We were told at the last election backing the net zero electrical revolution would cut domestic bills by £300. In the first year of the new government they kept putting the managed price of power up. Now we are told by Mr Miliband we all need solar panels on our roof to save £500 on our electricity bills.
He does not tell us in his bullish soundbite how much it will cost to put sufficient solar panels on our roof. He does not tell us how people can borrow the money to pay for the installation, or how much that borrowing will cost. He does not tell us what risks this entails, how long the solar panels would last or what maintenance they would need.
Meanwhile another ship is on fire with its cargo of battery cars said to be the cause. The Chinese look to the UK as a big potential buyer of their panels and electric vehicles. They out more coal fired power stations in to fuel their export industries as we close ours down.
These policies do great harm to the Uk whilst world CO 2 continues to rise.
June 8, 2025
Good morning.
In the meantime the de-industrialization of the UK continues.
Labour lied, Sir John. But the Conservatives also lied. No wonder people are sick and tired of politicians and politics. Question is – What is the solution ?
June 8, 2025
You vote for the party that will cancel net zero and undo the destructive institutions, policies and regulations that relate to or flow from it. Other than that the market may provide a partial solution as people refuse to do Miliband’s bidding and financial markets doubt the efficacy and/or durability of net zero measures.
June 8, 2025
First we need to correct the title of the article. Milibrains dream should read SCAM because that’s just what Net Stupid is.
It’s a Marxist dream to de industrialise us in parallel to replacing the indigenous population to destroy our culture.
We gave the world the industrial revolution which lifted millions out of poverty and disease.
Now it appears that by some deluded thinking we have to atone for this by reverting to 17th century lifestyles.
Oh how the rest of the world must be laughing, especially China as they continue to build and operate coal fired power stations to supply us with their tat.
Incoherent any wonder Reform are on the up.
June 8, 2025
I see not widely reported, Via Yousef of Reform is going to head up the parties DOGE section. He is forensically very good so that should shake up local government.
June 8, 2025
Nett Zero, the greatest single act of self harm we have inflicted upon ourselves in living memory. Supposedly conceived on a pillow in Downing Street by Boris, and perpetuated in its manifest insanity by Milliband. When you sit back and consider a desirable path to cleaner energy, from all the posibilities available, you could not opt for a more impractical and expensive path than that chosen by politicians, supremely ill qualified and advised, than that of Nett Zero. Let us pray that they become pillars of salt before the nation slides beyond the tipping point of recovery. Perhaps they are the emmetic the nation needs before a new golden age.
June 8, 2025
Mad Ed has 6700 civil servants industrial department named DEZNZ but apparently ot a single competent engineer who can do the sums when taking total costs into account. Fortunately for the UK there are independent engineers who have been adding up costs and also looking at the problems controlling the sudden changes in supply and demand, which require vast amounts of storage, backup and long transmission lines. All of this was plain to see when Professor MacKay wrote his Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air years ago and after he had worked with government and later became terminally ill he concluded that we should be building nuclear generation and running them all the time. Much though he admired windmills, he realised that they couldn’t supply an industrial country.
In trying to upgrade housing from EPC D or below to C as demanded by Ed, a lot of us have been paying for reports by assessors who now are told what to do on a computer programme and tick boxes for elements of the construction. In the case of one I know, to upgrade his flats he would pay £17k foe wall and roof insulation to save the tenant £179 per year. He sold them instead. In fact the best return was from roof solar panels without batteries because Chinese panels are cheaper now. This gave a payback over 7 years on capitalcost alone. However the life of these is likto be 20 years and an electric engineer has pointed out that if all buildings had solar panels the sudden changes of supply to the grid when demand is least during the day would be very difficult to control.
But Mad Ed seems to be totally unaware of the problems and only one political party would stop the Hot Air and prevent industry closing and blackouts.
June 8, 2025
The only engineer at my little convent girls’ school told me ages ago she’d been right through “the science” and could find no link between CO2 and global warming.
June 9, 2025
How many years ago? Was the ‘engineer at (your) little convent girls’ school’ conservant with quantum mechanics and spectroscopy?
June 10, 2025
Another question for you hefner.
Sorry.
To what percentage is CO2 responsible for global warming/climate change?
For example is it 10% 50% 100%
I presume there is consensus amongst you scientists?
June 10, 2025
Why does Hefner nearly always miss the point?
June 10, 2025
It is quite deliberate Rose.
Questions that are difficult to answer are avoided or diverted to sideline topics.
June 8, 2025
I think most people agree with policies that are good for the environment.
What makes us suspicious is when the those policies seem to have very socialist/marxists methods, such as state susidies, state dictats etc.
It seems to me that the zealots are not that interested in the environment and more interested in having a Trojan Horse to carrry their far-left dangerous idealogy.
June 8, 2025
I too agree with policies that are good for the environment that is why I want the mad net zero agenda to be scrapped.
CO2 is the gas of life, plant tree and crop food, greens the environment wonderfully and even a doubling of CO2 will (all other things being the same – they won’t be) will cause very little warming and a little warming is on balance a net good. EV batteries are not green, chopping forests down to burn at Drax is not green, solar panels on farm land is not green. Heat pumps rarely make much sense either.
Solar panels in the northern cloudy UK give you rather little electricity and a very slow payback (if any) after interest and depreciation. You also get the electricity mainly in summer when it is needed mainly in winter.
Solar panels on roofs are also a fire risk it seems. They increase your insurance costs and need cleaning or they loose efficiency and can devalue your house. They also get damaged in storms and in hail. Do the economic sums. See the picture of the solar farm after a storm in Anglesey.
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/newly-commissioned-solar-farm-on-isle-of-anglesey-significantly-damaged-by-storm-darragh-10-12-2024/
June 8, 2025
The other reasons I want net zero scrapped are:- it costs a fortune, does huge harms to the economy, freeze people to death when they cannot afford heating.
