From THE DAILY SCEPTIC

by Chris Morrison

Sunning himself in some Spanish spring sunshine, the British Prime Minister is no doubt relieved that the Supreme Court back home has given him some much needed guidance on the biology of a woman. But we must hope his holiday good humour is being disturbed by news that the breezes that will power his new socialist economic miracle went on strike during significant parts of the first quarter. In a colder-than-usual winter, windmill output fell by 11%, pushing up demand for gas and imports and causing a number of unstable and highly expensive price spikes. What dick is in charge at the Department of Energy, he might be asking himself.

Step forward Ed Miliband, whose entire political career now seems to rest on his ability to keep a straight face while stating that the unreliable breezes and sunbeams are cheaper than regular-as-clockwork gas. According to Montel Analytics, low levels of renewable generation and high demand drove gas-fired power production to its highest level since 2021 for the first three months of 2025. But this gas rescue act came at a large cost since Britain’s increasingly unstable electricity supply, which provides some of the highest prices in the world, showed wild cost swings in windless days in January. On at least two freezing winter days, wind production was more-or-less zero. Not untypical winter weather conditions also saw the sun fail to shine for a number of consecutive days. Some periods saw the wholesale peak-time electricity price top £160 per megawatt hour ((MWh). On January 8th, when winter high pressure stopped the wind blowing across the UK, the wholesale price soared to £300 MWh, while the sophisticated clearing price needed to balance the non-storable supply with instant demand soared to £2,900 MWh.

Gas-generated electricity rose to 26.8 TWh during the first quarter, a rise of 13% from Q4 2024 and the highest Q1 level for four years. This despite considerable new wind capacity coming online. Wind generation fell to its lowest first quarter output since 2020. Britain sits on huge reserves of onshore gas and offshore hydrocarbons but over the winter the Mad One ordered two remaining gas fracking wells near Blackpool to be destroyed. Despite an official admission that gas will be needed for renewable electricity back-up into the foreseeable future, new oil and gas exploration has been stopped. And continuing with the de-industrialising, job-destroying, national security harming themes, a new coking mine in Cumbria was recently knocked on the head and this may have contributed to the economic woes of steel-making at Britain’s last blast furnaces in Scunthorpe.

A modern electricity system fit to power an advanced industrial society is highly complex and must take account of large swings in demand throughout a 24-hour period. Power has to be instantly supplied whatever the time of day, weather conditions and the industrial or social activities a population of nearly 70 million people choose to undertake. Last winter saw long periods of wind drought causing chaos to this delicate operation and the UK was lucky to avoid serious blackouts. The German word for such a drought is dunkelflaute which might roughly be translated as ‘no frigging wind’. It might also be noted that the eco-zealots led by the Mad Miliband who are destroying a once reliable cheap electricity system and causing mass de-industrialisation have no frigging idea what they are doing.

The big lie of course is that renewable power is cheaper than gas. Many commentators including David Turver in the Daily Sceptic have shown this is deluded poppycock. The lie travels around the TV and radio studios because £15 billion of annual renewable subsidies are ignored. Without these subsidies, which add hundreds of pounds to the electricity bills of rich and poor alike, nobody would instal a windmill or solar farm. Add in the extra costs of grid balancing, backup and necessary expansion of the network and it is not difficult to see why some of the highest prices for electricity in the world are driving industry away from the UK. Turver notes that “if something needs a subsidy, it’s more expensive”. But few want to acknowledge the huge elephant in the room since Net Zero is not subject to rational mathematics and science. The obvious reason for this is that it is a political agenda. A fake climate crisis, accepted for 20 years by media outlets such as the BBC without a scintilla of convincing proof, is mobilised to achieve long sought after hard Left collectivist ambitions.

Another reliable commentator is Paul Homewood and he has been working on the true electricity figures for many years. “These subsidies have to be paid because renewables are intrinsically much dearer than gas power, not the reverse,” he observes. But the house of cards is undoubtedly starting to sway in the sceptical breezes. Journalist legend Andrew Neil recently posted on X his frustration with those interviewing Miliband by suggesting they “need to be better briefed so they can call him out when he spouts nonsense”. Miliband often claims the UK is in the grip of petro-state dictators, yet in the absence of job-creating fracking, Britain obtains most of it foreign gas from Norway and the USA. On the other hand, Miliband was noted to have recently travelled to China to plead for stakes in green UK infrastructure. Not so much a petro-state dictatorship, points out Neil, just a dictatorship.

Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor.

Guest Essay by Kip Hansen — 15 April 2025 — 1200 words

Looking over one of my earlier essays, I found a note pointing to a very interesting journal paper whose findings raised an important question.  The paper is not new, it is almost a  decade old:  “Spatiotemporal Divergence of the Warming Hiatus over Land Based on Different Definitions of Mean Temperature”; Zhou & Wang (2016) [ pdf here ].

