I think some children are not exposed to enough realistic "scary stuff" to be able to handle adulthood. Rather as one hardens off seedlings by putting them out in the cold frame from the greenhouse and then plants them out, the transition from having your nose wiped by someone else to becoming a well rounded adult capable of navigating the successes and failures that are part of the natural order needs to be a controlled process requiring some setbacks and scary moments to calibrate the sensors properly.  There is some truth in 'what does not kill you makes you stronger' Clearly it needs some sensible interpretation , and an avoidance of the worst excesses of stupidity, but within that, there is quite a broad success path humans have been managing for millennia. Thinks like getting lost in town, and hopefully found again, minor burns, death of pets, spending hours cooking and producing something disappointingly inedible etc are all important rites of passage. Omit too many of them and when a real problem comes along the character is brittle and falls apart.


Nearer to the OP of this topic, some times social progress is not forwards, and it is important to question the political decisions, and the thinking in behind them.  I find we are sometimes not in agreement in the details on here, but actually that is very healthy, and an indication that there is indeed quite a bit of uncertainty in what the rather limited climate data we have is really saying. Th climate situation is not as black and white as many pundits make out, and syncophantic behaviour to any 'trend'  and the dispassionate application of science required to keep the societal machine running smoothly are not good partners. I still think it is not bad thing to err on the side of more efficient use of energy and reducing emissions and so forth, but let us be honest about why, and the uncertainties about the likely effect if we do or do not.


Oh, and I too suspect threadlock has something to  do with some kind of misplaced political embarrassment rather than solely the stated reason. Plenty of other threads wander off-topic, it is something of a specialty here, and again not in itself unhealthy.

I have personally observed the steady change of climate, here in Scotland, with the slow loss of skiing conditions. I only just got my first mountain skiing last week, which is rather late! The climate had also been very slowly warming up before that. There have been aberration periods (e.g. ~1936). Elsewhere one can get photographs from the Victorian era showing where various glaciers used to be, photos' from circa '50s, and then see where the glacier, or it's remnant, is now. These are small indicators like a canary in the mine.


It is quite reasonable to say that one swallow doesn't make a spring (old saying), but a large accumulation of swallows, along with the daffodils, trees in bud, etc, become a much stronger indicator of the oncoming change. We are like miners in a mine who now can't get out we (only one have world and all that), so paying more attention to the canary's song is worthwhile.


The politics of "climate science" is not the same as the science of climate. I do remember many years ago a lecture on one of the early climate conferences where the relevant respectable person (white scientist/engineer of social standing, etc. etc.) had taken on the role, expecting it to be a short study report, and had done the quick sums, only to find all the different politicians wanted their own spin on their special conditions and locations. This mean repeating the work many times across all the contributor nations with lots of wobbly graphs and peculiar expectations, only to find that the aggregate graph (average) was the same as the original. Though now, maybe they did have an idea about possible error bars (from politically driven considerations).


Since then, more an more folk have piled in, each with their own special considerations, and selective science, along with elephants in the room  concerns. I compare some of the CO2 issues to saving for a pension - the early contributions have a much bigger effect than one realises, so most people kick the can down the road in the hope that it will be solved by someone else later and instead focusing on 5 year plans, quarterly progress and weekly bills.


We do need to clean up our own back yard a bit, with the hope that what we learn can be exploited. The planet isn't going anywhere, but it may become uninhabitable for the majority of us if we don't learn how to keep it habitable.

This appears to be the IET's last contribution to the Climate Change debate:



https://www.theiet.org/impact-society/thought-leadership/engineering-and-technology-at-the-uk-party-conferences/how-do-we-achieve-net-zero/


As ever no actual engineering content and a 1.5% temperature rise (from absolute zero?).


Where is the IET's engineering input? There was more actual discussion of what is required to reach 'Net Zer'o as well as discussion on what 'Net Zero' actually means in my No Climate Emergency thread than I have seen from the IET. If I am missing the IET's contribution could someone please point me to it.


Best regards


Roger

The IOT allows money to be made selling gadgets. Telling folk to turn things off and walk to the shops instead works as well for the climate but is not so profitable.

Amusingly all the big demand management projects such as smart car chargers that can also be inverters all assume it will be over the internet.

We already have a connection by the mains, and if we retain and formalise  the behaviour that falling frequency is an indicator of overload, (and inverters can be configured to do that) we can do demand management and high/low rate metering and yet dispense with all the internet stuff completely. If we were to charge more for every minute of consumption when the grid is below 50Hz than for consumption when it is above, and allow heaters and so on to be self organising as to when they came on, based on frequency, then we could get non-critical domestic loads on and off in a timescale that would  allow a far more graceful response to any situation like the problems last year when Hornsea disconnected.

Of course there is not as much money to be made doing that.

Alasdair wrote: "The only problem with that is it would mean charging the car by day and using it at night. As the grid can't at present cope with large in-feeds from local generation, what would also be needed would be a large (Battery?) energy storage system in each home. Then what about the homes with more than one car? Or those in flats without a 'house roof'?  There is still a lot of work to be done on infrastructure to support the goals"


Yes that is all true Alasdair, but if we accept that 'the goal' is NOT to mandate that every one in the UK has to eventually 'part exchange' their old (socially unacceptable and rapidly worth barely its own value for scrap and recycling) motor car/van/motorhome etc for an electric replacement, and that all the current batch of BEVs are going to remain far too expensive for the majority of uk citizens to buy, then only those who can afford a house with a front garden/garage/adjacent 'off road' parking, and enough roof area to support a 4Kw solar array will be able to be the proud owner of a vehicle with zero tail pipe emissions. This relegates the BEV into the realm of just being a Rich Man's Toy, because it can typically accelerate very briskly from a standstill with seamless high torque from zero mph to the national speed limit of 70 mph with no gear changes and then that's it game over until the 'low battery' alarm comes on! .


