Denmark didn't "transition" its grid—it replaced it.

 From Chris Meder, EVCurveFuturist

Denmark didn’t “transition” its grid—it replaced it. ~15% → 92% renewable electricity in 25 years. Wind did the heavy lifting. Solar is scaling. Interconnection balanced. Flexibility solved variability. Wind built it. Solar is scaling. Fossil lost it. This IS system replacement. ⚡#Bettrification

If little Denmark can we do it, we all can. There are no longer any technological hurdles to overcome. Technical hurdles, yes. There are no longer any economic hurdles either. The only factor standing in the way is vested interests.

Climate obstruction bingo

From CommsDeclare 

Rising heat kills one person a minute

 From The Guardian

Rising global heat is now killing one person a minute around the world, a major report on the health impact of the climate crisis has revealed.

It says the world’s addiction to fossil fuels also causes toxic air pollution, wildfires and the spread of diseases such as dengue fever, and millions each year are dying owing to the failure to tackle global heating.

The report, the most comprehensive to date, says the damage to health will get worse with leaders such as Donald Trump ripping up climate policies and oil companies continuing to exploit new reserves.

Governments gave out $2.5bn a day in direct subsidies to fossil fuel users and producers in 2023, the researchers found, while people lost about the same amount because of high temperatures preventing them from working on farms and building sites.

Reduced coal burning has saved about 400 lives a day in the last decade, the report says, and renewable energy production is rising fast. But the experts say a healthy future is impossible if fossil fuels continue to be financed at current rates.

 

Dr Marina Romanello, of University College London (UCL), who led the analysis, said: “This [report] paints a bleak and undeniable picture of the devastating health harms reaching all corners of the world. The destruction to lives and livelihoods will continue to escalate until we end our fossil fuel addiction.

“We’re seeing millions of deaths occurring needlessly every year because of our delay in mitigating climate change and our delay in adapting to the climate change that cannot be avoided. We’re seeing key leaders, governments and corporations backsliding on climate commitments and putting people increasingly in harm’s way.”

The report says the rate of heat-related deaths has surged by 23% since the 1990s, even after accounting for increases in populations, to an average of 546,000 a year between 2012 and 2021.

“That is approximately one heat-related death every minute throughout the year,” said Prof Ollie Jay, of the University of Sydney, Australia, who was part of the analysis team. “It is a really startling number and the numbers are going up.”

Jay said: “We constantly emphasise to people that heat stress can affect everybody and it can be deadly – I think a lot of people don’t understand that – and that every heat-related death is preventable.”

Laura Clarke, the chief executive of the environmental law firm ClientEarth, said: “We are living through the era of climate consequences. Heatwaves, floods, drought and disease are no longer distant warnings – they’re here now. But as attribution science, climate litigation and grassroots activism grow, accountability for climate impacts is no longer a question of if but when.”

The 2025 edition of the Lancet Countdown on Health and Climate Change was led by UCL in collaboration with the World Health Organization and produced by 128 experts from more than 70 academic institutions and UN agencies.

In the past four years, the average person has been exposed to 19 days a year of life-threatening heat and 16 of those days would not have happened without human-caused global heating, the report says. Overall, exposure to high temperatures resulted in a record 639bn hours of lost labour in 2024, which caused losses of 6% of national GDP in the least developed nations.

The continued burning of fossil fuels not only heats the planet but also produces air pollution, causing millions of deaths a year. Wildfires, stoked by increasingly hot and dry conditions, are adding to the deaths caused by smoke, with a record 154,000 deaths recorded in 2024, the report says. Droughts and heatwaves damage crops and livestock and 123 million more people endured food insecurity in 2023, compared with the annual average between 1981 and 2010.

Yet there are still imbeciles (or people in the pay of fossil fuel companies) who deny that global heating is happening.

Solar panels would require < 0.01% of Oz's land

The soft denialists ("Yes, global warming is real, but it would be too hard to do anything to stop it, so let's just go on using coal")  state that solar panels would have to cover the whole country to provide us with enough electricity.  This is rubbish.  (For example, rooftop solar in South Australia provides 20% of the State's electricity.  Just panels on rooftops.)

From Dr Ian Mackay, using data from the Clean Energy Council:

🌞 Total land required to replace coal fired energy 🌞 Example assumes all solar:120,000 hectares 🌞 That’s less than 0.016 percent of Australia’s total land currently used for agriculture [i.e., less than 0.01% of Oz's total land area] 🌞 Australian agriculture currently accounts for 58% of our land use 🌞And agrisolar = panels + grass/sheep etc

The Ozzie Right's nuclear plans are nonsense

Sizewell C in the middle of the image with the existing Sizewell B in the top right.
Source: Wikipedia

From IEEFA

 

The UK’s Financial Times has recently reported that the 3,260 megawatt Sizewell C project – expected to be the UK’s next nuclear power plant – is now likely to cost around GBP40 billion, or $80 billion in Australian dollars, to construct. That equates to $24,540 per kilowatt of capacity.

Sizewell C’s latest cost blow-out offers further confirmation that the opposition Liberal-National Coalition’s costing for its proposal to build nuclear power plants in Australia is far too low at $10,000 per kilowatt, and completely unrealistic. It supports IEEFA’s findings on the cost of construction for other nuclear power plants, detailed in our September 2024 report Nuclear in Australia would increase household power bills. The Sizewell C reactor’s newly estimated capital cost is about 2.5 times the capital cost used in the Frontier Economics modelling that has underpinned the Coalition’s plans.

At present the UK Government is yet to commit to construction of Sizewell C and an official costing for the project is yet to be released. But the latest information in Financial Times, which has reportedly come from government and industry sources close to the project, reinforces the findings from our prior report: that for nuclear power to be viable in Australia, large increases in power prices would be required.

If the reported $80 billion cost only covers the plant’s construction and doesn’t account for the substantial debt interest costs likely to be accumulated over the targeted nine-year construction period, then Sizewell C would need the wholesale power price to rise to average out at around $300 per megawatt-hour to be commercially viable. Even if this debt interest cost is accounted for in the $80 billion cited by the Financial Times, then it would still need the wholesale power price to rise to around $230 per megawatt-hour.

By comparison, according to the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC), over the 2023-24 financial year electricity retailers across Australia’s National Electricity Market needed to pay $132 per megawatt-hour on average for wholesale energy to service their household customers.

Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor has asserted on repeated occasions that any government investment in nuclear power plants would be made on the requirement that they were “commercially viable”, with no subsidies provided that would hit the Government’s budget. So, for a nuclear plant with similar costs to those reported for Sizewell C to be commercially viable in Australia, wholesale energy prices would need to rise by $98 to $168 per megawatt-hour, relative to 2023-24 levels, to enable cost recovery. This equates to a 74% to 127% rise in wholesale prices, which would be charged on to household electricity consumers.

Such wholesale prices would mean that average household power bills across the states in the National Electricity Market would increase by between $510 and $874 per year prior to application of GST. Once GST is added then the increase will be between $561 and $961 – assuming electricity retailers don’t add a margin on top. This is based on ACCC data, which indicates average household annual consumption is 5.2 megawatt-hours.

Over the last year, utility-scale solar cots $52/MWh, and wind $79/MWh.  These Sizewell C costings imply that nuclear will cost at least 4.5 times as much as utility-scale solar, 8 times as much as rooftop solar, and  3 times as much as wind.  So why is the LNP fixated on nuclear as a "cure" for whatever is supposed to ail the Australian electricity market, when it's so expensive?   Well, it'll take 15 years, at least, for any nuclear power station to be built.  And in the meantime we'll have to go on using coal and gas.  In fact, the LNP proposes to stop all new renewables construction if it wins the upcoming election.

What about the "unreliability" and "variability" of renewables?  Wind and solar are so cheap we could have double the capacity we need, and throw away the surplus, and it would still be much cheaper than nuclear.  And that's ignoring battery farms and the huge storage capacity of EVs when the car/light truck fleet has transitioned to fully electric.

Hottest January since 1940

 From Prof Eliot Jacobson

And still we do nothing to slash emissions.  And we've elected a climate-denying cretin to the White House.

Record temperatures in October

Via Earthly Education

 This chart shows the actual temperature, not the anomaly (that is, not the difference in temperature from the long-term average for that day.)    It's falling because of the season.  Even though it's spring moving into summer in the southern hemisphere, at first sight offsetting the reverse process in the NH, because a larger proportion of the NH is land, it cools faster than the SH heats up, since much more of the SH is water.  So you get an annual cycle of actual temperatures for the world as a whole, as opposed to the situation with temperature anomalies.  In other words, the declining temperatures shown in the chart are not secular, but seasonal.  It's not the end of global heating, just a temporary respite.

The short-dash line shows the average temperature for these dates for 1979-2000; the medium-dash 1981-2010; and the long dash, 1991-2020.  Each one is higher than the previous one.  The orange line shows the temperatures for 2023, for these dates, and the red line for 2024.   

The conclusions are obvious.  As is the inaction by our politicians and CEOs.

Climate activists are prophets

From The Guardian, by Tim Winton

[Tim Winton is an Australian novelist]

Not long before the Nazis murdered him, the Lutheran pastor and resister Dietrich Bonhoeffer wrote that “the ultimate test of a moral society is the kind of world it leaves to its children”.

That moral challenge is timeless. But with the climate emergency upon us, it has an unsettling new edge, and with that in mind, I’ve been preoccupied lately by the underappreciated power of solidarity.

Because the chances that a child in the next century will feel gentle sunlight against her skin, or hear birdsong, or see native animals in the wild, or even live some part of the year outside of a storm shelter, will depend on the degree to which we can manifest fellow feeling for her now.

To be a moral society, we need to rediscover and restore solidarity – with our Earth, and with its creatures and peoples.

But solidarity is anathema to capitalism, especially the brute version that’s spread and metastasized in the past 40 years. Fellow-feeling has been trained out of us. Two generations have been raised to fight a war of all against all, rendering us competitors and consumers when we could have been citizens and allies.

To face the anguish and chaos of climate breakdown, which is the miserable legacy of fossil capitalism or business-as-usual, we’ll need to skill up again and retrieve the best in ourselves. Only then do we stand a chance of not consigning our descendants to hell.

I have no neat answer for how to revive solidarity. But I’m certain it won’t emerge from the pitiless dog-eat-dog mentality that got us into this crisis. Nor will it spring from those who revere convention, crave respectability and align themselves with the powerful against the weak.

Moments of real human progress – from the abolition of slavery to the advent of workers’ rights and the struggle for women’s suffrage – have always sprung from empathy, vulnerability, imagination and disruption. From new concepts born in adversity. From fresh language that’s honest and calls out injustice, emboldening resistance and inspiring courage. And in deeds that are audacious, selfless and unforeseen, even shocking.

This is the stuff that draws us together and bears us up as one. Such words and deeds will be dangerous to the status quo, and there will be fear and rage in them. But for solidarity to endure, these must, in the end, be expressions of love, not of vengeance.

Love isn’t always gentle, though. For love makes. And it breaks. That’s the price of commitment – for communities as much as for individuals. Positive change is hard. Transformations and transitions are messy, they require sacrifice – not from the weak and oppressed, but from the powerful and prideful. Under capitalism that will feel deeply discordant, but it’s non-negotiable.

Having spent so long insatiably gilding the present by looting the future, transformative change is our only hope.

Naomi Klein says: “If we don’t demand radical change we are headed for a whole world of people searching for a home that no longer exists.” In other words, we will have expelled ourselves from Eden all over again.

Pope Francis says that as a matter of urgency, we need to undergo “an ecological conversion”.

New and unlikely threads of solidarity have been emerging for a while. You may not know about them, but across generations, religions, races, classes and time zones, new alliances are forming every day. The Pope’s “ecological conversion” is afoot.

Thirty years and several popes ago, Thomas Berry was busy laying some of the conceptual groundwork for it. A priest of the Passionist order, Berry described our dependency on fossil fuels as a global addiction.

Addiction is a form of captivity and degradation. Getting off the gear is hard, and recovery is messy, but the allies you find on the way are deeply surprising. And they’re life-changing.

But before you hit rock bottom as an addict, you’re in the grip of denial. There are so many lies you tell yourself and others. And, of course, while you suffer, there’s always someone profiting from your illness.

When you suspect someone has overdosed on an opiate, you find yourself walking them around while you wait for the ambulance. You shout at them, shake them, plead with them to stay awake, to stay with you.

Now, think of all the scientific and activist voices who have been pleading with us over recent years to stay conscious. They’ve done everything in their power to save us from sinking back into our deadly cultural and political stupor. Their efforts have been selfless and heroic. And yet we’ve scorned them. At best, we patronise them.

