Glasgow Fighting Climate Change
By Paul Homewood
h/t Ian Magness
In today’s propaganda bulletin, the BBC has presented one of those mindbogglingly boring educational pieces about Glasgow, for people who apparently don’t know that the city used to be full of slums and built ships:
I really would not bother reading it!
But Ian M has pulled out some of the gems:
The BBC points that where there used to be shipyards and docks there is now the auditorium where COP26 is to be held, an example of the vibrant city.
They appear to forget that we still happen to need ships to bring us all the goods and food we consume, and docks to unload them.
It then talks about the “greening of Glasgow”:
At 107 Niddrie Road in the south of the city, one of the red sandstone-fronted tenements, so emblematic of Glasgow, is being ripped apart and put together again.
These traditional multi-occupancy homes, built over a century ago to cope with a burgeoning workforce, are a problem for a city trying to reduce its carbon footprint.
About a quarter of the city’s housing stock was built before 1919. Bringing it up to modern insulation standards will be tough – but Niddrie Road is an experiment in how it might be done.
With all eight flats in the block vacant, Southside Housing Association is trying to reach the ambitious EnerPHit standard for retrofitting older properties.
“It’s a massive balancing act of energy efficiency versus heritage,” says Drew Carr of John Gilbert Architects.
When the tenants move back next year, monthly bills could be as low as £10 to £15.
The sandstone front is retained by stripping back the inside walls to the brickwork and fitting insulation internally. At the side and rear, the outside walls are clad with non-combustible mineral wool.
Making an old building airtight creates new problems with condensation and mould, so mechanical ventilation and moisture reduction are also part of the work.
Suitcase-sized units above the bathroom ceilings suck out warm moist air, extracting heat and using it to warm fresh air that is piped to the living spaces.
Heating is a mix of air source heat pumps and high efficiency gas boilers – but the flats are so well insulated little energy is required.
Cedar Court has been wrapped in mineral wool, the windows are triple glazed and – at the tenants’ request – balconies are now enclosed to create “winter gardens”. The predominant blue colour in thermal images shows very little heat is being lost.
Joanne Wong is among 1,300 residents who have benefitted from the project commissioned by Queen’s Cross Housing Association.
“The biggest difference is that inside the flat it’s now warm,” she says.
Another tenant, George McGavigan, says: “To tell you the truth my heating’s never on because everything’s boxed in, everything’s contained – and they’ve the got the ventilation system.
“You only need to open your windows to wash them.”
These projects show what can be done – but at a price. The investment at Cedar Court worked out at more than £48,000 per flat, while unit costs for the tenement retrofit will be higher.
There are also practical difficulties in rolling out such measures to buildings that are a mix of owner occupiers and tenants. And perhaps the biggest question of all – who will pay?
Ah!! £48000 per flat, plus more for the block itself.
Who will pay, he asks. I suggest the fairies at the bottom of the garden!
Then its on to electric buses:
Less than a mile away from the Niddrie Road tenement project, the UK’s biggest bus depot is being transformed into the country’s biggest electric vehicle charging hub.
The Caledonia depot will eventually have capacity to charge 300 fully electric buses.
Glasgow’s biggest bus operator, First, has 24 of them already and 150 are due to be in service by March 2023.
But it seems that the fairies are paying for this as well, as First explained a few months ago:
Phase One of the depot transformation is expected to be complete by September this year, allowing for the introduction of a further 22 electric buses to Glasgow’s streets ahead of the COP26, the United Nations Climate Change conference.
This transformation is being supported by £35.6m in part funded by £28.2m from the Scottish Government’s Scottish Ultra Low Bus Scheme (SULEB).
https://www.firstgroupplc.com/news-and-media/latest-news/2021/07-06-21.aspx
But it’s all worth it of course, because it will save the planet:
For Scotland, climate change means hotter, drier summers but with more sudden downpours. Winters will be milder and wetter with more frequent extreme weather events.
Three years ago the Glasgow Science Centre, one of the city’s top visitor attractions, was “melting” as a record June temperature of 31.9C caused its waterproof membrane to drip down its sides.
This summer saw the warmest average temperatures in Glasgow since records began in 1884 – but for residents of the Drumchapel area it also saw flooding as downpours overwhelmed the drains.
In the coming decades, the city will have to invest millions in “resilience” simply to protect its buildings and infrastructure from conditions they were never designed for.
Some 45,000 homes and businesses in Glasgow already face some risk of flooding. The council believes that figure could rise to almost 60,000 by the 2080s.
