By Paul Homewood

h/t Ian Magness

Today’s climate lies come from the Standard:

The West Nile virus has been found in mosquitoes collected in Britain for the first time, the UK Health Security Agency has said.

It is usually found in birds, and typically circulates through bird-biting mosquitoes. In rare cases mosquitoes can transmit the virus to humans or horses.

Its arrival is due to climate change, with experts saying warmer weather has made it possible for mosquitoes to spread further north than they have in previous years.

https://www.aol.co.uk/news/west-nile-virus-potentally-deadly-100515475.html

Despite its deceptive title, the West Nile Virus does not come from the Nile, although apparently the first recorded case was in Uganda in 1937.

The virus is already widely established across all of the 48 states in the contiguous United States and most of Europe – in other words in places with much colder climates than here.

It can be transmitted by most mosquitoes, not just tropical ones,

Its life cycle passes from mosquitoes to birds, and back to other mosquitoes who bite the infected birds. These mosquitoes are part of the Culex genus, which thrive worldwide except for the extreme northern parts of the temperate zone, and are the most common form of mosquito encountered in some major U.S. cities, such as Los Angeles.

The birds they infect are also extremely common and widespread, such as crows.

In short, the spread of the virus to Britain has nothing at all to do with global warming. It was inevitable sooner or later that an infected mosquito or bird would find its way across the English Channel or North Sea, probably amongst cargo or on a lorry.

Given that the virus was only known about in 1937, it has undoubtedly existed for thousands of years, and almost certainly here as well, without it being realised.

And as with malaria and other mosquito borne diseases, the solution was worked out years ago by our forefathers – get rid of the mosquito breeding grounds.

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May 23, 2025 at 09:42AM

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May 23, 2025 at 09:03AM

By Paul Homewood

h/t Doug Brodie

The Climate Change Committee has finally admitted that their Net Zero policies have made electricity unaffordable.

The Telegraph report:

Ed Miliband must consider raising taxes or gas bills if the UK is to have any hope of hitting net zero, the Government’s climate change quango has warned.

To ensure his flagship policy succeeds, the Climate Change Committee (CCC) said the Energy Secretary needs to remove green levies from household power costs.

However, to pay for this, it said the levies should be shifted onto gas bills or covered by general taxation. The quango stopped short of saying which one it preferred.

The quango said it was concerned that high electricity prices were preventing households from buying heat pumps and electric cars, which in turn was holding back the green energy transition

https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2025/03/05/heat-pumps-cost-british-households-more-than-europeans/

Fat chance of moving these costs to general taxation!

As for switching them to gas, there would be a number of issues, none pleasant for any government to accept.

For a start, would this switch cover just residential customers or all users? Households use 30% of all electricity, but 60% of gas; consequently they would be worse off if industry’s electricity bills were also subsidised in this way.

Then there is the issue that not all customers would be affected in the same way. It is not a zero sum game where cuts in power bills perfectly offset rises in gas bills. Some households, for example, don’t use gas.

And as people naturally switch to EVs and heat pumps, the unfairness for some becomes more acute. As gas consumption declines, the same £18 billion surcharge will have to be spread over fewer customers, while the richer households who can afford EVs and heat pumps get more subsidised electricity.

The whole idea is ludicrous anyway, and shows how far the CCC have lost the plot. They still talk of “policy costs” and “making electricity cheaper”, ignoring the fact that the current prices actually reflect the true cost of generation, notwithstanding some of the market pricing mechanisms which get in the way.

Putting renewable subsidies onto general taxation does not alter that fact. If the CCC want to make electricity cheaper, they can do it by sidelining expensive renewable energy and abolishing the carbon tax.

The CCC seem to believe that people are desperate to buy EVs and heat pumps, and it is only the price of power which is stopping them!

EV owners are already heavily subsidised by avoiding fuel duties, yet this has not made EVs more popular. In time, they will inevitably have to pay an equivalent tax, so saving a hundred quid on electricity charges will be irrelevant to uptake.

Similarly with heat pumps. It is not the cost of electricity that is putting people off, but the cost of installation, insulation and the rest. As with EVs, even an unsustainable £7500 subsidy has not shifted the needle, so I don’t see how saving a couple of hundred quid on running costs will.

The CCC in their little dream world now appear to have come face to face with hard reality. Their policies are already impacting the public financially, and will exact yet further penalties in future.

No amount of rearranging the deckchairs will alter that fact.

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May 23, 2025 at 08:33AM

Via SpaceWeather.com

More than 14 thousand years ago, there was a solar storm so big, trees still remember it. Dwarfing modern solar storms, the event would devastate technology if it happened again today. Spoiler alert: It could.

Subfossil trees along the banks of the Drouzet river in France [ref]

The record-strong storm is described by a paper in the upcoming July 2025 edition of the peer-reviewed journal Earth and Planetary Science Letters. It occured in 12,350 BC and is classified as a “Miyake Event.”

Miyake Events are solar storms that make the Carrington Event of 1859 look puny. Trees “remember” them in their rings, which store the carbon-14 created by gargantuan storms. At least six Miyake Events have been discovered and confirmed since Fusa Miyake found the first one in 2012. The list so far includes 664-663 BC, 774 AD, 993 AD, 5259 BC, 7176 BC, and 12,350 BC.

The Miyake Event of 12,350 BC is especially intriguing. It appears as a carbon-14 spike in Scots Pine trees along the banks of the Drouzet river in France, with a matching beryllium-10 spike in Greenland ice cores. The event was global and, based on the size of the spikes, very big.

At first, no one could say how big the storm was because it happened during the Ice Age.

Carbon-14 storage is complicated. When a solar storm creates carbon-14 in the upper atmosphere, the radioisotope doesn’t immediately appear in the woody flesh of trees. Getting there involves months to years of atmospheric circulation influenced by climate and geography, and even then the carbon-14 has to arrive during the tree’s growing season, otherwise it won’t be “taken up.” High-altitude trees are favored because they encounter the carbon-14 first, while different species each have their own sensitivity.

All these factors are a harder to tease out in the Ice Age. Most known Miyake Events occurred after the Ice Age, during the Holocene, a period of relatively stable and warm climate starting about 12,000 years ago. Climate scientists have atmospheric circulation models for the Holocene, so interpreting Miyake Events in 7176 BC, 5259 BC, 664-663 BC, 993 AD, 774 AD was relatively straightforward. Not so, the event of 12,350 BC.

To solve this problem, Kseniia Golubenko and Ilya Usoskin from the University of Oulu in Finland developed a chemistry-climate model (SOCOL:14C-Ex) specifically for Ice Age solar storms. It takes into account ice sheet boundaries, sea levels, and geomagnetic fields that existed during the Pleistocene’s Late Glacial period. Using this model, they were able to interpret tree ring data for 12,350 BC.

According to their paper, 12,350 BC is the biggest Miyake Event yet.  It produced a hailstorm of solar particles 500 times greater than the most intense solar particle storm recorded by modern satellites in 2005. During the 2005 event, an airline passenger flying over the poles might have received a year’s worth of sea-level cosmic radiation in just one hour. During the 12350 BC event, the same dose would have been received in a mere eight seconds.

This would seem to set a new standard for worst-case scenarios in space weather. However, the real news is deeper: The door to the Ice Age has been kicked open by SOCOL:14C-Ex. Older tree rings may now be interpreted with confidence, potentially revealing even worse storms.

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May 23, 2025 at 08:01AM