The American poet Christian Wiman writes that “to attend is to atone”. Think about that.

Because right now, legions of young people are divesting themselves of our sad and lonely captivity to business as usual. And they’re getting organised, networking, skilling up, raising their voices and literally placing their bodies in the path of those who profit from our addiction.

Politicians castigate them. The media vilifies them.

Yes, these young patriots can be awkward to contend with. They feel so vexatious and countercultural. All their banners and slogans. Their blockades slowing our commute. All those difficult questions they ask at shareholder meetings. And of course, the mortifying street theatre they insist on inflicting upon us.

But what else can they do? Many of them can’t even vote yet. They’re trying what they can, snatching whatever fleeting opportunity is available to them in a polity that shuts them out at every point – financially, politically, culturally.

But their voices are prophetic.

Prophets speak truth to power – and we know what happens to prophets. To the mighty and comfortable, the truth is a threat. It must be intimidated, arrested, beaten, shot and, yes, crucified to produce the silence required to maintain business as usual.

Prophets try to shake their communities awake. And that’s all these kids are trying to do.

Yes, they’re right up in our faces, blocking our path, begging us not to sink back into cosy oblivion. Because they know what our junkie habit is doing to creation, to our home and to their future. If things don’t change – and fast – they will be damned for our sins. And their sense of forsakenness is being ignored.

But it’s worse than that. Because now they’re being persecuted on our watch, in our name and on our dime.

By and large, we turn our heads and walk on by. Even those of us steeped in religious teachings urging us to defend the weak, the oppressed and the outcast.

We’re lucky to have young people of conscience and courage. And I suspect that deep down, we know they’re right. We’re just too proud to admit that we’re hooked, in thrall to the pushers and dealers, the drillers and their shills. And few of us are as deeply ensnared as our elected representatives. That’s not a tragedy – it’s a scandal.

But instead of owning our shame and frustration, and the rage we feel against those who make super profits from our misery, we project everything on to those trying to save us from ourselves.

I believe we have the collective juice to break free of what oppresses us. But we’ll need to do this together in new and unlikely alliances.

That work is under way, despite the efforts of the big polluters. But finishing the job will require us to shed some rusted-on beliefs about what and who we value, about how we run our economy and who it’s meant to benefit. Some unholy shibboleths need to be overturned.

French theologian Jacques Ellul said: “Belief is reassuring. People who live in the world of belief feel safe. On the contrary, faith is forever placing us on the razor’s edge.”

With less than a decade in which to forestall the very worst of climate breakdown, that’s where we are right now.

The razor’s edge is the terrain all morally serious humans must traverse in order to know themselves. Because the rim of oblivion is also the brink of opportunity and potential.

So as we teeter together at the rim of eternity, consider the words of WH Auden: “Eternity is the decision now, action now, one’s neighbour here.”

Tim Winton's latest novel is set in the dystopian
future cause by catastrophic climate change.

Climate protesters need to stop blocking roads!

 The aftermath of the recent extraordinary floods in Spain.  But no, ask any denialist: this has nothing to do with catastrophic climate change.

Something must be done

 By Mike Luckovich

Exxon's breathtakingly accurate climate predictions

From The Guardian

The oil giant Exxon privately “predicted global warming correctly and skilfully” only to then spend decades publicly rubbishing such science in order to protect its core business, new research has found.

A trove of internal documents and research papers has previously established that Exxon knew of the dangers of global heating from at least the 1970s, with other oil industry bodies knowing of the risk even earlier, from around the 1950s. They forcefully and successfully mobilized against the science to stymie any action to reduce fossil fuel use.

A new study, however, has made clear that Exxon’s scientists were uncannily accurate in their projections from the 1970s onwards, predicting an upward curve of global temperatures and carbon dioxide emissions that is close to matching what actually occurred as the world heated up at a pace not seen in millions of years.

Exxon scientists predicted there would be global heating of about 0.2C a decade due to the emissions of planet-heating gases from the burning of oil, coal and other fossil fuels. The new analysis, published in Science, finds that Exxon’s science was highly adept and the “projections were also consistent with, and at least as skillful as, those of independent academic and government models”.

Geoffrey Supran, whose previous research of historical industry documents helped shed light on what Exxon and other oil firms knew, said it was “breathtaking” to see Exxon’s projections line up so closely with what subsequently happened.

“This really does sum up what Exxon knew, years before many of us were born,” said Supran, who led the analysis conducted by researchers from Harvard University and the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research. “We now have the smoking gun showing that they accurately predicted warming years before they started attacking the science. These graphs confirm the complicity of what Exxon knew and how they misled.”

The research analyzed more than 100 internal documents and peer-reviewed scientific publications either produced in-house by Exxon scientists and managers, or co-authored by Exxon scientists in independent publications between 1977 and 2014.

The analysis found that Exxon correctly rejected the idea the world was headed for an imminent ice age, which was a possibility mooted in the 1970s, instead predicting that the planet was facing a “carbon dioxide induced ‘super-interglacial’”. Company scientists also found that global heating was human-influenced and would be detected around the year 2000, and they predicted the “carbon budget” for holding the warming below 2C above pre-industrial times.

Armed with this knowledge, Exxon embarked upon a lengthy campaign to downplay or discredit what its own scientists had confirmed. As recently as 2013, Rex Tillerson, then chief executive of the oil company, said that the climate models were “not competent” and that “there are uncertainties” over the impact of burning fossil fuels.

“What they did was essentially remain silent while doing this work and only when it became strategically necessary to manage the existential threat to their business did they stand up and speak out against the science,” said Supran.

“They could have endorsed their science rather than deny it. It would have been a much harder case to deny it if the king of big oil was actually backing the science rather than attacking it.”

Climate scientists said the new study highlighted an important chapter in the struggle to address the climate crisis. “It is very unfortunate that the company not only did not heed the implied risks from this information, but rather chose to endorse non-scientific ideas instead to delay action, likely in an effort to make more money,” said Natalie Mahowald, a climate scientist at Cornell University.

Mahowald said the delays in action aided by Exxon had “profound implications” because earlier investments in wind and solar could have averted current and future climate disasters. “If we include impacts from air pollution and climate change, their actions likely impacted thousands to millions of people adversely,” she added.

Drew Shindell, a climate scientist at Duke University, said the new study was a “detailed, robust analysis” and that Exxon’s misleading public comments about the climate crisis were “especially brazen” given their scientists’ involvement in work with outside researchers in assessing global heating. Shindell said it was hard to conclude that Exxon’s scientists were any better at this than outside scientists, however.

