Letter To The Times
By Paul Homewood
Following up that Prof Grubb letter, I have sent this off to The Times:
Dear Sir
The letter from Prof Grubb (Jan 4) concerning electricity prices was grossly inaccurate and misleading. He claims that “Consumers are paying three to four times the cost of generating electricity from new wind and solar”, and that “Last year these renewables generated more than a quarter of our electricity”.
In reality the new wind and solar farms he refers to have not even started operation yet, and will not for another two to three years. The “quarter of our electricity” currently coming from renewables is in fact extremely expensive, averaging about two thirds dearer than even the currently inflated cost of gas fired generation.
Subsidies for renewable generators are currently costing electricity users over £9bn a year, and are the reason why bills are so high, not the system rules which he blames.
Yours faithfully
Paul Homewood
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NOT A LOT OF PEOPLE KNOW THAT 
Thankyou Paul. Words failed me when I read Grubber’s letter yesterday. Very grateful that they did not fail you. I’ll scan the letters page tomorrow with great interest.
Similar misleading comments where made during Jeremy Vine’s radio 2 lunchtime programme yesterday.
No surprise there. He went to a couple of private schools in Surrey and has a Desmond in English from Durham, where he was involved in the ‘Durham Revue’ . (Those 2 details might be linked in some way?) So most unlikely, nay impossible, that he has an ounce of scientific, critical thinking brain cells. And all of his ‘researchers’ will be mirror images of their boss; after all that’s the way to progress in the woke BBC; hoovering up obscene amounts of money courtesy of taxpayers’ largesse.
Paul,
Happy New Year! I made a contribution to your site over the Christmas period, so keep up your brilliant work. I have many so called, “intelligent”, friends who simply believe what they read, see and listen to. I find it very sad when I suggest they look at your website and they say ok and still come out with the same ill informed rubbish – so they obviously don’t look at the website!
Kind regards,
Berkeley Thirsk.
I think it more likely that they do in fact look at this site but because it doesn’t always conform to their political agenda they do not take advantage of incontrovertible facts.
They do say it’s hard to become a professor, but very easy to be one.
“accelerate expansion of wind energy” really? some of the “professors” seem to lack any common sense too.
As becomes more and more apparent, listening to these talking heads spouting their useful idiot garbage, common sense is not very common.
Professor is just a job title.
And it seems Together Energy that is 50% owned by Warrington Council is the latest energy supplier to bite the dust after failing to find any funding. Article in CityAM claims it supplies 100% renewable energy which according to Grubb is very cheap.
That’s because he’s a member of the SCAM: the Society for Collecting Agw Money. I would love the Revenue to investigate him.
The whole thing is an eloquent demonstration of how far The Times has fallen. Paper of record? In the same sense that Pravda was, yes.
Hi…. I’ve reread several times the paragraph from Grubb – about electricity costing three or four times from new wind and solar and it doesn’t make sense. Should it not be “THAN from new wind and solar”? The criticism of his propaganda is not being properly addressed by not pointing this out to Times’ readers if this is the case. Best wishes to all for 2022.
Re. ‘renewables’, it doesn’t matter what the cost of their generated power is when there isn’t any being generated, due to darkness and/or lack of wind. Advocates have nothing useful to say about that.
It does matter as we get charged more when they are NOT generating. This is a major source of their income I believe.
Can anyone cut’n’paste Grubbs letter as The Times is not a available to me? Ta.
ooops!
Paul, do let us know whether they publish your reply or not.
of course they won’t publish it. It goes against their asinine beliefs!
This is the Grubb that admitted in 2017 that the warming prediction was double his latest correct prediction and this was a good thing because it gave us more time to build windmills and solar panels.
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-4897566/Fear-global-warming-exaggerated-say-scientists.html
I just wonder if, in 2017, he had been approached by one of Deben’s – or Davey’s – mates to support their (cough) businesses?
