Utopia, you are standing in it!

The hyperbole that greets the announcement of another giant battery is like the toxic plume they give off when they explode in flames. And, as we recently reported, that’s an increasingly likely occurrence: Giant Batteries Bomb: Renewable Energy Storage Systems Literally Setting The World On Fire

At a loss to deal with the hopeless and chaotic intermittency of wind and solar, renewable energy rent seekers and zealots have had to retreat behind the “batteries will fix it” barricades, as a last redoubt.

So, it’s only natural that they’ll overplay their hands every time a piddling 100 MW of lithium-ion storage gets tacked on to the grid.

Paul Homewood sets out to douse their misplaced exuberance with a little mathematics and physics.

Shell’s New Battery Won’t Solve Wind Intermittency Problem
Not a Lot of People Know That
Paul Homewood
22 February 2020

Oil and gas giant Shell has plans for a 100-megawatt…

The Statute of Rhuddlan provided the constitutional basis for the government of the Principality of Wales from 1284 until 1536. The Statute introduced English common law to Wales but also permitted the continuance of Welsh legal practices within the Principality.

The statute, which was enacted on March 3, 1284 after careful consideration by Edward I, takes its name from Rhuddlan Castle in Denbighshire where it was first promulgated on March 19 1284.

The Prince of Gwynedd had been recognised by the English Crown as Prince of Wales in 1267, holding his lands with the king of England as his feudal overlord. It was thus that the English interpreted the title of Llywelyn ap Gruffudd, Lord of Aberffraw, which was briefly held after his death by his successor Dafydd ap Gruffudd. This meant that when Llywelyn rebelled, the English interpreted it as an act of treason. Accordingly, his lands escheated to…

On March 19, 1649 the House of Commons abolished the House of Lords. This revolutionary action did not obtain the consent of either Lords or the King and so it was not recognised as a valid law after the restoration of the King.

The first part of the abolishing Act was as follows.

The Commons of England assembled in Parliament, finding by too long experience that the House of Lords is useless and dangerous to the people of England to be continued, have thought fit to ordain and enact, and be it ordained and enacted by this present Parliament, and by the authority of the same, that from henceforth the House of Lords in Parliament shall be and is hereby wholly abolished and taken away; and that the Lords shall not from henceforth meet or sit in the said House called the Lords’ House, or in any other house or…

I’ve posted twice on the story of the publisher Hachette canceling publication of Woody Allen’s memoir, Apropos of Nothing (see here and here). In short, Hachette was committed to publishing the book, but then Hachette author Ronan Farrow protested, on the grounds that he believed Allen had molested his step-sister Dylan Farrow when she was seven. (Two investigations failed to produce any evidence that Allen was guilty.) Farrow broke his relations with Hachette, and then a number of Hachette employees walked out for a day, on the grounds that they believed the accusations against Allen.

The next day, Hachette “caved”, as Bret Stephens puts it in the op-ed below, and canceled publication of the memoirs. So far as I know, nobody has picked up the book, but I may be wrong.  And, according to Stephens, they should, as he’s read the book and liked it. Having read Allen’s essays…

Although I’m not an expert on pandemic analysis, I am naturally following the COVID-19 data as best I can. And because I always understand data better when I make the figures myself, I’ve been making and looking at COVID-19 trend data, and sharing it as I go.

The figures below are the latest I made as of March 18. For the latest versions, and others I come up with, see the Figures folder in this Open Science Framework, here: osf.io/wd2n6/. You can also get the data and code I use there, under CC0 license. The project updates automatically as I go, but these figures won’t (because this is an old fashioned blog).

Home-rule movement

From the Act of Union on January 1, 1801, until December 6, 1922, the island of Ireland was part of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. During the Great Famine, from 1845 to 1849, the island’s population of over 8 million fell by 30%. One million Irish died of starvation and/or disease and another 1.5 million emigrated, mostly to the United States.

From 1874, and particularly under Charles Stewart Parnell from 1880, the Irish Parliamentary Party gained prominence. This was firstly through widespread agrarian agitation via the Irish Land League, that won land reforms for tenants in the form of the Irish Land Acts, and secondly through its attempts to achieve Home Rule, via two unsuccessful bills which would have granted Ireland limited national autonomy.

In April 1916, Irish republicans launched the Easter Rising against British rule and proclaimed an Irish Republic. Although it was crushed…

Victorian coal-fired power: what provides Tasmania’s energy safety net.

The renewable energy zealot is all care and no responsibility. Claims that the world can run on sunshine and breezes and become “100% renewable” have been outdone by Tasmania with its claim that it will soon be 200% renewable.

But, dig a little deeper, and the 200% claim is just as hollow as the 100% claim; neither have ever been achieved at grid scale, and neither of them ever will be.

Unless, of course, you turn a blind eye to the fact that behind every wind turbine and solar panel there’s a coal, gas or nuclear plant chugging away in the background to keep the lights on.

Of the so-called “renewables”, stored hydro at least has the ability to deliver power 24 x 7. However, that’s for only as long as there’s sufficient water sitting behind the dam wall. And the…

by Judith Curry

Lindzen’s seminar last week that was presented at the House of Commons may be the most effective seminar he has given on Global Warming.

I cracked the spine of my copy of Ben Pimlott’s Harold Wilson (HarperCollins; 1992) in the somewhat incongruous setting of the Villa Magna hotel in Madrid on a lovely sunny day in 1993. A treat in itself, the Pimlott opus also marked, or coincided with at any rate, something of a revival in the former prime minister’s reputation.

Not, in truth, that there was any way but up for Baron Rievaulx. In the years since his 1976 resignation, his name was mud, and not the friendly brown mud of an English autumn but the oozing black swamp mud familiar from films of the Indiana Jones variety. From all sides, the four-time election winner was pelted with dirt. The fact that the various groups of detractors disagreed as to why they despised him in no way lessened the impact of their attacks.

On the left, he was, quite simply, a traitor…

Greenland ice sheet (east coast) [image credit: Hannes Grobe @ Wikipedia]
Of course the other question about the start of an ice age still remains.

New University of Melbourne research has revealed that ice ages over the last million years ended when the tilt angle of the Earth’s axis was approaching higher values, reports Phys.org.

During these times, longer and stronger summers melted the large Northern Hemisphere ice sheets, propelling the Earth’s climate into a warm ‘interglacial’ state, like the one we’ve experienced over the last 11,000 years.

The study by Ph.D. candidate, Petra Bajo, and colleagues also showed that summer energy levels at the time these ‘ice-age terminations’ were triggered controlled how long it took for the ice sheets to collapse, with higher energy levels producing fast collapse.

Researchers are still trying to understand how often these periods happen and how soon we can expect another one.