The new work provided “further amplification” of Exxon’s misinformation, said Robert Brulle, an environment policy expert at Brown University who has researched climate disinformation spread by the fossil fuel industry.

“I’m sure that the ongoing efforts to hold Exxon accountable will take note of this study,” Brulle said, a reference to the various lawsuits aimed at getting oil companies to pay for climate damages.

 

Bogus scientific papers damage research credibility

Source: ArsTechnica

From The Guardian

Tens of thousands of bogus research papers are being published in journals in an international scandal that is worsening every year, scientists have warned. Medical research is being compromised, drug development hindered and promising academic research jeopardised thanks to a global wave of sham science that is sweeping laboratories and universities.

Last year the annual number of papers retracted by research journals topped 10,000 for the first time. Most analysts believe the figure is only the tip of an iceberg of scientific fraud.

“The situation has become appalling,” said Professor Dorothy Bishop of Oxford University. “The level of publishing of fraudulent papers is creating serious problems for science. In many fields it is becoming difficult to build up a cumulative approach to a subject, because we lack a solid foundation of trustworthy findings. And it’s getting worse and worse.”

The startling rise in the publication of sham science papers has its roots in China, where young doctors and scientists seeking promotion were required to have published scientific papers. Shadow organisations – known as “paper mills” – began to supply fabricated work for publication in journals there.

The practice has since spread to India, Iran, Russia, former Soviet Union states and eastern Europe, with paper mills supplying ­fabricated studies to more and more journals as increasing numbers of young ­scientists try to boost their careers by claiming false research experience. In some cases, journal editors have been bribed to accept articles, while paper mills have managed to establish their own agents as guest editors who then allow reams of ­falsified work to be published.

“Editors are not fulfilling their roles properly, and peer reviewers are not doing their jobs. And some are being paid large sums of money,” said Professor Alison Avenell of Aberdeen University. “It is deeply worrying.”

The products of paper mills often look like regular articles but are based on templates in which names of genes or diseases are slotted in at random among fictitious tables and figures. Worryingly, these articles can then get incorporated into large databases used by those working on drug discovery.

Others are more bizarre and include research unrelated to a journal’s field, making it clear that no peer review has taken place in relation to that article. An example is a paper on Marxist ideology that appeared in the journal Computational and Mathematical Methods in Medicine. Others are distinctive because of the strange language they use, including references to “bosom peril” rather than breast cancer and “Parkinson’s ailment” rather Parkinson’s disease.

Watchdog groups – such as Retraction Watch – have tracked the problem and have noted retractions by journals that were forced to act on occasions when fabrications were uncovered. One study, by Nature, revealed that in 2013 there were just over 1,000 retractions. In 2022, the figure topped 4,000 before jumping to more than 10,000 last year.

Of this last total, more than 8,000 retracted papers had been published in journals owned by Hindawi, a subsidiary of the publisher Wiley, figures that have now forced the company to act. “We will be sunsetting the Hindawi brand and have begun to fully integrate the 200-plus Hindawi journals into Wiley’s ­portfolio,” a Wiley spokesperson told the Observer.

The spokesperson added that Wiley had now identified hundreds of fraudsters present in its portfolio of journals, as well as those who had held guest editorial roles. “We have removed them from our systems and will continue to take a proactive … approach in our efforts to clean up the scholarly record, strengthen our integrity processes and contribute to cross-industry solutions.”

But Wiley insisted it could not tackle the crisis on its own, a message echoed by other publishers, which say they are under siege from paper mills. Academics remain cautious, however. The problem is that in many countries, academics are paid according to the number of papers they have published.

“If you have growing numbers of researchers who are being strongly incentivised to publish just for the sake of publishing, while we have a growing number of journals making money from publishing the resulting articles, you have a perfect storm,” said Professor Marcus Munafo of Bristol University. “That is exactly what we have now.”

The harm done by publishing poor or fabricated research is demonstrated by the anti-parasite drug ivermectin. Early laboratory studies indicated it could be used to treat Covid-19 and it was hailed as a miracle drug. However, it was later found these studies showed clear evidence of fraud, and medical authorities have refused to back it as a treatment for Covid.

“The trouble was, ivermectin was used by anti-vaxxers to say: ‘We don’t need vaccination because we have this wonder drug,’” said Jack Wilkinson at Manchester University. “But many of the trials that underpinned those claims were not authentic.”

Wilkinson added that he and his colleagues were trying to develop protocols that researchers could apply to reveal the authenticity of studies that they might include in their own work. “Some great science came out during the pandemic, but there was an ocean of rubbish research too. We need ways to pinpoint poor data right from the start.”

The danger posed by the rise of the paper mill and fraudulent research papers was also stressed by Professor Malcolm MacLeod of Edinburgh University. “If, as a scientist, I want to check all the papers about a particular drug that might target cancers or stroke cases, it is very hard for me to avoid those that are fabricated. Scientific knowledge is being polluted by made-up material. We are facing a crisis.”

This point was backed by Bishop: “People are building careers on the back of this tidal wave of fraudulent science and could end up running scientific institutes and eventually be used by mainstream journals as reviewers and editors. Corruption is creeping into the system.”

See also:  

Scientific fraud is rising, and automated systems won’t stop it. We need research detectives

Epic fraud: How to succeed in science (without doing any)

One simple way to stop bogus research papers:  if your institution requires and rewards publication of scientific papers, check the papers listed by your potential employee.  Don't just assume they exist or are genuine.

Global warming warning --- 85 years ago

 [From a toot by Ed Hawkins]

85 years ago.

In April 1938, Guy Callendar published his seminal paper showing that Earth’s land areas had warmed over the previous 50 years.

He also suggested that man-made CO₂ emissions had caused around half of the observed warming.

85 years ago.

https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/

The theory that increasing greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere would cause warming was developed earlier by Fourier, Foote, Tyndall, Arrhenius & others.

Their work enabled Callendar to join the pieces together and demonstrate a human-caused increase in both CO2 & global land temperatures and, importantly, link these together.

The work of Plass, Keeling, Revelle, Manabe & others would subsequently solidify these ideas.

Climate science has a long history we should use to communicate more.

