Mad Dictators

[Beelbeebub]

2 hours ago, Spinny said:

Very unclear what you are trying to say there. Are you claiming gas and oil consumption will halve in a decade, or are you claiming UK oil and gas reserves will halve in a decade, or are you claiming global oil and gas reserves will halve in a decade ?

UK production of oil and gas

 

2 hours ago, Spinny said:

Ever heard of SMR's. And if the idiots that govern us were even remotely competent we would already have more nuclear capacity. You might also note that France has 56 reactors that provide 70% of its electricity. I believe it is not unusual for the UK, given it is run by total idiots, to have to call on energy through international connectors - energy generated by nuclear plants in France that is always available whatever the weather. Some solar panels are never going to solve that national security issue. 

I have - can you tell me how many are in operation today? 2 - one in china that took just over 11 years to build and floating one in russia that also took 10 years to build.

 

And there are 6 or so under construction with intended in service dates sometime before 2030.  

 

Ideally we would have gone ahead with the various reactors we had planned back in the early 00's and have several up and running by now, but we seem to be very bad at nuclear construction in the UK.  I'm not convinced we will get any better in the timeline we need.

 

We have 2 under construction (hinkley C and sizewell C) with a combined capacity of around 6.5 GW coming online in 2030 and late 2030's.  But that only covers the loss from the 5 existing plants shutting down before 2030, and as they are AGR's they are going to be difficult to life extend - not impossible, they will be about 40 years old at planned shutdown and the design has been extended to 50 years at other sites.  Without a time machine, nuclear isn't going to dig us out of the hole.

3 hours ago, Spinny said:

Gas and Oil has always been traded and we have managed very successfully to have gas and oil supplies and it has done a brilliant job of keeping us warm and fuelling our vehicles for many decades. The global market generally keeps prices down for what is a fungible good.

Except when they don't keep prices down.  Several years ago our gas and elec prices rocketed because a politician 1,500 miles way decided the country next door was his.  Our gas and oil prices recently shot up because a politician 3,000 miles away got mad at a country 3,000miles the other way and started flinging bombs about and suddenly, ships with oil bound for us turned round in the ocean and headed to china and the far east because they outbid us.  Environmental issues aside, oil and gas are very shaky foundations.  We struggled in ww2 for oil.  We struggled in the 70's for oil.  This isn't going to get better

 

3 hours ago, Spinny said:

Really ? So that is why government has to offer huge subsidies/price guarantees to get companies to build solar farms. Of course it costs nothing to put in pylons and cables to connect them to the grid, and the fact they can't produce anything during the hours of darkness, and little when cloudy, and can't cope if temperatures go too high can all be completely ignored when assessing their actual efficiency and true costs. The fact they are made in China is not a national security concern at all.

but they don't - they offer (in effect) fixed price deals for capacity.  Those prices are lower than a new build gas plant can offer (and that was before the higher gas prices).  And whilst there may be a security issue with inverters made in china, in the sense they could be controlled from abroad - and there are strong arguments that the uk or at least europe should be making it's own inverters or at least the software running them - the fact the panels are made in china is irrelevant.  Once you have bought them they are yours, they are dumb bits of silicon and glass that create a voltage when illuminated.  That's it.  Once you have bought them they will last for 25 years or so, churning out power every day.  A barrel of oil, on the other hand, can be used one.  Then you have to buy a new one.

 

3 hours ago, Spinny said:

Incredibly few people die from heat in the UK. Overwhelmingly old people with existing medical problems that might die a few months or a year or two earlier than they otherwise would.

Meanwhile thousands die from the cold and we definitely need heating in the winter months, But wait, no, I guess you heat a draughty 1930's house every winter using a couple of solar panels - what am I thinking ?

You realise we have wind turbines, right?  They tend to do well in the winter.  And if the sun doesnt shine and the wind doesn't blow - what will we do?  Burn gas in CCGT plants exactly as we do now.  The difference is we will be burning gas for a month or two a year rather than all year round.

 

The future energy mix will have nuclear, wind, solar (etc) lots of battery capacity and a good chunk of CCGT plants with gas storage for the times when we need them. 

[Beelbeebub]

47 minutes ago, SteamyTea said:

I am going to repeat what I said about cost. Wind and PV are the cheapest forms of, and it is coming in bold , NEW generation.

It is not competing with the same contracts as legacy generation.

👍

[Spinny]

Just to reinforce the fact that people are being deliberately lied to with climate propaganda...

