Tag Archives: environment

22 November 2025 · 13:44

Climate Shaming 3.0

If people are confused about what to do about climate change in their everyday lives, they have every right to be. 

Fossil fuel companies have for decades funded disinformation through a network of ‘think tanks’, and commentators, planting stories in the media. This was all helped by PR and Advertising agencies who know how to play with people’s emotions; to create fear, uncertainty and doubt.

Many have explored this issue more deeply than I ever can or will. Notably, Oreskes and Conway showed, in their book Merchants Of Doubt [1], how the same tactics used to promote smoking and deny its harms, were used by tobacco companies.

We might imagine we can now see through their tactics. I’m not so sure. I feel there is a tendency amongst some progressives to almost fall into the trap of amplifying the messages.

I am thinking of how some who claim that heat pumps are for the comfortably well off and it’s not fair to push them for those in energy poverty. The alternative – to stick with the comfort zone of insulating homes – came to be the default. This is not fair to anyone. 

Before we get on to that, let’s start with the birth of ‘climate shaming’.

Climate Shaming 1.0: It’s your demand that’s the problem!

It is well established that fossil fuel companies like Exxon and their network decided to make you, the consumer, the problem [2].

The message:

It’s you driving your car and running your gas boiler. We are just meeting your demand, so don’t blame us.

Intended result:

Guilt, denial and inaction.

It is even alleged that BP and their communication agency Ogilvy cooked up the idea of ‘carbon footprint’ [3].  We could all then measure our level of guilt. No wonder people often resorted to tiny actions to salve that guilt, when they felt powerless to do more.

Yet, there is a counter argument that while this was and remains a key plank in the strategy to delay action, measuring things can be useful. What is needed is to shake off the guilt and find ways to act.

Climate Shaming 2.0: It’s all your fault!

Shaming has metastasised into everything we do that we can feel guilty about, where fossil fuels are often out of sight.

There are many voices at work here, but in the background, fossil fuel interests are keen to keep the heat on you, dear citizen, rather than them. 

They will claim to be doing their bit, with greenwashing PR and advertising … now over to you people! 

While they don’t control every part of this conversation we have amongst themselves, they have the wherewithal to influence it in a myriad of ways. The message we receive is, “don’t do this bad thing” (but we, fossil fuel interests, won’t help you):

Don’t fly to Europe (but we won’t divert fossil fuel investments into trains)

Don’t eat meat (but we’re happy to reinforce your guilt, when the Amazon burns; for cattle feed)

Don’t eat Ultra Processed Foods (but like this behemoth, we work hard to ensure law makers give our fossil fuel interests a free pass)

Feeling guilty? Feeling helpless?

(laughing emoji from fossil fuel boardrooms)

Recognising our agency

We are told by some progressive politicians and commentators that it’s all about system change, and that we should reject the idea that it is our fault. We can’t take an EV Bus if there is a bad bus service (and they are still run on diesel), we need to invest in rural public transport not just in the cities.

There is a lot of truth in this, but it isn’t quite that simple.

We are not separate from the system, and it is hardly ‘systems thinking’ to imagine such a separation. The system includes Government, business, civic society and the natural environment, interacting in numerous ways.

Citizen-consumers have a lot of identities (community members, consumers, voters, parents, volunteers, etc). These identities each have their own form of agency, which we can choose to use. We need the spirit of positive change in the choices we make:

To choose who to vote for. 

To chose where we spend our money. 

To choose where to go on holiday and how to get there (and if/how often to fly).

To modify our diet (reducing meat if not eliminating it).

To decide to buy quality clothing that is repairable (looking and feeling better).

To decide where we bank and where we invest through our pensions. 

Even when an action one would like to take (like getting an EV) is not yet in reach, one can keep exploring options and set a goal for when it does come within reach. 

Setting goals too is an achievement.

The shaming tactic of the fossil fuel interests is aimed at breaking our sense of agency. We have to organise and support each other and reclaim our agency, as individuals and as communities. 

The Take The Jump initiative [4] espouses practical steps we can take, while recognising we also need system change.

Electrification of energy end-use is a key threat to fossil fuel interests

There are a range of solutions available now to make a serious dent in our carbon emissions. The most significant and relatively easy thing to achieve is to electrify our primary energy and energy consumption. These solutions are so brilliant they have become a threat to fossil fuel interests, notably:

  • Electric Vehicles (EVs) of all kinds will not only clean up our towns and cities but are so much more efficient than their fossil fuel alternatives. They require only a third of the energy of a petrol/ diesel car to run them.
  • Heat Pumps are so much more efficient than their fossil fuel alternatives. They require between a third and a fifth of the energy needed to run a gas boiler.
  • Both EVs and Heat Pumps are powered by electricity.  When generated by solar and wind, it is both free and unlimited, because it is derived from the Sun (which deposits 10,000 times as much energy on Earth as humanity is ever likely to need).

There has been an incessant effort by the network of fossil fuel interests to plant stories and create memes aimed at trying to undermine this transition to clean, electrified energy use. 

They know they will eventually lose, because the science of thermodynamics and economic reality mean it’s inevitable. Yet they will try to delay the transition for as long as possible. They can then extract as much fossil fuels as they can, and avoid ‘stranded assets’. Whereas, if they truly cared about climate change they would be working to leave it in the ground.

This essay is not the place to enumerate every myth and piece of disinformation that relentlessly circulates on social media about EVs and Heat Pumps. Carbon Brief have done the myth busting for you [5].

Climate Shaming 3.0: It’s ok for you woke well-to-do!

In order to counter this threat a new form of shaming emerged, particularly in relation to personal choice. I’m calling it Climate Shaming 3.0.

