“THE VARIATIONS of the Arctic sea ice have attracted much interest in recent years, both because the changes during this century have been big and because the era of satellite observations and transpolar flying has made it possible to keep the ice under continual survey.”
“in August 1966 the maximum sea ice extent fell to 15.9×10 km ± 0.3×10 km . This is more than 1.5×10 km below the passive microwave record of 17.5×10 km set in September of 1986. This variation between 1964 and 1966 represents a change of maximum sea ice of over 3×10 km in just two years”
“The American Navy Joint Ice Center has produced weekly charts which have been digitised by NOAA ….. Since about 1976 the areal extent of sea-ice in the Northern Hemisphere has varied about a constant climatological level but in 1972-1975 sea-ice extent was significantly less.
Bit by bit, our personal freedoms are being eroded in the mad rush to Net Zero:
Property owners who fail to comply with new energy efficiency rules could face prison under government plans that have sparked a backlash from Tory MPs.
Ministers want to grant themselves powers to create new criminal offences and increase civil penalties as part of efforts to hit net zero targets. Under the proposals, people who fall foul of regulations to reduce their energy consumption could face up to a year in prison and fines of up to £15,000.
Tory backbenchers are set to rebel against the plans, which they fear would lead to the criminalisation of homeowners, landlords and businesses.
The proposals are contained in the Government’s controversial Energy Bill, which is set to come before the Commons for the first time when MPs return from their summer break on Tuesday.
It provides for “the creation of criminal offences” where there is “non-compliance with a requirement imposed by or under energy performance regulations”. People could also be prosecuted for “provision of false information” about energy efficiency or the “obstruction of… an enforcement authority”.
A Government spokesman said: “We have no plans to create new criminal offences, and any suggestion otherwise is untrue.
“Energy certificate legislation originated in EU laws, and our amendments ensure landlords, businesses and tenants are provided with the information they need to make their own decisions on energy efficiency in their buildings.”
Officials suggested the Government required such powers to amend criminal offences that already exist under the current regime.
Ministers are giving themselves broad umbrella powers to redraw and enforce the system before consulting on precisely which changes to make.
Tory MPs have expressed alarm that ministers would be able to create new offences with limited parliamentary scrutiny under the update.
Craig Mackinlay, the head of the Net Zero Scrutiny Group, has tabled an amendment to strip the “open-ended and limitless” powers out of the legislation. He told The Telegraph: “The Bill is festooned with new criminal offences. This is just unholy, frankly, that you could be creating criminal offences
“The ones we’ve found most offensive are where a business owner could face a year in prison for not having the right energy performance certificate or type of building certification.”
Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, a former energy secretary, said the proposed use of statutory instruments to create new offences was unacceptable, adding: “Criminal offences are an exceptional use of the state’s power and therefore require the fullest constitutional scrutiny.
Whilst such statutory instruments do have to be approved by the Commons, they are typically nodded through and not a single one has failed to pass in the last 35 years.
Sir John Redwood, the Tory MP for Wokingham, said the powers were “over the top” and a “clumsy intervention” to try and force through net zero, adding: “It’s entirely the wrong way around. If you want to speed up progress on energy efficiency, then you should do it via grants and assistance.
“People are in the best position to judge their own houses, and you need to give them a helping hand rather than threaten them with action.”
Research has revealed that wildfires are on the decline, despite the mainstream narrative that they have increased because of “climate change.”
Danish author and academic Bjorn Lomborg’s analysis, published in the Wall Street Journal, reveals a large disparity between the actual number of wildfires and the concern raised over them by the mainstream media and politicians.
“Climate change hasn’t set the world on fire,” Lomborg declared. “It turns out the percentage of the globe that burns each year has been declining since 2001.”
Lomborg’s claim is confirmed by the satellite data from the Global Wildfire Information System, which records a consistent decline in the extent of burned areas since the early 2000s.
“In the early 2000s, 3% of the world’s land area burned each year. Last year, fire burned 2.2% of the world’s land area, a new record low,” Lomborg stated.
“Yet you would struggle to find that reported anywhere,” he added.
However, despite wildfires occurring less often, reporting on “climate change” has increased by 400% between 2010 and 2020.
Lomborg pointed out that while satellites reveal that the world is burning less, the media continues to claim that there are more fires as a result of “climate change.”
“This falsely scares everyone,” Lomborg declared. “And that’s not okay.”
Sadiq Khan’s controversial Ultra-Low Emissions Zone scheme for London was supposed to put the rocket-boosters under electric car demand.
