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In this post last week, I took note that New York’s electric grid system operator, NYISO, has recently issued some clear, if muted, warnings of the impossibility of the energy transition mandated by the state’s 2019 Climate Leadership and Community Protection Act (CLCPA). In a November 2023 Report, NYISO stated (deeply buried at page 52) that “DEFRs are needed to balance intermittent supply with demand,” and those DEFRs must be “significant in capacity.” DEFRs are the elusive and not-yet-invented “dispatchable emissions-free resources.” At a conference the following month, NYISO’s VP for System Integration Planning, Zachary Smith, reiterated the need for...

@PolitlcsUK NEW: Nigel Farage responds to his comment calling the King a "stupid, eco-loony" "Well, he wasn't the King then, and I can't speak ill of the monarch obviously. But he did used to say that carbon dioxide was a 'pollutant', which I thought was a very stupid comment"

It's been pretty interesting watching the carefully worded but dire warnings coming out about just how tenuous the future of reliable power is in the Empire State. On June 6, the folks who manage and operate the state's electrical grid, the New York Independent System Operator (NYISO), issued their 2024 Power Trends Report. One of the first things that should have jumped out at Green Gov Kathy Hochul and the climate cultists in the state legislature should have been the #mathz. That alone would have given a rational person pause, but who are we talking about, right? There's only about...

The Government of Maine has really big plans for floating wind, a floating net zero fantasy, in fact. Since floating wind power is the next big green thing, it is worth taking a close look at this ruinous vision. Floating wind is a fad, not an established technology. It has yet to be built at utility scale or tested in a hurricane. The world’s biggest grid-connected system is a tiny 50 MW and just came online off Scotland. The cost of floating wind is necessarily much greater than fixed wind. A fixed wind tower sits on a simple monopile, while...

Environmental protesters sprayed paint on Britain’s Stonehenge on Wednesday, with orange marks covering some of the stones of the prehistoric megalithic structure on the eve of the summer solstice celebrations. Two people have been arrested on suspicion of damaging the ancient monument, police said in a statement. “This is extremely upsetting and our curators are investigating the extent of the damage,” English Heritage, the charity that manages Stonehenge, said on X. Stonehenge remains open, it added. The monument, one of Britain’s most visited tourist spots, also holds spiritual significance and attracts thousands of revellers, spiritualists and tourists during the summer...

A pair of climate protesters was arrested Wednesday after allegedly spraying the Stonehenge monument in England with orange paint, according to local authorities. The protesters, from the group Just Stop Oil, sprayed the monument with orange paint Wednesday, one day ahead of the Summer Solstice, the longest day of the year in the Northern Hemisphere, the environmental activist group said in a statement on the social platform X. The two individuals were “demanding the incoming government sign up to a legally binding treaty to phase out fossil fuels by 2030,” Just Stop Oil said. Wiltshire Police told The Associated Press...

@ST0NEHENGE Just stop oil protestors damage Stonehenge 😭 (Video...)

Science Alert warned Monday “worsening human-induced climate change” is contributing to an increase in heat-related deaths as the United States languishes under a “heat dome.” “Despite being preventable, the leading weather-related deaths in the US are caused by heat,” the article states, adding that heat-related deaths “are rising as heat waves like this one occur more regularly thanks to worsening human-induced climate change.” “Extreme heat events are also increasing in their intensity and duration, bringing along greater fire danger too,” it contends, arguing that “millions are at risk” from the intense heat.

When Biden took office, he inherited the over 630 million barrels of oil left behind by the Trump and other previous administrations.This was not far off the high of 727 million barrels in 2010.Biden allowed the reserve to begin falling and then catastrophically depleted it to improve his party’s chances in the 2022 midterm elections. And he’s been at it again in 2024.Now despite failing to refill the strategic oil reserve, he’s talking about emptying it further from the 300 million barrels or so in order to have an outside chance of winning the 2024 election.Jennifer Granholm, Biden’s Secretary of...

Scientists say the plant enset, an Ethiopian staple, could be a new superfood and a lifesaver in the face of climate change. The banana-like crop has the potential to feed more than 100 million people in a warming world, according to a new study. The plant is almost unknown outside of Ethiopia, where it is used to make porridge and bread. Research suggests the crop can be grown over a much larger range in Africa.