Are Scottish summers getting hotter? The hottest summers were in 1976 and 1995:
Are summer days getting hotter? No.
Are summers drier? Don’t make me laugh:
What about these summer downpours?
Milder winters? Recent winters are barely milder than the 1920s and 30s:
As usual, this is another load of economically and scientifically illiterate piece of drivel from the BBC. But they give the game away at the end:
Glasgow is not the only city to declare a climate emergency and target 2030 as a date for carbon neutrality, but it’s a big ambition. Is it achievable?
Net zero carbon means that the amount of C02 produced is balanced by the amount being removed, for instance by tree planting or carbon capture.
But these were the “easy wins” largely driven by the decarbonisation of the electricity network as coal-fired power stations were shut and renewables came on stream.
Aside from a project to plant 22,000 trees, there’s little detail yet on what other measures Glasgow could take to counterbalance the carbon emissions still remaining at the end of the decade.
What is certain is that the next stage in the journey toward carbon neutrality will require far greater upheaval and billions of pounds of investment.
The city’s leaders are promising a “just transition”, making sure the burden doesn’t fall disproportionately on the poorest citizens.
Public money may be targeted at the least well-off, but governments have already made it clear the public purse can’t pay for it all.
This once industrial city has a route map to a greener future – but whether it happens depends to a great extent on decisions taken at national and international level.
“One of the challenges we face in reaching net-zero carbon is the investment required, which is at a level never seen before in local government,” says the council’s sustainability and carbon reduction convener Anna Richardson.
And that of course is the rub. The transition to carbon neutrality is unaffordable, certainly more than the city itself could bear. It is a pity that Glasgow City Council did not think of that before they set their virtue signalling target.
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
What do you mean Paul that it used to be full of slums, been to Castlemilk, Trongate recently?
“They appear to forget that we still happen to need ships to bring us all the goods and food we consume, and docks to unload them.”
They also forget that those ships are little different from the aircraft that flew in many of the delegates. They both need concrete docks and runways, and, most importantly, carbon fuels which they intend to eliminate to zero. Save the planet???
Also the shipyards would’ve employed way more people year round than a conference that is only used from time to time.
Glasgow’s got bigger problems than worrying about the bloody weather. Not only is the city home to the majority of the top twenty poorest urbanised districts in the UK, most of whom are awash with druggies and diminished life expectancy because of poor health outcomes but, per capita, it’s also one of the most popular places in the U.K. to get murdered. Looking on the bright side, it’s regularly been voted the friendliest city in Europe. Glaswegian murderers obviously work with a smile on their faces. And, after 15 years in power, the SNP still blame the perfidious English for this sorry state of affairs.
You’re not wrong but murders in the city are predominantly amongst the gangland and drug community.
I’m an ex Glasgow copper, I worked in some of the most notorious areas, Easterhouse, Blackhill, Possil Park etc. and the vast majority are decent, hard working individuals who want nothing but the best for them and Scotland. The SNP are notably failing these noble people; there has not been one single major industrial business attracted to the country in the last 15 years of SNP incompetent governance.
This failure can be placed squarely at the door of Sturgeon. It is criminally neglectful and politically incompetent, but we are up against her wily manipulation of the rabid nationalists.
The seat of the enlightenment and the second city of the Empire is now represented by, what in my opinion is, the peaceful equivalent of Hamas; an organisation so determined to achieve fruitless political ambition it’s willing to sacrifice it’s own populace.
Very well put.
Hamas are certainly no angels but then they are fighting a brutal state and illegal occupation.
How would you react ?
As for FLOP 26 those that turn up will not be banning oil and gas for everyone.
After all as pointed out they need it for their things like collectors cars, planes and yachts.
They are gathering to decide which groups can continue to have these minerals and gases and those that cannot. Like you and I.
Why would anyone invest in big business in Scotland when Jimmy Krankie is still threatening to tear Scotland from the UK which will cause an exodus south of Hadrian’s Wall?
Mr Dragonfly, in what way are they fighting illegal occupation? How far back are we going then? Hamas” ancestors didn’t live there until relatively recently and gained their position through invasion. And Israel is “brutal”? For nearly 75 years it has fought against those who would wipe it out and kill every citizen. For much of that time Hamas has simply killed indiscriminately or deliberately targeted the softest civilians targets whilst rejecting every attempt at peace. No angels? One of the most unpleasant terror groups in the world.