 

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/07/16/no-there-werent-2700-heatwave-deaths-due-to-climate-change/

 

Much of the public still foolishly believe what the BBC tells them. Justin Rowlatt was out last night on the BBC with the political activist organisation called the Met Office proclaiming hottest evah again, and that we are all doomed because the AMOC/gulf stream could stop at any moment. The Met Office has been shown to be a scientifically corrupt and incompetent organisation that can't even maintain an accurate set of weather stations and publishes fraudulent data as though it were real.

 

As for the AMOC

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/07/09/fears-of-gulf-stream-collapse-fade-as-hard-data-reveal-major-role-of-natural-variation/

 

But there are good careers to be had in lying to the public and writing fear propaganda.

[SteamyTea]

7 minutes ago, Spinny said:

Much of the public still foolishly believe what the BBC tells them. Justin Rowlatt was out last night on the BBC with the political activist organisation called the Met Office proclaiming hottest evah again, and that we are all doomed because the AMOC/gulf stream could stop at any moment. The Met Office has been shown to be a scientifically corrupt and incompetent organisation that can't even maintain an accurate set of weather stations and publishes fraudulent data as though it were real.

You have a serious problem with people, bordering on paranoia.

Edited 14 hours ago by Nickfromwales

[dpmiller]

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c9w2wyw9x09o

 

"The Competition and Markets Authority (CMA) has been investigating the heating oil market in Northern Ireland and other parts of the UK.

It found that the huge spike in prices at the start of the Iran conflict largely reflected rising wholesale costs and that the market is generally competitive.

However, it concluded that oil consumers were not as well protected as those connected to the gas and electricity grids.

The CMA has not recommended the sort of price controls applied to the gas and electricity markets.

Instead it has suggested a "new, proportionate regulatory regime" which largely involves giving consumers clearer information."

 

Anything that promotes national independence and offers some kind of stability here in the hinterlands would be a Good Thing.

[Nickfromwales]

A polite note to all:
 

I have said earlier in this thread about direct insults, which will be moderated and removed from public view.

 

Buildhub T&C’s have been updated for this exact reason, and are available to (re)read at everyone’s leisure

to ensure that we all function admirably on here.

 

https://forum.buildhub.org.uk/terms/

[ProDave]

11 hours ago, Beelbeebub said:

You realise we have wind turbines, right?  They tend to do well in the winter.  And if the sun doesnt shine and the wind doesn't blow - what will we do?  Burn gas in CCGT plants exactly as we do now.  The difference is we will be burning gas for a month or two a year rather than all year round.

And what do you think the owners of the plants will do fir the 10 dormant months?  Pay to keep them maintained with no income?  I wonder what they will charge when they are asked to wake them up for a short time?

 

My concern is with the bonkers pricing system we have, in those periods electricity prices will rocket.

 

Before we get to that point a plan needs to be devised for ownership, maintenance and costing of plant only used for short periods.  And the wholesale electricity pricing changed so we are not held hostage to high price supplies to fill the gap.

[Beelbeebub]

23 minutes ago, ProDave said:

And what do you think the owners of the plants will do fir the 10 dormant months?  Pay to keep them maintained with no income?  I wonder what they will charge when they are asked to wake them up for a short time?

Yes, that's why the price per Mwh for a plat with 5% or 30% utilisation is higher than one with +90%.

 

But but it's cheaper to run a plant for 4 months at about £150 Mwh than a plant for 11 months at £100Mwh

 

Btw this is exactly what China is doing with coal.  There's lots of 'but china are building coal plants!' but little mention that the utilisation of those plants is falling.  It's china's energy security backup because they have lots of coal, but the growth in their demand as they electrify is coming from renewables 

 

Edited 12 hours ago by Beelbeebub

[Beelbeebub]

And the high peak prices are something we already deal with - consumers get a fixed price which is above the absolute lowest but also caps the peaks which can get very high.

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, Spinny said:

But there are good careers to be had in lying to the public and writing fear propaganda.

I agree - people willing to regurgitate the oil industry line about climate change being a hoax and a communist plot to destroy our economy can have a lucrative career with think tanks, the speaking circuit and providing papers so politicans can cite 'peer reviewed research' , whilst the scientists diligently studying ocean currents, atmospheric temperatures, rainfall patterns, climate models etc live precariously from academic grant to academic grant.

[Spinny]

I don't doubt that there are grifters on both sides.