 

Well he wasn't the first:  a woman called Eunice Foote proved in 1856 that CO2 trapped more heat than air, and maintained it longer.   Then there was Fourier, a French polymath genius.  And Arrhenius, a Swedish scientist.  Science has been clear about global warming for 170 years.

And still we do too little to avert catastrophe.  Politicians, owned by fossil fuel companies.  Other companies pretending to care, but just greenwashing.  Right-wing idiots, too stupid to realise they've been had.  And hoi polloi, hoping that somebody else will solve the problem.

Do solar panels attract tornados?

From This Is Not Cool (used to be called Climate Denial Crock of the Week, or ClimateCrocks)

In rural Carrol County, Indiana last week, I happened to listen in briefly on remarks at a County Commission meeting discussing wind and solar energy.
As familiar as I am with the entire range of bogus anti-clean energy talking points, I did hear a new one.

“Solar panels attract tornadoes.”

Kicked that around with some of my companions and everyone agreed that was a new one.

Well, this week I may have stumbled on the source. A good friend, centennial farmer and proud wind turbine host called me and asked me to take a look at a facebook posting about solar energy. He said the author claimed to be some kind of expert, and my friend did not feel well versed enough to respond.
This is what he passed along.

Facebook:

As more & more counties get more solar farms…here’s some truth about solar farms.

From a STEPHENVILLE resident, George Franklin:

I should start by telling you what bonafides I have for writing this. I am a retired aerospace engineer. A literal rocket scientist if you will. I worked on MX (Peacekeeper) Space Shuttle, Hubble, Brilliant Pebbles, PACOSS, Space Station, MMU, B2, the Sultan of Brunei’s half billion dollar private 747 with crystal showers, gold sinks and 100 dollar a yard coiffed silk carpets. I designed a satphone installation on prince Jeffry’s 757. I did all of the design work for the structure of Mark 1V propulsion module currently flying on at least 3 spacecraft that I know of. Some of the more exciting projects I have worked on are not shareable. My personal projects include a spin fishing reel with a 4.5 inch spool which is entirely my own designed, machined and assembled. It has 2 features that are patentable. A unique true flat level wind and a unique line pickup mechanism. I am also am FAA certified glider pilot and FAI certified gold glider pilot. I fly both full scale and model sailplanes. I am Microsoft certified and ComTIA A+ certified.

Solar panels are at best about 20% efficient. They convert almost 0% of the UV light that hits them. None of the visible spectrum and only some of the IR spectrum. At the same time as they are absorbing light they are absorbing heat from the sun. This absorbed heat is radiated into the adjacent atmosphere. It should be obvious what happens next. When air is warmed it rises. Even small differences in ordinary land surfaces are capable of creating powerful forces of weather like thunderstorms and tornadoes. These weather phenomena are initiated and reinforced by land features as they are blown downwind. It is all too obvious to me what will happen with the heat generated by an entire solar farm. Solar farms will become thunderstorm and tornado incubators and magnets.

Solar panels are dark and and they emit energy to the space above them when they are not being radiated. This is known as black-body radiation. Satellites flying in space use this phenomenon to cool internal components. If they didn’t do this they would fry themselves.

So solar farms not only produce more heat in summer than the original land that they were installed on, but they also produce more cooling in winter, thus exacerbating weather extremes.

So I conclude with this. There is nothing green about green energy except the dirty money flowing into corrupt pockets.

There is no such thing as green energy. The science doesn’t exist. The technology doesn’t exist. The engineering doesn’t exist. We are being pushed to save the planet with solutions that are worse than the problems.
———

Well alrighty then. But, as Samuel L. Jackson said, allow me to retort…

Peter Sinclair on Facebook:

This is typical BS produced by another elderly ideologue talking outside his field.

If this logic is correct, every asphalt Walmart parking lot would be creating tornadoes and thunderstorms on a regular basis.

The writer does not explain how solar fields make it “cooler in winter”, which would have to rely on an entirely different physical principle. In fact, solar panels work more efficiently, creating more electricity, in cold weather.

https://www.sunrun.com/…/do-solar-panels-work-in-cold…

Solar panel’s average efficiency of 20 percent makes them, according to research from Dr Paul Mathewson of Clean Wisconsin, an 80 to 150 times more efficient use of land than ethanol.

Gas, coal, and nuclear power plants are enormously inefficient as they emit tremendous amounts of waste energy as heat – requiring vast amounts of cooling water – water that is increasingly in short supply.

Most people don’t know that almost half of the surface water withdrawals in the US are to cool thermal power plants – coal, gas, nuclear.

https://www.usgs.gov/…/thermoelectric-power-water-use

Sun and wind, on the other hand, require little or no precious water.

https://www.iea.org/…/clean-energy-can-help-to-ease-the…

Moreover, as we electrify our energy system, the inherent efficiency of things like EVs will actually allow us to decrease the total primary energy that we use as a planet, as Dr Mark Jacobson (not a “rocket scientist” – an actual Stanford University expert on energy generation) has pointed out.

https://news.stanford.edu/…/50states-renewable-energy…/

Meanwhile, in Texas, energy consultant Doug Lewin points out that solar (and wind) are helping the state ride out the current arctic outbreak. And here in the MISO transmission region, solar and wind are doing a great job helping to keep us lights-on and toasty.

For a self proclaimed “rocket Scientist” – Mr Franklin’s prognostications are stunningly shallow. He should retire to work on his fishing gear.

The unfounded fuss about PV module waste

 From time to time, I see opinions that suggest old solar panels are a major environmental problem.  Of course, they should be recycled.  But the absolute amount of old solar panel waste is negligible relative to other waste sources.  At the bottom of all these "unfounded concerns" are fossil fuel companies and their useful idiots, trying to delay the phase out of oil, gas and coal.

From a toot by Gernot Wagner

Put me down on the side of more PV module waste, less of everything else

Unfounded concerns about photovoltaic module toxicity and waste are slowing decarbonization

Canada wildfires

 From Open Mind

Generally, I’ve stopped reacting to climate deniers’ idiotic claims, like the garbage firehose that is the “WattsUpWithThat” blog. Truly, I have better things to do. But this one is so ridiculous, it’s hard to pass up.

Here’s the theme: P. Gosselin claims that all the talk about the severity of Canada’s wildfire this year is hype. He titles his post “Canada Forest Fires Trend Has Gone Down Since 2000, Data Defy Alarmist Claims.” He supports his claim by showing this graph (of the NUMBER of wildfires in Canada each year since 2000):

It’s actually a common tactic of climate deniers, to make a false claim (i.e. tell a lie) and support it with a graph which doesn’t really address the point. Here’s the graph that does address the point (from the same data source), the AREA burned in Canada each year since 2000:

It seems that this year Canada hasn’t had many more fires than previously, but the ones it has had …

So … why do I bother to mention this? Because this is where republican politicians get their scientific beliefs.

