From NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT
By Paul Homewood
Events over the last week or so have included a number of episodes in which climate alarmism has intensified in the face of criticism. For at least two decades now, we have become used to hypersensitive reactions from greens: explosive reactions to being challenged. But whereas that routine of confected outrage may have served the political agenda well in the past, climate scientists’ amateur dramatics today signal something rotten, and not just about the actors. The tired script and empty theatre, too – institutional science – is revealed to be bent and rotten to the core.
“We are in a climate crisis, and we don’t necessarily need people who suggest otherwise,” stated Dr Paul Dorfman from Sussex University, in his closing words during a short debate with me on Talk TV. It was a sinister rejoinder from an expert who seemed to have risen through academic ranks without ever having been challenged, but who completely unravelled during the 12-minute discussion.
Read the full story here.
I watched the footage and Ben deserved a medal for his patience with the outright lies, ad homs, talking over and the plethora of silly faces and hand gestures you would expect from a petulant schoolgirl.
It is of course the same modus operandi we have seen lots of times from the likes of the clown Jim Dale and eco-zealot Donnachadh McCarthy.
The beauty was that Dorfman was there under false pretences anyway. He was introduced as Chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group, which you might think has something to do with the nuclear industry.
It does not. It is just another arm of the green blob, lobbying for renewables, as its own website makes clear:
Nuclear Consulting Group comprises leading academics and experts in the fields of environmental risk, radiation waste, energy policy, environmental sustainability, renewable energy technology, energy economics, political science, nuclear weapons proliferation, science and technology studies, environmental justice, environmental philosophy, particle physics, energy efficiency, environmental planning, and participatory involvement.
The fact that Greenpeace supports NCG says it all!
As for nuclear, several articles written by Dorfman, which are linked on the NCG website, are anti nuclear, such as one he wrote for the Guardian in June, titled “New nuclear would be too late and too costly”, when he stated “New nuclear has limited operational need and a poor business case”
I have no objection to a renewables lobbyist appearing on Talk TV, but viewers should surely be told just who he is?
The topic of this interview was to discuss why UK electricity prices are so high. Dorfman naturally blamed gas.
But surely, as a self proclaimed expert on energy policy, he must know that we are subsidising renewables to the tune of £17 billion this year, plus another £3 billion needed to balance the grid purely to cope with the intermittency of wind and solar?
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Sound like AlanJ on one of the 500+ comment rants.
Do not give him credibility by describing them as “comment rants.”
It is clearly a flame warrior at his most intense.
Electricity from nuclear in any appropriate country will expand when the relevant government announces its approval and enthusiasm.
The cost and time to build will hardly be influenced by mobs of known activists. Commercial reality will have been separated from ignorant paid opposition by sad people from an older era.
Anti-nuclear activists should take note that as they age, their minds will spend more time over and over asking “What have I achieved in my short life now coming to an end?” Those with little more to tell their grandchildren than “I spent my life opposing progress” will likely die early of remorse, contemplating a life of failure.
In my mid-80s now, I have had a fantastic time, including playing with my own tiny reactor in my lab and helping to find and develop world-sized uranium deposits and mines. Am I sorry for misery-guts greenpeace types? Not for a moment. I laugh.
Geoff S
Ben offered no science. Ben lied about climate scientists. Ben should stick to philosophy
The topic was the high cost of electricity. Dorfman offered no proper economics. Just a claim that it was all down to gas, which is a lie that Ben debunked. Dorfman offered no science: just atrempts at ad hominems. Proper citation required for your claim that Ben lied about climate scuentists .
Care to actually list these alleged lies, and even better, attempt to refute them?
Or are you just going to do the standard climate alarmist rant, and just assume that anything you disagree with is a proven lie?
Why? It’s perfect.
He’s shallower than a Hollyweed influencer.
I thought Ben did well: it is always difficult dealing with a live interview rather than carefully putting together a well argued video (at which he truly excels).
However, I think he needs to brush up a bit more on arguments that counter the nonsense put forward by the li(k)es of Dorfman. For example:
Contrast solar capacity with its low summer midday dominated output that is creating more problems than it solves withhigh capacity factor dispatchable output.