The paper was looking into this issue, as stated in the introduction:

“Despite the ongoing increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases, the global mean surface temperature (GMST) has remained rather steady and has even decreased in the central and eastern Pacific since 1983. This cooling trend is referred to as the global ‘warming hiatus’.”

We can see what they were concerned about with in this graph:

That is not the issue I am discussing in this essay, but I am basing this on the same study by Zhou and Wang.

In their discussion,  Zhou and Wang say this:

“Most of the existing studies were based on global analyses of T_a[elsewhere referred to as T_avg – kh], including those performed by several groups, such as the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s (NOAA) National Climatic Data Center (NCDC) with the Global Historical Climatology Network (GHCN, the Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), and a joint effort between the Met Office Hadley Center and the University of East Anglia Climate Research Unit with Temperature, version 4 (CRUTEM4).  All of the global temperature analyses for climate detection and attribution over land performed by the aforementioned groups relied heavily on T₂.”

T₂ is defined as “the average of daily minimum and maximum temperatures”.    To be clear, virtually all the global temperature analyses rely on that metric  T₂  [ sometimes called T_avg].

An alternate to T₂ is T₂₄ — “T₂₄ was calculated from the integral [meaning, arithmetic average – kh] of the continuous temperature measurements, i.e., 24 hourly temperature measurements from midnight to midnight local time.”

The author’s find that:

“However, the warming rates of T₂ and T₂₄ are significantly different at regional and seasonal scales because T2 only samples air temperature twice daily and cannot accurately reflect land-atmosphere and incoming radiation variations in the temperature diurnal cycle.”

Warming rates were found to be significantly different, regionally  and seasonally, based on the method of determining the Daily Average Temperature for each weather station, further blended in by whatever processes to achieve a metric called Global Mean Surface Temperature (many different versions:  Land, Land and Sea, various gridding, etc)   or any of its regional siblings. 

Now, regular readers will recall that I have mentioned before that T_avg  (called T₂  in this paper because  it is the average daily temperature  found by averaging only 2 temperatures, the daily high, T_max, and the daily low, T_min) is not really the daily average temperature at all.  Strictly it can be considered the Daily Median Temperature (considering the available data set as having only the two values, Max (high)  and Min (low))  or the “Mean of the High and Low for the day” – neither of those are a proper average of the temperatures for a location (say, a weather station) for a 24 hour period.

Zhou and Wang correctly state that T₂ or T_avg “cannot accurately reflect land-atmosphere and incoming radiation variations in the temperature diurnal cycle.”

So what is the difference that Zhou and Wang found? 

“The trend has a standard deviation of 0.43 °C/decade for T2 and 0.41 °C/decade for T24, and 0.38 °C/decade for their trend difference in 5° × 5° grids. The use of T2 amplifies the regional contrasts of the warming rate, i.e., the trend underestimation in the US and overestimation at high latitudes by T2.”

The method for determining Daily Average Temperatures in all the major GMST data sets has always generally been T₂, mostly to maintain consistency with older records, which are available only as T_min and T_max.

From the paper:

“For a global average (with incomplete coverage), T2 has an important error of annual trend (0.027 °C/decade) with respect to T24 (0.002 °C/decade) during the period 1998–2013 (Table 1).”

That comes out to be a 0.025°C/decade difference. 

That may not be a lot – but in 50 years, that’s 0.125°C.

But Zhou and Wang definitely find that the averaging method used for Daily Average Temperature,  and thus all GSMT_(land), may be responsible for some of the seemingly higher rates of warming seen in our GSMT_(land) graphs from the various groups. 

They find specifically that warming rate suffers an “overestimation at high latitudes by T₂.”

This is what we often see from NASA:

Let’s see what Zhou and Wang found:

The above shows temperature trends per decade, warming and cooling by colored dots. I have put yellow boxes around the higher latitudes in the north.  Using T₂  is on the left, and T₂₄ on the right.  Far fewer red dots show when using T₂₄.   What is missing is the great Polar or Arctic Amplification.  There are warming spots in the north using T₂₄ but not nearly as many, as clearly shown in the following which shows Annual Trends under T₂ and T₂₄.

The green boxes are the areas more closely investigated by Zhou and Wang.

So, What?

I don’t know – what you see above and what you read in Zhou and Wang (2016) is what you get here (in very truncated form).

The the area denoted by green box A1 (Eastern Europe), the use of T₂ instead of T₂₄ increases the decadal trend by 0.14°C. But in A3, the higher latitudes of the South America, the increase in decadal trend is a whopping 0.53°C . 