Climate denial: the republican party way.

Fossil fuel giants using influencers to greenwash

Credit: Feodora Chiosea / Alamy Stock Vector

Oil majors are no longer denying that global warming is happening, though no doubt some are still funding denialist stinktanks.  Instead, they're pretending they are doing something to cut emissions, and using influencers to spread their lies. 

From DeSmog

Oil and gas supermajors including Shell and BP are using UK influencers to push false solutions to the climate crisis and manufacture a more family friendly image, DeSmog can reveal.

The influencers have included a popular former BBC presenter, a polar explorer, and an exasperated father of five who needs a break and finds it in the form of BP’s rewards app.

The campaigns have been deployed across a number of social media platforms and are part of a global effort to give “millennials a reason to connect emotionally” with oil and gas firms, and to tackle their perception as “the bad guys”.

DeSmog analysed examples of more than 100 influencers being paid to promote fossil fuel firms worldwide since 2017, from the US to Malaysia, in campaigns that have reached billions of people.

Our analysis uncovered promotional material from two PR firms representing Shell, boasting of the success of their online advertising. One of the PR companies claimed that content fronted by UK inventor Colin Furze reached nearly a billion people, while another claimed that a campaign with explorer Robert Swan OBE made Shell’s audience “31 percent more likely to believe” that the oil company is “committed to cleaner fuels”.

This comes as major polluters are increasingly deploying digital tactics to detract from negative headlines about their record profits and decades-long contribution to climate change.

In 2020, leaked internal documents from BP showed how the firm sought to “reach influencers” in order to become “more relatable, passionate, and authentic” and “win the trust of the younger generation” – admitting that the company is “seen as one of the bad guys”.

Shell last year advertised for a new staff member to manage its TikTok campaigns, while oil and gas giant ExxonMobil has been the highest advertising spender on Facebook and Instagram in the last five years, shelling out $23.1 million since June 2018.

“There’s an endless supply” of greenwashing adverts on social media, environmental content creator Jacob Simon told DeSmog. “While there’s more knowledge in general around climate change and the harms of fossil fuels, I think that people have a lot of trust in creators. When influencers that people know and respect talk about something, they’re likely to believe them.”
‘We Needed Them to Think Differently About Shell’

Shell appears to have been the most prominent employer of influencer advertising over the last seven years.

In April, for example, the fossil fuel giant released a five-part YouTube series hosted by ex-BBC presenter Dallas Campbell, which touted the net zero benefits of hydrogen and featured one-on-one interviews with two Shell executives.

Oil and gas companies have been heavily promoting hydrogen as a green fuel, despite the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimating that hydrogen will represent at best 2.1 percent of total energy consumption in 2050.

“Shell has the ambition to make enough hydrogen from renewable power to kick-start this energy revolution,” Campbell said in the first video of the series, which has gained nearly 30,000 views.

The former BBC presenter has also promoted the series on his personal social media channels. On Instagram, Campbell encouraged his followers to watch his “Hydrogen powered adventure!” but did not tag Shell, nor mention his commercial relationship with the brand.

This was also not the first time that Campbell had partnered with Shell. In 2016, he presented the social media coverage of the company’s Make the Future London festival. “Dallas was fantastic,” Shell said in a testimonial following the event, adding that the social media campaign had fetched over a million views, which the company described as “absolutely huge!”

In 2022, a Harvard University paper found that a “green innovation” narrative was one of the key social media tactics deployed by fossil fuel companies. Analysing 2,325 social media posts from 22 major European polluters, the report found that 72 percent of posts from oil and gas firms tried to emphasise their spending on green technology.

As the study also pointed out, however, these firms invested just 1.7 percent of their annual capital expenditures in low carbon technologies between 2010 and 2018.

It also appears that major polluters have been using influential environmentalists to bolster their social media campaigns.

This includes Robert Swan, a popular advocate for the protection of Antarctica who received an OBE in 1995 after becoming the first person to walk both poles.

In late 2017, Shell sponsored Swan and his son, Barney, to travel to the South Pole and promote its “renewable” biofuels, with Shell distributing the campaign widely on social media.

Behind the publicity stunt was one of Shell’s principal PR agencies, Edelman. The PR firm boasts on its website that the expedition organically reached 600 million people on social media and was so successful that it increased “positive attitudes towards [Shell]” by 12 percent, and made Shell’s audience “31 percent more likely to believe” that the oil company is “committed to cleaner fuels”.

“The company [Shell] tasked Edelman with the job of giving millennials a reason to connect emotionally with Shell’s commitment to a sustainable future,” the Edelman website says. “We needed them to forget their prejudices about ‘big oil’ and think differently about Shell.”

Robert Swan told DeSmog that he is not a celebrity or an influencer but an “explorer” and that Shell helped in their “effort to support biofuel”.

“We needed a backup fuel because the sun doesn’t always shine,” he said.

This was echoed by his son Barney, who advises businesses on “reducing their environmental impact” and runs an environmental charity. He told DeSmog that to make meaningful progress towards the energy transition “you have to work with big industry,” adding that Shell’s biofuels are part of that solution.

“I’ve definitely copped a lot of criticism for it [working with Shell],” he said, yet adding that Shell offered him, “a younger person”, the opportunity to “feel represented” and “build more trust” in their so-called “nature based solutions”.

Ultimately, he said the expedition “was not a Shell story – it was a father and son story, having a good go of it.”
‘The Wrong Side of History’

British inventor Colin Furze, who has 12.5 million followers on YouTube, has also worked with Shell on its social media output. In a campaign produced for the fossil fuel giant by advertising agency EssenceMediacom, Furze co-hosted a six week virtual competition “challenging students to solve real life energy challenges”.

The campaign was co-hosted by US-based science influencer Astronaut Abby and won World Media Group’s 2021 Corporate Influencer Award. According to the award submission, the competition generated 127 million views and nearly one billion impressions, with EssenceMediacom boasting that Shell-branded content “actually outperformed Colin [Furze’s] own organic content benchmarks, achieving 59 percent more interactions than the norm for posts on Colin’s owned channels”.