With the Mayor pressing ahead with a highly-contentious scheme that forces non-compliant petrol and diesel car drivers to pay an eye-watering £12.50 a day to drive into the capital, the expectation was that hundreds of thousands of motorists would rush out to their nearest forecourt and snap up an electric version, triggering an explosion in sales of Nissan Leafs, Teslas and other battery-powered models.
True, sales are steadily increasing but not in the vast numbers that proponents of electrification anticipated or would like to see.
Proportion of cars on UK roads
In fact, it is becoming increasingly apparent that the car industry has misjudged the scale of demand quite badly. Vertu, which is one of Britain’s biggest car dealerships, has become the latest big name to admit that the sector is already suffering from a dramatic oversupply of battery-powered vehicles.
Indeed supply is outstripping demand to such an extent, that prices are tumbling rapidly.
The warning follows the extraordinary decision of German car titan Volkswagen in July to halt electric vehicle production at its sprawling Emden factory in north-west Germany and lay off a fifth of its 1,500 employees after sales of electric models fell 30pc short of forecasts.
Unwanted electric cars are piling up on American forecourts too leaving some dealers to refuse further deliveries until the backlog has eased.
One hopes politicians the world over are paying attention because what we are witnessing is another example of how the top-down economics of net zero increasingly don’t stack up: with the introduction of an entirely arbitrary 2030 ban on petrol and diesel cars, the Government is forcing manufacturers to churn out millions of vehicles, regardless of whether the market actually exists or not.
The deadline should be scrapped without further ado. This “cart before the horse” approach of trying to stimulate demand by creating supply is the wrong way round and almost never works in business.
Start-up Britishvolt tried something similar, promising to build a giant battery factory in Blythe, on the Northumbrian coast that would churn out enough batteries every year to power 300,000 cars.
Yet there was an even bigger flaw at the heart of its plans: it had failed to secure a single order – a situation that hadn’t changed by the time it ran out of money at the start of the year.
It’s hard to fault the intentions of the great net-zero crusade – a greener planet is something everyone should want to see. But far too much of it is built on hope rather than reality.
The Government’s policy on wind energy has proved to be similarly divorced from fact. The Contracts for Difference scheme, which guarantees a fixed price for the electricity that is produced for 15 years, is an effective incentive during more benign times but when overheads are surging, as they are now, it quickly becomes an impediment to progress.
With ministers showing little willingness to bend on prices in the face of rampant cost increases, major projects are being ruthlessly abandoned.
The biggest setback has come off the Norfolk coast after Vattenfall announced it would shut down construction of its Boreas wind farm. The 1.4 gigawatt development was set to power around 1.5m homes but the Swedish energy outfit insists a 40pc surge in costs, driven by inflation, supply issues and rising wages means it is no longer viable.
Without more generous state subsidies others will surely follow suit, shattering Britain’s stated ambitions to nearly quadruple offshore wind capacity from 14GW currently to 50GW by the end of the decade.
Yet perhaps nothing underlines the Alice in Wonderland disconnection of ministers more than the campaign to force the population to green their homes with heat pumps.
Even a ban on the sale of new oil boilers from 2026 has failed to convince people to make the shift largely because the cost of converting your home can be huge, so too the disruption and upheaval from having one installed, while much of the technology suffers from several major flaws.
It might explain why, in spite of a Government scheme that pays bungs of between £5,000 and £6,000 per household, less than 14,000 vouchers have been claimed since it was launched in May last year.
Naive politicians aren’t the only ones. Virtuous investors have wasted huge sums on other ‘green’ innovations such as fake meat that have turned out to be busts.
Perhaps the venture capital industry has got better at picking winners, though that seems doubtful. At one stage it could hardly have been worse.
A study by the American academic Ben Gaddy in 2016 found that of the $25bn ploughed into so-called “clean-tech” ventures, 90pc were abject failures, and close to all of them could be considered poor investments.
Here in the UK, the problem is compounded by our willingness to remain silent as more productive hi-tech industries that Britain should be building its future on are auctioned off to the highest bidders.
The takeovers in quick succession of Cambridge-based biotech firm Abcam by an American rival and of Staffordshire drug IT specialist Instem by French private equity make a mockery of our ambition to be a life-sciences powerhouse. This country’s help-yourself attitude to opportunistic foreign raiders has to end.
Equally, perhaps the time has come to accept that the economics of net zero are more fantasy than reality.
Iowa Climate Science Education 