Spinny

Except the other major issues are (1) cost, (2) environmental impact, and (3) intermittancy. 1. There is huge disagreement on the actual costs of renewable energy with people using different calculation methods and huge tax payer subsidies in place now. Subsidies not only being direct but also via paying producers to turn off wind turbines and cut off power feeds - effectively paying for no power. So we then have energy storage costs. We also have the cost of power cabling. 2. Environmental impacts extend from being a blot on the landscape, to killing wildlife, to felling rainforests, to catching fire, to falling over, to child labour in cobalt and lithium extraction, to interfering with radar, to loss of farm land. 3. Intermittancy means no energy security without huge scale energy storage, either centrally, or in a distributed fashion where everyone has to install a battery in their house. Renewables is not a free lunch or without very real issues.

I believe we will be very soon on range, cost and fire safety - I guess you are not following the developments in battery technology - try youtubing sodium batteries.

On the Medieval Warm Period - I did not make any claim as to whether it was hottest or not - I used a ? Your claim was - since humans left Africa - seems to be variously attributed to between 60,000 and 125,000 years ago. Your graph covers 12000 years only, but I do see that as we are on the back end of an ice age, yes it is warmer than it has been for some roughly 120k years. Nothing whatsoever strange or man made about any of that of course. We call it climate change - way outside of human control. Looks like it will be getting rather cold over the next 25,000 years - I'll buy a thick winter coat and some long johns :0). Looks like humans might be rather glad of some higher temperatures in that period - methane generators all round perhaps. So we are heading towards a new ice age, I'd be far more concerned about the impact of that on the future of humanity, rather than scaring half the planet into not procreating.

Nope, still wrong. What you say would be somewhat true for a single location if 100 year events became say 10 year events. But that is not what I said, and even then would depend upon whether 100 years was actually a meaningful timeframe anyway relative to long term fluctuations in the earth's climate. By definition a 100 year weather event is only statistically expected to occur once every 100 years. If you monitor a thousand different locations around the globe for 100 year weather events then you might well find 10 in a single year.

That is not actually true. The point was about 100 year events, not all time record events. What nonsense is this ? I don't think so. Medieval Warm Period ? Got any actual data to back that up ?

https://brightonjournal.co.uk/investigation-uncovers-allegations-of-fabricated-data-at-uk-weather-agency/ https://wattsupwiththat.com/2025/12/20/government-minister-steps-in-to-defend-met-office-as-fake-temperature-scandal-escalates/

Certainly not that. And don't confuse climate change - the climate is always changing - with anthropogenic CO2 as 'the' cause of a climate 'emergency'. Every year there are 100 year events in different places on earth - because there are rather a lot of places on earth, so somewhere is almost always having a 100 year event. 50 years ago you wouldn't have known, now every extreme weather event is seized upon by an army of climate activists and the globally connected internet and media and pushed out as propaganda. A good deal of that propaganda is provable lies. Once you zoom out, look at the actual long term record, it has all happened before. This year's hurricane season was below normal, there is no dangerous decline in the AMOC etc https://wattsupwiththat.com/2026/01/21/storm-goretti-was-not-worst-since-1703/

Yes I think we are all aware the days of UK peak oil & gas are over. That is not a reason to abandon what remains, and you never know when new reserves are going to be found. I am quite happy with mixed and diverse sources for UK energy. Let the people, and the market try them all and use them as and when they suit. They all have pros and cons. I don't think hacking down rainforest for balsa wood to make wind turbine blades is a great idea, nor chopping up sea birds and birds of prey, nor child labour digging for cobalt and lithium, nor covering prime farm land with solar farms. It is far from as simple as the virtue crusaders think. On energy security and national security I am old enough to remember when we had a proper focus on energy security and national security infrastructure - bourne out of the experience of 2 great wars. It was all abandoned when the Berlin wall came down. We are in our 4th decade of treasonous politicians of all hues doing their best to destroy our nation and it's security. We can barely even make any steel any more, have willingly prostituted ourselves to the totalitarianism of China, sold 50 Billion of gold at one twentieth of today's value, wasted vast sums on covid nonsense, have hacked the armed forces back to embarassing levels - there is an endless list.

But that is not the situation. It has been 20 years since Al Gore released 'An Inconvenient Truth' and the first COP meeting was in 1995 over 30 years ago. The end is nigh they cried but all the portents of doom have not actually occurred. And we definitely have people being paid to try to keep a failing narrative going, and people in school taught that opinon is fact, and organisations like the Met Office and the BBC obviously lying, censoring, and misrepresenting climate concerns. How do you know when a politician is lying to you - their lips are moving.

On the 'pick one' stuff, I am generally against false binary decision making. The best decisions under uncertainty are often to hedge your 'bets' and recognise the role and pros cons of alternatives - some of each please.

'Appeal to authority' as an argument is fallacious anyway. The truth is not determined by any 'authority' no matter his position or the number of letters after his name. Neither is it determined by popular vote, nor by the vote of those paid to promote narratives regardless of objective truths. Nature is as she is. As Rutherford said 'All science is either physics or stamp collecting'. I'd argue physicists generally have the most objective and questioning perspectives. They grow up with the motivation to find truths - nobody can really work as a physicist without both a capable mind and a passionate curiosity for truth. Climate science is more of a job - barely existed 40 years ago - now massively expanded as a result of climate alarm - turkeys don't vote for Christmas. We miss him still... https://youtu.be/OL6-x0modwY?si=vYOWFRolyMaOzxvQ

A juicy target in a hot war, especially if in port.

Europe stores gas of course, gets them through every winter. The Rough facility is off the coast of East Yorkshire, and accounts for about half of the capacity the UK has to store gas. It was closed in 2017, but then partly reopened in October 2022 following the energy crisis triggered by Russia's invasion of Ukraine. Even the US has a strategic oil reserve. And you can follow summary of the gyrations and commentary on natural gas supply and demand here... https://tradingeconomics.com/commodity/natural-gas

Energy storage seems to be coming. Would seem best to wait for sodium batteries made in the West rather than enable China's oppression. Also avoids the fire risk of lithium. (I remember buying an early flat screen TV - within 18-24 months you could buy 50% larger for almost half the price.)

According to ChatGPT... "No — there’s no credible evidence that John F. Clauser is paid by the American Petroleum Institute (API)."