Point out that we are paying subsidies of £100/MWh or 10p/kWh on top of market prices for ROCs, and guaranteeing revenues of over £150/MWh for CFDs right now, and these will be index linked for years ahead.
Emphasise that very large chunks of cost are going on infrastructure to connect and support renewables generation. These are low capacity factor assets, so the cost on our bills is high. It’s not just the price we pay at the grid connectionpoint.
Point out that curtailmentov surpluses is only going to be a growing problem as more renewsbles capacity is added, with storage being a further added cost that can only handle a small part of the problem before being uneconomic. That means that the real cost of incremental winc and solar is only going to increase, because less and less output will be useful, leaving tye cost to be recovered from distant finishing levels of output.
He could have also pointed out that despite decades of huge subsidies and forced adoption of wind and solar, fossil fuels and nuclear still produce 80+% of global energy and there has been negligible effect on CO2 concentration rate of increase. Oh, and the weather is still just fine.
“we are subsidising renewables to the tune of £17 billion this year, plus another £3 billion needed to balance the grid purely to cope with the intermittency of wind and solar”
£ 20billion yr extra ( population 69 million = £ 289.85 per man woman & child )
So every family of 4 is paying an extra £1,159.40 for their electricity
And the blatant liar, Miliband, still touts renewables as low cost … sad thing is, many stupid people believe him.
[Inconvenient] facts lead to false balance and that will not do.
Easy to spot fails – like Arctic ice disappearing – are harder to spin out. We’ve always been at war with..,
If natural gas is the problem, just cut it all off and see how things go.
stator ti[p
here are some real facts
https://edmhdotme.wpcomstaging.com/analysis-of-renewable-power-de-uk-fr-in-the-context-of-europe-2024/
I thought Talk TV had shut up shop?
It doesn’t seem to be listed by Barb.
Have they any viewers, if they cannot be measured?
Talk TV stopped, but Talk Radio continued and is available in vision on the app. ‘Talk’ which can be loaded from app store.
Thank you. That explains it.
Thought it had failed.
Nuclear Consulting Group comprises leading academics and experts in the fields of … participatory involvement.
That has to take the cake for an example of phony expertise.
‘participatory involvement’ equals ‘we do antinuclear demonstrations’. Public disorder is what they are expert in.
I think «participatory involvement» means conferences in general and junkets in particular. Is there a reasonable doubt that many people who can be called «leading academics» are experts on that?
Do they get “participation” trophies?
I came across Paul Dorfman in the 1990s and was surprised to see him included in a climate change discussion because he was very anti nuclear and that was always his issue.
Oh yeah, I deal with them nearly every day where their well-developed inability to rationally debate climate related topics in several forums and a couple blogs is classic as they employ the pseudoscience approach of fallacies, personal attacks with oil funding bromides be overtly hostile to the official data I use and they often ignore the posted article content as they seem to treat it like holy water which makes them recoil and run away.
Now I commonly call them Warmest/Alarmists or Pseudoscience supporters which are factually true.
Dorfman, like all advocats of wind and solar energy, talks only about large gains in “installed capacity” of these machines without mentioning that they cannot generate at their capacity but for a few minutes or hours in a year. They typically generate no more than 1/4 to 1/3 of their capacity on average only in areas with favorable wind and sunshine, and frequently generate nothing regardless of where they are. What they do generate is erratic and without inertia causing heavy costs in the grids to accommodate these deficiencies and imposing increase cost on gas backup generation. I am sure Dorfman is aware of these and other faults of wind and solar energy. It does him no credit not to mention them when he talks publically.
Angry Outbursts, But No Facts–The Climate Alarmists’ Playbook
If I didn’t know better, I would have thought that there is no difference between a Climate Scientist and a Democrat. But I may be wrong. Angry Outbursts and No Facts seems to be a common denominator.
“Angry Outbursts and No Facts seems to be a common denominator.”
From the … political Right, Left & Centre,
Religions of all persuasions,
Armchair warriors on social media,
& particularly … ‘The Climate Alarmists’.
No, you’re not wrong…
Same funding source, same overlords.
Paul Dorfman is a disgrace. He has no argument except an appeal to authority. He claims gas sets the price yet agrees that renewables are 12 pence and gas is six pence. If gas sets the price then we shouldn’t be charged more for renewables than gas. Apparently his university doesn’t have a math department. Thank god he is on their side and not ours, we have no room for that kind of dishonesty on our side.
