Utopia, you are standing in it!

Apogee = position furthest away from Earth. Earth. Perihelion = position closest to the sun. Moon. Perigee = position closest to Earth. Sun. Aphelion = position furthest away from the sun. (Eccentricities greatly exaggerated!)
Planetary cycles affecting climate. The study title: ‘Two annual cycles of the Pacific cold tongue under orbital precession’. Some real climate change theory to ponder.
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Weather and climate modelers understand pretty well how seasonal winds and ocean currents affect El Niño patterns in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean, impacting weather across the United States and sometimes worldwide, says Robert Sanders, University of California – Berkeley (via Phys.org).

But new computer simulations show that one driver of annual weather cycles in that region—in particular, a cold tongue of surface waters stretching westward along the equator from the coast of South America—has gone unrecognized: the changing distance between Earth and the sun.

The cold…

The UK electricity system’s so-called transition to renewables hits yet another bump in the road. The dream of guaranteed income was just an expensive illusion.
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One of the country’s largest solar farm owners has entered administration amid the fallout from a scandal that forced an Essex council leader to resign, reports The Guardian.

Administrators at Interpath Advisory have been appointed to Toucan Energy Holdings, which owns a portfolio of 53 solar parks with a combined capacity of 513 megawatts across England, Wales and Northern Ireland.

A recent investigation by the Bureau of Investigative Journalism found that Thurrock council in Essex, Toucan’s main creditor, borrowed hundreds of millions of pounds to invest in the solar farm scheme run by globetrotting financier Liam Kavanagh.

On my Discord channel, I was reminded of the late-2000s work by some institutional American urbanists about the concept of megaregions. Wikipedia has a good summary of the late-2000s discourse on the subject. In short, there are linear ties across the East Coast from Boston to Washington (“BosWash”), with more or less continuous suburban development in between, and some urbanists tried to generalize this concept to other agglomerations of metropolitan areas, not usually successfully. The American work on this carved most of the country’s population into 10 or 11 megaregions, sometimes annexing portions of Canada, as in the Regional Plan Association’s America 2050 program:

There is a lot to critique about this map. Canada has a strong self-conception as a distinct entity from the United States; while there’s a case for lumping Vancouver with Seattle and Portland as the Pacific Northwest, lumping Toronto with the Midwest is irresponsible…

By Paul Homewood

h/t Richard

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https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/71491799?searchTerm=swiss%20glaciers%20melting

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https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/138381943?searchTerm=swiss%20glaciers%20melting

Voters get the governments are to serve, so it’s said, which means that sympathy for their current energy woes runs thin. Voters who walked into a booth thinking they would save the planet by backing candidates and parties who promised to go all in on the grand wind and solar ‘transition’, might be suffering a little buyer’s remorse, right now. Particularly as they struggle to pay power and gas bills that have shot into orbit, and particularly so the next time they’re boiling (or freezing) in the dark, when the sun sets and/or calm weather sets in and there aren’t enough coal-fired plants left to meet their immediate power needs.

Sooner or later, we all sit down to a banquet of consequences.

As Stuart Ballantyne outlines below, if voters keep ticking the box in favour of deluded lunatics who are hellbent on destroying Western civilisation from within (see above), they…

… is the best argument against democracy.”

So, it is often claimed, did Winston Churchill pronounce upon our system of government – his system of government – as one of his famous quotes.

Except it’s not.

As the International Churchill Society points out on their wonderful website with Red Herrings: Famous Quotes Churchill Never Said:

No attribution. Though he sometimes despaired of democracy’s slowness to act for its preservation, Churchill had a more positive attitude towards the average voter.

I often find myself in need of such positive attitudes when looking at the state of politics in this country and across the Western world, particularly in the wake of the results of the US Mid-term elections.

No, I do not say that because the GOP did less well than they should have, or because they lost some key races. I’m not a doppelgänger for the shrieking hysterics of the…

(Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev and President John F. Kennedy)

Vladimir Putin’s ill-advised invasion of Ukraine last February has not produced the results that he expected.  As the battlefield situation has degenerated for Russian army due to the commitment of the Ukrainian people and its armed forces, along with western assistance the Kremlin has resorted to bombastic statements from the Russian autocrat concerning the use of nuclear weapons.  At this time there is no evidence by American intelligence that Moscow is preparing for that eventuality, however, we have learned the last few days that Russian commanders have discussed the possible use of tactical nuclear weapons.  The conflict seems to produce new enhanced rhetoric on a daily basis, and the world finds itself facing a situation not seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis of October 1962 amidst the Cold War.

(A map of Cuba annotated by former U.S. President John F. Kennedy…

Last week I reread Victoria University historian Jim McAloon’s history of New Zealand economic policymaking from 1945 to 1984, Judgements of all Kinds, first published a decade or so ago. Good works of economic history, let alone of the history of economic policymaking, aren’t thick on the ground in New Zealand, and as McAloon himself notes in a journal article published a year or two later:

“Economic history has a relatively low profile in New Zealand. Few economics programmes offer much in the way of economic history, and none of them offer courses in New Zealand economic history. Very few academics in New Zealand economics programmes publish in economic history. Victoria University, once boasting the only New Zealand chair in economic history,
has largely abandoned the field.”

(Actually, when I was at Victoria in the early 80s – and not wise enough myself to have done much economic history…

The wild claims about wind and solar replacing, coal, gas and nuclear power don’t stand first contact with reality.

Over the last 20 years, trillions of dollars have been squandered on subsidies, tax breaks, mandates, penalties, and other state-directed efforts to make chaotically intermittent wind and solar serious contenders on the world energy scene. Their combined contribution to world energy demand remains thoroughly underwhelming, as John Hinderaker highlights below.

$3.8 Trillion for Essentially Nothing
Powerline
John Hinderaker
26 October 2022

Jeff Currie, who is Global Head of Commodities Research for Goldman Sachs, describes the utter futility of “green” energy:

Here’s a stat for you, as of January of this year. At the end of last year, overall, fossil fuels represented 81 percent of overall energy consumption. Ten years ago, they were at 82. So though, all of that investment in renewables, you’re talking about $3.8 trillion, let me repeat that…