If one believed the framing so often evident in right-wing papers like the Mail and Telegraph titles, EVs and Heat Pumps are (paraphrasing)

… for the woke well-to-do – something they can afford but is not any good for most people …

If it was only these usual suspects one might try to shrug off this chatter.

Unfortunately, there has emerged an unholy alliance amongst those who would regard themselves as green progressives (in a non political sense), who are in a way doing exactly what the fossil fuel messaging is intended to promote.

We have politicians of all kinds who have been cowed by toxic reporting on heat pumps who  – wanting to show they are addressing fuel poverty – will talk endlessly about the need to insulate homes. Yet they dare not use the words ‘heat pump’ for fear of being accused of elitism (even though a heat pump is a far more cost-effective route to decarbonising heating than deep retrofit [6]).

They must be laughing their heads off in the boardrooms of fossil fuel companies.

Is it really ‘climate justice’ to promote the poorly designed ECO (Energy Company Obligation) scheme that the NAO (National Audit Office) declared [7] has been a total failure? NAO found that external wall insulation, for example, has led to bad and often exceptionally bad outcomes 98% of the time. This has required very expensive re-work in many cases, compounding the injustice.

This is to be contrasted with the BUS (Boiler Upgrade Scheme) that – despite all the claims about a lack of skills in the sector – has helped to really pump prime the heat pump sector and can be regarded as a success. 

Communities like Heat Geek are really shaking things up too, to lower installation costs and improve the quality of installations (to the level already practiced by many small businesses with great track records).

The unholy alliance extends to plumbers, retrofit organisations, council officers, architects and politicians who claim you cannot heat an old building without deep retrofit. A disproven and false claim, but repeated as many times as the story about British pilots seeing better in WWII thanks to eating carrots. 

Some untruths live on through repetition.

The idea that we can insulate our way out of energy poverty, without also pushing at least as hard on rolling out heat pumps (individually or using shared heat networks) is an illusion, that would mean we’d be stuck with burning gas for much longer than necessary. 

More laughter from those boardrooms.

Insulation, replacing windows and other fabric measures are important but you can easily blow so much money on these that you leave nothing in the pot for a heat pump [6]. 

Here is a diagram from Nesta that was based on one I originally produced and here I have added some further annotations (see [6] for Nesta version):

That is not climate justice, or fair on anyone.

It is not climate justice for those in energy poverty to have to pay for gas that will inevitably go through repeated market crises and cost spikes in its dying decades. 

Climate justice is future proofing our electricity supply, the grid, our homes and our streets. 

These will then be not only cleaner and more efficient but future proofed. As the late Professor Mackay observed, once you have electrified end use of energy, the electricity can come from anywhere: from your roof, from a community energy project, or from a wind farm in the north sea.

It’s time that those that claim to be progressives stopped falling for the tactics of fossil fuel interests, that time and again are slowing our transition to a clean energy future, and action on climate change.

It started with shaming people for their consumption. Let’s not fall for the new tactic of shaming those who actually care enough to adopt effective solutions.

References

[1] Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming, Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway, 2010, Bloomberg Press.

[2] Exxon Mobil’s Messaging Shifted Blame for Warming to Consumers, Maxine Joselow & E&E News, Scientific American, 15th May 2021. 

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/exxon-mobils-messaging-shifted-blame-for-warming-to-consumers

[3] Can fossil fuel companies really support a carbon tax?, Alain Naef, SUERF Policy Brief, No 724, November 2023. 

Click to access f_58a1fea84b28483ad90beb50a9457959_78435_suerf.pdf

[4] Take The Jump, https://takethejump.org/

[5] Carbon Brief

[6] ‘Insulation impact: how much do UK houses really need?, NESTA, 8th January 2024, https://www.nesta.org.uk/report/insulation-impact-how-much-do-uk-houses-really-need 

[7] Energy efficiency installations under the Energy Company Obligation, 14th October 2025, National Audit Office https://www.nao.org.uk/reports/energy-efficiency-installations-under-the-energy-company-obligation/

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26 October 2025 · 15:55

Mind the ‘Spark’ gap

All the talk of the ‘spark gap’ – the particularly high ratio of electricity unit prices to gas unit prices – might deter people from getting a heat pump, because they think it will mean they will pay more for their heating than they do currently, but this is false in the majority of situations where householders are end-of-lifeing their old gas boiler.

Let’s run the numbers.

  • Take a building that currently that consumes 30,000 kWh of gas for heating per year.
  • At a gas unit price of 6p/kWh that totals £1,800 per year (for the moment, ignoring standing charges for simplicity)
  • Let’s assume the old gas boiler is 75% efficient (in many cases with will be quite optimistic).
  • So, building actually needs 22,500 kWh of heat reaching radiators (0.75 x 30,000 = 22,500).

So the question is, can a heat pump be cheaper to run with its high relative performance that counteracts the ‘spark gap’? Let’s see …

  • Let’s assume a reasonable minimum achievable heat pump system SCOP of 3.5
  • So heat pump needs 6,429 kWh of electricity to produce 22,500 kWh of heat ((22,500 / 3.5) = 6,429)
  • At a electricity unit price of 22p/kWh that totals £1,414 per year 
  • That is a saving of £386 on running costs

Health Warning: The difference is very sensitive to the ‘spark gap’ (ratio of electricity to gas unit prices), and crucially the SCOP. 

Now, I am not saying there is not an issue with the ‘spark gap’. Adoption rates in Europe show that the smaller the spark gap, the high the adoption of heat pumps (see ‘Figure 2.4 Comparison between the heat pump market share, the number of heat pumps installed, and electricity and gas price ratio for countries in Europe in 2023’, Progress in reducing emissions – 2025 report to Parliament, 25 June 2025).