Freeman Dyson is a physicist who has been teaching at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton since Albert Einstein was there. When Einstein died in 1955, there was an opening for the title of “most brilliant physicist on the planet.” Dyson has filled it. So when the global-warming movement came along, a lot of people wondered why he didn’t come along with it. The reason he’s a skeptic is simple, the 89-year-old Dyson said when I phoned him. “I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic,” Dyson said. ------------------------------------------------------ Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models...

theodp writes "In The Civil Heretic, the NYT Magazine takes a look at how world-renowned scientist Freeman Dyson wound up opposing those who care most about global warming. Since coming out of the closet on global warming, Dyson has found himself described as 'a pompous twit,' 'a blowhard,' and 'a mad scientist.' He argues that climate change has become an obsession for 'a worldwide secular religion' known as environmentalism. Dyson has been particularly dismissive of Al Gore, calling him climate change's chief propagandist and accusing him of relying too heavily on computer-generated climate models and promoting 'lousy science' that's...

... Lately, however, since coming “out of the closet as far as global warming is concerned,” as [eminent physicist Freeman] Dyson sometimes puts it, there has been noise all around him. Chat rooms, Web threads, editors’ letter boxes and Dyson’s own e-mail queue resonate with a thermal current of invective [...]. Dyson had proposed that whatever inflammations the climate was experiencing might be a good thing because carbon dioxide helps plants of all kinds grow. ... IT WAS FOUR YEARS AGO that Dyson began publicly stating his doubts about climate change. Speaking at the Frederick S. Pardee Center for the...

In the absence of audience interruptions Mr. Dyson had and argument anyway with the scores of people like Al Gore who weren`t present to defend their belief in the dire consequence of global warming . ("There`s no accounting for human folly", Mr .Dyson said when asked of Mr.Gore`s Nobel prize.) Saying on a recent trip he and his wife found Greenlanders to be delighted with their warmer climate and increased tourism, Mr.Dyson suggested that representing "local warming by a global average is misleading." In his comments to both the Nassua Club and Labyrinth, he decried the use of computer modeling...

HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY [8.8.07]By Freeman DysonFREEMAN DYSON is professor of physics at the Institute for Advanced Study, in Princeton. His professional interests are in mathematics and astronomy. Among his many books are Disturbing the Universe, Infinite in All Directions Origins of Life, From Eros to Gaia, Imagined Worlds, and The Sun, the Genome, and the Internet. His most recent book, Many Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe (Page Barbour Lectures), is being published this month by University of Virgina Press.Freeman Dyson's Edge Bio Page HERETICAL THOUGHTS ABOUT SCIENCE AND SOCIETY1. The...

Transcripts are clickable on the site too if you dont want to watch. You can read instead. Three interesting clips. This guy is not caught up in the hype over atmospheric CO2. He slams computer models pretty hard. Three short vids. First one should start right away. Select the last two on the dropdown menu on the left. http://www.peoplesarchive.com/browse/movies/1248/en/ 144. Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere: the balance between vegetation and atmosphere [Duration 00:06:33] 145. Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere: global warming and stratospheric cooling [Duration 00:01:27] 146. Carbon Dioxide in the atmosphere: conclusions [Duration 00:02:42]

Freeman Dyson: My optimism about the long-term survival of life comes mainly from imagining what will happen when life escapes from this planet and becomes adapted to living in vacuum. There is then no real barrier to stop life from spreading through the universe. Hopping from one world to another will be about as easy as hopping from one island in the Pacific to another. And then life will diversify to fill the infinite variety of ecological niches in the universe, as it has done already on this planet. ... Concerning the climate models, I know enough of the details...

BBC Audio: Dyson and Clarke Will life spread out from Earth to flourish in the cosmos? Freeman Dyson has always supported the idea, and with great persuasiveness. BBC Four has created an archive of interviews on its Web site, among which is a clip of Dyson discussing life’s variety and the imperative of broadening its range. The theoretical physicist, who played an important role in the development of the ‘atomic spaceship’ concept called Project Orion, doesn’t believe man’s role is simply to send the occasional astronaut out in what he calls ‘a metal can’ to look out a window....

Princeton, New York - May 2016 I interviewed theoretical physicist and mathematician Freeman Dyson (1923), as part of the documentary "The Uncertainty Has Settled". Below a selection of the almost 3 hours conversation I had with Freeman Dyson.   - Obviously we are living in an era where we are pushing major changes in terms of fighting global warming and reducing carbon dioxide. Are we saving the world or missing the point? I would say missing the point. I mean, roughly speaking there are two totally different things going on in the natural world. It’s the carbon dioxide in the climate that everybody talks about and there...

Freeman J. Dyson, a mathematical prodigy who left his mark on subatomic physics before turning to messier subjects like Earth’s environmental future and the morality of war, died on Friday at a hospital near Princeton, N.J. He was 96. His daughter Mia Dyson confirmed the death. As a young graduate student at Cornell in 1949, Dr. Dyson wrote a landmark paper — worthy, some colleagues thought, of a Nobel Prize — that deepened the understanding of how light interacts with matter to produce the palpable world. The theory the paper advanced, called quantum electrodynamics, or QED, ranks among the great...