Tag Archives: climate scaremongers

The climate scaremongers: Cheap wind power myth is blown away

Cheap wind power is a green myth.

Conservative Woman UK

By Paul Homewood

THE myth that our energy bills would come tumbling down thanks to the abundance of cheap offshore wind power has finally been blown to smithereens by the failure of the latest auction for the Contracts for Difference subsidy scheme to attract any bidders. The government’s price cap of £44/MWh at 2012 prices (about £60 at current prices) was simply not economically viable.

This follows the Swedish energy firm Vattenfall’s recent decision to cancel its giant 1.4 GW Norfolk Boreas project before construction had begun. Boreas had been awarded a CfD in last year’s round.

For years we have been promised that ultra-cheap wind power was just around the corner. In 2020 Dr Malte Jansen of the Centre for Environmental Policy at Imperial College London claimed: ‘Offshore wind power will soon be so cheap to produce that it will undercut fossil-fuelled power stations and may be the cheapest form of energy for the UK.’ Last year the Guardian bragged that the cost of offshore wind had fallen yet again, to just £37/MWh.

All these claims, of course, derived from the annual auctions for the Contracts for Difference subsidy scheme. What the cheerleaders had not realised was that the wind farms were under no legal obligation to honour these contracts. Instead those companies which bid low are now selling at the much higher market price.

In this latest auction round, however, this loophole was removed, and bidders would have been forced to honour their contracts. As a result, they have pulled out of the auction, and are now demanding much bigger subsidies.

There never was any evidence that the true cost of offshore wind was as low as the auction prices suggested. Independent analysis has long concluded that the real cost is between £80 and £100/MWh, and this does not take account of the wider system costs of integrating intermittent wind power, maybe as much as another £50/MWh. Gas-fired power is currently about £80/MWh.

It is not only the UK where the wind industry is struggling to match expectations. In the US developers such as Shell and Avangrid are pulling out of contracts to build offshore wind farms. The giant Danish wind company Oersted has lost a third of its market value since warning two weeks ago that it may be writing down its assets by up to $2.3billion on its US projects. European turbine makers are also in trouble, appearing to have woefully underestimated the costs and problems of building large turbines for operation offshore, where conditions are much more severe.

In stark contrast to the promises of the renewable lobby, subsidies for offshore wind are expected to add nearly £5billion to our energy bills this year.

In large part, the wind industry has been hoist by its own petard, with the government believing all of its propaganda about falling costs. Now, thanks to the government’s obsession with renewables and its closure of coal power capacity, it may have little choice but to cave into the industry’s demands for greater subsidies.

Meanwhile our energy bills will continue to rocket.

September heatwaves

IT WAS certainly exceptionally hot last week, but even with thermometers next to airport runways, main roads and in the middle of London, the highest temperature the Met Office could come up with was 33.2C (91.8F) at Kew.

It was much hotter in September 1906, when the temperature reached 96F at Bawtry in South Yorkshire, still a UK record for the month. That heatwave lasted five days from August 30 to September 3, and covered the whole country, from Scotland and Ireland to the south of England.

In contrast, temperatures last week did not appear to get above the mid 80s at most for much of the country. The Central England Temperature series, for example, peaked at only 84F.

Monthly Weather Report of the Meteorological Office

Maybe even more remarkable were the three September heatwaves in 1911, which were the culmination of an exceptionally hot summer.

Mean temperatures in July/August were a full 2C higher in 1911 than this year.

I have no doubt that in due course the Met Office will highlight this year’s heatwaves in June and this month, and claim they are evidence of climate change. I doubt that they will mention the summer of 1911, much less explain how it could happen in the absence of climate change.

Another day, another £65billion!

WHEN the Climate Change Act was passed in 2008, and upgraded to ‘Net Zero’ four years ago, there was no attempt to estimate the costs involved, nor any technical plan as to how the targets were going to be achieved.

Even now the government refuses to treat the matter of costs in any serious fashion, instead pretending that the country will end up being better off eventually, thanks to all those lovely green jobs and a booming, world-leading green economy.

What our economy will look like in 30 years is something nobody can know, but it is becoming increasingly apparent that we are all going to be much worse off in the foreseeable future, certainly the next decade or so. And we are finding more problems which were not anticipated at the start.

This week the Daily Telegraph reported that it could cost £65billion to decommission Britain’s gas grid, a 176,000-mile network of buried pipes. This is according to a draft National Infrastructure Report. It says that unused pipes must be removed or they risk decay and experts fear the potential collapse of roads. At the moment the network is properly maintained, with the cost included in our gas bills.

Quite who is expected to pay this bill which, knowing what we do about public infrastructure projects, is probably a gross underestimate, is another matter. It works out at £2,300 per household.

