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)."

I didn't actually say it cost a fortune to install a heat pump in a new build - where did I say that ? And the poor don't generally live in new builds. We are talking about older properties and going around ripping out existing central heating to replace it with heat pumps at great TOTAL cost to the tax payer. Think victorian terraces of flats and high rise buildings, cheek by jowl, little parking, no gardens. When someone from government (Millipede) arrives and says 'I am here to help you' - run for your life as fast as you can. The history of centrally planned economies is not good for anyone.

You seem not to understand the point I made. You cannot in one breath push for and bring about the destruction of the UKs indigineous fossil fuel industry (in the name of CO2 emmissions and climate emergency) AND then bemoan the low levels of UK energy security because of the need to import fossil fuels. You cannot claim the lack of UK indigineous fossil fuel industry (which you have acted to destroy) as a reason to destroy all fossil fuel use. There is only 1 reason there - you want to destroy use of fossil fuels in the UK to achieve net zero - it is 1 reason, there is no 2nd reason regarding energy security. You are using tautology and not recognising it. Smoke and mirrors. We are going to be using fossil fuels for many decades to come whatever is done. The UK cannot go net zero in any short timescale, so we will be happily burning gas for many more decades, like it or not. Energy security has many solutions including building gas & oil storage facilities, building nuclear power stations (large & small), building clean coal solutions. Batteries will eventually play a role. etc. Mr Millipede has just announced a new package of mad policies to ban gas boilers in new builds and spend a fortune installing heat pumps for the poor (who often live in accommodation for which they are unsuitable). Fortunately there is no industry capacity to achieve his policies on the scale he proposes, and thankfully he will be out of power within 3.5 years now. IMO, the country does not need mad crusading zealots leading us into self destruction like Chicken Licken.

There is a scientific theory yes - a hypothesis. In physics we look to establish the veracity of theories using experiment with independent repetition. The experiments aim to show that the predictions of the theory occur in practice. To my knowledge no actual experiments have been done as it is clearly difficult if not impossible to replicate a mini earth and atmosphere to experiment on in the lab. For the theory which does exist there are also strong counter arguments e.g. that (1) atmospheric effects reach a saturation point beyond which more CO2 no longer significantly impacts temperature and (2) that the impact of water vapour and clouds - present in vastly greater amounts than the 0.04% of CO2 - drown out any CO2 effects. One theory was even based on variations in cosmic rays impacting the nucleation and formation of cloud cover. Lots of things impact climate - many cyclical. In the longer term records there are clear disgreements over whether higher CO2 is actually a cause of higher temperatures, or indeed is itself caused by higher temperatures. Looking for simplistic dependencies in complex systems can be misleading. I am not saying it is wrong, I am just saying it is not proven and is open to question. Unfortunately too many people would rather engage in personal attacks, cancellation, and spurious appeals to 'authority', over actual engagement in scientific debate. Certainly I have studied Physics. Presumably you are aware anthropogenic climate emergency is questioned by at least one Physics nobel prize winner. But I think we get off the point, which is really just an appeal for recognising uncertainty and doubt, and not charging around like just stop oil fanatics insisting on net zero extremism.

If only that were still true. In today's world academics get monitored and ranked by papers published and citations. Lots of junk journals and journals with biased editors etc. Academics can often engage in mutual back scratching, reviewing, citing, and naming each other on papers for mutual advantage.

I don't need to cite a paper to disprove something. Anthropogenic driven climate change through emmissions of carbon dioxide is a hypothesis which has not been scientifically proven. There are no papers that prove it occurs. All we have is a claimed correlation over 50-100 years between industrialisation and global CO2 emmissions and some average global temperatures. 50-100 years is a short time period - there are plenty of climate variations with no industrialisation - the romans grew grapes in england. It is a theory and correlation is not necessarily causation. Many models are built and used where CO2 driven warming is assumed as input and therefore produce warming output. There are alternative theories and many doubting and questioning scientists that are frequently censored, blocked, and cancelled. Others use their wealth to promote the theory by paying journalists to write anthropogenic climate change propaganda. That doesn't mean it is wrong, but it is certainly unproven and has very considerable doubt and uncertainty. Unfortunately many people do not understand how science works, many people are unable to cope with things being uncertain, many people are content to watch BBC climate propaganda without questioning it, many people want to make political capital out of it, or to make money off the back of it. It is very wrong to be tearing up the UK economy and finances as though it is a climate emergency when it is not. If we get some perspective we can think of many things that we were told 20 years ago would be upon us but are not - from polar bears dying out, coral reefs being no more, the sea lapping at the ankles of the statue of liberty, the earth ''boiling'', the polar ice retreating opening up the arctic seas - none of which has occurred. In the internet age nothing sells like fear, every other piece of clickbait is a scare story.