However, when people talk about the spark gap they seem to assume the context is ‘buy a new gas boiler or buy a heat pump’. Needless to say that is a higher bar but not an insurmountable one. Many people who are concerned about climate change and have an ageing gas boiler simply want to know that their heat bills will not rise.

Now back to standing charges. I rerun the numbers for different SCOPs and included standing charges (see NOTES for assumptions). The ‘breakeven’ SCOP is then close to 2.9, which frankly only an incompetent heat pump installer would fail to exceed.

And what is more, for any of these SCOPs the carbon saving is at least 4 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent per year. So both the planet and the bank balance can be happy with the choice.

So, let’s fix the spark gap, but stop banging on about it as though it is a reason not to press on with rolling out heat pumps.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2025

NOTES

Assumptions used in table: With heat demand of 22,500 kWh and old gas boiler with efficiency of 0.75 (75%), so gas bill showing 30,000 kWh primary energy used by gas boiler. Used standing charges of 28p and 59p per day for gas and electricity, and unit rates of 6p/kWh and 22p/kWh, respectively. The breakeven running costs SCOP in this case is 2.935. Also, a carbon intensity of gas of 184 gCO2/kWh and for UK electricity grid (for 2024) of 124 gCO2/kWh; so even at a SCOP of 2.5 you save 4.37 tonnes of CO2 a year.

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04 September 2025 · 18:29

Loading the Climate Dice: Why ‘chaos’ does not prevent climate change predictability

Most people have heard about chaos theory, especially as it applies to weather, but may be a little fuzzy about what it all means. They may even hear people claim “if they can’t even predict the weather in a month’s time, how on earth can they tell us what the climate will be in 25 years time?!”.

It’s a fair challenge, but one that has been answered many times by climate scientists [1], but often in ways that perhaps are not as accessible as I feel they could be. When I was recently asked this question I was frustrated I could not share a plain English article with them.

So here is my attempt in plain, non-scientific language to explain how we can project future climate, despite ‘chaos’. I will use the analogy of rolling dice to help explain things – so no equations or mathematical jargon, I promise.

Chaotic Weather

Let’s start with the discovery of ‘chaos’ by Lorenz in 1963 [2]. Weather projections have to start from the current state of the weather and then project forward. The models incrementally step forward to see how the weather patterns evolve over minutes, hours and days. Lorenz discovered that even with the simplest models, if one did two ‘runs’ of the model which had an infinitesimal difference in initial conditions (eg. the temperature in Swindon at 15.0oC and 15.00001oC) the predicted weather can look very different in just a few weeks..

If this was just a trivial observation that errors can magnify themselves in a complex system, one might be tempted to shrug one’s shoulder – and it was not even a new insight [3]. But Lorenz discovered something far more profound: beautiful patterns amongst the chaotic behaviour of complex systems (think of the eddy currents that appear in the turbulent flow of a river). For those interested in learning more about Lorenz’s mathematical legacy, Professor Tim Palmer gave an interesting talk on this [4].

I say ‘errors can magnify’ because sometimes you end up with a chaotic outcome and sometimes you don’t [5]. This is important if you are about to head off to Cornwall for your summer holiday. Weather forecasters now do multiple runs of the models varying the initial parameters [6]. If all the outcomes look similar then the weather system is not behaving chaotically – at least over Cornwall for the period of interest – and the weatherman can say confidently “it will be dry next week over Cornwall”. If, however, out of 100 runs, 20 indicate wet and windy weather, and the rest were dry, they’d say “There is a good chance of dry weather over Cornwall next week, but there is a 20% chance of wet and windy weather”, so take your waterproofs!

Predictable Climate

It really is all about the question being asked, as with most issues in the world. If you ask the wrong question, don’t be surprised if you get a misleading answer.

If I ask the question “will it be sunny in Cornwall on the 3rd of July of 2050?” (wrong question) then it is impossible to say, because of ‘chaos’. If, on the other hand, I ask the question “do we expect the average temperature over Cornwall to be higher in the summer of 2050 as a result of our carbon emissions compared to what it would have been without those emissions?” (longer but valid question) I can answer that question with confidence; it is “Yes”. 

This illustrates that when we talk about weather we are interested, as in our holiday plans or a farmer harvesting their crops, in the specific conditions at a specific place and specific time. 

Climate is very different, because it is about the averaged conditions over a longer period and typically wider area.

Throwing the dice

I want to illustrate the difference between these two types of question (specific versus averaged) by use of a dice [7] analogy.

If I throw a dice I expect that the chance of getting a 6 to be 1 in 6. If I ask the (specific) question ‘what will the hundredth throw of the dice show?’ (think weather), I am no more certain of the outcome than after 10 throws [8]. 

Now ask a different question: ‘what will be the average number of 6s after 600 throw?’ (think climate). I would expect it to be around about 100. As the number of throws increases I’d expect the average (number of 6s divided by the number of throws)  to get closer and closer to 1 in 6.

This is just how statistics comes to the rescue in the face of the much used, and abused, “chaos” in the climate debate.

You can do this yourself. Make multiple throws of a dice, and after each throw, take the count of the number of 6s thrown and divide by the number of throws – that is the observed odds. You might be surprised to find how long it takes before the odds settles down to close to  1 in 6.

Being lazy, I wrote a little program to plot the result (using a random number generator to do the ‘throwing’ for me). 

The averaged number of 6s converges on the expected odds of 1/6 (shorthand for ‘1 in 6’).

I then imagined two dice, one that was ‘fair’ (where the odds of throwing a 6 were 1 in 6) and a ‘loaded’ dice (where the odds have changed to 1 in 5). This is a analogy for a changed climate where carbon emissions have been happening for some time but have now stopped, and there is a raised but stable concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. This gives rise to a higher averaged temperature, represented by the higher odds of throwing a 6 in this analogy (see next illustration).