Cargo ship from China to Mexico carrying 3,000 cars, including 800 EVs, ablaze — crew rescued 5th June.
Amazing they are still allowed on the Channel tunnel and car ferries! Not to mention all the EV bikes and scooters being charged in houses garageis and the halls of high rise flats!
June 8, 2025
Or parked near or under houses or near other such cars in multi-story car parks or under offices.
How much energy went into making these 3,000 cars and their batteries and this doomed cargo ship? What is the insurance claim likely to be? £200 million perhaps? Surely best to put the EV on a different smaller ship (if you must) so the EVs do not take down the other 2,400 conventional ICE cars and other cargo and only take down a smaller ship? I see Tesla is down about 30% from its peak last year but still amazingly hold on a PE multiple of of X 162. Toyota is on X 7.36.
June 8, 2025
Roof solar panels are also a fire hazard. I’ve read about the fires caused and know someone whose neighbour re-roofed and added solar panels, only for the entire roof to catch fire!
June 8, 2025
I saw a house fire was blamed on their solar panels – presumably not the water type.
June 8, 2025
Indeed the photo-voltaic ones can short & burn. The hot water ones are quite good for hot water – for a few sunny days, for swimming pools sometimes or if you live in southern Spain – otherwise best save your money and use a cheap natural gas as an all year boiler!
June 8, 2025
+ 1
June 8, 2025
Jeremy Hunt on Camilla Tominy – pushing he new book Can be Great Again?
“We spend £400 billion supporting businesses and individuals during the pandemic and I think this was the right thing to do”
So still totally deluded then Hunt £400 billion on net harm lockdowns and net harm vaccines and who pay for this £400 billion plus interest but those businesses and individuals anyway.
“we mad mistakes” No jeremy you stood on several manifesto that promised to control immigration, to cut taxes, to deliver Brexit but then deliberately delivered the complete reverse. Not “mistakes” more a case of intentional fraud against the voters wishes and votes.
June 8, 2025
I have never forgotten that he wanted a “real” Chinese-style lockdown. I couldn’t bear to listen to him and turned the TV off.
June 8, 2025
The push for heat pumps will push electricity demand up hugely especially in winter. Vast new generating capacity and grid capacity will be needed plus wind back up (Solar delivers virtually nothing on short winter days).
The policy is totall deranged.
June 8, 2025
All this vast investment in extra capacity, grid and backup will just be wasted other than on a few cold winter days. Total lunacy have they consulted any competent engineers? It will not even save any CO2 should that wrongly concern you!
June 8, 2025
Mad Ed Millibands crusade to Net Zero is crippling the last vestiges of UK industry. It’s caused the highest electricity prices in the developed world. It will lead to parts of the population freezing in Winter. It may even lead to power cuts.
All this nonsense to save <1% of global Co2. Whilst China continues to increase it's emissions to over 30% of global co2.
June 8, 2025
The irony is that CO2 has encouraged green growth across the world… some deserts are shrinking.
Net zero is a tool being used to de-industrialise the west. It seems to be working. An article on net zero suggested that energy could end up as a luxury, not a necessity!
June 8, 2025
Climate Change Act amendment 2019, changed the legally set target to 100% Net Zero.
I wonder which government did that? Yet again ‘you’ started this misery,
Blaming Miliband, how convenient!
June 8, 2025
Well even Thatcher fell for it at one point then Blair, Brown, Milibands Climate Change Act supported by nearly all MPs (not JR, Lilly, Widecombe…) Cameron, May, Boris, Sunak, Kemi, Starmer… May drove this insane 2019 amendment nodded through without even a vote so deranged are our scientifically illiterate MPs!
June 8, 2025
Miliband created the Climate Change Act which kicked off the insanity.
June 9, 2025
All of Parliament did it. There was no meaningful debate and no division to record opinions: it was passed on the nod. Chris Skidmore was the MP who formally introduced the bill: a wolf in sheep’s clothing who now bats for Labour. I can only presume he holds some kompromat, since he was able to get May to support his review work very easily.
June 8, 2025
These policies do great harm to the Uk whilst world CO 2 continues to rise.
And your party was just as bad with this Nett Zero crap, I said to myself years ago that if the government could tax the air we breathe they’d do it and a presto its here in the guise of Nett Zero rubbish, people in Parliament must really take the general public for mugs, but there’s a change in the air and it’s nothing to do with Nett Zero crap it’s the wind of change of political following, so Tories/labour/lib-dems make hay while you can because come the next General election hopefully you’ll be Nett Zero MPs screwing the last pennies from our grasp
June 8, 2025
CO2 continues to rise. Indeed now about 1/5 of the highest levels we have had on earth. The trees, plants, crops and life on earth all benefiting from this gas of life. Slightly warmer rather good too.
I was wondering how much the construction huge solar arrays on farm land affects the climate. Does give some urban heat island effects and changes to evaporation levels. Surely it will have significant effects relative to a field of apple trees or wheat or barley? Wind farms must also reduce wind speeds rather significantly while they get on with their bat, bird and insect murdering. While confusing sea mammals with their noise pollution.
June 8, 2025
Red Ed is implementing a policy created elsewhere; in the UN (Agenda 21 and Agenda 2030) which is being disseminated via the EU and the WEF. It is in his personal interest to pursue it, just as it was for Alok Sharma.
Our problem is that the British Establishment is determined to pursue it and around 600 of our current crop of MPs either support the insanity or will do nothing meaningful to oppose it.
Longer term, we need MPs who have not drunk the cool-aid; do not rely on toe-ing the Net Zero line for their income/career and will put the interests of the British people above the demands of the UN/EU/WEF. In the meantime we have to rely on the British people, many of whom are refusing to go along with the insanity because they don’t believe the nonsense spouted by the likes of the BBC or they can’t afford the ludicrous policies spouted by the likes of Red Ed.