Ben Pile did a good job.
The reality is that a radiant greenhouse effect has not been detected on any planet in the solar system with a thick atmosphere. It is entirely a convective greenhouse effect that determines the thermal insulating effects of the atmosphere. The AGW hypothesis has been falsified by science. It is nothing but science fiction The greenhouse gases in the Earth’s atmosphere do not cause surface warming. They act as coolants in the upper atmosphere, radiating LWIR energy out to space.
Perhaps it is time for pragmatics to stop using alarmist vocabulary, especially “greenhouse effect” and “greenhouse gas.”?
Basically, the argument about wind costing too much is because the grid can’t handle the energy when it’s being generated, and the grid isn’t capable of handling the location from where the wind energy comes. So it’s the fault of the grid.
Absolutely nothing to do with the fact that wind energy is being generated when it can’t be used, and where it can’t be used from. Nah, it’s the grid’s fault for not being able to cope with wind energy.
And these guys expect to be taken seriously?
But even if the grid could handle it the cost of doing so is enormous. Look at the EGL1 interconnector being built between Peterhead and Blyth. It’s a £4.3bn project for 2GW. The cost of financing and amortisation will run to £300m a year. Connect 2GW of new wind capacity that would produce around 8TWh per year, and the cost of the link is £37.50/MWh.
It looks even worse if you figure that on lower wind days you don’t need the link at all, because existing capacity is sufficient.
I don’t understand how people can live with themselves knowing you are paid to lie. Even when it’s true that you have abundant cheap wind energy there’s still a failed economical model. You can only sell energy to demand, the price must cover the initial costs of every windpark. Even when we would only have energy when the wind blows the price won’t be cheap if investors want profit. But there’s no common sense, overproduction? Keep building more and then when the sun shines we must turn them off or trying to to block the sun. Every nation with renewables has high energy bills. I knew this 20 years ago but the lies after al this time should be criminal. I can’t understand how dishonest you can be.
Orsted – Stocls down 28% Offshore wind is clearly winning.
They are considering a rights issue so the market is discounting the shares accordingly.
Dr Paul Dorfman sounds like a very arrogant and rude man. It must be very tiring having to explain to the uneducated that 12 pence is cheaper than 6 pence. Correctly, he says that if there is too much wind, there is too much electricity generated and wind turbines must be turned off (perhaps they shouldn’t have built so many?), on the other hand, if there is no wind, as often happens, there is no electricity (perhaps they haven’t built enough?). Worryingly, he says he has advised the UK Government on dismantling nuclear submarines (I hope he was fired). He should know that a few submarine-sized reactors dotted around the country could replace many intermittent, expensive wind turbines with cheap, reliable electricity.
Over at Real climate a carbon brief article is linked as an attempt to rebuff the EPA climate report.
At the beginning these two statements are made:
https://interactive.carbonbrief.org/doe-factcheck/index.html
“”” The executive summary of the controversial report inaccurately claims that “CO2-induced warming might be less damaging economically than commonly believed”.
It also states misleadingly that “excessively aggressive [emissions] mitigation policies could prove more detrimental than beneficial”.”””
Which of course have the problem that the original statements are carefully phrased and therefore neither inaccurate claims, nor misleading (quite independent of how probable and alarmist might estimate either to become true without proving that either statement is impossible for some reason, they may possibly happen!)
I stopped reading somewhere in the many posts not disproving the reports statements about global greening they are all very similar..
>> Birds can’t fly because of sharks
My wording here, but stating something unrelated does not disprove global greening by CO2, for example
Report: “””The growing amount of CO2 in the atmosphere directly influences the Earth system by promoting plant growth (global greening), thereby enhancing agricultural yields, and by neutralising ocean alkalinity”””
Critique: “”” This ignores other effects of rising CO2 concentrations, i.e.: on climate. It is also failing to mention that increased CO2 can reduce the nutrient density of some crops.”””
It also does not talk about mayor work of recent art, the traffic in New York and very many other topics.
Instead it makes some clear statements the critiques does not critique at all..
I am more than a bit baffled! If there is any valid scientific critique in that propaganda piece it is well hidden under lot of irrelevant garble and wrong statements!