Despite the uncertainty in any specific throw (think weather) in both cases, the average chance of getting a 6 can be predicted (think climate) in both cases. We can see the loaded dice clearly in the graph, compared to the fair dice. In both cases it takes a little time for the influence of randomness (chaos if you like) to fade away as the number of throws increases.

However, the emissions have not stopped, and in fact have been growing since the start of the industrial revolution. There has been a significant acceleration in emissions in the last 75 years. So the amount of accumulated greenhouse gases in the atmosphere has been growing, and with it, the averaged surface temperature on Earth. 

So, taking the analogy one step further,  I created a dice that gets progressively more ‘loaded’ over time (think each year of emissions). 

Now, the averaged chance of throwing a 6 will progressively increase, compared to the fair dice. This is illustrated in the next graphic.

 Again, we see the averaged odds after a number of throws jump around for quite a while (think chaos), but things settle down after a several hundred throws. 

We now see a clear and ever widening gap between the two dice. 

This is analogous to what is happening with our climate: our continuing carbon emissions are progressively loading the ‘climate dice’.

No amount of weather chaos can cancel the climate statistics that become more evident with every year that passes.

Extreme Weather Events

Now while weather and climate are different, because climate is an average of what the weather is over time, there is an interesting flip-side to this. Since the climate changes due to our carbon emissions, that means the spread of possible weather must have also shifted, to generate a new average.

This means that extreme weather events become much more likely. 

Once again, this is just basic statistics. So events that may have been “one in a hundred years” become much more frequent, and very extreme events, like the 40oC we saw in England in 2022, that were “basically impossible” without our carbon emissions [9], now start to happen.

I don’t want to make this essay longer explaining how this works, and the Royal Statistical Society have done a great job on this, so please visit their explainer [10].

Extreme weather events are now popping up all over the world, almost on a weekly basis, and thanks to the statistics and associated modelling, scientists can now put a number on how much more likely each event has become due to our carbon emissions [11].

We have already loaded the climate dice, the question now is, how much more do we want to load it, and make the odds even worse?

© Richard W. Erskine, September 2025

Notes

  1. Chaos and Climate, James Annan and William Connolley, RealClimate, 4th Nov 2005.https://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2005/11/chaos-and-climate/
  2. Edward Lorenz, Deterministic Nonperiodic Flow, Journal of the Atmospheric Sciences. 20 (2): 130–141, https://journals.ametsoc.org/view/journals/atsc/20/2/1520-0469_1963_020_0130_dnf_2_0_co_2.xml
  3. Stephen Wolfram wrote some historical notes on chaos theory https://www.wolframscience.com/reference/notes/971c/ 
  4. The Butterfly Effect – What Does It Really Signify, Tim Palmer, Oxford Mathematics, 19th May 2017, https://youtu.be/vkQEqXAz44I?si=bLBWR7hLNsHBaE5E
  5. Over the specific place and time period of interest, of course.
  6. This is called ‘ensemble modelling’. 
  7. For the grammar police: common usage now prefers ‘dice’ for singular and plural cases.
  8. In this sense, the dice analogy is somewhat different to climate, because climate change is conditional on what came before, but this does not change the point of the analogy – to distinguish between specific and averaged questions.
  9. UK’s 40oC heatwave ‘basically impossible’ without climate change, Georgina Rannard, 29th July 2022, BBC, https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-62335975 
  10. Explainer: Extreme Weather, Royal Statistical Society, https://rss.org.uk/policy-campaigns/policy/climate-change-resources/explainer-extreme-weather 
  11. World Weather Attribution, https://www.worldweatherattribution.org/ 

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20 July 2025 · 20:33

Is climate inaction the new denial?

I respect those wishing to protect nature who are worried about unrestrained infrastructure projects, but the ‘unrestrained’ bit was never part of the plan, and strawman arguments now abound, such as the claim we will be building solar farms on prime arable farmland. 

An astonishing 30% of UK land is devoted to grazing, and raised solar arrays can co-exist with grazing, even providing shade during heatwaves. It may even pay back some of the carbon impact of those methane burping ruminants. Solar grazing (or agrivoltaics) is now a thing in some countries so why is it not supported by organisations like the CPRE in the UK?

I have concerns about the impact of progressive weakening of the Government’s new infrastructure policies that may continue the blocking or delaying of essential on-shore renewable energy projects. 

In his seminal book over 15 years ago, Professor David Mackay wrote1:

If the British are good at one thing, it’s saying “no.”

No to this solar farm; no to that wind turbine on that hill; no to that wind farm off my coastline; etc.

This, despite the fact that the Government’s most recent public opinion survey2 shows 80% are   in favour of renewables; although when it comes to on-shore wind and solar farms in one’s locality, this drops to 37% and 47%, respectively. 

Is this because the public are not aware of the benefits of local energy production? Or because not enough of it is community owned? Is it that people do not understand the nature of the emergency we face and the imperative to act?

We’ve seen over the sequence of three heatwaves3 recently (heatwaves that have been made much more likely due to man-made global warming4) that our beloved commons around Stroud now look more like the Serengeti than our green and pleasant land. This will be the new norm by 2050 if we don’t urgently address our emissions. 

At this stage in the climate emergency, climate inaction is tantamount to climate denial.

The Climate Change Committee has made it abundantly clear that we need to electrify most of our economy to get to net zero expeditiously and affordably5: This applies to both generation and consumption:

“In many key areas, the best way forward is now clear. Electrification and low-carbon electricity supply make up the largest share of emissions reductions in our pathway, 60% by 2040. Once the market has locked into a decarbonisation solution, it needs to be delivered. The roll-out rates required for the uptake of electric vehicles (EVs), heat pumps, and renewables are similar to those previously achieved for mass-market roll-outs of mobile phones, refrigerators, and internet connections.”

and really at a much lower costs than many have claimed:

“We estimate that the net costs of Net Zero will be around 0.2% of UK GDP per year on average in our pathway, with investment upfront leading to net savings during the Seventh Carbon Budget period. Much of this investment is expected to come from the private sector.”

