epsilonGreedy

The overrun cost is good, the House Builder's Bible estimates this at 8% per week. I visited another self builder recently and he was stung with a £5,000 overrun bill after months of zero communication and his assumption the scaffolding company were giving me a free overrun. He negotiated the bill down by half. The base price looks a bit high for such a low eve height.

Very useful tip that, thank you.

Crikey this a premier division Grand Design, all you need is to incorporate a tree house and Kevin McCloud will be around like a shot.

Academia is an international market there will be leveling influences, a bit like medicine. I had a quick look at Aus professor salaries they are similar to the US. Also in the UK average prof salaries are higher, looking at this report and allowing for inflation the average is £70k to £80k. I imagine a senior academic aged 50 at a Russel Group uni is looking for £100k plus, so about the same as a GP which seems fair. http://www.economic-policy.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/09/996_Academic-Salaries-and-Public-Evaluation-of-University-Research.pdf There are 1/3 million tenured academics in the US and possibly 1.3 million if non tenured positions are included. You might need to adjust your perception of what professor means. British Universities have re-calibrated job titles to remain competitive with the US so there are many more profs about these days. Anyhow back to the original theme, Climate Change is a gravy train that pays believers well and there are many non research positions. For example Canada sent 140 delegates to the big climate change shindig in Poland last year. Here is a single page of job titles pulled off their delegate list: Negotiator - Indigenous Engagement Environment and Climate Change Canada Government of Canada Minister Environment and Climate Change Strategy Government of British Columbia Policy Analyst Environment and Climate Change Canada Government of Canada Senior Policy Advisor, Pan-Canadian Framework Implementation Office Environment and Climate Change Canada Government of Canada Negotiator - Technology Natural Resources Canada Government of Canada President Native Women's Association of Canada Communications Advisor Environment and Climate Change Canada Government of Canada Assistant Deputy Minister, PCFIO (MLA Presenter) Environment and Climate Change Canada Government of Canada Negotiator - Markets Environment and Climate Change Canada Government of Canada. https://unfccc.int/sites/default/files/resource/PLOP.pdf I doubt if more than a handful of the 140 Canadians could articulate the difference between proof by deduction v. proof by induction.

You are basing your claim on a regional historic anomaly that existed in a scientific sector which is numerically minor from a global perspective. Climate Change is a gravy train even the "PA to the Director of Centre for Climate Change Engagement" at Cambridge University can expect £31k to £36k according to the current job advert. The cost of a university education has gone up by multiple factors in the western world and this is reflected in salary and position inflation. In the US where professors sprout all over the place due to their different grading scheme here are the current average salary levels: https://academicpositions.com/career-advice/phd-professor-and-postdoc-salaries-in-the-united-states Assistant Professor $67,231 to $70,791 Associate Professor $75,284 to $81,274 Professor $93,830 to $104,820

I don't want further polarization of wealth globally and so far the thermogeddonists have triggered panic policy responses that have amplified polarization of wealth. I propose we continue to refine the material and manufacturing science behind low co2 energy production so that if there comes a point in the next 100 years when the human race needs to control the climate we have the ability to do so. What troubles me is that on current trajectories the global economy will be damaged while we attempt to implement impossible co2 reduction targets. If in that same period a true threat to humanity appears we will not have the spare capacity to respond, for example it we discover in the next 10 years that emulsified plastics in the oceans are triggering a collapse of ocean biology there won't be the $ trillions available to fund the clean up.

One thing I know about scientists is that they are human beings and we know a lot about how humans behave. Scientists like fast cars and travel to exotic places, so offer a juicy big salary career position for on-message scientists and some will discover that message. Offer podium time at an international conference in Cancun for on-message papers and the result is new papers with appropriate discoveries. Of more concern is the systematic hostility formulated at western universities against rebel academics, did you watch the video about the ousted physicist in Australia?