Reply Conservatives and Reform oppose current net zero policies.
June 8, 2025
To reply – Well the Kemi “Conservatives” want they current Labour net zero lunacy but just a bit more slowly. The Sunak agenda let’s destroy the economy and drive over the cliff but just a bit more slowly and a little later than Labour – totally deluded.
June 8, 2025
@ Donna
+1
June 8, 2025
That would be some Consertives? Not including Mr Claverley from reports of a recent speech.
June 8, 2025
Problem is that neither the Conservatives not Reform will get a sniff of power for another 4 years by which time so much damage will have been done that it may prove irreparable.
June 8, 2025
Reply to reply. SOME Conservatives do or to be more accurate, SAY they do. We have long experience that what they say and what they do are very different.
June 8, 2025
I think he’s just said on all new houses not all houses?
June 8, 2025
Indeed slowing up house building and vasty increasing the costs and stamp duty. Will this even be for house up in the cloudy north, ones facing the wrong way, in the shade of trees, mountains or other buildings? Total insanity!
June 8, 2025
Increasing fire risks and insurance cost too. Please it gives rather little electricity mainly around summer lunchtimes when little more is needed. After captial costs, cleaning, depreciation, insurance, grid connection, working at height directives, costs… it make little sense even if they are made cheaply by slave labour!
June 8, 2025
so
June 8, 2025
@Richard1. Yes. I had to just look that up, as our kind host put the fear of God into me for a few minutes. I can’t afford solar panels and don’t want them.
I got a quote recently for them, from an installer putting them in next-door. I calculated the payback as being many decades. Stuff that!
June 8, 2025
No payback often with interest at say 8%, cleaning, the odd bit of storm damage, grid connection…
June 8, 2025
So the new houses will be shunned. That should encourage house builders.
June 8, 2025
Yes. But that is still ludicrous. It will significantly push up the price of the new house. Most prospective purchasers will need a larger mortgage to afford one. So they will be borrowing an additional sum of money (say £10,000) and paying it back over 25-30 years with the interest on the mortgage generally front-loaded.
So, even IF they manage to save £150 a year on the cost of electricity, they will end up paying £tends of thousands in additional purchase cost + interest.
And the panels only last for 10 years (max 20) and will then need replacing.
None of it adds up.
June 8, 2025
Interesting…in England it is claimed there are 25m dwellings. Labour say they want to build 340k new homes per year, a target they will not reach. Not much over 1% added with solar panels!
June 8, 2025
Does the proposal include panels on new houses in the ‘darkest north’?
just asking.
June 9, 2025
The latest housebuilding numbers are for Q4 2024. Ther has been an unwind of the effects of the commencement of much tougher net zero oriented building standards that came into effect at the end of Q2 2023, which caused a huge upsurge in spade in the ground starts to avoid the new regulations which add cost and make homes much less attractive by limiting windows etc. The result is that for 2024 while completions were 184,000, starts were sharply lower at around 135,000, with quarterly levels now below 30,000.
So we are perhaps down to 100,000 completions a year with added cost to come from solar reducing sales potential further. The government will slowly discover that builders don’t build what they can’t sell at a profit. But perhaps it means about 50,000 new solar homes (allowing for flats, shaded roofs etc.) with 4kW installations with an average capacity factor of 10%, or about 20MW of supply on average. A posturing rounding error of about 0.06% of demand. Yet it will serve to cause local problems for electricity distribution near larger new housing estates, as well as depressing the building industry and increasing the housing shortage.
June 8, 2025
The stupidity behind the drive to achieve net zero and the lack of intelligence that is behind it, is quite frankly staggering.
Time and time again we are advised by the current Government that this is the route we must take to save the planet when most industrialised countries aren’t doing as much or anything at all towards achieving it, despite appearing at COP 26 etc to confirm to the world that they are.
Net zero can never be achieved so why doesn’t Ed Miliband wake up to this; he is already back tracking on heat pumps and the rate at which they are to be installed.Grants for solar panels have been reduced and up until recently have not been mandatory unless for new houses.What’s the cost, what’s the return,what’s the annual saving, is all conveniently left out of the equation and whether they actually work effectively in residential property doesn’t seem to be of consideration.
USA and the major industrialised nations on this planet have realised that to give up on oil/gas and coal is a death knell to industries that rely on these products and to convert existing industries to electric is very expensive and there isn’t the availability of power at the right price nor the infrastructure to generate power in sufficient quantities, and probably never will be.
The Uk is a very small Country whose industrialised base is dwindling fast so why are we as a Country always feeling the need to lead the charge on these initiatives; it should be Russia,China,India and the USA to set an example to us all; why is it always the UK,and even more so, why is it Ed Miliband?
June 8, 2025
Sorry Sir John I have to disagree on this one my understanding is that its new build housing. I believe we should generate it were we use it. I haven’t seen the proposed bill hopefully it will include storage. A question will this take pressure off the grid?. I have had panels for 10 years and and they have paid for them self in year 7.
Reply Mr Miliband recommends solar panels for old homes as well as proposing to make them mandatory on new
June 9, 2025
Microgeneration, especially where it depends on intermittent renewables, even when backed by some storage, is a very expensive and unreliable way to go. Solar output is highly seasonal, so a battery that might supply your needs overnight in sunnier months would be useless in winter when your demand is much higher. So you need that grid connection, and all the backup generation to keep your lights on in winter. Once you have the grid connection the economics of private storage are for rich greens only (and even without it). But you will produce large surpluses on sunny days which need all the local distribution grid to be beefed up to take them away once you force solar on your neighbours, and the investment is determined by peak solar output. That’s a huge cost. You can get around it by being forced to curtail (which is what is already happening to commercial scale renewables), but that means you get no value from a large chunk of your output, pushing up the cost of the useful portion.