Much has changed since David Mackay wrote his book. The costs of renewables has dropped, so they are now the cheapest form of energy (and onshore cheaper still).. Yet I believe another kind of “No” has developed in the dialogue around renewables infrastructure.

There has emerged a false dichotomy between green energy infrastructure and nature. The case often presented is that to protect nature we have to limit infrastructure to only those places which no one cares about, like brownfield sites, which of course would completely undermine any attempt to reach the levels of onshore wind and solar that are needed to supplement off shore development. Whereas there are many things harming nature which are much worse including farming systems, tidy gardens, and climate change itself.

Take the rewiring of our electricity grid that is needed for an electrified economy. The case is made for burying cables as opposed to pylons because it is assumed they are environmentally less harmful, and despite the enormous increase in capital costs (and hence delays) that would result. In fact, burying the quite different ultra expensive cables needed in wide trenches can have impacts on flora and fauna, such as harm to tree roots and subsoil ecology, that can exceed those arising from pylons.

Isn’t the honest truth that people simply don’t like their view being changed by the addition of renewables to the landscape and some use the nature card to avoid being labelled NIMBYs? I fear so.

Rodborough Common 19th Juky 2025 by Richard Erskine

Conversely, we can fail to act and our grandchildren will see a landscape changed forever by our inaction. The MetOffice’s most recent State of The Climate report6 states that under the intermediate pathway scenario (RCP4.5) “years 2022, 2023, and 2024 would likely be considered average by the 2050s and cool by around 2100”. Is that preferable to some wind turbines today offering local energy security and resilience, helping the local community do its part in decarbonising our economy?

The good news is that because of the enormous efficiencies of electrification and the end of burning fossil fuels, the primary energy required from renewables – about 800 TWh per year – would be about one third of the primary energy hitherto required from fossil fuels. Even if we almost double this – to allow for new demands like synthetic meats, AI, minerals recycling, etc – to about 1500 TWh, an Oxford University study7 shows wind and solar can power the UK. As Hannah Ritchie summarises the findings8:

“They think there is a large potential for offshore wind. This would be spread over 10% of the UK’s exclusive economic zone. Onshore wind could be used on 5% of British lands, and combined with farmland. 2% of British land would be used for solar PV, and could also be combined with farmland using a technique called ‘agrivoltaics’. Rooftop solar doesn’t add much – the output is quite small, even if 8% of British rooftops are covered. Definitely still a good option for individuals, but maybe not for the nation as a whole.”

For those that say let others do it, because we are special, don’t be surprised if everyone claims the same. It is analogous to a parent who says let other children take the vaccine (while their child benefits from community immunity so they can avoid the very small risk of side effects of inoculation). If everyone made that choice, everyone is at risk. 

Have we, in short, become too selfish to take the steps to act with the urgency needed to actually take declarations of a climate emergency seriously; to go beyond laudable actions like recycling to really substantive endeavours?

We need to make the difficult decisions needed but work hard to take people with us, rather than stoke fears as some political parties choose to. The political debate has created some surprising bedfellows amongst those opposing onshore renewables projects.

Are we Brits just still too good at saying “no”?

© Richard W. Erskine, 2025

References

  1. David Mackay, Sustainable Energy without the hot air, 2008, https://www.withouthotair.com/c18/page_108.shtml
  2. DESNZ Public Attitudes Tracker: Headline findings, Spring 2025, UK, Published 3 July 2025, https://www.gov.uk/government/statistics/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-spring-2025/desnz-public-attitudes-tracker-headline-findings-spring-2025-uk 
  3. Heat health alerts come into force as third UK summer heatwave builds, Ben Rich, 9th July 2025, https://www.bbc.co.uk/weather/articles/c9w1xpz841no 
  4. Explainer: Extreme Weather, Royal Statistical Society, https://rss.org.uk/policy-campaigns/policy/climate-change-resources/explainer-extreme-weather/ 
  5. The Seventh Carbon Budget, The Climate Change Committee, 26th February 2025, https://www.theccc.org.uk/publication/the-seventh-carbon-budget/ 
  6. State of the UK Climate in 2024, Mike Hendon et al, International Journal of Climatology, Vol. 45, No. S1, July 2025. https://rmets.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/joc.70010 
  7. Could Britain’s energy demand be met entirely by wind and solar?, Brian O’Callaghan et al, University of Oxford Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment, Working Paper No.23-02, September 2023, https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2023-09-26-wind-and-solar-power-could-significantly-exceed-britain-s-energy-needs   
  8. Can solar and wind power Britain? An update of David MacKay’s numbers, Hannah Ritchie, Sustainabilitybynumbers, 30th October 2023. https://www.sustainabilitybynumbers.com/p/can-solar-and-wind-power-britain 

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12 July 2025 · 07:02

The elephant (no, scientists) in the room

UK news coverage  just triggered me so please excuse me but really …

Good news: the coverage of heatwaves is drawing the link with climate change on BBC and C4.

Bad news: there seems to be a lot of surprise at this! The dry conditions and repeated heatwaves, causing head scratching on questions like ‘who knew?’, ‘does this herald worsening heat extremes?’, etc. 

Well hello people, this has all been completely obvious to scientists studying climate since at least the 1970s, but society has gone along with denial (yep, we’re all in denial, to some degree).

