly uneventful pre-industrial period forms the straight shaft of the stick, and at its end, with rapid modern warming, comes the upward blade of the hockey stick. It is therefore a déjà vu, an unnecessary one. The 3rd Assessment of the Climate Report of 2001 already contained a similar field hockey stick pattern, intended to fool politicians into thinking that today’s warming was unprecedented and therefore entirely man-made.

Recent paleoclimatological research confirms Medieval Warm Period

In the last two decades, however, paleoclimatology has made great progress, and data have been diligently collected. From this, more realistic temperature developments were created, with a pronounced Medieval Warm Period and a later Little Ice Age.

All the more bitter now is the relapse into old hockey stick times. How could this happen? What were possible motivations behind the renewed distortion of climate history?

Why back to the hockey stick? PAGES 2k

The questionable new hockey stick temperature curve comes from the international paleoclimatology group PAGES 2k, whose coordinating office is based at the University of Bern in Switzerland. Climate scientist Thomas Stocker, who has contributed to IPCC reports since 1998, also teaches and conducts research at that university. In 2015, Stocker even ran for the overall IPCC chairmanship, but lost to South Korean Hoesung Lee, who just presented the 6th Working Group 1 report. Stocker co-authored the Summary for Policymakers of the IPCC’s 3rd Assessment of the Climate report in which the hockey stick played a prominent role.

Dissent among the PAGES-2k group

A good twenty years later, the resurfaced field hockey stick now comes from Stocker’s university, where he heads the Department of Climate and Environmental Physics. Just a dumb coincidence? There are many indications that the new climate curve may have been a commissioned paper for the 6th IPCC report. Five of the nineteen authors of the papers on the new hockey stick curve are from Bern.

But a significant portion of the PAGES-2k researchers could not technically support the new hockey-stick version and walked out of the group in dispute.

Proof thanks to tree rings

Meanwhile, these dissenting scientists published a competing temperature curve with clear pre-industrial climate changes. Based on tree rings, the specialists were able to prove that summer temperatures had already reached today’s levels several times in the pre-industrial past. But the work of Ulf Büntgen of the ETH Research Institute WSL and colleagues was not included in the IPCC report, although it was published in time for the editorial deadline. Interestingly, the controversial PAGES-2k curve was already included in the first draft of the 6th climate report, although the associated publication had not even formally appeared yet.

How could this be? In the second draft of the Summary for Policymakers, the curve shrank to postage-stamp size, positioned on the edge of a composite larger figure. This was the last version available for comment by the IPCC reviewers, of which a Die kalte Sonne scientist was one of the reviewers. It was all the more surprising, then, when the field hockey stick image suddenly appeared in full size in the final version.

IPCC conceals PAGES-2k controversy

The IPCC concealed from the public the fact that many experts and reviewers consider the curve to be highly problematic. On the one hand, the new hockey stick contains a whole series of outlier data, the use of which is difficult to justify. For example, PAGES-2k integrates a tree-ring dataset from the French Maritime Alps, even though the creators of the original case study explicitly advise against using it for temperature reconstructions. On the other hand, data are omitted that demonstrate strong pre-industrial natural climate variability. Detailed criticisms of this made in the review process of the report and formally published in publications were ignored by the IPCC authors.

That’s how easy it is to rewrite climate history, and hardly anyone notices. Why is this important? Pre-industrial temperature trends are highly relevant to the attribution of modern climate change to man-made factors on the one hand and natural factors on the other.

Since climate models have assigned only negligible natural climate forcings, they can only generate hockey stick patterns. Any real observed pre-industrial warm or cold phase therefore causes problems for the models because they cannot reproduce it. They are designed not to do so from the outset.

Fatally flawed model calibration

This raises uncomfortable questions about their fitness and usability for projecting the future climate. Ultimately, they are uncalibrated simulations that should not be released for future modeling at all, as long as they are still failing on past climate  In other words, if a climate model provides answers to the question of what the past was like that are miles off reality, forecasting the future is likely to be similarly flawed.

It is particularly peculiar that the climate models of the so-called CMIP6 type that were created specifically for the 6th Climate Report proved to be mostly unusable. Due to cloud modeling errors, they provided temperature histories that were far too hot. Therefore, the IPCC stated that in the current 6th report that it would place more emphasis on the historical temperature development. In its official press releases, the IPCC largely omits these inconvenient issues. And in most media reports, too, the public hears nothing about them.

