Google has signed a strategic agreement with nuclear project developer Elementl Power to support the early development of three potential fission reactor sites in the US.
But with no selected reactor tech and no construction timeline, the announcement sounds more like a handwaving exercise to distract onlookers from the massive amount of energy that will be expended as Google and other companies race to capitalize on the AI boom.
…
But as The Register pointed out recently, Google’s nuclear plans – along with those backed by Meta, Amazon, and others – may be too little too late to address the growing concerns that there isn’t enough power to fuel the growing demand from datacenters and AI. Experts predict an “unprecedented” spike in demand, driven in part by datacenter and AI growth, that could require 3,500 TWh of new energy generation by 2027.
Google’s own plans for AI expansion are gigantic. Google parent company Alphabet saidin its most recent earnings call last month that it intended to invest $75 billion in CapEx in 2025, much of that going to servers and datacenters to support the expansion of Google services and DeepMind AI products. At least a portion of the electricity going into those data centers is generated by burning fossil fuels, which contribute to global warming: Google itself admitted in its 2024 environmental report AI investments were a big factor as Google’s carbon emissions to increase by 13 percent year-over-year, writing “Overall, our total GHG emissions increased by 13% — highlighting the challenge of reducing emissions while compute intensity increases and we grow our technical infrastructure investment to support this AI transition.” Overall, the report said, its emissions grew 48% between 2019 and 2024.
The green movement is finished. The AI revolution has barely begun, yet the momentum behind AI is already unstoppable.
Wait until advanced AI powered consumer devices – robotic household servants which can mind the kids, take care of the gardening, or provide for other needs – start penetrating the consumer market at scale. There is no way the gargantuan energy needs of the AI required to power such consumer tech will be satisfied by handwaving agreements with early stage nuke startups, it will be all hands on deck for new dispatchable energy capacity in whatever form is most readily available.
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52.91454 -4.15807 Met Office CIMO Assessed Class 4 Installed 1/1/1993
Porthmadog weather station is not in Porthmadog (or even “Port Madoc” as it was sign-posted when I went there as a child) but by the seaside at Morfa Bychan situated on the local golf course. It represents all that is bad about Met office weather stations in location, maintenance and data representation. it is also a stand out star for reporting occasional infrequent weather events so that makes it an obligatory inclusion for the Met Office.
This below is a fairly common headline event for selected weather stations in parts of Wales and Scotland and also those by long beaches and sandy soils.
Weather stations such as Prestatyn, Rhyl and Llandudno regularly claim daily highs especially in winter months. There is nothing at all wrong in recording such occasional weather events and they are important features to study. However, such weather events do not reflect the climate of the UK as a whole and including them in the climate record only distorts any natural trends. There is enough “noise” in the data without adding such one-off occurrences.
However, there are other effects of siting at play with the current Porthmadog site recording these highs in early May. This wide angle view highlights the point.
The whole area is either sandy soil, beach or inland bare sand. Parts of the golf course look almost like a continuous sand bunker. Any extended period of dry weather and areas like these become tinderbox dry and, in the absence of water having to be evaporated, will warm up very rapidly by day. Yesterday’s regional high is quite normal for Porthmadog in these conditions. By the same token such locations will normally rapidly cool by night but only in the open countryside.
A known flaw with Stevenson Screens is that at low wind speeds i.e. <1 metre per second (3.6 kmph/ 2.25 mph) the screen will entrap air to be daily warmed and overheated. As discussed at Heathrow researchers at the University of Reading were reported to have established this flaw accounted for – “1% of cases where the differences greater than 1°C. We estimated that across Europe about 4% of maximum temperatures will be affected in this way, and about 12% of recorded minimum temperatures.”
The above findings were observed under test conditions at the Reading University Weather Station which is obviously exceptionally well maintained being probably the UK’s most important meterological education centre. Such low wind speeds are relatively uncommon in the UK’s open maritime climate but not so rare if the area surrounding the screen has been either deliberately (Walled Gardens) or inadvertently (overgrowth) converted to a major wind break.
This is the historic image of Porthmadog not long after original instalation.
There was no enclosure around the screen, neither were there any shrubs nor trees in the immediate surrounding area. There was a 10 metre radius clear of obstructions – Class 4 just about. Now, however, as the headline image demonstrates the screen is virtually surrounded to the north, east and south by dense conifer and to the south west by an ever increasing heat island of dense housing. This site is now unquestionably Class 5S and thus completely unusable for any climate reporting. On the day of the above regional high the nearest wind readings revealed very low wind speeds at 10 metres of open and exposed height and dead calm overnight for periods even at ultra windy clifftop Capel Curig at 216 metres amsl.