People talk about the elephant in the room – the thing no one has mentioned but really should not have been ignored. Well, here we have the scientists in the room, including the news room, and now regularly demonstrating the long prediced link between man-made global warming and extreme weather events and episodes..

The Metoffice produces frequent decadel forecasts that few read, and then people get surprised when we have another 100 year heat wave or 100 year flood (following the last one 5 years ago; remember 40C in UK in 2022).

Short memories, and shifting baseline syndrome.

When the odds keep changing the use of the phrase “100 year event” we heard from ‘the orange one’ in relation to the deadly Texas floods, is meaningless, and misleading, but unsurprising from someone who is well into his mission to dismantle the USA’s climate science capacity, weather forecasting, and ability to adapt and respond to extreme weather events (driven by man-made climate change that is the underlying driver).

Switch off if you want to, but the simple truth is that every tonne of carbon dioxide we emit cumulatively turns up the climate one-way ratchet and increases the risk of extreme weather events (at both ends of the hydrological cycle, because warmer air holds more water). 

More emissions. The dice gets loaded a bit more. The odds get changed a bit more. Repeat.

At this rate, by 2100, my great grandchildren will yearn for the (relatively) cool summers of the 2020s. 

And because CO₂ is a long lived greenhouse gas, don’t expect the atmospheric concentration of it to fall anytime soon. Ratchets turn in one direction. Give it hundreds to many thousands of years before long-term carbon cycles begin to reduce atmospheric concentrations to comfortable levels for humanity, but by then on a changed planet.

Prevention is better than cure with a vengeance in this case.

Worried about heatwaves? You should be but please, don’t be surprised.

Worried about the cost of net zero, then don’t be, as the Climate Change Committees 7th Carbon Budget explains:

“We estimate that the net costs of Net Zero will be around 0.2% of UK GDP per year on average in our pathway, with investment upfront leading to net savings during the Seventh Carbon Budget period. Much of this investment is expected to come from the private sector.”

And 0.2% of roughly £3 billion of GDP is just £6 billion a year (and most coming from industry), less than what the UK spends on fizzy drinks. Even the Government’s spending watchdog agrees. And what a fabulous investment with huge ROI (Return On Inhabitability).  The costs of inaction make the costs of action look small by comparison.

Reject the populist, science rejectionists,  who think denial wins votes.

I’ll always vote on behalf of those who come after us who I hope will be wiser, less selfish and less ignorant than our generation have been, yet will feel the full force of our failure to take urgent action when we should have.

Yet, it is not too late for us to reduce harms. The harm-free-option ship has sailed, but every tonne avoided makes a difference, and reduces the level and frequency of extremes to come. 

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2025 

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08 January 2025 · 14:01

Stop demanding certainty from climate models: we know enough to act

‘Climate Models Can’t Explain What’s Happening to Earth: Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on’ is the headline of an article in The Atlantic by Zoë Schlanger [1]

The content of the article does not justify the clickbait headline, which should instead read

‘Climate Models Haven’t Yet Explained an anomalous Global Mean Surface Temperature in 2023’.

Gavin Schmidt authored an earlier comment piece in Nature [2] with a similarly hyped up title (“can’t” is not the same as “haven’t yet”). He states very clearly in a discussion with Andy Revkin [3], that he fully expects the anomaly to be explained in due course through retrospective modelling using additional data. It’s worth noting that Zeke Hausfather (who also appears on Revkin’s discussion) said in an Carbon Brief article [4] that 2023 “is broadly in line with projections from the latest generation of climate models” and that there is “a risk of conflating shorter-term climate variability with longer-term changes – a pitfall that the climate science community has encountered before”.

It is not surprising there are anomalous changes in a single year. After all, climate change was historically considered by climate science as a discernible change in averaged weather over a 30 year period, precisely to eliminate inter-annual variability! Now, we have been pumping man-made carbon emissions into the atmosphere at such an unprecedented rate we don’t have to wait 30 years to see the signal.

If you look at the historical record of global mean surface temperature, it goes up and down for a lot of reasons. A lot of it has to do with the heat churning through the oceans, sometimes burping some heat out, sometimes swallowing some, but not creating additional heat. So the trend line is clearly rising and the models are excellent in modelling the trend line. The variations are superimposed on a rising trend. Nothing to see here, at this level of discussion.

The climate scientists are also, usually, pretty good at anticipating the ups and down that come from El Nino, La Nina, Volcanic eruptions, etc. (Gavin Schmidt and others do annual ‘forecasts’ of the expected variability based on this knowledge). Which triggered the concern at not seeing 2023 coming, but why expect to get it right 100% of the time?

Don’t confuse this area of investigation with extreme weather attribution, which addresses regional (ie. sub-global) and time limited (less than a year) extreme events. Weather is not climate, but climate influences weather. So it is possible using a combination of historic weather data and climate models to put a number on the probability of an extreme event and compare it with how probable it has been in the past. So, 100 year events can become 10 year events, for example. This is what the World Weather Attribution service provides. The rarer the event, the greater the uncertainties (because of less historic data to work with), but it is clear that in many cases extreme weather events are becoming more frequent in our warming world, which is no surprise at all, based purely on statistical reasoning (The Royal Statistical Society explain here.)

So back to The Atlantic piece.

The issue I feel is that journalists and lay people can’t abide uncertainty. What are the scientists not telling us! In general people want certainty and often they will choose based mostly on their own values and biases rather than expert judgment. In the case of the 2023 anomaly, the choice seems to be between “it’s certainly much worse than the modellers can model”, “it’s certainly catastrophic”, “it’s certainly ok, nothing to see here”, or something else. All without defining “it’s” or providing any margin of error on “certainty”. Whereas scientists have to navigate uncertainty every day.