Off topic unless COP 26 is included:
https://www.cfact.org/2021/10/28/clintel-catalogs-ipcc-errors-in-time-for-un-cop-26/
Detailed nontechnical analysis of multiple misrepresentations.
TIC, my comment was slightly tongue in cheek. I’m ex law enforcement myself so I know that ‘stranger’ murders are very rare in Glasgow. My family also hail from the Vale of Leven and the banks of Loch Lomond, many of whom served their apprenticeships and forged their careers as precision engineers, shipwrights and mechanics along the Clyde in, what was then, the beating heart of the second phase of the Industrial Revolution. The ingenuity, enthusiasm and industry of the Scots in that period was almost unequaled outside of the British Isles. Barely a hundred years ago, more than in 1 and 5 ocean going ships on the planet were launched from a Scottish shipyard. Under SNP ownership for years, the last remaining major (non Royal Navy) Scottish shipyard has been unable to knock out a couple of serviceable island hopping ferries for the entire lifetime of SNP control. However, as long as the voting population keep the SNP in power, I’m afraid I have no sympathy for their current plight nor expect any change in Scotland’s fortunes.
Can I add that in my long career as a project manager in oil and gas, mainly overseas, it was the skilled people raised in those shipyards that always came to the fore as construction managers, specialist supervisors etc. Where are those people going to come from to biuild Boris’s brave new world?
Well said Vernon, and these guys keep the oil flowing in the North Sea too, along with a pretty substantial cohort from Teeside. Of course there’s hardly any heavy industry left to shut down which will be problematic when we’re trying to source workers to build our brave new wind powered world.
It’s not only carbon neutrality the city needs it’s Rubbish and Rat infestation neutrality.
Forgive me for asking, but with probably every electricity supplier giving us zero net carbon electricity there must be an awful lot of trees being planted. Where are they, and how long befor all those skinny sticks get round to sucking enough CO2 out of the air to justify the claims of carbon neutrality?
And then there are all the trees that have been felled to make way for all those oh so useful wind turbines out on those, what we’re once, beautiful Scottish hilltops!
And the trees being felled to supply pellets for biomass. St Andrews University have proclaimed their wood for biomass will be supplied from a 50-mile radius. There is already a large biomass plant near Glenrothes. How long will the 50-mile radius last?
I am struggling to believe that a temperature of 32 degrees caused plastic to melt. Butter isn’t melting and running at that temperature. I suspect the actual temperature was far, far higher where the plastic wa located because it was in a location that greatly magnified temperatures. In other words very poor design.
As for the claims about changes in climate, I struggle to understand how warmer summers are drier if warmer winters are wetter? Is there some magic about summer air in terms of its moisture content?
They are proclaiming Scotland has lousy engineering. Yet they are going to engineer Net Zero. Hmmm . . . maybe related.
Phoenix44 It’s clearly the same magic that makes human sourced CO2 more potent as a greenhouse gas than the natural sourced CO2 !!
If Glasgow wants cleaner air and more efficient heating – fine. If it expects to influence it’s own climate by ‘fighting’ something – forget it.
Meanwhile Glasgow Airport is threatened by rising sea levels – it is only 26 feet above sea level, after all!
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/10/29/glasgow-airport-risks-sinking-sea/
Prestwick is not much better at 66ft. Would it go under before Buck Pal?
Here’s the nearest tide guage I could find easily (Millport at the mouth of the Clyde estuary)
Looks trendless to my eye.
Just read an this in the DT
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2021/10/29/glasgow-airport-risks-sinking-sea/
In case it’s behind a paywall I’ll give brief details
A report by S&P investments has given a danger warning of various climate catastrophes in various places around the World and has graded them for probability 1-100. Laughingly it has given Glasgow airport a 43 rating for the danger of sea level rise causing it a problem. Wiki gives the airport an 8m elevation. Further, it gives it a 15 for dangers relating to heatwaves.
I would suggest that if anybody has entrusted their investments to S&P they should think seriously about their suitability as investment managers.
They omit to mention that number would be higher but for the Luftwaffe.
Are you suggesting the Luftwaffe were the vanguard of the Green Movement?
Not really. Glasgow was more or less out of range of German bombers for most of the war. The Clydebank blitz, although devastating to the town (which lies outside the city’s boundary), only lasted two nights – March 13th & 14th 1941 – while the city itself was almost unscathed. The local council’s “comprehensive redevelopment” programme of the ’60s and ’70s did far, far more damage.