Last evening I watched Nigel on GB News interviewing a Professor of Climate something- or- other at LSE putting forward exactly the same arguments as Glub in an extremely aggresive way. Nigel can handle most things but this guy just avoided the questions and bullied his way through the interview. Is there a thread here? These “professors” are fanatics but they are in education. What’s going on? I have for many years been half-amenable to conspiracy theories (especially UN Agenda 30 for Sustainability) but this is weird. Keep going Paul.
They are protecting their income. If you’re on a good bung you will fight to protect it. Which means: bugger the proles.
Sorry – Grubb not Glub.
Who’d have thought a pretend market, rigged to drive out the cheapest and most flexible electricity generators, would put the price through the roof!
Paul,
Thank you for writing that letter. It needed doing, and I almost felt the urge to try myself having seen such a perversion of the facts on the ground by a man who claims to be an “expert”.
I doubt your letter will be printed as others have said, but at least you tried with a brief well argued piece. Much better than anything I could have mustered. Those arguing with Grubb rely on auction prices as a guide to the price of renewable electricity with no thought for all the current production with vastly higher subsidies, and no thought as to whether the auction prices will ever be implemented.
But the chickens will only come home to roost when the system has to rely on these auctions being turned into actual output. And then no doubt the operators will make it obvious that they must be bailed out to prevent the lights going out. But at least we are seeing a preliminary run of that scenario right now as the industry clamours for relief from current market forces.
“Last year these renewables generated more than a quarter of our electricity”.
Imagine the challenge of balancing the grid 60/60/24/7/365 when demand is highly variable and your mandated primary inputs have these generation profiles:
Wind – each half-hour in 2021:
Solar – each half-hour in January (our month of greatest electricity demand) 2021
If viewing the second image on a device with a small screen, solar’s contributions to demand (the red line) are the tiny yellow blips at the bottom of the chart.
Thank goodness you are on the ball to face out these duplicitous fools
Does anyone know why “renewables”‘ were ever thought to be any use, without pilot studies?
Is it all just motivated by Grubby/Debeny corruption and/or ignorance along with the contents of brown envelopes or perhaps sackloads now?
Sorry for the off topic post but the Spectator Australia has some interesting articles on climate change, from a decidedly sceptical perspective. This article is by Jennifer Marohasy titled “ Maori science beats woke myths”. I thought some of us might find it interesting.
Every community has those who are designated wise — sometimes able to anticipate imminent catastrophe. For example, back in the 1500s, some in rural England and France would suspend dead birds — specifically kingfishers — from silken threads that purportedly acted as natural weathercocks. It was thought that the dead kingfisher was able to anticipate approaching storms and turn its breast into the wind. This is an unfortunate example, though, because Thomas Browne showed it to be nonsense. He suspended two dead kingfishers, side by side, and they pointed in different directions, thus demolishing the myth. I can’t imagine that all the wise ones took their dead birds down immediately, but Browne’s book Pseudodoxia Epidemica of 1646 championed a new kind of evidence-based science that relied on simple experiment.
For a period of some few hundred years, science came to replace superstition and key zoological texts including, for example, Origin of Species by Charles Darwin, were penned by the curious who tried hard to sort fact from fiction through observation. Browne and Darwin’s works followed Nicolaus Copernicus’ book On the Revolution of the Heavenly Spheres, published in 1543, that explained humankind was not at the centre of the universe.
Before evidence-based science, natural historians and even astronomers, relied on the work of Aristotle who thought mankind was at the centre of the universe. In the twelfth century, Aristotle was a major source of information for the medieval encyclopaedias of animals, known as Bestiaries, with moral biblical lessons added.
We have somehow returned to this practice where natural history is once again interwoven with moralising. Worse, many of those designated as wise are full of hubris and carry on as though humankind can affect the weather and climate. This extends to projects at universities, where, even in zoology departments the ‘research’ must lament the trace gas carbon dioxide and its perceived impact on the distribution and abundance of species.