The fact is that we know a lot but not everything. There is a spectrum between complete certainty and complete ignorance. On this spectrum, we know:

  • a lot ‘that is established beyond any doubt’ (e.g. increasing carbon dioxide emissions will increase global mean surface temperatures);
  • other things that ‘are established outcomes, but currently with uncertainties as to how much and how fast’ (e.g. sea-level rise as a result of global warming and melting of ice sheets, that will continue long after we get to net zero; before it reaches some yet to be determined new equilibrium/ level);
  • and others that ‘currently, have huge uncertainties attached to them’ (e.g. the net amount of carbon in the biosphere that will be released into the atmosphere through a combination of a warming planet, agriculture and other changes – we don’t even know for sure if it’s net positive or negative by 2050 at this stage given the uncertainties in negative and positive contributions).

So we can explain a lot about what’s happening to Earth, we just have to accept that there are areas which have significant uncertainties attached to them currently, and in some cases maybe forever. Not knowing some things is not the same as knowing nothing, and not the same as not being able to refine our approaches either to reduce the levels of uncertainty, or to find ways to address those uncertainties (e.g. through adaptation) to mitigate their impacts. Don’t put it all on climate models to do all the lifting here.

The current climate projections are much more precise than say the projections on stock market prices in 5 or 10 years, but we don’t use the latter as angst ridden debate about the unpredictability of the markets. We consider the risks and take action. On climate, we have enough data to make decisions in many areas (e.g. when it would be prudent to build a new, larger Thames Barrage), by using a hybrid form of decision making within which the climate models are just one input. Even at the prosaic level of our dwellings, we manage risk. I didn’t wait for certainty as to when the old gas boiler would pack up before we installed a super efficient heat pump – no, we did it prudently well beforehand – to avoid the risk of being forced into a bad decision (getting a new gas boiler). We managed the risks.

Climate models have been evolving to include more aspects of the Earth System and how these are coupled together and to enhance the granularity of the modelling (see Resources), but there is no suggestion that there is some missing process that is required to explain the 2023 uptick but probably missing data; not the same thing. Although there is a side commentary in [4] involving input from Professor Tim Palmer calling for ‘exa-scale’ computing, but Gavin Schmidt pushes back on the cost-effectiveness of such a path; there are many questions we must address and can with current models.

There are always uncertainties based on a whole range of factors (both model generated ones, and socio-economic inputs e.g. how fast will we stop burning fossil fuels in our homes and cars; that’s a model input not a model design issue). There is possibly nothing to see here (in 2023 anomaly), but it could be something significant. It certainly doesn’t quite justify the hyperbole of the The Atlantic’s headline.

If we globally are waiting for ‘certainty’ before we are prepared to act with urgency, we are completely misunderstanding how we should be managing the risks of man-made global warming.

We certainly should not, at this stage at least, be regarding what happened in 2023 as an extra spur to action. Don’t blame climate models for not having raised a red flag before or urgently enough – which is the subtext of the angst over 2023.

The climate scientists will investigate and no doubt tell us why 2023 was anomalous – merely statistical variability or something else – in due course. It is not really a topic where the public has even the slightest ability to contribute meaningfully to resolving the question. It might be better if instead The Atlantic was publishing pieces addressing the issue of what questions climate models should be addressing (e.g. constrasting the building of sea walls, managed retreat and other responses to sea level rise), where everyone can and should have a voice (as Erica Thompson discusses in her book [5]).

Climate scientists have been issuing the warning memo for decades, at least since the 1979 Charney Report, with broadly the same message. We read the memo, but then failed to act with anything like the urgency and agency required. Don’t blame them or their models for the lack of action. Ok, so the advance of models has allowed more diverse questions to be addressed (e.g. trends in flooding risks), but the core message remains essentially the same.

And please, don’t use 2023 as another pearl clutching moment for another ‘debate’ about how terrible things are, and how we need more research to enable us to take action; but then turn our heads away again. Until the next headline, of course.

(c) Richard W. Erskine, 2025

REFERENCES

  1. ‘Climate Models Can’t Explain What’s Happening to Earth: Global warming is moving faster than the best models can keep a handle on’, Zoë Schlanger, 6th January 2025, The Atlantic.
  2. ‘Climate models can’t explain 2023’s huge heat anomaly — we could be in uncharted territory’, Gavin Schmidt, 19h March 2024, Nature, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-00816-z
  3. ‘Factcheck: Why the recent ‘acceleration’ in global warming is what scientists expect’, Zeke Hausfather, 4th April 2024, https://www.carbonbrief.org/factcheck-why-the-recent-acceleration-in-global-warming-is-what-scientists-expect/ 
  4. ANDY REVKIN speaks with longtime NASA climate scientist GAVIN SCHMIDT about his Nature commentary on what missing factors may be behind 2023’s shocking ocean and atmosphere temperature spikes, Youtube, https://www.youtube.com/live/AYknM2qtRp4?si=fsq0y-XkYG58ITw5 
  5. ‘Escape from Model Land: How mathematical models can lead us astray and what we can do about it’, Erica Thompson, 2022, Basic Books.

SOME RESOURCES ON CLIMATE MODEL EVOLUTION

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05 June 2024 · 19:41

Apologists for Climate Greenwashing

Today, World Environment Day, the UN Secretary-General António Guterres made a special address on climate action “A Moment of Truth” in New York. In a speech that covered the impacts already being felt from the delays in taking action, and the injustices this gives rise to, he turned his ire on fossil fuel companies and their enablers (my emphasis):

“Fourth and finally, we must directly confront those in the fossil fuel industry who have shown relentless zeal for obstructing progress – over decades. Billions of dollars have been thrown at distorting the truth, deceiving the public, and sowing doubt. I thank the academics and the activists, the journalists and the whistleblowers, who have exposed those tactics – often at great personal and professional risk. I call on leaders in the fossil fuel industry to understand that if you are not in the fast lane to clean energy transformation, you are driving your business into a dead end – and taking us all with you. Last year, the oil and gas industry invested a measly 2.5 percent of its total capital spending on clean energy.”