Logistically it will be a nightmare too, with districts being turned off one by one. I could mention the traffic chaos as roads are dug up in town after town, but I doubt whether many of us will be able to afford cars by then.

wind farm Holsworthy

The climate scaremongers: The day the Earth didn’t catch fire

From conservativewoman

By Paul Homewood

YOU probably saw stories last week claiming that Thursday July 6 was the hottest day on Earth in the history of human civilisation. Climate scientists said that the global average temperature was precisely 17.23 deg C. Yes, not 17.22 or 17.24C.

Some went as far as to claim that it was the hottest day for 125,000 years.

Naturally the BBC’s Justin Rowlatt attempted to trick the public into thinking that because we had some sunny weather last month, the whole world must be burning up. 

The idea that we can measure the world’s temperature to a hundredth of a degree is of course ridiculous. Indeed the very concept of a global temperature is unscientific, because there is no such thing.

The calculations behind this claim are, you won’t be surprised to learn, based on computer modelling. The models go back only to 1979, when satellite data became available. This was a time when there had just been three decades of global cooling and a massive expansion of Arctic sea ice. It is little wonder that temperatures have increased since.

Prior to the satellite era, much of the world had little or no reliable temperature data, so we have no idea at all what temperatures were then, particularly in the early 20th century and before.

It is summer, so inevitably some places are hot. But the map of temperature anomalies behind the claim tells a totally different story to the one peddled by the BBC. Across the world as a whole, there is the usual mix of above and below temperatures:

https://climatereanalyzer.org/clim/t2_daily/

The only exception is around Antarctica, where, as Climate Reanalyzer explain, weather patterns in the southern hemisphere have brought warmer air than usual. Because polar regions are so dry, a small change in heat produces a large swing in temperature, whereas it requires much more energy change to produce the same size swing in temperatures in the mid-latitudes. This is because water has a much higher heat capacity than air. Think, for instance, of the Sahara Desert, and how temperatures fall away dramatically at night because the dry air holds so little heat there.

Although average global temperatures may have increased because of the warm air brought to the Antarctic, the overall heat content of the Earth’s atmosphere has not changed at all.

As for the claim that it is now warmer than any time in the history of human civilisation, this is self-evidently bogus. There is an abundance of evidence that the world’s climate was much warmer than now for most of the last 10,000 or so years since the last Ice Age ended.

Studies of treelines, tree rings, ice cores, glaciers, ocean sediments, stalactites and many other proxies all point to the same thing – a Holocene optimum, which lasted up to maybe 5,000 years ago. This was followed by the Minoan, Roman and Medieval Warm periods, and the Little Ice Age, which was probably the coldest era since the Ice Age and which ended during the 19thC.

This evidence comes from all around the world. Even, for instance, in New Zealand:

https://niwa.co.nz/our-science/climate/information-and-resources/clivar/pastclimate

Is there any other branch of science where so-called scientists can simply make up fairy tales and pass them off to a corrupt media as fact?

BP and another waste of energy

SINCE 1952, BP has published its Annual Statistical Review of World Energy. In BP’s words, this is ‘a constant source of objective, comprehensive – and, most importantly – trusted data to help industry, governments and commentators make sense of developments in global energy markets’.

This year’s edition has just been released, and it has a new custodian, the Energy Institute, which BP says is ‘the chartered professional membership body for people who work in energy’. 

It is slightly concerning, therefore, that the Energy Institute is not quite the professional body that BP makes out, but a lobby group for Net Zero. According to its website, its objective is ‘creating a better energy future for our members and society by accelerating a just global energy transition to net zero’. Its president is Juliet Davenport, founder of Good Energy, a renewable energy company; senior positions are occupied by other lobbyists for renewables. Whether the review is quite as objective, comprehensive and trusted going forward remains to be seen!

Nevertheless this year’s edition provides the same categories of data as previous ones. The story can be summed up in a handful of charts.

First, emissions of carbon dioxide continue to rise, a seemingly relentless trend, arrested only during the lockdowns of 2020. Last year saw yet another record high. Emissions now stand 5 per cent higher than in 2015, when the world’s politicians supposedly agreed to save the planet in Paris.

Whilst emissions in OECD countries have fallen by 1,287million tonnes since 2011, they have increased by 3,790million tonnes in the rest of the world. The UK’s total emissions are tiny in comparison.

Despite repeated claims of whopping increases in renewable capacity, fossil fuels continue to dominate, still increasing year-on-year. Meanwhile wind and solar account for only a tiny 5 per cent of the world’s energy:

And as our final chart illustrates, the small reduction in fossil fuel consumption in OECD countries has been offset by a six times larger increase in the rest of the world. Again we see that the increase in wind and solar energy has been tiny in comparison.

It has been evident all along that the world’s poorer countries were not prepared to sacrifice their public’s standards of living on the altar of climate change. This means the provision of abundant, reliable and cheap energy that only fossil fuels can supply.

The full review can be downloaded here.