Political tactics undermining science

Thus, scientific integrity falls by the wayside. It is only a matter of time before critical climate scientists systematically address the inconsistencies in the filtered IPCC 6th climate report. The incident reveals how political tactics are undermining the IPCC’s scientific integrity and further eroding the trust placed in the institution.

===============================================================
Climate researcher Thomas Stocker declined to comment when asked by WELTWOCHE. This article first appeared in WELTWOCHE Zurich: Die Weltwoche, No. 33 (2021)| 19. August 2021. (Subheadings added by NoTricksZone) 

Also see:
– Pages-2k rebuttal
– MWP Map
– 200 Non-Hockey Stick Charts

MY CLIMATE CHANGE POSITION SET OUT IN OUR LOCAL PAPER

 Here is a link to the article which appeared in this week's print edition of the paper:

Senior NFDC Tories at odds over climate change urgency (advertiserandtimes.co.uk)

As you can read, the local Lib Dem opposition are making a fuss about my views, but all they are doing is giving me more coverage which enables me to put my voice of reason to a wider audience. It will be interesting to see what comments (if any) are made by the public. I will keep readers informed of anything that appears.

ANARCTICA STILL COOLING SIGNIFICANTLY

 Read the linked report for the details.

“Surprising” And “Statistically Significant” Cooling Trend Over Entire Continental Antarctica – Watts Up With That?

You probably won't find this information in the summary of the latest IPCC report, or on the main television news. I wonder why?

LETTER TO THE PRESS - CLIMATE EMERGENCY JUST BLUSTER BY THE WEST

 Isn't it odd that the leaders of India and China seem to be so unworried about the so-called climate emergency that Western leaders keep telling us about. While it is true that these countries need to fully develop their electricity supplies it is apparent that they choose to do so mainly by using considerable numbers of coal-fired power stations instead of using wind turbines and solar panels.

They must know that their actions are driving the increase in atmospheric levels of CO2, yet they don't seem to care. Not only that but the Western nations are not putting any pressure on them to stop. If they really believed there was a climate emergency we would expect to see UN trade sanctions threatened on China and others with increased emissions of CO2. The reason we don't see this is clear evidence that, despite the rhetoric, there is no real belief in a climate emergency. It is merely bluster.

MY OWN POSITION ON CLIMATE CHANGE

 

My position is that there is a modest amount of global warming, which, as the IPCC report says, is about 1.1 degrees C since around 1850, which was at the end of the Little Ice Age. (I don’t think anyone would think that this was an ideal climate!) Some of this warming is natural – most of that before 1950 and about half of that post 1950 is what scientists have estimated. So approximately half a degree C can be attributed to man. That is very modest and cannot by any means be called an emergency.  

 

The problem is that politics has taken over from the science and this issue has now been captured by extremists, such as Extinction Rebellion and, unfortunately, the government has listened to these extremists and they are now fully embarking on a very costly policy of trying to eliminate fossil fuels, regardless of the fact that other major industrial nations, such as China and India, are increasing their fossil fuel usage which means our costly efforts will be wiped out.  Unilateral action is pointless, just as with nuclear disarmament.

 

The language now being used is very extreme with terms like “climate emergency” being used as an everyday phrase.  It is the use of this extreme language, along with almost daily clips of extreme weather events on our main news channels which is designed to convince a sceptical public that the vast expense of decarbonisation (government estimate is £1.4 trillion up to 2050) is justified. Extreme weather has always occurred and the data show it has not increased in either severity or quantity when measured over the long term.

 

I am very concerned for the residents of the UK who will have to pay heavily for this and so I believe it is very important to speak up as a voice of reason. 

ENVIRONMENT BILL LIKELY TO BE DELAYED BEYOND COP 26

  Alok Sharma faces embarrassment on world stage as Environment Bill won’t be ready for Cop26

The Sunday Telegraph, 12 September 2021
 
Alok Sharma is facing embarrassment on the world stage at November’s Cop26 climate conference because the Government is unlikely to have passed its flagship Environment Bill in time for the summit, The Telegraph can reveal.
 
Ministers had hoped the bill – which runs to some 270 pages and includes dozens of new commitments on the environment – would receive royal assent by October 31, when the conference begins.
 
But following a series of successful attempts to amend the Bill in the House of Lords, Downing Street has decided to delay it entirely if the changes cannot be fought off in time.

The Telegraph understands Mr Sharma, who has spent the past eight months flying around the world securing international cooperation on measures to be agreed at this year’s conference, has been pushing for it to be completed before world leaders arrive in Glasgow.

