to be sceptical about man made climate change

[Brioche201]

.. to a layperson like myself the evidence does not seem robust (record antarctic ice caps) .Even if it were true 'the climate' is such a complicated thing affected by thousands of factors.Is it likely that changing just one or 2 of the factors that are within out control would make a difference (or even that the difference would be in the right direction)
Do you still believe in man made climate change or think it is mainly rooted in politics?

I don't agree with subsidising anything.

The banking industry was ruinously bailed out by Labour. It was an appalling decision. Only guaranteed depoists and the payment system needed to be saved.

As for the oil industry in the North Sea that should not have been subsidised either. We can buy oil and when the price rises high enough the oil companies could have then invested in North Sea. In fact, we would have more oiland gas left in the North Sea now if we had.

Syria, we should not be fighting wars in the Middle East at all.

Trident is our last line of defence. I am sure if we could build an equally effective and cheaper deterant we would have it by now.

Really there is no point in comparing subsidies for renewables with other wasteful subsidies. Electric should be generated and sold at a market price and that is that.

'larry - We are not in the UK.

You have spectacularly missed the point of my post which was that you are wrong to criticise wind turbines for being noisy, ugly, and especially destructive to bird habitats (which is completely untrue).'

So how does what you are paid for your wind generated power compare with the market price in electricity wherever you are (France, I assume)? Care to answer?

Also there are many links showing the impact to bird life of wind farms of which I just show one below:

www.birdlife.org/datazone/sowb/casestudy/289

Cote - the thermal power station backing up your wind turbines is miles away. It could be on the other side of the country. Your town is connected to the grid for precisely that reason so electric can move from the wind turbines or the back up gas turbine plant miles away. You need the power regardless of whether the wind is blowing. It isn't just an accident that you can use electric night and day regardless of whether wind is blowing.

Ego -- yes of course I know about pumped storage. Its not costless to run, its not costless to build, the sites are few and far between. Its fine to use pumped storage - its an extremely fast response technology but it has very limited capacity. There are so few places it can be built there would never be enough to back up all the wind turbines Until recently it was a great big dirty coal fired power station sat burning coal all day that backed up wind power. That's the dirty secret about UK wind power over the last decade to back itself up. Wow what a great 'green' technology. Vastly expensive and utilises CO2 emitting coal plants as back up!

Free,

It has been a fantastic scam for EIS investors though, generating circa 7% tax free. Luckily the tories have at least cut back the subsidy.

Electric should be generated and sold at a market price and that is that.

I'd agree with you if the market price was constructed to show the true costs of all forms of electricity, including costs related to health (air quality), more flood defences, potentially increased defence and foreign aid spending, and all the other economic costs related to fossil fuels.

But at the moment, new nuclear has all its cleanup costs built in (and is more expensive because we took ourselves out of the game for a generation), while fossil fuel fired production doesn't have its ancillary costs taken into account. It's a failure of market design, which makes market intervention appropriate.

That's the dirty secret about UK wind power over the last decade to back itself up. Wow what a great 'green' technology. Vastly expensive and utilises CO2 emitting coal plants as back up!

Hardly a secret, and preferable to running those plants and building more for all our needs.

This is my fav quote about this from a friend

"I don't know if climate change is man made or not as the climate is always changing, but living through it is going to be hell so what does it harm us to try and slow it down?"

Also there are many links showing the impact to bird life of wind farms of which I just show one below

Your link doesn't suggest that offshore wind should not be built, rather that it should be located with consideration given to bird populations and migration paths.

Man made climate change is backed up by numerous scientific papers

The same could be said of Intelligent design, Piltdown man, Phrenology, Bertillionage and any other bollocks dodgy ideas people want to believe in.

Larry - I cheered when the Tories announced they were cutting subsidies to renewables. At last the common sense has prevailed. We just cant afford to pay for stuff that doesn't work and costs more than the alternatives.

Ego,

It adds substantial amounts, directly maybe 7% but then there is the £11 billion spent on smart meters to reduce consumption. if one looks at the cost of electricity vs the cost of oil over the last 15 years, the supposed subsidy costs look very dodgy to me.

Maybe we should all pay for schools then. And healthcare. Old people's homes should be the going rate and not given any funding. The police should charge for call outs

But surely we're already paying massively for these things through taxation, which is why some would like to see more of it spent on what we were promised rather than appeasing noisy and alarmist pressure groups

PPs have given excellent examples of research around smoking, MMR, etc. being bent to suit agendas, which is why I've never believed scientific bodies to be "reputable one moment and partisan the next" ... I've always believed they're susceptible to be undue influence

Sorry, but we've been lied to so often, so badly and for so long that sometimes it's hard to know which way is up - which is why I'll go right on trying to do my bit not to waste or pollute, but leave the wailing and gnashing of teeth to others

Larry, the cost of smart meters on bills is included in the costs quoted in the link I provided upthread.

I'm assuming you're aware the percentage of a bill made up of wholesale costs? One shouldn't expect even the wholesale price to track the oil/gas price directly, let alone consumer bills.

But surely we're already paying massively for these things through taxation, which is why some would like to see more of it spent on what we were promised rather than appeasing noisy and alarmist pressure groups

Yeah, the UN are fuckers like that.

Unfortunately we don't have much room for pumped storage in this country, we are just about maxed out.
So we have to rely on banks of noisy , polluting diesel engines for when the sun doesn't shine and the wind doesn't blow.

Not really true, is it Under?

Undercracker - they should make all wind turbine operators install a diesel generator of the same capacity next to every turbine with the associated fuel storage and switching costs that kicks in immediately the wind stops blowing. That would cover the intermittency problem and reveal the true cost of wind turbine technology.

Once we did that and made them pay for the cost of transmission lines from remote locations AND stopped all the subsidy there would be no more built until the costs of that technology could compete with gas turbines.

"Man made climate change is backed up by numerous scientific papers"
"The same could be said of Intelligent design, Piltdown man, Phrenology, Bertillionage and any other bollocks dodgy ideas people want to believe in."

The key word there is scientific. Some of the above are pseudoscience and the rest are mistakes/misunderstandings on the path to proper understanding of the human body/mind, before scientific measurements & experiments were possible and methodology was developed.

Undercracker - they should make all wind turbine operators install a diesel generator of the same capacity next to every turbine with the associated fuel storage and switching costs that kicks in immediately the wind stops blowing. That would cover the intermittency problem and reveal the true cost of wind turbine technology

Should every coal generator have to pay for a proportion of NHS respiratory medicine costs? Flood defences?

No technology is paying its true costs.