How this deterioration of the Porthmadog site has come about probably lies in this deliberate planting of windbreaks for the benefits of those using Porthmadog Golf Club. The image below is the only clear Street View one and dates from 14 years ago in 2011. Conifers grow quickly and it is these that have caused the current poor lack of open area around the screen.
Surely the Met Office must be aware of the problems at this site and should have taken steps to either improve it or re-locate the screen – continuing to use almost certainly inaccurate readings is unacceptable.
Then things get worse, when reviewing sites I routinely look at how the data is portrayed in terms of long term averages. Porthmadog was established 32 years ago and could well warrant a climate average over the standard accepted 30 year period. As so often the Met Office declines to offer such figures but offers alternative sites – these offerings were incredibly bizarre for Porthmadog.
Cwmystradllyn (3 miles away) has temperature records starting 1/4/1974 and ending 31/12.1982 – barely over 8 years of data which was very poorly recorded – most of those few years had more than 10% missing days but far more ridiculous was the accuracy of reporting. For reasons only known to the Met Office, who give averages to the second decimal place, the Cwmystradllyn observers did not even bother to take readings to the FIRST decimal place. This is a perfectly typical example of the site readings seemingly untroubled by too much accuracy. Columns I and J represent maximum and minimum temperatures…………very approximate indeed but apparently good enough for 60 year average calculations.
If comprising rolling 60 year climate averages based on just that short period of dodgy data seems remarkably contrived then consider Llanbedr – temperature readings started on 5/2/1998 and ended 1/11/2004, not even 7 years of readings. I believe the modern expression is “YCMIU” – less than 7 years incomplete data is good enough for a 60 year extrapolation to the one hundredth of a degree?
Cwymstradllyn, below, had died 9 years before this climate reporting period even started. If readings are to be kept from “well correlated” stations then why not simply use Porthmadog itself to continue the readings? Or is that too difficult a question to answer?
Naturally, I shall be asking these very reasonable questions to identify exactly which stations are being used to contrive these figures. If the Met office cannot or will not answer then I feel it is reasonable to discount these types of figures as fictional junk……But will the Met Office listen?
Despite 30 years of wall-to-wall propaganda most adults seem to feel that Climate Change is not an emergency. For some reason, they’d rather cut their electricity bill now, than cool the world by a thousandth of a degree in a hundred years time.
It’s taken billions of dollars worth of prime time news, school doom projects, clean-green advertising, and hot-weather-girl hyperbole to keep the fantasy levitating. Not to mention the weeping lectures from 97% of experts — yet somehow, improbably, most people are not buying it.
Imagine if we had a free press, and the Nobel Prize winners who disagreed were interviewed by the 7:30 Report or 60 minutes? It wouldn’t be 60% of voters who were skeptical, it would be 100%.
He who controls the media, can confuse 40% of the people.
Michael Deacon, Telegraph, UK
This week, a new polling firm called Merlin Strategy asked voters for their views on tackling climate change. But here’s the crucial thing, it didn’t merely ask them: “Do you support net zero?” Instead, it asked them which was more important: action to achieve net zero, or cutting the cost of living. And guess what they said? Almost 60 per cent chose cutting the cost of living, while a mere 13 per cent chose net zero.
So 13% were wealthy enough, or obsessed enough to want to pay more to “put environmental aims first”.
Jack Elsom, The Sun
A Merlin Strategy poll of 3,000 people found 59 per cent of Brits agreed that “action to reduce the cost of living has to come first over sustainability and being eco-friendly”.
Just 13 per cent of people thought ministers should put environmental aims first.
The verdict was returned by supporters of all parties. For Labour voters, 61 per cent agreed and 12 per cent disagreed, for Tories it was 70 per cent and eight per cent, and for Reform it was 65 per cent and 15 per cent.
Clearly most polls ask loaded silly questions so they get loaded silly answers. But most polls ask open apple-pie questions “Would you like the government to spend other people’s money making storms nicer?” It isn’t hard to write surveys that ask people to rank choices, or to ask them what they would be willing to pay, yet pollsters rarely do that.
The point of a poll is not to tell the Blob what the people want, it’s to tell the people what The Blob wants.
PS: The New Pope has been picked –– a man of the times, American cardinal Robert Prevost of Chicago – who is a fierce opponent of same-sex marriage and gender studies in classrooms. He also opposed a plan in Peru to add gender studies instruction in classrooms, saying “The promotion of gender ideology is confusing, because it seeks to create genders that don’t exist.” I don’t think the Left will be happy with Pope Leo XIV.
Iowa Climate Science Education 