Even in The Spectator Australia, James Allan in ‘Decline and Fall of New Zealand’ (11 December) remonstrates about how woke our universities have become but then lauds the superiority of Western science relative to Maori mythology. But is woke science superior to Maori myths? Arguably the most significant climate event since satellites began measuring global temperatures in 1979, was the very strong El Niño of 2015/16. It caused global temperatures to spike in February 2016, corals to bleach, and so on. This hottest period – according to the UAH satellite record – was forecast some years earlier by long range weather forecaster Ken Ring relying on Maori mythology. It was not forecast by Western meteorological bureaus that run simulation models on super computers.
Apologies but part of the article was missed, the rest is below.
In 1974, Ring, then a high school mathematics teacher ‘dropped out’ to home school his children. He moved his family to the remote East Coast of the North Island of New Zealand and over a period of six years befriended local Maori fishermen. He returned to ‘civilization’ six years later with what he has described as ‘the rudiments of a weather prediction system’ based on traditional Maori knowledge. Sometime later he began publishing weather almanacs for Australia, New Zealand and Ireland with rain, frost and snow maps including fishing calendars and gardening guides.
I’ve no doubt that the forecasts in those almanacs could be vastly improved, including through the mining of historical weather data using artificial neural networks, a form of machine learning that uses artificial intelligence. John Abbot and I showed its application to monthly rainfall forecasting in a series of research papers published from 2012 to 2017, including in the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Advances in Atmospheric Sciences (Abbot J. & Marohasy J., 2012. Vol. 29, No. 4, Pgs. 717-730).
What has made Ken Ring’s long-range forecasts often more accurate than those from our bureaus of meteorology is their reliance on lunar cycles, uncorrupted by simulation modelling that misguidedly insists atmospheric concentrations of carbon dioxide are relevant to weather and climate forecasting.
It is possible to forecast El Niño and other key weather events years in advance because the passage of the Moon overhead is regular and cyclical. A 2019 technical paper by Jialin Lin and Taotao Qian entitled ‘Switch Between El Niño and La Niña is Caused by Subsurface Ocean Waves Likely Driven by Lunar Tidal Forcing’ explains the underlying physical mechanisms in terms of Newtonian physics.
In fact, observations of the Moon’s changing trajectory were a main test of the theories detailed in Isaac Newton’s The Principia, published in 1687 and recognised as a highlight of the Scientific Revolution in the 17th century.
If we open our eyes to the evidence – as Thomas Browne implored a few hundred years ago – we would notice that the very hot year globally of 2016 immediately followed a year of minimum lunar declination, as did the super El Niño exactly 18 years earlier, in 1998, that also caused mass coral bleaching. It is now well understood, beyond Maori mythology, that there is an 18.6-year lunar declination cycle. But this is wilfully ignored by mainstream meteorologists lest such extra-terrestrial influences on weather and climate detract from the moralising about humankind’s influence.
More than ever, Westerners who claim to respect science —could benefit from a return to simple observation as practiced by Maori fishermen who see the weather patterns created by the passage of the Moon and its changing declination. Browne’s contemporary, John Ray wrote, ‘Let us not suffice to be book-learned, to read what others have written and to take on trust more falsehood than truth, but let us ourselves examine things as we have the opportunity, and converse with Nature as well as with books …’
In meteorological bureaus, simulation modelling has replaced observation and Heads of state are urged to sign international treaties absurdly pledging to stop climate change. The true nature of this woke western climate forecasting would be better appreciated if it was evaluated against other methods. Forecasts from different systems could be placed next to each other, in much the same way that Thomas Browne strung up dead kingfishers – side by side.
As at 6 January Paul’s response has not appeared in the Times. There are more pieces supporting the CC agenda though. Looks like I’ll be trying the Telegraph again. At least it has started to carry occasional sceptical articles.
REM: don’t bother. The Telegraph articles are all over the place but mostly pro climate emergency. I have written numerous letters but the only ones published have been on other topics.