The better solution is to have district or regional power stations that serve areas of demand that average out much better, and don’t require lots of long distance transmission (although the grid helps to provide coverage during maintenance shutdowns and helps balance local demand fluctuations without straining the local generators so hard).
June 8, 2025
What is wrong with using fossil fuels until we gradually build a complete nuclear replacement in about 50 to 60 years time? NZ 2050 is an invention and a trojan horse for evermore Socialism. We need growth not ‘eco’nomic destruction.
June 8, 2025
Nothing. Except that as mentioned above, it is the UN, EU and the WEF that are setting the agenda, not the UK Government.
June 8, 2025
If we had clarity on our power bills, most people would be anti net zero.
When you see the breakdown of an airfare, which the airlines provide in their ticketing systems, you can see how taxes and duties make up a massive part of you fare. The airline only gets a minor percentage.
If power bills were set out the same way, it would be a game changer.
June 8, 2025
His policy will fail simply because the necessary engineers are not available or in training. I read they are 170K houses short this year, with planning applications at an all time low and a massive shortage of trained planning personnel. Miligreen will fail.
June 8, 2025
Afraid the Government will ignore all of the sensible thoughts and ideas, and will plough on with our self destruction, accelerated with more and more subsidies on what they want, and more and more taxes on what we already have, thoughtless, clueless, financially and commercially ignorant.
Many insurance companies now inserting clauses in their House insurance policies about garaging and parking an EV near or within an integrated garage.
June 8, 2025
David Turver has published his latest substavk today, showing that the Climate Change Committee has used assumptions about costs of wind and solar which are wildly out of line with actual costs. Their expectations of the useful life of turbines and panels is also way over the actual experience.
June 8, 2025
Indeed they are either totally deluded, ignorant or just lying but the CCC is headed up by a pleasant enough but scientifically ignorant Oxford Classics Graduate who probably confuses energy with power and has zero understanding of climate, energy, energy economics, entropy, energy storage, grid stability… – like most of these people!
June 8, 2025
Might the Chinese be willing to accept Ed Miliband as a full-time student in one of their remote temples, where he would start by assessing all the wrongs he has created and developed over his time in parliament? After several years of contemplation, he might then be ready to focus his attention on planting seeds or caring for wildlife. Virtually anything that takes him away from interfering in UK matters would be beneficial.
June 8, 2025
“We were told at the last election backing the net zero electrical revolution would cut domestic bills by £300.”
Net Zeroing our electricity alone has cost us £220bn or £8000 per household since 2002 with 5 direct and 5 indirect subsidies for renewables. The annual subsidy now amounts to £25.8bn/year and comprises 40% of the cost of electricity. Not only do renewables get subsidised prices higher than the market prices they also get get grid priority and constraint payments when their energy is not needed. DESNZ’s Clean Power by 2030 plan has been costed by NESO at “over £40bn/year”.
June 8, 2025
There is no energy security when we are heavily reliant on China, a state described by our security services as “hostile”, for our energy infrastructure (wind turbines and solar panels) and the metals and minerals for electrification. There is no energy security when we are locked into a dsingle source of energy, electricity, when there is no grid-scale backup and the grid can be hacked or collapse because of insufficient backup or grid inertia or even a Carrington event. There is no energy security when low energy density wind turbines and their undersea cables can be easily attacked by air and undersea drones and vast arrays of unprotected solar panels can be destroyed overnight by gangs of strangers.
June 9, 2025
Absolutely: the Chinese have been imposing export embargos on rare earths that are essential to wind turbines, car alternators, chips and much else. They have partially backed down for Europe for now, but it lacks the manufacturing of Taiwan, Korea, USA, Japan etc. who are all in the embargo. The chatter in Europe has been about the automotive sector, but renewables will be deeply affected. Prices will go up. Miliband is supposed to be announcing maximum bid prices for AR7 CFDs in July. He will need to shoot high if he isn’t going to see a fiasco of no bids like in AR5. He has already delayed the results timetable for AR7 into next year, so a failure would make his 2030 targets quite impossible.
June 8, 2025
I agree completely with your comments. Neither does Miliband mention the inefficiency of solar panels; in hours of darkness (14-16 hours in winter) or cloud cover they are useless and installing them on roof areas facing north further degrades their already poor efficiency. Frankly Net Zero is a scam on the British people and must be abandoned. We are being lied to.
June 8, 2025
NET-0 was always going to be a nightmare – it was designed that way!
Based on questionable science and only kept alive by constant indoctrination, as well as outright lies, from the media and alleged experts, the reason why we have to destroy our economy has never been fully detailed, nor put to any real test. (Simulated computer models are far from truthful or even scientific).
There are no informed plans that tell us how to combat this alleged threat to our existence, other than to surrender our society, install windmills and solar panels everywhere, and depopulate ourselves.
Should a living entity like the Earth take priority over sentient beings? Anything we do we can undo, except that we are not responsible for this alleged extreme weather.
The foul science of this subject is intermixed with irrational ideology. They want to keep oil ‘in the ground’ but will insist on wilfully excavating for precious metals to keep their batteries and their mobiles alive.
Net-0 is a tool being used to persecute us, nothing more.
June 8, 2025
We used to have solar panels in our old house. They produce a surplus of power in the summer and a dearth in winter. There was no battery back up, so the benefit was selling back to the grid at a generous rate.
In our new house, I looked at the prospects a couple of years ago. The incentive was to protect ourselves against power cuts. With a small battery storage they would keep the lights on over night in winter and with a larger battery supply the house’s needs in summer. By no means could we have a battery to store the excess from summer to last through winter.
With the expected depreciation cost of the battery in particular, solar panels only make sense as a protection from power cuts.
