Utopia, you are standing in it!

As immutable laws, solar output collapses when the sun sets and wind power output collapses when calm weather sets in (and when wind speeds hit gale force and turbines automatically shut down). No amount of spin doctoring, varnishing or linguistic invention can undo them.

Rafe Champion builds on those laws with his ‘iron triangle of energy realism’.

He starts with the fact that irrespective of the number of turbines or solar panels, there will be occasions when wind and solar inevitably produce nothing, at all. See above – courtesy of Aneroid Energy – the output delivered by Australian wind power outfits to the Eastern Grid during May last year. Spread from Far North Queensland, across the ranges of NSW, all over Victoria, Northern Tasmania and across South Australia the entire capacity of the Eastern Grid’s wind fleet routinely delivers just a trickle of its combined notional capacity – back then…

Isar nuclear power site, Bavaria
Arm-waving propaganda about tiny amounts of ‘carbon’, i.e. vital carbon dioxide gas, in the atmosphere has led to this decision. One obvious problem being that wind and solar energy can’t be stockpiled, or accessed on demand, hence Germany’s newly increased dependence on coal power for its electricity.
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Germany became only the third European country to shut off its nuclear power supply on Saturday when its final three reactors were severed from the grid for good, says The Daily Telegraph.

The end of German nuclear energy, a process begun by former chancellor Angela Merkel after the Fukushima disaster in 2011, came at the same time as the country seeks to wean itself off fossil fuels and manage an energy crisis caused by the war in Ukraine.

A small crowd of pro-nuclear demonstrators turned out in front of the Brandenburg Gate on Saturday…

“I know some commenters here view TV1 as simply the propaganda arm of Labour, but I am not one of them.”

That’s from page 22 of the annual report from JMAD Research (Journalism, Media and Democracy), part of AUT (Auckland University of Technology).

The whole report paints an equally grim picture and although they don’t go into much detail about subscriptions – looking at the proportion of their sample who pay for online access to things like the NZ Horrid – other reports over the years show steady reductions in eyeballs and ears, translating into falling subscriptions, readership numbers and TV and radio ratings.

It’s not hard to accept that the two are connected and that it’s not just about Facebook, Twitter and the rest of Social Media stealing those eyes and ears, combined with Craigslist and TradeMe stealing advertising revenue.

The response of the MSM to all this…

Using other people’s to offload personal guilt is hardly virtuous, but the wind and solar scam has attracted plenty of guilt-laden oligarchs looking to atone for their (often obscene) wealth doing just that – and using taxpayer-backed subsidies to conjure up all manner of new ‘green’ scams, like ‘green’ hydrogen.

Australia’s Twiggy Forrest, is just another blowhard billionaire eager to squander taxpayer’s money. Forrest made his $billions digging up large parts of Western Australia and shipping it to the Chinese, among others.

Wallowing in a mountain of cash from iron ore sales – at record prices – he’s been targeting the renewable energy scam, with over-the-top plans for the mass production of what eager rent-seekers call ‘green’ hydrogen.

Like every well-connected rent-seeking spiv, he recoils at the thought of staking of his cash on his grand green hydrogen fantasy, instead he’s demanding untold $billions in subsidies for something that he…

Or perhaps he’ll issue a protest vote that leaves the Democrats in power, especially in his native California.

The one thing he won’t do is vote for the Republican Party, although to be fair, there’s not a lot of signs that they’re willing to do anything about any of this either, whether in academia where it started and where it’s getting crazier by the day, or in any other part of American culture.

Oh the GOP will certainly take advantage of the Culture Wars, in the same way the Democrats beat the abortion drum in the 2022 Mid-Term elections. But the difference is that the Democrats actually deliver for their voters on these issues when they have power, whereas the GOP just craps on their people once in power (see Party, Tea, 2010).

Still it’s nice to see a very liberal, indeed libertine, comedian come out swinging at this Left-wing…

There was an article on Business Desk yesterday that led with the suggestion that the LSAP losses now totalled almost $20 billion.

As soon as the article appeared I emailed the author and pointed out that the two numbers she was using could not be added together and that the best estimate of the direct fiscal losses were still around $10 billion. We had a few email exchanges and a telephone conversation, by which point she accepted that her number was wrong, but didn’t fully understand why she was wrong (apparently several other journalists were also confused), and indicated that there would be a further article forthcoming, using quotes I (and others?) had provided. I didn’t have the time for anything in depth yesterday but suggested I might write a post today that attempted a fuller and more intuitive explanation.

Unfortunately I didn’t print off the original piece and the…

Popular monarchy is a term used by Kingsley Martin (1936) for monarchical titles that refer to a people, or a tribe, rather than a territory or a nation state. This manner of titiling a monarch was the norm in classical antiquity and throughout much of the Middle Ages, and such titles were retained in some of the monarchies of 19th- and 20th-century Europe.

For example, Alfred the Great was King of the West Saxons (Wessex) from 871 to 886. In 886, Alfred reoccupied the city of London and set out to make it habitable again. Alfred entrusted the city to the care of his son-in-law Æthelred, ealdorman of Mercia. Soon afterwards, Alfred restyled himself as “King of the Anglo-Saxons.” Alfred remained King of the Anglo-Saxons from 886 until his death in 899.

Alfred’s grandson, King Æthelstan (c. 894 – 27 October 939), was King of the Anglo-Saxons from 924 to 927…

From the Emperor’s Desk: As I focus on the issues surrounding Richard III becoming King I will not be addressing the fate of the Princes in the Tower. Although it is a related topic, I view it as a separate issue, for their fate was a result of Richard taking the throne, therefore I will address that in another blog entry in the near future.

King Richard III succeeded to the English throne based on the claims of Titulus Regius. Titulus Regius (“royal title” in Latin) is a statute of the Parliament of England issued in 1484 by which the title of King of England was given to Richard III.

The act ratified the declaration of the Lords and the members of the House of Commons a year earlier that the marriage of King Edward IV of England to Elizabeth Woodville had been invalid and so their children, including…

Let’s continue from where I left in previous post about a Newsweek fact check of the claim that “humanity would end by 2023”. This claim was made in 2018 and attributed to James Anderson in a gritpost article. The fact checker made the argument that the gritpost article didn’t correctly report on Anderson’s claim and that the claim was in fact about the polar ice caps, more specifically, that “unless the world stopped using fossil fuels by 2023, the effect on the polar ice caps would be irreversible“.

That seems rather vague, especially after having read the articles that were used by the fact checker. I think he pretty much understated the actual claim that was reported in those articles:

The chance that there will be any permanent ice left in the Arctic after 2022 is essentially zero.

Volcanic eruption
At least they now know about it. In tests, ‘inclusion of the eruptions degraded the model’s predictive capabilities’.
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Simulated volcanic eruptions may be blowing up our ability to predict near-term climate, according to a new study published in Science Advances.

The research, led by the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR), finds that the way volcanic eruptions are represented in climate models may be masking the models’ ability to accurately predict variations in sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific that unfold over multiple years to a decade, says Phys.org.

These decadal variations in sea surface temperatures in the tropical Pacific are linked to climate impacts across the globe, including variations in precipitation and severe weather.

Accurate predictions, therefore, could provide community leaders, farmers, water managers, and others with critical climate information that allows them to plan years in advance.

“Near-term climate prediction on…