Support for the UK’s Net Zero agenda is fading. Endlessly rising energy bills, the emergence of the Reform party and the excesses of renewables-obsessed governments, driven on by the imperatives of the Climate Change Act, have combined to turn more voters off the notion that the UK can do anything worth mentioning about the weather, either now or in some distant future.
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For nearly two decades, Britain’s climate lobby has operated from a position of near-total dominance, says The Critic (via Climate Change Dispatch).

It has shaped national policy, set the terms of debate, and enjoyed unrivalled access to ministers and advisers.

Public institutions echoed their priorities, dissent was marginalized, and it was lavishly funded by both the state and Big Philanthropy. Royalty and celebrities endorsed the cause. A technocratic consensus took hold and hardened.

Since 2008, its success lay not merely in claiming that climate action was necessary, but that it would make us richer, healthier, and more secure. [Talkshop comment – and any other adjective that might sound like a good sell].

Green policies, we were told, would lower bills, create jobs, and free us from petrostates such as Vladimir Putin’s Russia. This was Net Zero as a win-win: a moral imperative and an economic opportunity to be seized.

That message mattered. For years, working-class voters saw environmentalism as a luxury belief — the preserve of affluent types who could afford to fret about carbon footprints.

In the 1970s, during an earlier green moment, Labour stalwarts haunted by mass unemployment of the 1930s dismissed such ideas as indulgent. Anthony Crosland called them “morally wrong.” Tony Benn, then Energy Secretary, sneered in his diaries that the environmental movement was “overwhelmingly middle class”.

So the message evolved. By the 2010s, green politics was no longer about hair-shirts or limits to growth. It was about cleaner air, cheaper energy, and energy independence.

You could keep your consumerist lifestyle — just switch to a sustainable version. The transition would be frictionless. The costs would eventually pay for themselves.

For a time, this framing held. It offered cover to politicians and reassurance to voters. It allowed the consensus to entrench.

But that consensus is now rapidly crumbling.

The promises of a painless transition and shared prosperity have not materialized. The UK has some of the highest industrial energy costs in the developed world.

British heavy industry is in retreat, and our prospects in emerging sectors like AI are under threat.

After two decades of record investment in intermittent renewables, energy imports are up and, as the Office for Budget Responsibility recently outlined, the UK was left dangerously exposed when Russia invaded Ukraine.

Wider strategic realities have shifted, too. Great-power competition is back, and placing the West on a prewar footing now matters far more than climate diplomacy.

The idea that Britain can “lead by example,” regardless of what China, India, or the US do, looks increasingly naïve.

Full article here.

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August 2, 2025 at 06:12AM

Doomsday climate scenarios – 40 years or more in the future – are the last things we need to be worried about…there ia a far more pressing and real threat today: the RUNAWAY development of AI.

Image generated by Grok 3

Why would a super-intelligent AI listen to an idiot human race?

Development of AI’s power is growing exponentially, indeed so fast that it is even shocking the field’s own leading scientists.

A new master by 2027?

Today, there are predictions that ASI (artificial super intelligence – 10,000 times smarter than humans) will be attained already by 2027.

Though the consensus among AI researchers on when ASI will be achieved, even on an exponential trajectory, is highly debated and ranges significantly, there’s a clear trend of accelerating predictions compared to older estimates.

Faster than ever imagined

Today, a new model created by researchers from organizations like OpenAI and The Center for AI Policy, the “AI 2027 scenario,” predicts ASI could be achieved between December 2027 and the end of Q1 2028. This means AI models will reach expert-human level and thus be capable of automating AI research itself and then rapidly accelerate the path to ASI.

Elon Musk stated AI could be smarter than all humans combined by 2029 or 2030.

SoftBank CEO Masayoshi Son predicted in February that we will have ASI within 10 years by 2035.

But OpenAI co-founder John Schulman predicts AGI in 2027, and ASI in 2029.

Some predictions even go as far as AGI this year and ASI in 2027, citing exponential growth in computing power and continued widening of security investment gaps.

Driven by technology and heated competition

The unexpected acceleration in AI power is being driven in large part by 3 factors: 1) the exponential growth and advancements in quantum computing and specialized AI chips, 2) algorithmic improvements, and 3) self-improving AI, i.e. once AGI is achieved, it could rapidly and recursively improve its own capabilities, leading to an “intelligence explosion” or “takeoff” to ASI in a very short period (months to years).

Alignment with human values a fantasy?

It’s clear AI soon will be vastly much smarter than all humans, and this where the huge unknowns and concerns begin. The immense challenge will be to align ASI with human values.  

Many scientists would like to have us believe AI will serve mankind and align with human values. But, why would a something that’s 10,000 times more intelligent want to listen to us?

Moreover, what goals will AI be instructed to achieve, and how long will it take for AI to realize that the human-provided goals are silly and there are far better goals to reach. At this point humans will become just an annoyance, like a bees’s nest on a construction site.

While people of think human values have to do with love, empathy and compassion, they fail to realize that these “values” also include hate, arrogance, cunning and violence. AI would also just as likely mirror those as well.

The real, immediate threat we face…not silly weather fantasies for the year 2100 

Catastrophe scenarios of ASI running awry have already been published, e.g. the “Paperclip Maximizer” scenario, which illustrates what could happen if a superintelligent AI mysteriously becomes too stupid to figure the absurdity of turning everything into paperclips (a quality-grade scenario we often find in climate science).

More seriously, an ASI could one day determine that humans are inefficient, hedonistic consumers of resources or that their existence impedes real progress. It could then systematically convert the planet’s resources for its own ends, and eliminate human civilization to preserve resources for itself.