 

Do you think all academics and scientists are paragons of virtue. They would never ever think of seeking grant funding from public and privately funded groups dedicated to climate emergency investigations as a nice trendy and extremely well funded source of money ? That when paid say £300k to do a study they would happily report back to their sponsor that there was no hard proof of anthropogenic CO2 driven warming, only correlated data sets that may or may not signify actual causation. They are not going to bite the hand that feeds them.

 

You do know there are immensely wealthy individuals actively funding climate emergency advocacy groups with many £millions. In some cases funding training courses to teach journalists how to write climate propaganda pieces and get them published.

[-rick-]

3 hours ago, Spinny said:

Just to reinforce the fact that people are being deliberately lied to with climate propaganda...

 

https://dailysceptic.org/2026/07/16/no-there-werent-2700-heatwave-deaths-due-to-climate-change/

 

A little story from my past. Back when the war in Iraq started after what seemed like obviously overhyped (putting it politely) weapons of mass destruction evidence I sought out alternative news sources for progress of the war having lost trust in what we were being told by the mainstream media. I came across a blog 'Colonel Cassad' who was supposedly a Russian military analyst of some form. For some time his reports seemed to fairly well match what was reported in the news except that from his reports the losses on our side were much higher than reported. At some point it became obvious that the blog was propaganda rather than truth and that was the end of me reading it. However, I feel grateful I found it when I did as that experience has served me well as inoculation against similar tactics repeated (by both Russians and other motivated players) in other areas. Once you've gone down a rabbit hole and come out the other side it's fairly easy to spot.

 

Which brings me to the Daily Skeptic. Which uses all the same techniques as Colonel Cassad. Take elements of truth, use incomplete quotes to reinforce your angle, mix them in with some motivated reasoning and deliberate bias. Avoid stating counterpoints unless you deliberately want to diminish them  (using the same tactics) and focus on areas where there is a willing audience who is ready to take in what you say because it agrees with their priors. It's an incredibly successful tactic that works over and over.

 

3 hours ago, Spinny said:

But there are good careers to be had in lying to the public and writing fear propaganda.

 

Indeed, it's Toby Young's most successful career move (founder of the Daily Skeptic). He earns many times the salary of any climate scientist you ever see quoted in the news.

Edited 10 hours ago by -rick-

[LnP]

Since it keeps coming up, and I got no response when I made these points before, I'll briefly repeat them:

1. Renewables aren't cheap. They appear cheap because the generators sell their electricity without having to be accountable for the system costs they incur, which are intermittency and grid capacity. A kWh of electricity from a firm power generator (nuclear, CCGT) which is connected to the grid close to consumers is worth more than a kWh from an intermittent generator in the North Sea off Scotland.

2. The issue of North Sea oil and gas prices peaking with global prices at the whim of geopolitics could be easily solved. The government could issue licences to the oil companies which would work similar to CfDs for renewables, fixed price for a fixed period and conditional on being landed in the UK for UK consumption. It's been done before. That's how it was in the early days of North Sea oil and gas production.

[JohnMo]

42 minutes ago, LnP said:

kWh of electricity from a firm power generator (nuclear, CCGT) which is connected to the grid close to consumers is worth more than a kWh from an intermittent generator in the North Sea off Scotland

Couple of issues, offshore generation in Scotland isn't really that intermittent with a strong enough and almost constant wind - around 96% if the time over a year. 

 

Second issue is Scottish wind energy is really an export product, so is equal too the energy England imports from Europe, but had no emissions. But also it's transported via high voltage DC interconnector (or will be) so very little losses occur over long distances.

 

3rd issue all generation is responsible for the grid network costs not just renewable!

 

48 minutes ago, LnP said:

The issue of North Sea oil and gas prices peaking with global prices at the whim of geopolitics could be easily solved. The government could issue licences to the oil companies which would work similar to CfDs for renewables, fixed price for a fixed period and conditional on being landed in the UK for UK consumption. It's been done before. That's how it was in the early days of North Sea oil and gas production

Yes they could change the law to make the UK government the only place they can sell too with hedge pricing.

 

Trouble is the oil produced is too good for general stuff like fuel oils, plus nearly all the refineries have gone from the UK, so we would have to export anyway and buy lower quality oils for fuel oils etc. 

 

Gas a slightly different story. We could self consume. We or various companies currently store gas (taken from the market when wholesale prices are cheap) in vast onshore cavens, dotted about across the UK, many million of m³ at a time. This is then sold back to the market when prices are high. So we are getting screwed there also.

