Utopia, you are standing in it!

By Paul Homewood

Europe’s energy crisis is all down to its delusional reliance upon intermittent wind and solar, which is why the smart money is backing nuclear power, at any scale, including Small Modular Reactors.

The list of operators investing in SMR technology is growing at such a rate that could be described as an investor gold rush.

In the US, NuScale, based in Oregon, has cleared all of the regulatory hurdles and is ready to deliver 924MW reactors to those with the wit and temerity to acquire them (more on NuScale below).

Britain’s Rolls-Royce is well ahead of the curve, with a 470MW unit almost ready to roll.

Hot on the heels of NuScale and Rolls-Royce, UK Atomics – a subsidiary of Denmark’s Copenhagen Atomics, GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy, Holtec International, BWX Technologies are on the process of designing, developing and improving on SMR technology.

There is little new about SMRs –…

By Paul Homewood

http://notrickszone.com/2016/09/13/massive-cover-up-exposed-285-papers-from-1960s-80s-reveal-robust-global-cooling-scientific-consensus/#sthash.oWZrStbL.PXvEHcU3.dpbs

Kenneth Richard provides a detailed and damning account in NoTricksZone of the attempt to cover up global cooling in the 1970s by William Connolley:

Beginning in 2003, software engineer William Connolley quietly removed the highly inconvenient references to the global cooling scare of the 1970s from Wikipedia, the world’s most influential and accessed informational source.

It had to be done. Too many skeptics were (correctly) pointing out that the scientific “consensus” during the 1960s and 1970s was that the Earth had been cooling for decades, and that nascent theorizing regarding the potential for a CO2-induced global warming were still questionable and uncertain.

Not only did Connolley — a co-founder (along with Michael Mann and Gavin Schmidt) of the realclimate.com blog — successfully remove (or rewrite) the history of the 1970s global cooling scare from the Wikipedia record, he also erased (or rewrote) references to the Medieval…

Most people considered these weather conditions to be abnormal and temporary, but, instead, climatologists now believe that the first half of the 20thC was blessed with unusually mild weather and that the global climate has begun returning to a harsher – but more normal – state.

Sounds familiar? Well, yes, but this was written in 1974.

Classifying this as humour may not be appropriate, but we live in hope.
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IT IS the year 2050 and Britain, relentlessly driven by the governing Labour-Green coalition, has achieved Net Zero, imagines David Wright @ TCW (The Conservative Woman).

The nation is quite unrecognisable from the comfortable, well-fed country it was in the early part of the 21st century.

Massive wind turbines cover the landscape; the old ones built 25 years ago now knocked down and lying next to the new ones because it was uneconomic to remove them.

The whole country is covered in a dense spider’s web of power lines from the multitude of wind and solar farms miles from where the power is needed.

By Paul Homewood

The move of the ITCZ towards the equator during periods of global cooling is a well known phenomenon, and was responsible for the catastrophic Sahel droughts in the 1970s, a period when India also suffered several monsoon failures.

This is the climate which the climate establishment would like us to return to.

Birth and ancestry

The future King Edward IV was born on April 28, 1442 at Rouen in Normandy, eldest surviving son of Richard, 3rd Duke of York, and Cecily Neville. Until his father’s death, he was known as the Earl of March. In previous entries I’ve outlined Edward’s descent several ways from King Edward III. However, his mother was also a direct descendant of King Edward III.

Cecily Neville was the youngest of the 22 children of Ralph Neville, 1st Earl of Westmorland, in this case born to his second wife Joan Beaufort, Countess of Westmorland. Her paternal grandparents were John Neville, 3rd Baron Neville de Raby, and Maud Percy, daughter of Henry de Percy, 2nd Baron Percy.

Her maternal grandparents were John of Gaunt, 1st Duke of Lancaster, and his third wife Katherine Swynford. John of Gaunt was the third surviving son of King Edward III of England and…

By Paul Homewood

5 charts explain gas & power price slump into 2023

Europe entered winter confronting the threat of gas & power supply cuts and price spikes. Policy makers scrambled to protect consumers. Energy companies did their best to protect portfolios.

Across the 4 weeks from mid Dec 2022 to mid Jan 2023 Europe’s energy crisis delivered its latest twist. Instead of spiking, gas & power prices slumped. Benchmark TTF forward gas prices for delivery across 2023-24 were cut in half, falling 40-60%.

The knock-on impact of this rapid decline was a textbook case study in why the European gas market is so important to broader energy market pricing. European power prices saw an associated decline as the variable cost of marginal gas generators fell. Pacific & Atlantic basin LNG prices also followed TTF south given Europe’s key role in anchoring global LNG prices.

What the …. happened? Let’s…