But that would have meant agreeing to amendments passed in the Lords, including one that would force ministers to declare a climate emergency – a key demand of Extinction Rebellion.

“The sort of people who want to make the most out of Cop would like to politically say that the Environment Bill is this great landmark achievement, and therefore Britain is delivering on all that stuff around the time we do Cop,” a source said.

“The mood in No10 is now about getting a good Bill rather than getting a Bill which is sorted by Cop. Obviously, the Government is not going to agree to Extinction Rebellion-written amendments.”


Full story (£)

THE THREATS OF THE NET ZERO CULT

Gerald Warner: Net zero cult threatens energy meltdown and political revolution
Reaction, 8 September 2021
 

 Britain is a massive coalfield, surrounded by an ocean of oil and gas. So, why are we fretting over the threat of energy shortages and winter power cuts? For one simple reason: our national energy policy is not being run by the government. Ministers are simply the straw men fronting decisions imposed by the most formidable global pressure group ever constructed in human history. The policies being devised to drag Britain and the world back into a neo-Pleistocene age are dictated by religious fanatics who have replaced slogans like “Millions now living will never die” with the cult mantra “Net Zero”. This is climate jihad.

 
This week, National Grid ESO was forced to ask EDF to fire up two units at its West Burton A coal-fired power station in Lincolnshire, to compensate for wind farms generating just 474 megawatts on Monday morning. At the same time, global gas and power prices are soaring to new highs. Monday’s pathetic 474 megawatts output of wind energy contrasts with wind’s record generation of 14,286 megawatts as recently as 21 May. But that volatility spells unreliability. What will happen, in a similar situation, after 2024, when Britain is scheduled to phase out coal-fired power completely?

The irresponsible shambles that is Britain’s energy policy arises exclusively from the “climate” hype and the demonisation of reliable forms of energy generation. The inconsistencies are epitomised by the fact that, in many circles (excluding Angela Merkel’s), nuclear power is today rated as “clean”. Swivel-eyed proponents will harangue you about how the nuclear waste generated can be compressed to the size of a matchbox and accommodated safely in your hip pocket. Their discourse resembles that of another school of energy Mormons, the carbon-capture loons. What unites all factions is a neurotic fear of CO2, previously regarded as a benevolent and essential element of life on the planet.

This hysteria has led to a masochistic lust to destroy traditional energy sources. Nicola Sturgeon is demanding a “reassessment” of the licensing of the new Cambo oil field in the North Sea, forecast to deliver 150m barrels of oil over its 25-year lifetime. That is a far cry from the 1970s, when the slogan “It’s Scotland’s oil” first enabled the SNP to claim that independence need not mean impoverishment, lending them sufficient credibility to begin winning parliamentary seats. But, today, climate conformity requires politicians to compete in expressing loyalty to Net Zero, so, in dangerous seas, the officers are going around smashing the lifeboats.

The huge increase in gas prices is driving some countries, especially in Asia, to re-embrace coal as an energy source, to the horror of purists. Gas prices have quintupled over the past two years, recently reaching a record high of 135p per therm. OFGEM’s raising of the energy price cap will affect 15 million consumers. There are the makings here of a Grade A political crisis. How will energy consumers view the capering and grandstanding at COP26? Inevitably, Boris Johnson will wish to make himself the star attraction at this climate Stonehenge ritual, particularly as he will be on hostile turf – Sturgeon’s La La Land.

Boris is a creature of impulse and occasions such as COP26, designed to create a mood of exaltation transcending sublunary realities, are dangerous. Some of the worst decisions in history have been influenced by competitive virtue signalling (e.g. the extravagant collective hysteria generated in the revolutionary French National Assembly and Convention). Boris is capable of answering the call to “come on down” by committing himself, in an emotional spasm, to some climate policy even more ruinous than those he has already embraced.

On green expenditure, politicians are smoking in a powder magazine. The plain fact is that, post-Covid and in an unfavourable economic situation, there is absolutely no possibility that the Net Zero policy is affordable by the United Kingdom. Taking advantage of the fact that the cumulative expenditure, involving the T-word –  “trillions” – is some years away, civil servants have produced their usual dog’s dinner of creative accounting, spin, claims of compensatory “gains” from a thousand unlikely and unquantifiable sources, to arrive at a fantasy accounting package, as a cosmetic concealment of a predictable nightmare.