June 9, 2025
I suspect that for now a much cheaper solution is a UPS to cover short power interruptions (seconds to minutes) for key equipment, and a propane fuelled generator big enough to power additoonal essentials such as fridge/freezer, boiler controls and pump for longer outages of a day or two. Only when we move to chronic power shortages with regular rotating blackouts, as in South Africa, or if your grid connection is remote enough to mean you might be waiting some days for repair might a more extensive solution be justified. Some battery powered LED lighting and entertainment also helps for powercuts lasting a few hours. I used my portable CD player when we lost power for 2 days in snowy winter or example, while enjoying reading books.
June 8, 2025
A few years ago we had a rep in to give us a quote for solar panels. He said our roof being east west was wrongly oriented and would need twice as many panels to get the electricity we needed. The conclusion we came to was that we couldn’t afford such a thing and that at our age we would never recoup the outlay. I doubt Red Ed has ever had to fund anything for himself in his whole life so he has no clue how people like us live. Same with heat pumps. None of it is practical but that doesn’t stop the mad zealots keeping on with a dead loss. Also, not having a smart meter either until it becomes law, which it will eventually as they need to control us because of their inadequate decision making in choosing the wrong path for this country. Scoundrels, all of them and totally unaccountable too.
June 8, 2025
ill-conceived, ill-considered and going no-where.
He is obviously an agent for the Chinese Government. Everything he is behind so far has been for the total benefit of the Chinese Government, he has given them UK Jobs, UK wealth, while depleting the option of the UK to respond to a future
June 8, 2025
I just listened to the interview of Michael Gove by Andrew Neil. What a joke this man is. He admitted all his policies were a disaster, and the current Conservative party is right to move away from them. Instead of being vilified for his disastrous time in politics, he is put into the House of Lords to continue his destruction of our country. Where is the justice in this? It reveals just what is wrong with our country, and he is allowed to laugh about it while we all suffer.
June 8, 2025
To reduce CO2 we should all hold every breath for, say, 5 or 10 seconds or so and, voilà, problem solved. And ban all this running and jumping so that athletes do not start breathing heavily and thus using more than their fair share. And politicians use more than necessary by constantly spouting nonsense by non-stop talking.
June 9, 2025
I can’t immediately find it, but I did estimate the increase in CO2 content in the Commons chamber from Miliband speaking for an hour. Needless to say, it was far in excess of the annual rise in the atmosphere.
June 8, 2025
While Ed Miliband remains obsessed with his desirable end result, wilfully ignoring cost, feasibility and risk of unintended consequences, we ordinary plebs are having the consequences of a statutory target inflicted upon us.
The only answer is to elect a majority government with a mandate to repeal the Climate Change Act. It is no use to speak of (say) reviewing or diluting Net Zero – in context Theresa May ratcheted up Miliband’s original 80% benchmark emissions reduction to 100% – because there would be no consequential improvement to quality of life if any statutory targets remained, thereby leaving overzealous public authorities and watermelon pressure groups free to continue inflicting and nagging.
June 8, 2025
There is no climate emergency. Table 12 in Chaper 12 of the IPCC Working Group 1 (“The Science”) shows there to be no signals for changes to precipitation, droughts or storms. Only some mild warming which UAH satellite data shows to be 0.14 degrees C per decade. Even the IPCC can only calculate a warming of 1.2 degrees C for a doubling of CO2 (see P95 footnote). Happer & Wijngaarden have demonstrated that increasing CO2 brings little if any additional warming because of saturation, a phenomenon recognised by The Royal Society, and Shula & Ott have made a compelling case for the whole IPCC radiative warming theory to be invalid both experimentally and theoretically because of thermalisation.
June 8, 2025
I reiterate my demand: when and where has the Royal Society recognised the findings of H&W. To repeat that claim as you do you must have a reference.
As for S&O’s thermalisation, how comes that downward long-wave (LW) radiative fluxes have been measured since 1992 by the Baseline Station Radiation Network (bsrn.awi.de) in stations spanning 80degN to the South Pole if such surface LW fluxes do not exist.
June 9, 2025
hefner:
https://royalsociety.org/news-resources/projects/climate-change-evidence-causes/question-8/
“The Royal Society write: As CO2 concentrations increase, the absorption at the centre of the strong band is already so intense that it plays little role in causing additional warming. However, more energy is absorbed in the weaker bands and in the wings of the strong band, causing the surface and lower atmosphere to warm further.” This is saturation. But they don’t quantify the additional warming because it so tiny and don’t want to admit it.
S&O do agree some downward radiation exists and has been measured. But because of thermalsation it goes nowhere and does not amount to any real flux and hence warming effect. The IPCC radiative theory expects us to believe that this downward flux is almost as large as that from the sun itself and that it contravenes the 2nd law of thermodynamics since a colder atmosphere is expected to be warming a warmer planet.
June 10, 2025
So the RS says that saturation in the centre of the 15 micron band but not in the weaker bands and the wings of the strong band causing the surface and lower atmosphere to warm further. Isn’t it what radiative transfer as applied in meteorological models have been saying for years?
What about the measurements of downward long-wave radiation (DLWR) done for decades? Are they fake? What do pyrgeometers measure?
Looking at the diagram in S&O the fraction of the electromagnetic spectrum (around the 15μm band) where ‘thermalisation’ is supposed to act is so wide that measured DLWR should be much smaller. And they are not.
And I am sorry, the 2nd law of thermodynamics has nothing to do here: there’s the atmosphere, it contains a bit more CO2 (and other GHGs), by themselves (without effects of water vapour) they would increase a bit the temperature. This in turn increases the total humidity (Clausius-Clapeyron) and further strengthens the downward flux (as clearly seen at high latitudes where the effect of humidity is smaller and the relative effect of other GHGs is more visible).
To explain that there is no need of the 2nd law.
BTW convection works taking into account latent heat, sensible heat and the total radiative heat (solar, ie shortwave plus long-wave radiation) another flaw in S&O’s description.