He then went on to say:

“Many in the fossil fuel industry have shamelessly greenwashed, even as they have sought to delay climate action – with lobbying, legal threats, and massive ad campaigns. They have been aided and abetted by advertising and PR companies – Mad Men – remember the TV series – fuelling the madness. I call on these companies to stop acting as enablers to planetary destruction. Stop taking on new fossil fuel clients, from today, and set out plans to drop your existing ones. Fossil fuels are not only poisoning our planet – they’re toxic for your brand. Your sector is full of creative minds who are already mobilising around this cause. They are gravitating towards companies that are fighting for our planet – not trashing it. I also call on countries to act. Many governments restrict or prohibit advertising for products that harm human health – like tobacco. Some are now doing the same with fossil fuels. I urge every country to ban advertising from fossil fuel companies. And I urge news media and tech companies to stop taking fossil fuel advertising.”

The active disinformation has gone on for decades, as we well documented in the book, Merchants of Doubt, by historians Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway (first published in 2010 https://www.merchantsofdoubt.org), and for which companies like Shell were active participants in climate science denial.

The on-going activities of organisations, individuals and PR companies funded by fossil fuel interests did not end in the mid 1990s (even <shocked emoji> in the UK), and has continued in many ways unabated, as Desmog has documented on an almost daily basis https://www.desmog.com. However, now the emphasis is on trying to undermine climate solutions, so as to justify carrying on using fossil fuels, either in electricity generation, or in end-use such as transport and heating. But as the alternatives are now so good, the PR and greenwashing has to be world-class to try to undermine them.

So it was astounding to hear Nick Butler – a Visiting Professor at King’s College – being interviewed on BBC Radio 4’s PM today (5th June 2024) by Evan Davis, being highly critical of the Secretary General’s speech. When asked about fossil fuel companies obstructing public discourse with their lobbying, public affairs, and so on, he said:

“… I think that was the case in the past but from the middle of the 1990s that has changed, certainly for the European companies, certainly BP and Shell, are going in a different direction …” <my jaw drops emoji>

Well being an ex-BP employee he would say that wouldn’t he. He is just one example of what might be called an apologist for climate greenwashing.

And it is incredibly disingenuous to say that adverts for oil and gas don’t appear on TV anymore in the UK. No, but adverts and PR for petrol powered SUVs, or Hydrogen Boilers, or … the list goes on. And to say that its all our fault for making the wrong choices, as Nick Butler suggested, is really the equivalent of victim blaming. I can’t take an EV Bus if there are no EV Buses (or indeed no bus service worth talking about), because car manufacturers and fossil fuel interests have been in cohoots to promote gas guzzlers (and are now whining because the China actually invested in an EV supply chain and market).

The truth is that between 2010 and 2018, Shell dedicated just 1% of its long terms investments to renewable energy, and paying creative agencies to target influencers to improve the brand’s image, etc, as Client Earth’s expose ‘The Greenwashing Files’ reveals. BP and the rest are no different.

You see they have moved on from the mid-1990s. Then the focus was on full front climate science denial, through a myriad of think tanks, influencers writing for the Daily Telegraph, Wall Street Journal, and wherever. Now they are more subtle, more devious. “Oh yes we love renewables”, they will say, but “when the wind doesn’t blow or it doesn’t shine our gas will be needed to generate your electricity”. Gas, I should stress, which they want to grow as a proportion of their business, not phase it out at all. It’s almost as if they are trying to gaslight renewables.

We have an example in the UK of fossil fuel interests – the gas network – producing hit pieces on heat pumps, and claiming that green hydrogen is better, even though all the science shows this is not the case (and in any case, its a ruse by them to carry on extracting natural gas to turn into hydrogen, which will never be green, because they will never be able to afford to bury the carbon dioxide produced in the process). Yet even the Bosch executive vice-president Stefan Thiel now accepts that hydrogen is a lost cause for heating homes. The delays caused by the industry’s disinformation campaign on just this one attack line has come at a cost – being delays in decarbonising UK home heating.

And the greenwashing has been getting worse as the fossil fuel companies try desperately not to be in possession of stranded fossil fuel assets. But they, and their PR / Advertising agencies, are now feeling the heat as one Desmog story Litigation Over Misleading Climate Claims Has ‘Exploded’ Over the Past Few Years reveals:

“Companies are increasingly facing legal action over their false or misleading climate communications, according to a new report examining trends in global climate litigation. That report, released late last week, highlighted a surge in litigation around climate-related greenwashing — what researchers have termed “climate-washing” — over the past few years.”

And to take Shell as an exemplar again, far from “going in a different direction”, as Nick Butler claimed, they are actually reducing investments in renewables because it does not “align” with their strategy to maximise extraction of methane (aka “natural” gas, see what they did there, long ago). They have been pulled up several times for misleading greenwashing advertisements.

As recently as 2022 Shell has had some of its adverts banned by the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) for misleading claims about how clean its overall energy production is, as the BBC reported here.

One can forgive Evan Davis for not being as well briefed as he could be on the history and on-going tactics of the fossil fuel companies to delay the green transition through well funded PR, advertising and influencer campaigns, but it would not be a bad idea for BBC PM to do a follow-up with someone who is well informed.

For example, how about inviting Joana Setzer (Associate Professorial Research Fellow at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment), and co-author of the report Global trends in climate change litigation: 2023 snapshot, as we know how much the BBC loves a bit of balance.

Richard W. Erskine, 2023

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