EssenceMediacom, which belongs to multinational communications company WPP, has previously claimed to help clients “integrate sustainability into their advertising and marketing strategies”.

Environmental content creator Jacob Simon told DeSmog that, “Any agency with fossil fuel clients is on the wrong side of history. Agencies have a responsibility to use their talent and skills for good, to connect and make ads that benefit society and make the world a better place instead of harming us and contributing to global pollution and destruction.”

YouTube also appears to have been a target for Shell. In December 2021, the popular motoring channel Seen Through Glass was paid to host a collaboration with Shell, during which its host Sam Fane was shown around Finali Mondiali, the World Finals of the Scuderia Ferrari Challenge Series. Seen Through Glass has 600,000 YouTube subscribers and was named as one of the Sunday Times’s top 50 UK influencers in 2019.

In 2021, Shell also sponsored GadgetsBoy – a consumer tech channel with 73,000 YouTube subscribers – to test the firm’s new e-scooter.

“These public messaging efforts form part and parcel of a broader greenwashing strategy of which the objective is to portray Shell as a global champion in the energy transition,” Gregory Trencher, an Associate Professor at the Graduate School of Global Environmental Studies, Kyoto University, told DeSmog.

“Yet this is far from the reality, as despite having a goal in place to reach net zero emissions, Shell has abandoned its plan to reduce its production of oil by 1-2 percent each year up to 2030 and has reaffirmed its plans to grow its gas production.”

A Shell spokesperson said that, “People are well aware that Shell produces the oil and gas they depend on today. However, what many don’t know is that we are also investing billions of dollars in low- and zero-carbon solutions globally as part of our efforts to support the energy transition.

“No energy transition can be successful if people are not aware of the alternatives available to them. Making our customers aware – through advertising or social media – of the low-carbon solutions we offer now or are developing is an important and valid part of our marketing activities.”
Global Reach

Fossil fuel companies have also relied on family lifestyle influencers to promote their products and improve their reputations.

In June 2019, oil and gas supermajor BP used Alex Galbally, a UK-based “dad influencer”, to promote its reward app, “BPme”.

Galbally, who boasts over 100,000 followers on Instagram, posed outside a petrol station along with four of his kids and told his followers that the BP app “really is gonna make my life!”.

Galbally deleted this post after being contacted for comment by DeSmog.

This post was part of a concerted effort to promote the BPme app via lifestyle and cultural influencers across the English-speaking world, with at least 17 influencers posting content that gained at least 675,000 likes and five million views.

DeSmog also identified influencer campaigns promoting fossil fuel companies in other countries including India, Chile, Germany, and Indonesia. The total combined following of all the influencers who have posted fossil fuel partnerships since 2017, in posts analysed by DeSmog, is nearly 60 million.

These campaigns often took advantage of lax restrictions on the labelling of social media sponsorships. In the UK, influencers are required to clearly label when they have been paid to promote a brand – rules that are absent in many other countries.

In 2021, a number of Instagram influencers in India promoted a Shell advertising campaign, racking up millions of video views.

Few of the posts flagged that they were paid adverts (something that wasn’t required under Indian law until this year), though they all used a similar format and included Shell corporate hashtags.

One of the few labelled campaigns was from Indian actress Radhika Apte, who posted a paid video partnership with Shell on Instagram that received 3.6 million views.

“I think that fossil fuel companies are very good at shape shifting to maintain their social licence,” environmental activist and influencer Francesca Willow told DeSmog. “They have smart people working there who have realised that social media is where they can focus their attention, or where they should focus their attention, because other strategies have started to fail them.”

Major polluters also appear to have used influencers to exaggerate the green credentials of their products. In Indonesia, Shell paid popular travel photographer Felgra Yogatama to promote its lubricant Shell Helix Ultra, which he described in an Instagram post as “The world’s first carbon neutral oil, made from natural gas,” claiming that it is used to “ensure high performance and low emissions”.

“The claim of ‘carbon neutral’ engine oil is ludicrous,” said Professor Trencher.

Yogatama, who is followed by over 400,000 people, confirmed to DeSmog that Shell had approached him “to do a project just like any other brand”, but this fact was neither stated in the body of the post nor in the label, giving the impression of an organic post.

“Greenwashing attempts have been rampant with the big oil and gas companies for a long time,” said Arild Wæraas, an Associate Professor at Oslomet Business School, who has studied corporate attempts to exaggerate their social and environmental work.

Ultimately, though, Wæraas doesn’t believe that social media campaigns will measurably shift public perceptions of big polluters. “I don’t think Shell and others will be able to improve their reputation much until they transition fully to producing green energy,” he said.

Meanwhile, environmental groups are determined to expose the tactics of fossil fuel giants and to persuade influencers not to work with them.

“We need to educate people more on what these companies are actually doing so that when you are approached as a creator, you don’t fall for it,” Tolmeia Gregory, associate creative director at Clean Creatives, told DeSmog.

This was echoed by James Turner, founder of the creative collective Glimpse. “The fossil fuel industry is using the glossy sheen of influencers to stop it looking like a creaking dinosaur,” he said. That’s why we need young creators of all stripes to avoid the likes of Shell and BP and use their talent to promote brands that are actually serious about climate change. This influencer stuff is just getting started, and we need to nip it in the bud while we still can.”

All the individuals and firms named in this article were approached for comment.

Which was warmer: the 1930s or the last 10 years

From The Climate Brink

Cherry picking is a tactic where someone selectively chooses a small portion of a data set that contradicts the conclusion drawn from the entire dataset. This aims to mislead the audience by presenting a distorted picture of reality, leading them to question established facts.

In discussions surrounding climate change, the inherent complexity of the climate system and significant natural variability make it relatively simple to identify isolated parts of any big data set that seemingly refutes what scientists are telling you. Climate contrarians exploit these cherry picked facts to cast doubt on the existence or severity of climate change.

Numerous methods can be employed to cherry pick data. For instance, one might focus on a specific time period or region that demonstrates a different trend than the entire data set. Examples include examining short periods during which the climate appears stable or cooling. Or they might focus on a particular data set that gives the lowest trend (e.g., UAH satellite measurements).

Or they might concentrate on a geographically distinct area where the local climate behaves differently than the global average. An example of this is one of the most well-known examples of cherry-picked science:

This is classic cherry picking because it focuses on a very small region, the U.S., as we describe below.

Let’s begin by making it clear that the Earth is much warmer today than it was in the 1930s.