June 9, 2025
I don’t think the fact that the Royal Society haven’t endorsed Wijngaarden and Happer’s work has any relevance to its validity. They no longer adhere to their founding principles, and are much more concerned with protecting established dogmas. I have found no valid criticism of their work, and have explored it in depth myself (although I have not repeated their calculations which took some weeks of laptop time). Perhaps you can find something wrong with it or point to someone who has, but I doubt it. For now it is the best available set of calculations of the radiative fluxes in a selection of cloudless atmospheric columns available, but far too complex to be used as part of a full climate model. They have also recently proposed an analytical framework for tackling the problem of clouds which again looks at the detailed physics. The first difficulty for that is securing data.
Shula & Ott on the other hand have clear methodological flaws that mean they do not reflect the correct physics, and so underestimate or even incorrectly eliminate the radiative fluxes.
June 10, 2025
Agreed, H&W use proper radiation transfer theory and modelling. Where they are far from honest is to present their work as brand new. This type of radiative transfer calculations has been part of meteorological models since the 1970s. It started with Manabe and his one-dimensional radiative-convective model in the 1960s, got tri-dimensional in the 1970s. The weather forecast models in the USA, UK, Japan, Europe adopted a similar approach in the same decade. And contrary to H&W, they deal with huge number of profiles (O(10^4) in the 70s, O(10^6) now, both clear-sky and cloudy columns, and every ten minutes in weather predictions up to 6, 10 or 15 days.
The difference with climate
models is essentially the coarser horizontal and vertical resolutions, the additional physical processes that are accounted for (vegetation, oceanic transport, much better representation of sea-ice processes, …) and obviously much longer length of the simulations.
As for Barbara’s non-linear chaotic argument, maybe consider Tim Palmer’s ‘The primacy of doubt’ and the efforts made by the scientific community to work ‘Ensembles’.
June 8, 2025
The earth’s climate has always changed and this will continue. Net zero is a scam to impoverish and control the majority for the benefit of globalists. Without CO 2 there would be no life, as we know it, on earth.
June 8, 2025
Who wants to suppress all the CO2?
June 8, 2025
Tell us hefner
Is there a climate emergency?
Come on, it is a simple question
Yes or no.
Please reference the excellent IPPC reports in your reply.
June 9, 2025
Yes, the climate is changing, not so much over the British Isles as they are in the temperate zone. But certainly at high latitudes, the North West Passage is opened for six months of the year now, similarly along the north coast of Siberia/Russia. Similarly seen in the thinning of ice around parts of Antarctica.
Temperatures have gone up a bit (globally 1.4C but with large latitudinal and regional variations). It makes the atmosphere contain more humidity (7% per degree) so more violent downpours and associated winds in some places, drier for longer in other places.
Also seen in the slight warming of the oceans, their acidification, and much more recently observed changes in some oceanic currents.
These ‘weather events’ have been presented in the news with increasing regularity over the last 10-15 years.
All these observed facts consistent with physics as discussed from the 19th c (Tyndall, Arrhenius), quantum mechanics that allow the description of absorption/emission lines by all gases including the ‘greenhouse’ gases (H2O, CO2, O3, CH4, N2O, CFCs, HFCs and a few others), and radiative transfer theory (as every day used in meteorological models).
And all that discussed in the various IPCC reports that have been published every five-six years since 1990.
As said to start with, yes to your simple question.
Politicians (*), whatever their colour, should now discuss not only mitigation but adaptation, as the positive trend is not diminishing.
(*) if they have children and grandchildren …
June 9, 2025
Yes we know all that hefner.
The climate is changing.
But is there a climate emergency?
June 9, 2025
In the UK no, but yes for people losing their housing because of coastal erosion and slightly but surely rising sea level (Tuvalu, Kiribati, Micronesia, …) or Florida’s Ventura County or China’s Sanya …
Your question (as usual) is loaded (in fact have you ever known how to ask a proper question?)
There can be ‘a climate emergency’ in some coastal regions at some latitudes and nothing much happening in the rest of the world that is more than a metre from sea level or a couple of kilometres in-land. But these other areas might get more precipitation, higher temperature and drier weather spells.
With what I think is your implicit definition that’s not a ‘climate emergency’.
But will you relate migration from affected areas in the present or next 10, 20, … years to climate change/emergency?
How many of the small boat people coming from Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, … are fleeing war or could they (also) be affected by the funny weather?
June 9, 2025
“In sum, a strategy must recognise what is possible. In climate research and modelling, we should recognise that we are dealing with a coupled non-linear chaotic system, and therefore that the long-term prediction of future climate states is not possible.”
IPCC Working Group I: The Scientific Basis, Third Assessment Report (TAR), Chapter 14 (final para., 14.2.2.2), p774.
June 10, 2025
hefner.
Perhaps being cleverer than everyone else on here you could explain how we ask a proper question.
Is it one you like or one you approve of?
I asked a straightforward question
We see protests worldwide and demands for more action to deal with the climate crisis and the climate emergency.
Evrn the head of the UN talked about global boiling.
But at least we can relax knowing someone as clever as you has doubts.
PS
I thought mass migration was caused more by wars and the evils of failed states and that coastal erosion had been happening for centuries but I must be wrong.
It must be that 1.4 degree increase in global average temperatures since 1850
Off to Maldives next month hefner.
Do you remember the predictions that they would be under water by 2020.
Well they’ve recently built a new excellent international airport.
June 10, 2025
Can you tell me how to ask a proper question hefner.
It’s good to learn.