But what is blazeingly obvious is that using (T_min + T_max)/2 [the mean between the daily high and the daily low] as the Daily Average Temperatures [T_avg or T₂] for individual stations led to a magnification of the decadal temperature trend between 1998 and 2013;  increasing the global land decadal trend by 0.0125°C/decade.   Not that much – but for five decades, that comes up to an increase in GMST_(land) of 0.0625, six one-hundredths of a degree C.

And that is merely  interesting. 

But even more interesting is that “the T2 trend shows a markedly higher overestimation in warm seasons (by ~57%) than in cold seasons (by ~3%) both regionally and globally”.  And the sharp faster warming in the highest northern latitudes is greatly reduced when Daily Average Temperature is calculated using T₂₄:  “the continuous temperature measurements, i.e., 24 hourly temperature measurements from midnight to midnight local time.”

Bottom Line:

1.  Methods and definitions matter and can change our understanding of claimed rates of change of Global Mean Temperature. As covered in my series “The Laws of Averages”, not all averages give the same result or the same meaning.  Some averages obscure the physical facts.

2.  “…the use of T2 may bias the temperature trend over globe and regions” and “the sharp faster warming in the highest northern latitudes is greatly reduced” by using T₂₄  to calculate warming trends.

3.  Zhou and Wang recommend using the Integrated Surface Database-Hourly (ISD-H, [T24]) available from NOAA.

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Author’s Comment:

I am not entirely sure about the impact of Zhou and Wang (2016) except the fact that I have not seen, in any of the NOAA and NASA global warming/climate change material,  any hint that this important paper made any difference in their approaches to calculating warming trends.

Zhou and Wang validates those of us who have railed against the T₂ approach to daily temperatures and puts to rest the insistence of some that “it doesn’t make any difference” because “we are looking at trends” or “anomalies” or “trends of anomalies”.   

Does it mean that the massive polar amplification seen in all the warming maps – that dark red swath across the top of the northern hemisphere – is an averaging method artifact?  

Just maybe….some of it at least.

Thanks for reading.

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Essay by Eric Worrall

Extreme poverty and vulnerability to adverse weather will be a thing of the past, if everyone participates in exploitation of fossil fuel.

Climate change is not just a problem of physics but a crisis of justice

Friederike Otto
Fri 18 Apr 2025 19.00 AEST

In an exclusive extract from Friederike Otto’s new book, she says climate disasters result from inequality as well as fossil fuel.

…

So how does weather become a disaster?

We can’t say exactly how the effects of climate change vary by location and type of weather, but what is absolutely clear is that the more people are in harm’s way and the more vulnerable they are, the greater their risk.

…

For example, one of our studies from 2021 showed that the food insecurity linked to the drought in southern Madagascar was caused mainly by poverty, a lack of social structures, and heavy dependence on rainfall, but not by human-induced climate change. Nevertheless, just as with the Nigerian floods, international reports talked only of the weather and climate. The international media barely mentioned that, in fact, the local infrastructure, which had remained unfinished for decades, played a decisive role in the disastrous drought.

…

But it always proves true that the people who die are those with little money who can’t readily obtain all the help and information they need. And that doesn’t have to be the case, no matter where they are.

…

Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/apr/18/climate-change-is-not-just-a-problem-of-physics-but-a-crisis-of-justice

The above was taken from an excerpt of Frederike’s book “Climate Injustice”, which will be available from the 24th April.

I left a fair bit out in the quotes above, most of the guardian book excerpt in my opinion is social justice gibberish.

But when you cut away the obligatory assertions of white male dominated climate science and complaints about colonial exploitation of the Global South, the central point seems clear. Weather disasters, climate driven or not, are mostly a problem for poor people. Rich societies can afford advance tornado and typhoon warnings, flood mitigation, rescue operations, fast personal transport on good roads, insurance, alternative accommodation and food imports to cover crops lost to adversity.

The good news is Africa is already addressing their poverty problem, by massively ramping up exploitation of fossil fuel resources.

Granted a lot of the profit from such activity will end up in the beloved leader’s Swiss bank account or be distributed to his Wabenzi cronies, but you can’t have economic activity on that scale without local workers getting their hands on some of the money. For projects on this scale, it is always cheaper to train locals with low wage expectations than to import 10s of thousands of expensive foreigners. Even the UN admits the African fossil fuel boom is driving rapid economic growth.

An important benefit of all this economic growth is it will foster the development of civil society and will eventually increase people’s resilience and ability to survive climate disasters – just as it did in the West. If nothing else, better weather forecasting and flood management will be essential to protect the fossil fuel infrastructure.

The message seems clear – if you want poor people to become more resilient to weather disasters, climate driven or otherwise, you can help by buying their oil, gas and coal exports.