True but what you omit is that it is often effective. Patrick Moore when reciting his 15 years at Greenpeace claims: Within a year of protesting US atmospheric atomic bomb tests the US president at the time cancelled the rest of the test program. The same for France following that protest. Greenpeace then moved onto whales and seal culls and achieved similar spectacular global change. The activists will hit a brick wall with energy policy because there are no easy wins. The 2050 co2 reduction targets are impossible to achieve and trying to move the target date to 2025 is lunacy.

I am not sure how I feel about this. During the 20 year credit boom up to 2007 young people disengaged from politics, philosophy and activism, they were instead seduced by brand label consumerism and easy credit for junk-bond higher education. Brexit, Trump, housing and student debt have had a shock effect. A 16 yo lecturing the establishment is a positive sign of change.

Does it not strike you as odd that the largest historical set of climate readings covering +100 years has only now being declared unreliable and needing to be twiddled towards the truth? https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/earth/environment/globalwarming/11395516/The-fiddling-with-temperature-data-is-the-biggest-science-scandal-ever.html https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2017/feb/5/climate-change-whistleblower-alleges-noaa-manipula/ https://phys.org/news/2017-02-major-global-defended.html https://canadafreepress.com/article/fiddling-with-temperature-data

This gets to the core of the problem for me, my source presents a graph showing the complete opposite. How will policy makers persuade the people to abandon their fossil fuel based lifestyles when apparently authoritative sources present opposing interpretations of the same numeric event? https://realclimatescience.com/2018/03/noaa-data-tampering-approaching-2-5-degrees/

Not quite, I am saying human nature empowered by unaddressed counter opinion will forestall attempts at action. Consider mandatory pricing on plastic bags, minimum pricing on alcohol and sweets lined up at supermarket checkouts. Politicians have found it very hard to act on such trivial but socially beneficial policy for years. The changes that might be necessary for climate change are orders of magnitude more imposing on everyday life. The only time the Government has attempted such wholescale micro management of the country for the common good was in WWII. I am not talking about opinion sources, I am concerned about the opinion receptors, i.e. The People. Subscription to Climate Climate culture today is a cost free fashion statement for the average person today. Now take their cars away for any journey under 5 miles and imagine the response.

Because if there is some incontrovertible climatic event such as the arctic sea becoming entirely ice free in summer or 5 years of sea level rise at 10mm a year then mankind will have to exercise some remarkable changes in everyday behaviour and self restraint. Trying to effect such changes across a whole population will be nigh on impossible if there is a raft of suppressed counter opinion left bubbling away for years. Actually no, we have already had far too much climate change science spouted by the BBC. What would be needed in the event of an ice free summer arctic is grass roots consensus on the necessity to act and in the era of YouTube that consensus will not be achieved through suppression of climate change skeptics. I say hand over BBC 4 to the skeptics with unlimited air time.

My alternative sources of news have at-least enlightened you about the core event though you are comfortable with the official explanation. I sense large segments of the population will polarize around different interpretations of the same basic facts for years to come. Now that the BBC has declared there is nothing left to debate and hence they will no longer even bother to present opposing views on climate change, people are going to seek alternative sources of opinion. My concern is how will people react when the Government demands true lifestyle changes. Most people pay lipservice to Climate Change today but should the Government announce each citizen now has a co2 flight budget of one foreign holiday every 5 years things could get ugly with inconvenient facts like climatic data adjustment lurking out there.

Wow. Wind must form a substantial part of that because a quick eyeball interpretation of the yellow slither of PV across the whole year chart on the site you referenced suggests it is more like 10% annually.

Hmm I am not familiar with that prediction but my thoughts immediately turned to something I read on how NOAA recently re-calibrated over of 100 years of US climate readings because the original numbers were disproving climate change. It is all so political I do not know who to trust but I will follow up on your Hansen reference. At this point I am abstaining from any non build threads on BuildHub because after an abrupt discussion on moderation policy I have concluded BuildHub is not an equitable forum for general discussion.