June 8, 2025
We are being gaslit by the BBC and the government department, The Met Office, to believe we have a climate emergency often using “models” that predict events that never happen but are designed to frighten or at the very least provide false information as they are never corrected later. Almost 85% of all Met Office sites are NOT deemed acceptable for climate data reporting purposes by the World Meteorological Organisation and International Standards Organisation stated requirements. 79% are junk status with 49% class 4 (+- 2 degrees C) and 30% class 5 (+- 5 degrees C). Furthermore of the 302 Met Office sites quoted, over one third (103) do NOT even exist. Their data is entirely made up from measurements from other sites. This is in addition to the positioning and use of thermocouples to measure temperature which can record 1 minute highs when jet aircraft pass by as happened with the highest ever temperature recorded at RAF Coningsby in July 2022. There is no way the Met Office can be relied upon for climate data.
June 8, 2025
The good news is that without energy we can’t ‘go in a war footing’.
June 8, 2025
By all accounts it appears that most EU countries are preparing for a Russian invasion. They base this action on nothing more than their hatred of Putin who has stood against WEF policies for too long.
In any case, like the UK they are moving towards a war footing.
The Russians have little to fear though, for EU bureaucracy comes to the rescue of a little sanity.
If it wasn’t so stupid it would be funny.
June 8, 2025
I think we are storing the inflatables near Dover in order that when a decision is made to ‘invade’ northern France or Southern Belgium we can have the means to take troops across the Channel at short notice. *sarc*.
June 8, 2025
The good news is, more CO2 is great for the biosphere and for life on Earth in general.
Those who wish to reduce CO2 effectively wish to reduce life on Earth.
What does that tell you about Ed Miliband, and his LibDem/Green supporters?
June 8, 2025
Indeed, they even want to dim the sun too – while installing solar PV arrays. Make you minds up!
June 8, 2025
“He does not tell us in his bullish soundbite how much it will cost to put sufficient solar panels on our roof.”
Nor that they are made using coal power and slave labour and fitted with Chinese controlled kill switches. Nor of the huge tailing lakes in China from their production, nor how when they are past their useful life in 20 years time how difficult and expensive it will be to dispose of them.
June 8, 2025
Plus you get the energy in summer when largely not needed. For the school ones he wants largely in the summer holidays!
June 8, 2025
“These policies do great harm to the Uk whilst world CO 2 continues to rise.”
Yes, that’s the sole purpose of the CAGW hoax and its Net Zero “solution”! Nothing else makes sense. CO2 does not cause warming and anyway the actual warming of 0.14 degrees C per decade (according to UAH satellite data) and increased CO2 are both greening the planet and thus producing measurable increases in vegetation and food production wholly beneficial to all life on the planet. That the planet has experienced warmer temperatures even since the last ice age which ended 10,000 years ago is evidenced by by many observations such as retreating glaciers in BC/Canada revealing 7000 year old tree stumps. It is instructive to note that the climate alarmists who call for net zero CO2 are also against nuclear power, the only low CO2 emitting energy source which is affordable (everywhere in the world but the UK), reliable and abundant.
June 8, 2025
I used to think the UK needed a military takeover. But the military have gone Woke. The King is Woke. There is no guarantee of a general election aft we 5 years. Even though parliament dissolves the government remains in office. It need only connect some emergency which its massive majority would ensure parliament approves delaying the election. Starmer’s Gang already has form postponing local elections.
To whom can the electorate turn to get rid of Starmer’s Gang in 2029 or any other time?
June 8, 2025
PDG : “It need only connect some emergency which its massive majority would ensure parliament approves delaying the election.”
Such as a climate or lack of energy emergency?
June 8, 2025
Shame about the sham.
Peer review is a sham – DT 22nd May.
” Peer review, supposedly the gold standard of scientific respectability , is increasingly a fraud.
On the one hand it takes the form of pal review in which scientists usher their chums` papers
into print with barely a glance , let alone a request to see the underlying data .
That way all sorts of fakes and mistakes get published unchecked .
Heretics who challenge dogmas , on the causes of stomach ulcers , Alzheimer`s or climate change,
have all been denied funding by the high priests of consensus. ”
Science without free and honest open debate is not science .
Shambuster required !
June 8, 2025
+1
June 8, 2025
Matt Ridley is usually spot on I think I have read nearly all his excellent books and despite the disadvantagr starting off with Zoology rather than Physics and Maths!
June 8, 2025
If one looks at the requirements when a scientist submits a paper to a journal there is an explicit demand for access to the data and/or the computer code used to produce the data.
For example, Quarterly Journal of the Royal Meteorological Society
rmets.onelibrary.wiley.com
Go to QJRMS then to ‘Author Guidelines’ then ‘1.Prepare’ then ‘Supporting information’, look for ‘data sets’.
See also ‘Policy on the availability of data associated with articles published in Society journals’.
US journals have (had …) similar requirements.
Looking at all these requirements it is not surprising that H&W and S&O do not publish in standard journals and prefer ‘open source’ journals, independent.academia.edu or YouTube presentation where the ‘peer review’ is minimal or non-existent.
June 9, 2025
hefner:
Unfortunately the whole science of energy and climate has been corrupted. Journals wil not publish anything not agreeing with the UN IPCC’s radiative theory just as we see with the BBC refusing to interview scientists such as the co-founder of Greenpeace, Patrick Moore, and the 2022 Nobel Prize winner for physics, John Clauser. Hence any alternative ideas have to use Youtube to get their ideas known. In the past, scientists could publish even if the concensus was that they were wrong. To copy from Wikipedia: “In a 1905 paper,[221] Einstein postulated that light itself consists of localized particles (quanta). Einstein’s light quanta were nearly universally rejected by all physicists, including Max Planck and Niels Bohr. This idea only became universally accepted in 1919, with Robert Millikan’s detailed experiments on the photoelectric effect, and with the measurement of Compton scattering.
BTW, you can always comment on S&O’s Youtube presentation and Tom Shula has said he will read and reply.