[Spinny]

1 hour ago, -rick- said:

Which brings me to the Daily Skeptic. Which uses all the same techniques as Colonel Cassad.

All journalists, podcasters, influencers, politicians, PR people, salesmen etc use language, communication, and 'spin' techniques to appeal to and to persuade or influence an audience. Most of what we read has been angled one way or another for an audience, and newspapers typically align left or right and edit and distort their content accordingly.

 

So what are you trying to say exactly ? That I am a child and don't understand this ? That every article in Daily Skeptic is without merit or any underlying truth because they use journalistic techniques to appeal to an audience, whereas your own (unknown and uncited) sources are never subject to the same ? That all that is necessary is to listen to 'officialdom', 'authority', and 'government' departments that always speak absolute truth whatever the consequences and never use such dirty tricks ? 

 

The underlying question is always is it true, or is it false ? So I look forward to your takedown of the facts about UK claimed heat deaths raised in that Daily Skeptic article ? Discussing your counter argument might be illuminating.

[ToughButterCup]

How about cover as many car parks as we can with solar PV.... ?

[LnP]

1 hour ago, JohnMo said:

Couple of issues, offshore generation in Scotland isn't really that intermittent with a strong enough and almost constant wind - around 96% if the time over a year. 

 

Would you be happy with your electricity supplier cutting you off 4% of the time? I doubt it. Filling the last few % of the intermittency gap is expensive and the renewables generators are getting it for free. If they were required to deliver firm power, they would have to back up their

wind farms with CCGT or batteries. Amortising that capital cost over 4% utilisation is expensive. At the moment they don't pick up the cost.

2 hours ago, JohnMo said:

all generation is responsible for the grid network costs not just renewable!

Well, yes, all generators need to pay a share, but if money has to be spent on the grid to accommodate newly connected renewables, their share should reflect that. At the moment, renewable electricity which we've all committed to pay for with CfDs is being curtailed because the grid can't take it. The grid was completely fit for purpose before renewables came along.

Dieter Helm explains it very well.

• Current peak demand: 45 GW
• Before renewables, capacity installed to meet the peak with a security margin: 60 GW
• Current installed capacity: 120 GW requiring a much larger grid for the same demand.
• And we have to add the cost of the batteries, storage, CCGT etc. to fill the intermittency gaps.

I'm fully in favour of decarbonisation, but we need to be clear about the costs and how we mitigate them.

[JohnMo]

26 minutes ago, LnP said:

you off 4% of the time? I doubt it.

They pretty do any for maintenance activities and gas is switched quite a bit anyway. I  have just planned 3 maintenance activities for 3 offshore gas turbine generators, each service takes 3 weeks and will allow them to run on demand. 3 weeks is equal to 4% of the year. Also only 2 of the 3 run at any time, so actually the run time is well below 96%. That is how you have to manage rotating equipment.

 

26 minutes ago, LnP said:

The grid was completely fit for purpose before renewables came along.

Dieter Helm explains it very well.

• Current peak demand: 45 GW
• Before renewables, capacity installed to meet the peak with a security margin: 60 GW
• Current installed capacity: 120 GW requiring a much larger grid for the same demand.
• And we have to add the cost of the batteries, storage, CCGT etc. to fill the intermittency gaps.

I'm fully in favour of decarbonisation, but we need to be clear about the costs and how we mitigate them.

If peak demand is 45GW, the grid doesn't need to handle the whole installed capacity available, it needs to handle 45GW.  It may need to be altered to accept electricity from different areas but that's life. Towns grow or shrink so does industry they need have different electric demands change is part of life, the grid and generation changes also.

Edited 7 hours ago by JohnMo

[-rick-]

1 hour ago, Spinny said:

All journalists, podcasters, influencers, politicians, PR people, salesmen etc use language, communication, and 'spin' techniques to appeal to and to persuade or influence an audience.

 

While 'journalist' is a broad term and applies to just about anyone writing stories for newspapers/doing tv news/etc. For a lot of the last century Journalist has meant something more specific. Someone who writes following journalistic ethics, aims to report unbiased, factual information. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journalism_ethics_and_standards

 

Unfortunately, that does seem to have faded in recent years and most of what people call journalism now is at best what I would call reporting and much more is closer to mere opinion. This is unfortunate, we would all be better off if the bulk of journalism we encountered day to day was of the form that followed strict ethics. I tend to focus my news reading on those sources which are clearly trying to follow those standards and actively avoid those who reject them.

