Mad Dictators

[Beelbeebub]

13 minutes ago, Spinny said:

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

I mean I read through it and there wasn't much wrong.

 

Personally I would have used less precise % given the inherent uncertainty in these methods.  I wouldn't say "39%" i'd say "around 1/3" I wouldn't say "59%" Icd say "over half"

 

But apart from that there want anything controversial - I mean we broke multiple records are saw exceedingly high temperatures even for August and Europe saw even worse.  We would be daft to ignore this event even if we escaped it.

Edited 3 hours ago by Beelbeebub

[LnP]

@JohnMo and @Beelbeebub, all fair points but I recommend you read the piece by Dieter Helm I linked to and I'll be interested in your thoughts about his arguments.

[Spinny]

Beelbeebub - have you even read the Daily Sceptic counter article I provided a link to above ?

 

Do you know what the point is ?

 

Edited 3 hours ago by Spinny

[SteamyTea]

39 minutes ago, Spinny said:

Truly the Met Office is lying to the public

It is even worse when you lie to yourself, and then believe it.

 

[-rick-]

@Spinny

 

I'm really not sure there is any point in engaging further. You claim the article is exposing lies, when all the Met Office are claiming is that they have made estimates.

 

If the article was focused more on something like 'Met Office estimates of heatwave death toll use deceptive methods' and actually showed the methods were bad then that may be different. But that's not what the article does and to be clear I don't think there is any evidence presented that the estimate is significantly wrong (I'm not saying it's right either - it's too soon to tell).

 

The graph showing the ONS death toll is a lagging indicator, it takes time for reported deaths to make their way through the system so a graph that shows less deaths last week than same time last year doesn't prove anything. You have to wait for the data to come through.

 

I've seen plenty of criticism of 'excess deaths' over time (same thing came up during covid). It's a difficult measure and the way it's used in the scientific community doesn't exactly match the way the lay-man understands it but again the article doesn't engage with that. I can't provide links or anything to backup the following but I have read various long and detailed explanations and critiques of this in the past and my conclusion from this reading is that excess death estimates we see are generally in line with reality.

Edited 2 hours ago by -rick-
I removed part of this because it was a bit muddled

[-rick-]

And now I've written that I fell I've fallen (again) into the trap of talking in detail about something that doesn't warrant the time. The article is written from such a biased perspective in obvious bad faith that engaging with it is just falling into the trap of giving it more credit than it deserves.

 

Quote

Because, even if climate change and the heatwaves were real, the deaths were not.

 

This line is implying climate change is false, the heatwaves didn't happen and people didn't die from those non-existent heatwaves. It's a case of 'believe what I'm saying not what you are seeing/experiencing'

Edited 2 hours ago by -rick-

[Beelbeebub]

1 minute ago, -rick- said:

I've seen plenty of criticism of 'excess deaths' over time (same thing came up during covid)

The author ignores the enormous hump in the blue and orange line that occured during the COVID epidemic but absolutely didn't show excess deaths from COVID.....😁

 

But @Spinny to address the graph fully you need to understand what was done

 

They took all the previous years (usually omitting COVID)and effectively produce a smoothed average.  If you visualise a smooth line running through *the middle* of the bundle of lines that's the baseline.

 

You then look at the number of deaths in the target period Vs that theoretical baseline -as you can see the 2026 line is towards the upper end of the "bundle" hence there are "excess deaths".  The difficult but is to differentiate between excess deaths that are abnormal and excess deaths that a normal (ie natural variation). Clearly the COVID lumps were abnormal (🤫) but the heatwave deaths, much harder to call.  It is highly likely there were excess deaths, there always are when it is hot or cold.  It's likely that there were more excess deaths as the temperature for hotter.  But the exact number, to a corpse, will never be known.

[Beelbeebub]

To drag back to the original topic.

 

The article about the solar farm was emotive (as all anti ones are) invoking the loss of "prime" land that was actually not particularly prime.

 

The second article made the "gotcha" observation that renewables do  it always produce at their peak output....  Not news and built into the calculations.  This is why we need considerably more peak capacity than our nominal maximum.  This is the calculation every one with solar panels makes.

 

I have 11kwp of panels on an 9kwh inverter feeding a house that runs about 500w continuous and peaks at maybe 7kw if we really try.

 

Why have I got so many panels? Because it means they produce enough to power the house even in sub optimal conditions (most of the time)

 

It's the same with our national capacity -we will prob need something like 2 or 3x our nominal peak demand, so north of 120gw peak.  Will we ever see that demand? Hopefully not!  But it means that the system will still be able to provide a significant amount of our national demand even when operating at 20, 25% of maximum

 

[Beelbeebub]

1 hour ago, LnP said:

@JohnMo and @Beelbeebub, all fair points but I recommend you read the piece by Dieter Helm I linked to and I'll be interested in your thoughts about his arguments.

To break his arguments down by section

1. He makes the mistake that declining N.Sea production is a choice - it isn't the rate of decline is slightly modifiable but not to any significant degree. We are arguing over the green line or the red line.

He also makes the mistake that our high gas and electricity prices are due to us deliberately running down our production. Aside from my point above, they are high due to the high price of gas and the international price of gas is not changed by the UK output.  The price is set by the international markets and those are (nominally)supply and demand.  Even at best, our output is too small to change the international price.

 

It should be noted that the rise in electricity prices and gas prices was very closely correlated in 2022 because a much larger proportion of our electricity came from gas.  In 2026 the rise was much less direct because less of our electricity comes from gas.

 

He talks about the supply chains for renewables being dirty and having emissions. This is a variation of the landman rant (and the "EV's will never pay back the carbon used in making the battery" argument before that). Study after study shows wind turbines, solar panels and EVs are all net negative for carbon well within their lifetime. It also ignores the carbon and pollution from fossil fuel extraction as a comparison.

 

2. He talks about "what happens is the gas prices fall?" Well, they will eventually for a while,until the next crisis. Then they will  fall again until the next crisis and so on.  So far we have had 2 massive "once in a lifetime" shocks in the current decade -that we are only half way through...

 

Does anyone want to bet Trump doesn't do something stupid I'm the next 2 and a bit years.

 

What would happen to oil prices if the world's largest oil producer suffered massive political instability? Say a the kind caused when a leader who loses an election tries to cling to power using a paramilitary police force or even elements of the armed forces....

 

Who wants to say that is fantasy land?

 

3. He seems to get mixed up on the cost of capacity. With renewables capacity is a more statistical figure than gas plants etc.

 

With ccgt plant the peak cavity is easy. Just an engineering question -"that plant, at full chat, will produce 2GW of electricity."

 

With renewables there is a theoretical capacity - what if everything was perfect, but that's only a few % of the time.  A better question would be "what is the 95% available capacity" ie the level it can produce 95% (or whatever arbitrary figure you want) of the time.  So my 11kwp solar array has a 95% figure closer to 1kw  (during daylight obviously).

 

Essentially we will have to dump a load of capital into building these assets.  Once e have built them they will provide cheap energy for decades.  Or we could kee the capital and dole it out to buy oil and gas as we need it.  That's our choice.

 

Right enough for now....