June 9, 2025
OR, Did you ever read the QJRMS or the journals of the American Meteorological Society or the American Geophysical Union before writing your comment? I guess not. If you had done you would have seen the papers by R.Lindzen, or G.Paltridge, or S.M.Japar, or K.P.Green, or J.Christy, or R.W.Spencer, …
BTW a 2020 paper by J.Christy was among the 10% most downloaded papers from the AGU journal Earth and Space Science (uah.edu, 26/07/2021 ‘Paper on climate model’s warming bias co-authored by Dr. Christy is top download’)
I did put my comments to S&O’s with references to the Baseline Station Radiation Network with no reactions and no publication not even as a comment.
June 9, 2025
Wijngaarden and Happer use cited publicly available data for their inputs: the HITRAN database of extremely detailed molecular absorption and emissions, and their detailed assumptions about atmospheric columns by composition and local conditions if temperature and pressure, based on NASA’s standard atmosphere assessment of balloon measurements. They set out their calculation methodology in detail. There are no secrets. The volume of calculations is such that they take several weeks on a laptop computer but they do not require a larger computer to complete.
Open access to the data and methods offer no reason not to publish in any journal. The main reason appears to be that the journals do not want to be held accountable for undermining the far less accurate work and models used in climate modelling, and thus the credibility of the models themselves. The W&H work requires far too much computational effort to be used in dynamic global climate modelling, and in any case doesn’t offer answers where clouds are a significant factor- but neither does anything else. They have at least set out a methodology for analysing clouds based on the underlying physics. Feeding that with data is a very different problem.
June 10, 2025
Weather forecast models have clouds from the various condensation processes (water, ice and mixed phase clouds). The radiation transfer (RT) scheme embedded in those models deal with those clouds and depending on the cloud part of the RT scheme computes the reflectivity and transmissivity in the shortwave part of the spectrum and emissivity and transmissivity in the long-wave part of the spectrum. These calculations account for the liquid/ice water path and for the most advanced radiation transfer schemes, use a diagnostic/prognostic of the aerosol content to compute the effective radius of droplets/effective size of particles in the clouds.
Radiation transfer schemes doing that have been around for at least fifteen years.
ECMWF being in the Wokingham constituency might bring a good example.
For people interested, the present version of the ECMWF radiation scheme is available at:
confluence.ecmwf.int ‘ECMWF Radiation Scheme Home’ then get the report Hogan and Bozzo 2018.
I am afraid that this scheme and equivalent ones from other weather forecast centres let Happer & Wijngaarden’s model (taking ages to compute a couple of clear-sky profiles) on the starting line with most of them already on or near the finishing line.
June 8, 2025
It’s Socialist economics. Invest £5000 to get a return of £500. The remaining £4500 to go to the ‘friends’ of Socialism.
June 8, 2025
Are we spelling it out correctly? All of us hearing the stupid ideas emulating from one man, then blame that one man for the stupidity, irresponsibility and lack of thought. The UK’s legislator is 650 MPs along with the 834 Lords of which the majority has to agree with the direction that seemingly one man wants to take us – so it can’t be one man. It’s a majority agreement that they all as collective demonstrate compliance.
The Government, its cabinet, its collective responsibility cabinet has to approve the way one man wants to take the UK before the rest of the legislator gets to approve the direction. The all own the direction.
I would suggest we have a rotten Legislator full of hypocrites, full of the them and us, the two tier rulers. They have legislated that we must all buy Chinese, we must all use Heat Pumps, we must all drive EV’s but out of these 1484 caring individuals how many of them do what they preach.
June 8, 2025
On Wednesday 4th June the film ‘The Agenda’ was released by Oracle Films, available free via YouTube, X/Twitter and Rumble. It explains what is going on with the rise of Technocracy and global control. Well worth a view.
June 8, 2025
I have zero confidence in either the labour or tory net-zero plans
June 8, 2025
We had a unique government that got it wrong on climate change, taxation and defence. Ignoring the other areas where they were also wrong.
A government that borrowed money to spend on the wrong things. The NHS is a money pit that will bankrupt the UK, and the refusal to take tough decisions means we are sinking in a pile of debt.
That is what 14 years of Conservative Government were like!
Bet you thought I was talking about the current Labour Government. Well, they are a continuation, but even worse, of what the government has been like. On Net Zero, they have closed minds, on the economy, not a clue, and every agreement the PM negotiates is worse for the UK. What a shambles they are!
June 8, 2025
Zonal pricing anyone ? Some of us should be charged more they say. ( South/ SE/ Midlands e.g. ) Forget the £300. A nice vote winner ? Not. Or perhaps something more preferable, extra pylons with a £250 a year bung if we care to hug a pylon. Carbon capture – No problem. Give them the £20+ billion. EU policy alignments. ( EU Scrutiny Committee cancelled by this gang from the start ) – No problem and no £ figures yet !
June 8, 2025
Having read all the comments above, what a sensible group of readers comment on Sir John’s Diary, and what a condemnation of the whole British political class.
June 8, 2025
Ed Miliband is also stipulating that all newly built houses must have a heat pump in 2 years time. If these heat pumps don’t keep people’s homes warm enough in the winter might homeowners resort to having log burners installed with new shiny metal chimneys up the side of the house? The particular matter and pollution from these is far worse than a gas central heating boiler
June 9, 2025
Sir John
As with all things, the BoE loses our taxpayer money because those we ‘voted in’ to look after our interest don’t care or don’t understand.
All flows of taxpayer money are under control of the Chancellor, the Government, the collective responsibility Cabinet, and then sanctioned by Parliament and the House of Lords.
Yourself, Me and others blame the BoE but who controls the money they are throwing away?
Who is in charge of expenditure, the expenditure of Taxpayer money? Or should I have said theoretically in charge as our Legislator seem stuffed full of ‘free-loader’ where the last thing they want to do is the job they promised the electorate.