 

1 hour ago, Spinny said:

So what are you trying to say exactly ? That I am a child and don't understand this ? That every article in Daily Skeptic is without merit or any underlying truth because they use journalistic techniques to appeal to an audience, whereas your own (unknown and uncited) sources are never subject to the same ? That all that is necessary is to listen to 'officialdom', 'authority', and 'government' departments that always speak absolute truth whatever the consequences and never use such dirty tricks ? 

 

I don't regard any publication or author who don't follow journalistic ethics to be journalism. I want my news to seek truth, cite sources, to accurately quote statements (rather than selectively quote just the bit that agrees with viewpoint of the article), etc. The Daily Sceptic is not that, it imitates that.

 

1 hour ago, Spinny said:

The underlying question is always is it true, or is it false ? So I look forward to your takedown of the facts about UK claimed heat deaths raised in that Daily Skeptic article ? Discussing your counter argument might be illuminating.

 

Based on all the threads we have had here in the past on similar topics I doubt spending an hour dissecting an article would reveal anything that hasn't already been covered many times. But I will briefly highlight two things:

 

1. The whole article is seething with bias and loaded language, to the extent that if you'd been living in a climate controlled box and hadn't experienced the recent heatwave you'd think we hadn't just lived through a period of time where records were falling repeatedly and by significant amounts.

 

2. The whole premise of the article is that the reports of 2700 dead were false.

 

Quote

Accordingly, then, the bodies were found by the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine (LSHTM), Imperial College London and the Met Office, who claimed to have found more than 2,700 corpses, each with the signature of anthropogenic climate change on them.

 

But this is not what they claimed at all. They very clearly say they estimated that up to 2700 may have died. That is not the same as finding 2700 dead people.

 

It goes on from there and someone with more patience than me could write a very long critique but I have said enough, I don't see how saying more will make any difference.

[SteamyTea]

56 minutes ago, ToughButterCup said:

How about cover as many car parks as we can with solar PV

Good idea.  Can get the National Trust to do it, they own most of the best carparks down here.  Most are just fields, not gird connection, and charge £6 a visit.

Take my local carpark in PZ, be nice to cover it over as it does rain a lot here.

Now, the interesting bit.  We often get 100 MPH winds, with gusts over 120 MPH, so would need a complete redesign.  Deep files driven, a very sturdy roof, and maybe a half MW capacity.  We could take the build costs totally out of the car park charges.  So rather than £1.20 for 3 hours, let them charge £8/hour.  Seems cheap to me.

 

When will people realise that the easiest solution is the best.

1 hour ago, Spinny said:

That I am a child and don't understand this

Well I have know idea of your age, but your understanding of complex issues, and your total denial of evidence, suggests you are.

So you have summed yourself up nicely.

 

Edited 6 hours ago by SteamyTea

[Beelbeebub]

56 minutes ago, LnP said:

• Current peak demand: 45 GW
• Before renewables, capacity installed to meet the peak with a security margin: 60 GW
• Current installed capacity: 120 GW requiring a much larger grid for the same demand.
• And we have to add the cost of the batteries, storage, CCGT etc. to fill the intermittency gaps.

I don't agree with this point.

 

But in both cases the maximum grid load is the same as it's demand driven so the grid doesn't need to be bigger.

 

The only difference is the location of the generators is different so some additional work is needed to get the power from it's new source.

 

National grid have identified the current weak links (a big one being on the Scottish borders) and are upgrading them.  Another is on the east coast and one across Wales.

 

The cost of these upgrades is expected to add about £50 to bills but save about £40 in curtailment related costs.

 

The last point: yes we will have to add things like storage. Current rates for domestic storage are less than 5p per kWh (£50 per Mwh) I suspect grid scale is less. That's on top of the input electric cost, which would generally be near zero (the whole point of storage).  As an aside the capacity of all the EV's currently on the road (5% of all cars now) is about 60Gwh. That could,with the right V2G infrastructure yield as much as the nuclear plants under construction for several hours.  They would be the ideal peaker plants.

[Beelbeebub]

"journalist" has come to mean

something different these days.

 

Once it was someone committed to finding and explaining facts and complex topics.

 

Now it includes columnists writing opinions, partisan press releases, commercial press releases (every single one of those 'new poll suggests' articles) and even those idiot "auditors" (any idiot with a go pro and chip on their shoulder) who call themselves "citizen journalists".