Thanks for the clarification. I was conflating the two.
What was the carbon footprint of the rebuilding of those flats and tenements?
How long will the payback in CO2 take?
The headline says it all, this BBC dross is stupid beyond belief.
Glasgow:The Last best hope to fight climate change By Calum Watson, has by implication the idea that humans control the climate, that this IPCC jamboree can by some mysterious method tame this planet’s natural climate and it’s wild excesses. That notion is ludicrous and utterly irrational. The IPCC even fails to acknowledge that the SUN’s variations are THE major influence on our climate.
Humans do NOT, and can not control the climate.
Nature controls the climate!
The headline is of the same ilk as the perpetual “___ years left to save the planet!”
Whether CoP26 “fails” or “succeeds,”* they’ll still have CoP27.
*Unknown metrics.
And COP27 will be the last best hope to save the World….until COP28….
‘“One of the challenges we face in reaching net-zero carbon is the investment required, which is at a level never seen before in local government,” says the council’s sustainability and carbon reduction convener Anna Richardson.’
‘sustainability and carbon reduction convener’
How decadent.
The ONE challenge they all face is that their unilateral action will result in their death. Period. ‘Investing’ in stupid $#|+ when no one else does is suicide. Handicapping yourself with high energy costs, high taxes, etc, simply excludes you from the global market. The global market is the Blob, flowing to areas of least resistance.
The objective of CoPadnauseum must be to get everyone to agree to cripple themselves, too. The West’s cultural Marxists are eager, for any path to global governance is a good path (the ends justify the means). The rest of the world’s governments play along because the West is handing out money.
For most CoP26 attendees, it’s NOT about the weather.
‘Glasgow:The Last best hope to fight climate change’
I expect the majority of the people in the world find this hilarious. The decadence of the West is mind boggling. I assume it’s caused by their ignorance of how the rest of the world lives. Two billion people dry dung for energy.
“This summer saw the warmest average temperatures in Glasgow since records began in 1884”
Did it hell. I don’t think you’ll find anyone in the city who won’t say last summer was warmer.
“but for residents of the Drumchapel area it also saw flooding as downpours overwhelmed the drains.”
Yeah, because the Scottish People’s Water Soviet couldn’t run the proverbial brewery piss-up.
“But it’s all worth it of course, because it will save the planet”
Difficult to save the planet, when it would not even save it from CO2.
https://scc.klimarealistene.com/2021/10/new-papers-on-control-of-atmospheric-co2/
See Figure 9 in Part 2.
Well said Vernon, and these guys keep the oil flowing in the North Sea too, along with a pretty substantial cohort from Teeside. Of course there’s hardly any heavy industry left to shut down which will be problematic when we’re trying to source workers to build our brave new wind powered world.
Mr Phoenix44,
I do not agree. As for this how far back stuff. Are you suggesting that Australia is returned, the Americas ?
What I see – children suffering – is unacceptable.
How long does a Glasgow winter last? 18 months!
The propaganda machine called the BBC is now in overdrive. Please join me in switching off their News programs the minute they mention Climate/cop26/Glasgow/Greta Blah Blah.
I have been loading similar comments on the online newspapers.
The Weather Channel on cable TV here in the US is proclaiming they are going to cover Glasgow “gavel to gavel.” Impossible to know what that means. I just want them to tell me if it is going to rain tomorrow.
I saw a program on Göbekli Tepe today, an ancient ‘Turkish’ civilization/settlement which seemed to last from 12/13k to about 8k years ago. Then for some reason they seemed to go mad and start sacrificing/smashing holes in skulls and using them for ornaments. They didn’t offer any reason for this. Of course the probable reason is obvious and well known – dramatic natural climate change.
https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/abrupt-climate-change/Post-Glacial%20Cooling%208%2C200%20Years%20Ago
Maybe they couldn’t make beer anymore.
“The last best hope to fight climate change”
Where have I seen similar “last change” messages before? 🙂
I will start to believe the COP-people if they start serving locally grown in-season fruits and vegetables only during all the COP-meals. Of course no meat. Meat is bad. Maybe insects for proteins?
Anyone from the Glasgow area to give some suggestions for menus?
NHS Scotland have cancelled face to face medical appointment s during COP, to stop traffic jams! So we plebs don’t matter. Also in this months Buses magazine a third major bus depot fire in Germany, when charging electrical buses. The latest in Stuttgart destroyed 25 buses.