When, in the depths of a British winter, people find themselves lacking heat, light,  working domestic appliances and the disposable income of which they have been deprived by the robber barons of green taxation and “clean” energy, that is when their thoughts turn to lynching politicians. The Net Zero mania is the elites’ most ambitious imposition yet and it has the very real potential to be their last outing ever. It is no exaggeration to say that, if productivity, employment, medical care, living standards and civilised existence were brought crashing down by the Net Zero fanatics, the outcome could very well be a revolution.

The nagging question behind this nightmare scenario is: how serious is the climate problem? Despite endless, expensively funded propaganda hype, it cannot be repeated too often that we do not have a cast-iron, authoritative, neutral analysis of the alleged threat.
 
Climate models churn out whatever they were programmed to produce. What would possess us to put our material civilisation at risk to prevent a supposed crisis that has not – despite the bullying claims of alarmists – been empirically demonstrated not only to be real, but also an existential threat? [...]

The, as ever, out-of-touch elites imagine that COP26 will mark an inspirational moment, a final apotheosis of the Green cult that will carry the world with them. On the contrary, normal people, already overburdened with taxation and apprehensive about energy bills and security of supply, will watch this pantomime with hostility and contempt. The climate alarmist case is discredited by its own conduct: declaring the science “settled”, labelling sceptics as “deniers”, touting the bogus “Hockey Stick”, ditto Al Gore’s upside-down ice cores and East Anglia’s “hide the decline” – not to mention the “reduction” in the polar bear population from 15,000 in 1970 to 26,500 today.
 
Finally, there is the cult of Greta, a cross between something confected by the Brothers Grimm and a doomsday sect awaiting the world’s end on a mountain top. It is all weird; nothing could be less like a conventional scientific and fiscal policy debate.
 
This is not normal and, considering it will cost £2 trillion to convert every home in Britain to green specifications, a second precautionary principle ought to come into play, to make certain we are not about to destroy a quality of life painfully gained over several generations, in pursuit of a mirage. Extinction Rebellion is useful in one respect: it helpfully illustrates the true character of climate alarmists, shorn of the suits and red boxes that lend spurious authority to politicians doing the bidding of an insatiable lobby.
 
Full essay (£)

ELECTRICITY EMERGENCY FOR CALIFORNIA

 California declares energy emergency, seeks to avert blackouts by burning more fossil fuels

Bloomberg, 9 September 2021

California is asking the federal government to declare an “electric reliability emergency” so the Golden State can lean more heavily on fossil fuels to avoid blackouts.

The emergency request highlights the conflict between California’s green aspirations and the physical reality that wind and solar thus far haven’t been able to cover power shortfalls exacerbated by the shuttering of gas-fired generators. The California Independent System Operator has warned of looming electricity shortages several times this summer.
 
Full story

NO END TO COAL IN SIGHT

 Australia rebuffs Biden, Boris and the UN; vows to keep mining coal

GWPF International, 9 September 2021

For the UN climate summit in November in Glasgow to succeed it “must be the COP that consigns coal power to history”, Britain’s climate envoy Alok Sharma has repeatedly stressed. After all, a binding agreement on phasing out coal by 2030 is the main goal of both the Biden administration and the UK government.
 
Today’s developments down under, however, demonstrate once again that their COP26 agenda is almost certain to fail as Australia has become the latest nation to reject the demands for an end to coal.

When markets closed on Monday, metallurgical or coking coal was selling for $274 a tonne, very near the all-time high of $299.33 a tonne in November 2016.

The $274 cost was below its close last Friday which was the highest price for coal since April 2017.

In the past year, coal has been up 170 per cent.

That’s despite China unofficially banning coal since October last year, with power companies warned off the Australian commodity.

In fact, Peter Cai, director of the Lowy Institute’s Australia-China Relations Project, believes China is accidentally shooting itself in the foot and bearing the brunt of those costs.

HYDROGEN A VERY COSTLY OPTION TO REPLACE FOSSIL FUELS

 This new paper - Montford-Cost-of-Hydrogen-2.pdf (thegwpf.com) makes for very disappointing reading for those hoping that hydrogen offers a practical alternative to fossil fuels. It is looking increasingly likely that here in the UK we face a very costly future as far as heating, travel and electricity are concerned. Come to think of it, this will affect all aspects of our future cost of living. All those Extinction Rebellion supporters will live to regret their short-sighted obsession.

Meanwhile we will see the developing nations powering away using fossil fuels. And all this to try and prevent a very modest rise in world temperatures (so far 1.1 degrees C over 170 years)