Sorry Beelbeebub, but you have some daft self contradictory arguments here... It is the mad Millipede and the extreme net zero nutters that are actually greatly responsible for UK dependence on oil & gas from overseas - because they have spent the last 10-20 years stopping all uk fossil fuel production. You cannot then argue that the UK should go net zero because it depends on overseas oil and gas and that is a security issue. You are in the land of the madman there. The UK probably has plenty of fossil fuels on and around it's own shores that would provide energy independence for an awful long time. In case you were not born then the UK shut down it's coal mines in the 1980's. There is more gas and oil around our coast, ample coal reserves, and then there is fracking. Also worth remembering that at some point mankind will master fusion power anyway. The UK has very very foolishly done away with its gas storage facilities. You also claim one nearly 80 year old man aka Trump, will hold the UK as an LNG energy hostage in the same way Putin was doing with Europe. Trump will be gone in 3 years, may become powerless after the mid terms, why would any nation take the slightest bit of notice of Trump when planning for energy security for the next century. (PS There is no definitive scientific evidence for anthropogenic climate change of course. Many people are unfortunately making a good living touring the world on jet planes and cranking out unscientific lies and misinformation that the world will end if we don't stop cows farting, and blaming every flood or fire (which we have always had) on carbon dioxide. It is nonsense and the wheels are already beginning to fall off the band wagon.) The way to energy security is a diversified energy infrastructure using multiple sources, not a self righteous dependence on 100% renewables only. Technology will render many of today's solutions obsolete within a decade or two anyway. The world is only just beginning on engineered proteins for example. So nothing wrong with building energy efficient homes or using alternative energy sources, but let's not kid ourselves with net zero extremism.

Just looking at WoodUpp, as I will need to disguise an access panel which I plan to install to hide electrical gubbins. Seems like it could word to conceal a hinged wall access panel. Also seems to have the benefit that coat hooks and shelves and things can be mounted onto it. However I am not sure of the strength of these for hanging coats and things. Any one have any experience of this stuff ? (Or other suggestions for hidng an access panel)

Circuits/loops and Zones are two different things - presumably you are aware of that. Do you have a design that actually provides the pipe layouts ? Our suspended floor system design included the proposed pipe layouts. Are you going to put pipes under the island and banquette seating ? Views seem to differ, architects argue the u/f heating is for life of building so should allow future internal reconfiguration. (I have no expertise here, but is it not a good idea to ensure you have sufficient loops to provide some resilience should the worst ever happen - i.e. a loop fail, get punctured etc.) Do think about ventilation and solar gain. Having had a cold house we thought it would take care of itself and our architect never once mentioned it as something requiring design. Depending which way your glass faces and what it is, solar gain can be significant. Only one appliance in the utility ? Or is that X a washer and dryer stacked on top of each other ?

Not clear where your boundaries are with neighbours etc from those drawings. Personally I find all this 'permitted development' stuff a bit unnecessary. If you are going to build something reasonable with due consideration for your neighbours and the local context and setting, why be trying to use permitted development ? The cost and timeline involved with getting planning permission is not excessive compared with the costs, timelines amd risks involved with a building project. I don't think LA planning are going to have spurious objections. You don't say whether you are engaging with neighbours regarding your plans - which is the recommended approach by all good architects and the planning office. Going through planning permission will at least ensure immediate neighbours are informed even if you want to shaft them. You never know, LA planning might have something helpful to say about your plans, and having planning permission can only be a positive when it comes to the sales value of the property, and dealing with neighbour relations during the build itself.

Which way is that horizontal round pipe across the wall above the window actually falling ? Looks very horizontal or even running the other way ? I'd say think about why someone has done that Heath Robinson type arrangement of pipe work. It looks like some kind of extension and/or remodelling work was done at some point, but wasn't very well planned with drainage routes not planned properly in advance - or else kind of botched to avoid spending money doing a proper job. If it had planning permission there may be some drawings on the local authority planning applications website. Kinda looks like the ground floor window may have been added blocking the vertical path down to the drain - and/or the drain moved along the wall to make room for a new wall. (Does surface rain water at ground level drain away from that external corner between the windows as it should - or towards it ulp ? I wonder if those leaves near the corner have been washed there because the surface falls into the corner ?} People do very weird and wacky stuff when they lack the brain or money to do things properly. It may be best to give the whole arrangement some thought to see if there is just a whole better layout which might involve more work but be a better long term answer if you plan to live in the house for many years ?