However your comment about the growing carbon footprint of the many power hungry heat islands created by Internet Server Farms, is a little known consequence of the exponential growth and demand for mobile bandwidth and mobile applications development not to mention 5G and the IoT - there is a whole area for critical discussion.!


Mike (mapj1) - your comments re the management of the national grid, frequency variation, load management etc and the IoT are also very interesting. Surely, with all this technical expertise available to the IET we should be able to 'propose solid fixes for everything that is broken and malfunctioning in the the whole world' in under, say, 5 years? - come on chaps let's form an industrial collective.! P.S. I must say that the Hornsea Disconnection Report makes fascinating reading - thank you.

BUT Malcolm the problem is not that we cannot come up with some fixes for some of the difficulties, but that people will not listen to solid Engineering, including some areas of the IET! For some reason there is a fascination with rail transport, which works well but is very expensive at all parts, both construction (HS2 £100Billion) and its electric operation is no more fuel efficient than Diesel, but the overhead power lines are ugly and expensive throughout the lifetime. The HS2 cost is interesting, because say 5000 people use the service each day the tickets have to cost probably £1000 each way for it to be an economic proposition including discounted interest costs. Why is this not understood? The extra speed has Concorde type costs associated to save 30 minutes? Spending the same money on a couple of new Motorways from North to South would allow 100,000 vehicle movements per day (including Freight) which would be a great deal more useful. Railways are really a Victorian answer to use steam for distance transport. Is this the best idea we can invent, I rather think not.

Grid Load Management.

This is an area where again we can suggest solutions, but a faulty starting point has been chosen by someone as to where the discussion should start.


It appears that the chosen point is that the supply of electricity should be limited to the general population by disconnection rather than price as at present. The whole "Smart Meter" concept is about limiting supply to the householder when it suits the "Powers that be", in order to match consumption to availability in some arbitrary way. It is said that knowing individual consumption figures helps load management but this is simply untrue, those figures with a slightly larger granularity are already available to DNOs, National Grid etc. It does help billing and could allow variable tariffs, but these things are not up for discussion to the consumer, who sees continuously increasing prices and very poor quality of market regulation. I have been in several countries where this method of demand control is used, and it is crippling to the population as well as small businesses. The primary demand for electricity is that it is 100% available at all times, and in the quantity needed by the customers. This seems to have been forgotten by the "Green" advocates, although they whinge that there are not enough electric vehicle charging points available! Renewables cannot and never will be able to supply this reliability or demand but we are continuously told we just need to build wind turbines!  Just who is living in cloud cuckoo land, as with railways the cost of these is not understood by the Government advisors, nor payback rates. Germany has a lot of wind, but also the most expensive electricity in Europe. The wind companies are loosing money because payback is nothing like that suggested by nameplate ratings. Maintenance costs for wind are crippling because a fault costs £100,000 for suitable huge crane hire. All of the turbines should have a suitable crane built in (on) to lower the heavy equipment at the top, but I am sure I am not the first person to suggest this, although it would be fairly cheap at the time of construction. Imagine how much it costs to service heavy parts on an offshore turbine, and how long one might have to wait for suitable weather.


The point I am making is that no one has actually thought most of this through at all, not the discounted costs, the advantages against the disadvantages, the technical difficulties etc., and yet they were happy to pour public money into projects because it looks "Green". We are about to make cars only available to the rich and powerful, the rest of us must use trains and buses, because the costs have not been considered. All this to "save the Earth", although this is actually completely scientifically false! It is also economically disastrous, as you may see in the coming Budget.

Alasdair Anderson:

One other comment to worry about is the idea that the IoT should be expanded. There is a report on the BBC (https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/av/stories-51742336/dirty-streaming-the-internet-s-big-secret) stating that the internet produces more emissions than flying, so have the IoT related emissions been accounted for?

The answer to that is of course not


It's a well known fact that the combined wishful thinking of a dozen hipsters in Shoreditch can charge an iPhone, but they have no concept of the background energy consumption required by their tech


The real facts are that datacenters in the 100MW capacity bracket are being built at an ever increasing rate  - whilst companies like mine attempt to get the PUE under control, the reality is that on chip cooling etc will probably double that 100MW to 200MW in terms of grid connection - we are looking at yet another one as I write this


Consider when all the hamsters are turning the wheels at Hinckley C it can crank out about 3200MW - or about 16 Data centers worth - that's about 7% of UK consumption.


It's exacerbated that we also want the data centers to be reasonably accessible but not too vulnerable so opportunity for energy recovery etc is limited and also energy reduction opportunity is limited as we usually don't want to be build them in cold (and hence remote) locations.


To get an idea of the picture then take a look http://worldstopdatacenters.com/power/


It never ceases to amaze me how the hard of thinking are all suddenly outraged  - where does Greta think the internet is powered from - ahh yes, unicorns. An idea that also seems to be in favour with the political class at the moment.


Quite aside from a climate debate, what we first need is an energy debate to decide what is it that society actually needs - from there we can work out what security, carbon intensity etc actually look like in terms of technical solutions in order to frame an energy policy for the next few decades and beyond


OMS