By Jo Nova
The Gods in the UK Parliament plan to spend £50 million in a quest to control sunlight, because obviously, the UK is too sunny
Also obviously, there is nothing more useful the United Kingdom could spend money on than pie-in-the-sky plans for weather-control. It’s not like people are struggling to heat their homes or put food on the table.
And it’s not like anything could go wrong, or plants use sunlight.
It’s not like the UK just installed 1.5 million solar panels on homes and is now paying money to reduce the sunlight falling on them.
In the end, this is just another Grow-The-Government-Blob job, but it’s also an escape plan. Wait for it. Twenty years from now, if the world is cooler due to solar activity or cosmic radiation, they’ll say the Geoengineering saved the world from global warming.
Experiments to dim the Sun will be approved within weeks
Scientists consider brightening clouds to reflect sunshine among ways to prevent runaway climate change
By Sarah Knapton, The Telegraph
Experiments to dim sunlight to fight global warming will be given the green light by the Government within weeks.
Outdoor field trials which could include injecting aerosols into the atmosphere, or brightening clouds to reflect sunshine, are being considered by scientists as a way to prevent runaway climate change.
But it’s all really safe and effective “by design” (unlike all those other experiments which were designed to be dangerous):
Prof Mark Symes, the programme director for Aria (Advanced Research and Invention Agency), said there would be “small controlled outdoor experiments on particular approaches”. “We will be announcing who we have given funding to in a few weeks and when we do so, we will be making clear when any outdoor experiments might be taking place,” he said.
“One of the missing pieces in this debate was physical data from the real world. Models can only tell us so much.
“Everything we do is going to be safe by design. We’re absolutely committed to responsible research, including responsible outdoor research.
Now they tell us? Suddenly (when a grant depends upon it) researchers remember that “Models can only tell us so much” and they need real data. Where were you Professor Symes for the last 30 years while national economies were being crushed on the alter of climate modeling.
Looks like the big plan to use pollution to fight “pollution”
The press release coyly talks about “aerosols” being injected into the sky, like it might be an giant air-misting device, or aromatherapy for the atmosphere. They don’t want to name the actual aerosol these experiments will dump in the sky — not in one sentence. Instead, they hint suggestively that sulfur dioxide comes off ships and makes clouds brighter from space, which is a nice way of saying that pollution from diesel makes clouds darker from Earth. See how this works? Bad-sulfur-dioxide needed regulation and created jobs (and the UN was very proud of itself for getting rid of SO2). Now good-sulfur-dioxide needs grants and creates even more jobs. SO2 just needs a makeover. So, gasp, it’s a common thing in jet exhaust. Did he just admit that we could all fly more and “save the planet”? The WEF won’t be happy about that.
Dr Sebastian Eastham, a senior lecturer in sustainable aviation at Imperial College London, said: “Every time you fly, sulphur, which is naturally present in jet fuel, is emitted into the lower most stratosphere causing a small cooling effect.
Experts are hopeful that if experiments prove a success, they could be scaled up and implemented within 10 years.
So they don’t specifically say they’ll be adding pollution to the sky that we’ve spent the last 100 years trying to get out of shipping. But it’s likely that’s exactly what they’re thinking of. Nearly all stratospheric aerosol injections use sulfur dioxide. Just last week, news came that the project called “Make Sunsets” in the US uses weather balloons to drop sulfur dioxide in the sky to “cool the world”.
The latest papers blame their success at getting SO2 out of shipping as the reason we got freakish warming that their models didn’t predict.
For the record, some crazy geoengineering schemes may involve chalk dust, titanium dioxide, and sea salt. Perhaps they’ll try them all?
And as the commenters on X are saying, I do not consent!
h/t David M, Rafe, Jim Simpson,
Image by Myriams-Fotos from Pixabay
Once Great Britain is about the least sunlit extensively populated countries on earth and utterly unsuitable for solar power, let alone making the place even more cold, dark and miserable with less sunlight.
Things were much more pleasant there, back in the days of the Medieval Climate Optimum when grapes used to be grown in the south of Britain.
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The Bishop of Durham made good money from wine from his own vineyards.
Indeed there were 2 attempts by importers of French wine (taxed) to have his wine selling at higher prices (untaxed) be subject to taxes.
Chaucer claimed that there was a walled vineyard near Edinburgh which I haven’t been able to find – but Chaucer’s father was a wine merchant.
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Sod the weather over there, what happened to the nation that led the world into the Industrial Revolution. The nation that opened up the rest of the world, the nation that survived, if not led the free world thru 2 world wars??
They’ve been conquered by a third world cult & their own people giving a great nation away to communists. Too late to wake up now. It’s all over.
Stop all immigration from once Great Britain into Oz ! We have enough useless & activist communists of our own to deal with! We still have time to wake up. Do it now before we go the same way!! Roll on the 3rd May. Our last gasp!
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As they say, and it’s 100% true, “import the Third World, become the Third World”. This can only be avoided if there is an expectation for such immigrants to work hard, obey the law and assimilate, but that’s not happening.
It’s unbelievable that a country that settled much of the known world and brought to it Civilisation and the Enlightenment, Scientific and Industrial Revolutions can itself now become the Third World.
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It’s the good ones that are leaving the UK and the duds that are moving in.
The Brain Drain again. So just take the good ones.
I’m sure that Border Farce here can spot the good ones.
Oh, wait………………
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Its OK to pay guv to do nothing. Paying them to do something is dangerous and expensive.