 

 

Edited 6 hours ago by Beelbeebub

[-rick-]

5 minutes ago, Beelbeebub said:

even those idiot "auditors" (any idiot with a go pro and chip on their shoulder) who call themselves "citizen journalists".

 

Really thread drifting...

 

It's unfortunate that this term encompasses such a wide range of people. Plenty of idiots using it as cover for awful stuff but some good independent researchers really digging into things that traditional media no longer has the budget for (but used to be a big part of their modus operandi -- eg BBC Newsnight).

 

Every journalist that got let go due to budget cuts (ad driven revenue collapsing) starting their own substack really not helpful to a healthy media environment. It reveals plenty of money to fund journalism but spread extremely inefficiently. Only example I'm aware of that breaks out of this is Jim Waterson who was let go and started 'London Centric' a substack but instead of just being a him thing, he started hiring others and has turned it into an interesting local paper with proper investigations.

[Spinny]

33 minutes ago, -rick- said:

It goes on from there and someone with more patience than me could write a very long critique but I have said enough, I don't see how saying more will make any difference.

What you are doing there is criticising the language, but you seem to have nothing much to say about the numbers discussed. The author is angry because there has been a very clear effort made to mislead the public. To claim thousands of deaths from the heat based on an estimating approach which is clearly wrong is misleading. One might ask why the people claiming and getting press coverage of their 'estimate' are doing so ? Might it possibly be that they are themselves motivated to create public fear because they want the public to clamour for net zero. ?

 

Here is the Met Office statement...

https://www.metoffice.gov.uk/about-us/news-and-media/media-centre/weather-and-climate-news/2026/more-than-2700-excess-deaths-estimated-in-england-and-wales-during-may-and-june-heatwaves

 

It is a lie. Truly the Met Office is lying to the public, publishing false statements, writing news stories which are propaganda lies. These then get picked up and circulated. What is the end result - that many people glancing at the news get told once again to be very afraid because surely soon by implication their own loved ones will be fried to death.

 

Why is the Met Office which is a government agency with funding from our taxes putting out lies and propaganda aimed at influencing us ? They should be confining themselves to making well evidenced scientific statements of fact. Not issuing false political propaganda.

 

It is precisely these behaviours that cause more and more people to doubt and turn away from the narrative that there is an anthropogenic climate emergency. As someone once said...

If you have to be persuaded, reminded, pressured, lied to, incentivised, coerced, bullied, socially shamed, guit-tripped, threatened, punished and criminalised. If all of this is considered necessary to gain your compliance - you can be absolutely certain that what is being promoted is not in your best interest.

 

If those organisations were interested in publishing information in a balanced way, they would of course put any numbers they give in context. Joe public hasn't got a clue how many people die each day. Is 2700 (itself a lie) a lot or a few ? But it is propaganda and giving context would reduce its impact by being honest - so that is omitted. The exact same tricks were used during covid when the BBC started publishing daily covid death figures with no context - '40 people died with covid today'. Sounds bad doesn't it - don't tell the public that 1800 people die every day.

 

Sorry but we cannot have these organisations lying to us. I don't want my kids living in 1984 - and right now that's a bigger risk than climate variation.

 

Can I look forward to your critique of the Met Office statement ?

[Beelbeebub]

6 minutes ago, Spinny said:

It is a lie. Truly the Met Office is lying to the public, publishing false statements, writing news stories which are propaganda lies. These then get picked up and circulated. What is the end result - that many people glancing at the news get told once again to be very afraid because surely soon by implication their own loved ones will be fried to death.

Sorry  what do you base "it's a lie" on?

 

Obviously it's impossible to compare the counter factual of no heatwave, but the practice of looking at what the expected death rate in June would have been in most summers and then looking at the actual death rate to compute a difference is fairly well established. It's some for every major public health intervention.

 

For example the recent news about the drop in cervical cancer deaths amongst girls due to HPV vaccinations was done by a version of this method.

 

We do the same when a report comes out about how many extra deaths are caused by a cold winter.

 

Your entire rant rests on the notion that the met office statement about extra deaths is a deliberate untruth on their part. 

 

If the number is calculated using mundane regular methods we use for every other similar situation then your entire point collapses.

 

Extra deaths caused by an unusually long hot spell is exactly the sort of information the met office should be providing.

Edited 5 hours ago by Beelbeebub