Utopia, you are standing in it!

Still waiting
Climate modellers have a fairly dismal record in trying to predict sea ice patterns in the Arctic, always erring on the side of too much warming. Will this research do anything to improve matters? They seem to be using Earth’s past climate as a guide, while asserting that human-caused carbon dioxide is the main problem today.
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A new study, published this week in the journal Nature Climate Change, supports predictions that the Arctic could be free of sea ice by 2035, reports Phys.org.

High temperatures in the Arctic during the last interglacial—the warm period around 127,000 years ago—have puzzled scientists for decades.

Now the UK Met Office’s Hadley Centre climate model has enabled an international team of researchers to compare Arctic sea ice conditions during the last interglacial with present day.

Their findings are important for improving predictions of future sea ice change.

Effervescent claims that offshore wind power is cheap have fallen flat. When the rising capital cost of taking wind turbines offshore is accounted for, the power that they occasionally generate turns out to be the most expensive electricity of all, and by a very substantial margin.

A couple of years back in the UK, rent seekers’ claims about the falling cost of offshore wind power were lapped up by mainstream journalists and regurgitated ad nauseam.

Not all were convinced.

Indeed, the team at the Global Warming Policy Forum were sceptical from the outset. Now, having run the hard numbers, Gordon Hughes, Capell Aris, and John Constable are able to claim vindication. The true cost of offshore wind power is gobsmacking.

Offshore Wind: Definitely Expensive
The Global Warming Policy Forum
Andrew Montford
31 July 2020

Back in 2017, there was great excitement among environmentalists and the media, when it was announced…

As Joe Biden’s mental decline has got worse over the last six months his campaign team have decided on a basic strategy of limiting his exposure to the public.

The Chinese Sinus Rot disease was an alibi made in heaven for such a scenario, as Biden stayed in his home like tens of millions of other elderly Americans and used the Internet to conduct interviews, give speeches and so forth. Even then, Biden has not done well, with the following merely one of an almost endless run of incidents where he’s wandered off-topic, lost the thread of what he was saying (even when reading from notes), garbled words and generally produced word salads. By contrast this is merely the sort of foot-in-mouth gaffe that has marked his entire career:

I’ve reported before on what happened during the recent troubles in Seattle (see here, for instance) , in which a six-block area of the downtown (renamed “CHAZ” or “CHOP”) was taken over by protestors and was abandoned by police, who wouldn’t respond to calls from within the area. Mayor Jenny Durtkan, too, refused to do anything, and even had concrete barriers and portable toilets brought in to reinforce the occupation. Roving groups of armed citizens policed the area, especially at night.

Eventually, the site was cleared by police after several shootings occurred, but things still aren’t back to normal: businesses are either shuttered or aren’t doing much trade, and a group of local businesses is suing the city for abandoning the district, leading to “enormous property damage and lost revenue.”

That revenue is estimated at about $200 million.

I still can’t completely fathom why the city didn’t stop this…

Some time ago PM Trudeau floated the idea that pandemic shutdowns can’t be lifted until a vaccine is available.  More recently, the lack of a vaccine is touted in the US as a reason for keeping schools closed and travel restrictions in place.  What is this obsession with a vaccine as the savior whose healing powers we must await while hiding in isolation?  As a previous post reprinted below explains, it is again a case of generals fighting a past war rather than the current one.

But let’s also be attentive to a bait and switch involving shifty use of words.  A vaccine by definition works by training our immune system to recognize and resist a targeted pathogen.  And it’s a long road to perfecting an agent which achieves that without doing harm to some or many individuals.  Meanwhile Bill Gates is promoting something termed a “vaccine” which intends to…