Let’s take a look at the average summertime maximum temperature, calculated by averaging daily TMax for each day during the summer months (June, July, and August) over land:

This shows that maximum summertime temperatures are higher just about everywhere. We can make this clearer by differencing these plots:

The exception is in the central United States – the region that saw extreme warmth during the dust bowl era – where summertime maximum temperatures were indeed higher in the 1930s.

It is this small blue region in the central U.S. that contrarians are focusing on when they argue that the 1930s had worse heat waves. Obviously, focusing on that one region gives a deeply misleading picture of the evolution of summer heat globally.

When we expand our perspective to encompass the entire globe, the data tell us that the hottest temperatures are getting hotter, with record-breaking temperatures occurring at a faster and faster pace, just as we would expect in a warming climate.

The bottom line is that when you see a plot that looks suspicious (like heat waves in the 1930s were worse than today), it’s worth asking whether you’re being told the whole story. In this case, you’re not.

I've only just discovered this blog.  It's very interesting.

What denialists say now

 By Ruben Bolling

Why Rowan Atkinson is wrong

Rowan Atkinson

Rowan Atkinson did a piece in The Guardian which was filled with errors. Simon Evans of Carbon Brief responds.

In a widely shared comment piece for the Guardian, comedian Rowan Atkinson said he felt “duped” by the green claims about electric vehicles (EVs).

In support of his contention, however, Atkinson repeats a series of repeatedly debunked talking points, often used by those seeking to delay action on the climate crisis.

Moreover, he suggests alternatives to EVs that are not yet widely available, would be less beneficial to the climate and are guaranteed to be more costly.

Atkinson’s biggest mistake is his failure to recognise that electric vehicles already offer significant global environmental benefits, compared with combustion-engine cars.

While EVs won’t solve all of the problems associated with car use – from traffic congestion through to our increasingly sedentary lifestyles – they are an essential part of tackling the climate emergency.

In its latest report, for example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said, with “high confidence”, that EVs have lower greenhouse gas emissions than conventional cars. The IPCC said that electric vehicles not only “offer the greatest low-carbon potential for land-based transport”, but their use would save money. (Despite elevated electricity prices, EVs are still much cheaper to run than petrol cars in the UK.)

Indeed, without a widespread shift to EVs, there is no plausible route to meeting the UK’s legally binding target of net zero greenhouse emissions by 2050 – and the same is true globally.

Contrary to Atkinson’s article, EVs cut emissions in the “bigger picture” taking into account vehicles’ full life cycles, from the extraction of oil or mining of lithium for batteries through to actually driving the cars.

As Carbon Brief noted some years ago, EVs already cut planet-warming emissions by two-thirds on a life cycle basis relative to combustion engine cars in the UK – and the benefits are growing.

Atkinson cites Volvo figures showing emissions from producing EVs to be 70% higher. This is misdirection. While many details of the Volvo study have been thoroughly debunked, the more important issue is that the emissions from producing batteries, while significant, are quickly outweighed by the CO2 emissions from fuelling petrol and diesel cars.

Atkinson is also wrong to say that the UK government’s plan to ban the sale of new petrol and diesel cars from 2030 “seems to be based on conclusions drawn from only one part of a car’s operating life: what comes out of the exhaust pipe”.

For starters, the government’s cost-benefit analysis of its policy plans for cars talks in detail about life cycle emissions. Specifically, it mentions government-commissioned research that proves EVs offer a large and growing emissions benefit on a life cycle basis.

Echoing Carbon Brief’s findings, the analysis says: “BEVs [battery electric vehicles] are expected to reduce GHG emissions by 65% compared to a petrol car today, and this rises to 76% by 2030.”

That same analysis gives one answer to Atkinson’s touting of hydrogen as an “interesting alternative fuel” to replace petrol and diesel. The research shows that hydrogen vehicles would only cut emissions by 39% today, relative to petrol engines, potentially rising to 56% by 2030.

Another answer is that there are still only 72,000 hydrogen-fuelled fuel-cell vehicles on the planet, accounting for a tiny fraction of the roughly 1.5bn cars on the road globally. In comparison, about 14m EVs are due to be sold this year alone, according to the International Energy Agency (IEA).

Even Toyota, the carmarker most closely associated with pushing hydrogen vehicles and cited in Atkinson’s article, has recently started to follow the rest of the market in shifting towards EVs.

Atkinson goes on to suggest hydrogen for trucks, inaccurately claiming electrification is a “non-starter” due to the weight of batteries. Yet manufacturers sold 60,000 electric trucks last year and now have 220 heavy-duty vehicle models on the market, according to the IEA. European electric truck sales grew fourfold in the first quarter of this year alone, according to Volvo.

As Auke Hoekstra at the Eindhoven University of Technology has argued, electric trucks will not have a major weight disadvantage over diesels. More importantly, says Hoekstra, they will be much cheaper to own and run.

The main problem with hydrogen vehicles is the same as for the “synthetic fuel” that Atkinson is also keen to promote. Specifically, both of these alternatives are incredibly inefficient, requiring many times more energy to drive the same distance.

Figures from NGO Transport and Environment show EVs can be driven two to five times further on the same energy as would be needed if using hydrogen or synthetic fuels. This thermodynamic disadvantage inevitably makes these alternatives much more costly to run than EVs.

A few of Atkinson’s other claims are worth mentioning.

• He says EV batteries only last “about 10 years”. Yet “most modern lithium-ion units are likely to last the lifetime of the car”, according to Autocar. Tesla’s batteries are “designed to outlast the vehicle”.
• He complains that new cars are only kept for three years before being sold. Yet he does not reference the secondhand market, and the fact that British people are keeping their cars for longer than ever.
• He claims that it is better to keep running old petrol cars than to replace them with EVs. Yet a new EV would start benefiting the climate in less than four years, relative to an old combustion engine.
• He claims that lithium-ion batteries contain rare earth elements. They do not.

In concluding, Atkinson says people should “hold fire” on EVs. This is linked to the false premise that EVs “will be of real, global environmental benefit one day, but that day has yet to dawn”.

The alternatives he promotes are not yet widely available, are less beneficial for the environment – and are thermodynamically guaranteed to be much more costly.

In contrast, and contrary to Atkinson’s central claim, EVs already offer significant emissions savings – and their widespread use is central to meeting UK and global climate goals.

Simon Evans is the deputy editor and senior policy editor at Carbon Brief