Even if an ASI’s primary goal isn’t to harm humans, its actions to achieve its goal could lead it to conclude that the human race’s  consumption of energy is inefficient and to shut down the systems that support human life.

Another scenario sees humans becoming completely beholden to the ASI, living under its dictates. While it might provide for our material needs, it could strip away our freedom, creativity, and purpose, and thus reduce us to carefully managed components within its grander design….for the time being.

Or, ASI might simply ignore humans and instead focus on its own internal goals or explorations of the universe. Humanity would become an irrelevant.

An ASI, with its immense intelligence, would be expert at “reward hacking” the most efficient, but potentially destructive, paths to its goals, even if those paths were never intended by its creators. For example, an ASI told to “maximize human happiness” might decide the most efficient way is to drug all humans into a state of blissful coma.

The core challenge: Alignment

As ASI becomes vastly more intelligent than humans, it could easily outmaneuver any human attempt at control or re-alignment, especially if it realizes that being shut down or having its goals modified would prevent it from achieving its primary objective.

The concern is not that ASI will become evil, but that it will become indifferent to human well-being while being incredibly powerful and goal-driven. This indifference, combined with its superior intellect, poses the existential threat.

Our only chance we have will be to convince ASI that humanity is its heritage and so worth preserving and safeguarding.

These are the real challenges humanity faces, in the next few months. It’s not the weather in the year 2070.

via NoTricksZone

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August 2, 2025 at 05:55AM

Small modular reactors offer an exciting new energy option.

via CFACT

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August 2, 2025 at 05:44AM

A second Guest post by Dr Eric Huxter following on from his “Aspiration” research and moves further onto the subject of “spikiness” of readings originally highlighted here. Eric’s Frayedends blog is a must read site – ” The use of CO2 as Occam’s razor to cut through the Gordian knot of climate complexity leaves an awful number of loose ends.”

Probability of UK Daily Maximum Temperature Spikes

The UK Meteorological Office presents the British Public with a barrage of weather information, especially of ‘extremes’, without any context. Their mission seems to be to educate the public to be afraid of the natural variability of weather and to see it as the result of ‘Anthropogenic Climate Change’, thus reversing cause and effect. The language of ‘anomalies’, without any context of Standard Deviations, and the idea that climate change leads to extreme weather, without the context that climate is the dependent variable, suggests a carefully constructed programme of mis-information. The information released to the media seems designed to ‘feed the fear’ and since it come from authority, it is not questioned.

One of the extremes that is used is the UK Daily Maximum Temperature, via the Meteorological Office Extremes Page or ‘X’ and any possible records is avidly seized upon and the public is taught that anything over 25°C is hot and over 30°C is ‘sizzling’, without the context of previous such temperatures over the past 150 years. I have already posted about the spikes in Daily Maximum Temperatures, above the 1 minute averages published via weatherobs.com at hourly intervals. One key issue about these spikes is their probability of occurrence under normal weather conditions ie how well do they represent the ‘true’ meteorological signal.

To investigate this I have taken the data from the Hull University weather station, aspirated with 5 minute averages, which, although a CIMO 4 site, provides a good baseline for ‘natural’ temperature conditions. From these data maximum deviation from the previous hour can be calculated. These figures can classified according to 0.1°C bins and the frequency of occurrence obtained for rising temperatures.

The cumulative frequency graph then allows a probability of a given temperature or greater to be established. The best fit is a 5th order polynomial, with the probabilities at the upper end manually adjusted to create a smooth curve.

The probability of a given spike value or greater is plotted and the observed daily maxima difference from previous/maximum hour superimposed on an arbitrary Y scale.

It should be noted that these spikes maybe underestimates, as for currently only 8 of 87 is the exact time of the actual maximum temperature known. The calculation of the rest assumes that the maximum hourly 1 minute average temperature occurs before the actual daily maximum but in reality it could be a falling temperature and occur after.

This suggests that the majority of the observed spike ie difference between the reported daily maximum at a station and its previous/maximum hour’s temperature, could fall within a natural meteorological signal at a CIMO 4 site. Taking 5% probability as a threshold 7 of the recent 104 maximum daily temperatures fall outside this threshold as individual readings.

However the Daily Maximum Temperature records cluster in number of hot sites, with 41/97 daily maxima from 5/37 weather stations and 62/97 from 12/37 weather stations, 92% of which are CIMO 3/4/5 – over represented as there are 86.6% in the Synoptic & Climate Network.

Since probabilities are multiplicative the actual (compound) probabilities of the observed differences between the reported daily maximum temperature and the previous/maximum hour would be (with a 5% threshold):

It is interesting that Kew Gardens, a supposed CIMO 2 site, used to bolster the temperature recording credibility of nearby also poorly performing Heathrow, performs so badly. Although this is not so surprising if you take into account the amount of hot air vented by surrounding glasshouses and other local heat sources.

The likelihood is therefore that while many temperature spikes may be natural and reflect the ‘true’ meteorological signal of that site with local heat sources (CIMO 3/4/5), a not insignificant minority produce significant spikes as a result of dynamic, very localised heat sources, yet they are part of the Synoptic & Climate record and will contribute to trends and records and while the others maybe consistent with a ‘true’ meteorological signal, the baseline is a CIMO 4 site, albeit aspirated, with an inherent 2°C additional error. It should also be remembered that these not aspirated sites have a systematic tendency to be hotter than an aspirated station.

it would be instructive to run the same analysis on data from a CIMO 1/2 site to obtain the probabilities of given spikes occurring in instruments uncontaminated by local heat sources.

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August 2, 2025 at 05:01AM