These are persuasive numbers but I think you have swayed the figures to support you point. The average turbine is much smaller than 8MW. Some of that daily revenue will be at times of day when the energy is not needed hence you are counting subsidized revenue. Since posting I found a report that the average offshore turbine maintenance cost is $48k a year. The industry is also fretting about the number of turbines now coming out of warranty which suggests current average maintenance costs are for a youthful population of turbines. I might also have misstated the gearbox repair cost, that £40k might be the ship charter cost, I read something a long time ago.

Statistical analysis of other statistics is a grow area in science at the moment largely because it is easy cheap science and a soft route to being published. The longterm value of such science is questionable particularly when applied to a scientific discipline rife with group-think such as climate change. If climate change modelling could achieve even a paltry 10% accuracy in its gloomy predictions than I would become a vociferous tree hugger overnight. The only thing climate change science can achieve with 100% accuracy at the moment is a failure to predict. Some of the grand fathers of global warming culture stood before the US Congress in the 1970s and warned of the coming ice age. I am keenly aware there is only one earth and humanity does not have a lifeboat so my belief threshold re. climate change is very low.

A figure that demonstrates impressive progress though the whole year percentage is probably lower. I still think there is a renewable crunch point a decade or two away when the mechanical equipment starts to fail, I read somewhere that the estimated price for renewing a gearbox in an offshore turbine is £40k. Unless the UK economy is in excellent health 20 years from now and we are prepared to cross subsidize renewable infrastructure maintenance I suspect broken turbines will be mothballed and a new generation capacity gap will creep up on us.

The world is awash with investment money awaiting viable propositions, what you are saying is you are frustrated the Government is not sponsoring a pet project of yours. This demonstrates why Governments should not try to micro manage the economy by creating convoluted artificial market structures, yet you advocate more examples.

There is another option. Wait a few decades for the immature and highly unreliable science of climate change to improve its modelling, instead you advocate executing a crash economic gear change for the whole nation based on a scientific culture that is notable for the gross unreliability of its current models. In the mean time we can prepare the ground with persuasive taxation to change consumption side behavior, look at the phenomenal success of co2 tiered vehicle duty. And let's do something about plastic packaging, there is an easy win.

Which is another way of saying "make the rich richer and oppress the poor". If domestic PV is not economically sustainable without subsidy the technology is not viable. The Government is effectively bankrupt, do you think that precipitating the collapse the nation state through mass subsidy of an ineffective technology will help combat climate change?

I asked a related question about laying a ground bearing garage floor slab and was told that pouring concrete into a pool formed from a one block high perimeter wall would simplify the process. Not sure why you think such an alternative floor creation workflow influences a decision over door threshold expansion joints. Will you be fitting UFH? I ask because I am thinking of the Grand Designs Graven Hill lady who suffered frost damage because cold weather got her UFH pipes due to a delay in creating a weathertight shell. Less of a concern for you given the current time of year.

In the long term historical context today is not that different, Galileo and John Harrison had problems with innovative ideas clashing with the establishment. Today is very different when compared with the last 150 years. In the past 5 years academics have been ousted with increasing frequency for simply not complying with a new establishment belief system that often originates from the Social Sciences. Today is different because alternative views are not tolerated, fear and tribal cult allegiance has replaced reason. Take this poor chap [edited - unnecessary comment about someone's appearance]. His career was terminated because he dared to question the established climate change party line, sit through the video and tell me academic culture in western countries is not derailing. This is why there is no effective review of climate change science. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GgLjKFzYvIM

This is to be expected because the climate change lobby owns the co2 news agenda, any notion that in some circumstances more co2 is desirable is a heretical fact. You have to dig into non mainstream media sources to discover that: For most of the period of life on earth co2 has been higher than today. The greenhouse effect of additional co2 is not a linear risk, the negative effect of more co2 tails off. I share your concerns about climate change and think we need to act promptly, I just feel cheated by the media control of the subject that feeds me a distorted incomplete picture. [Playing of humans rather than the ball deleted]