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Hang on a minute. My chemistry is a bit rusty, so maybe someone will help me out here. SO2 + H20 = H2SO3 or sulphurous acid. Or, SO2 + 2H2O = H2SO4 + H2. So are they trying to get back to the bad old days of acid rain? I remember as a youngster growing up in the UK, Margaret Thatcher was waging a war on coal and coal miners. She wanted to get rid of coal fired power stations and change all of the electricity generation to nuclear. Before coming up with the idea of vilifying CO2, they tried acid rain. Burning coal in power stations produced SO2 in the exhaust and on contact with water in the atmosphere, this turned in to acid rain. I can’t remember the exact advert that ran on Radio 1, but it was a little girl’s voice saying something like “Mummy I don’t like it here. It’s all dark and horrible and everything is dying. Why can’t I go out and play? Can we go somewhere else?” Mum’s answer was something along the lines of “No darling. There is nowhere else to go. The acid rain is destroying our world, poising our lakes and killing the forests. You can’t go outside because the acid rain will hurt you.” Hmm, back to the future?
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https://www.forbes.com/sites/larrybell/2014/02/11/remember-the-acid-rain-scare-global-warming-hysteria-is-pouring-down/
Opinion
Remember The Acid Rain ‘Scare’? Global Warming Hysteria Is Pouring Down
By Larry Bell, Contributor. I write about aerospace, environment, energy, Second Amendment policy
Feb 11, 2014, 08:00am EST
Remember the big “acid rain” scare during the 1970s and 1980s attributing damage to lakes and forests to emissions from Midwestern utilities? If so, did you ever hear the results of a more than half-billion-dollar, 10-year-long national Acid Precipitation Assessment Program study that was initiated in 1980 to research the matter?
Probably not.
As it turned out, those widespread fears proved to be largely unfounded, since only one species of tree at a high elevation suffered any notable effect, and acidity in lakes was traced to natural causes. The investigating scientists reported that they had “turned up no smoking gun; that the problem is far more complicated than it been thought; that other factors combine to harm trees; and that sorting out the cause-and-effect was difficult and in some cases impossible.”
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Fifty-five years ago one of my jobs was to sample wheat1, grass and brassicas to check the sulphur levels as there was concern that the cleaning up of sulphur emissions was resulting in less sulphur in rainfall.
In the UK the amount of sulphur in rainfall fell from 6.5 million tonnes in 1975 to 0.3 million tonnes in 2023.
This was found to be leading to deficiencies in crop and grass yields to the extent that sulphur is now routinely added to fertilisers’.
Sulphur is as easily leached from soils as nitrogen over winter, so needs to be regularly applied each season.
Now they are proposing banning bunker fuel for shipping. Maybe they should allow it to continue as the sulphur emitted could have both fertiliser and cooling effects?
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Two points:
1. All it takes is one scary big volcano to emit thousands of tonnes of SO2 to overcome such puny efforts.
2. You could pay coal power plants to by-pass their SO2 scrubbers and achieve the same result. It would be cheaper than all of these efforts.
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Like the great men from Top Gear and the Grand Tour said; “What could possibly go wrong?”
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When the fiction changes,
I change.
What do you do,Sir?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CogvSAMMLqI
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This is planetary engineering, otherwise known as terraforming.
It’s the stuff of science fiction.
Terraforming as a term waa introduced by Jack Williamson in the science fiction story Collision Orbit in 1942.
Leftists tend not to read much, if at all, so where are they getting these crazy ideas from? Who’s telling them this Civilisation-destroying stuff? I suspect public “service” “scientists” trying to secure funding because they are too incompetent to do real science competitively.
It takes an event like a major volcanic eruption with vast amounts of energy to have any weather altering effect, e.g. Krakatoa or the Hunga Tonga-Hunga Haʻapai eruptions which inject vastly more materials into the upper atmosphere than humans could manage.
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I don’t believe in “chemtrails” conspiracy theories AT ALL, but for those that do believe in them, this validates their worst nightmares…
In any case, so many other “far right conspiracy theories” (sic) have actually turned out to be true, as we learned from the covid disaster. And most recently in Victoriastan, Australiastan where we just learned that the world’s most draconian covid lockups were entirely based on the lie of an autocratic dictator and no scientific advice whatsoever.
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Oh god, don’t mention the chemtrails!
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And off go the believers, clutching photos as “proof”, and no doubt the flat-Earthers too…
I debunked this repeatedly elsewhere for years now…
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So it seems we have been too successful in “limiting” pollution these past thirty years, so much so that we may now need to ramp back up our pollution “emissions”, to cool the planet…..
But hold on,…..were we not limiting our “pollution” emissions these past thirty years to prevent the planet from warming.
This Climate Science bizzo is becoming more bizarre by the day.
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You touch it…You own it.
Hold them $$$$$$$$$$ accountable for ANY weather event at ANY location on the planet thereafter.
“If you hadnt done A then B would not have happened..”
If you want to DELIBERATELY attempt to alter climate – then whatever the outcomes, they land on you.
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Following on from Murray’s comment:
The best source of these upper atmosphere aerosols would be to build vast numbers of coal power stations, just like the Chicomms (two per week) and remove ALL emissions controls and optimise the combustion process to produce maximum smoke.
Solved.
Heh, I wonder if I could get a “research” grant for that?
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Seems they want to re-create the Black Country
https://www.britannica.com/place/Black-Country
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And how does attempting to dim the Sun help crops to grow?
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More importantly, what about solar farms…
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We will obviously need more solar farms to compensate for the reduced output of the existing ones.
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Perhaps we should try Dim Sum instead?
But would it add up?
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They can not get any dimmer.
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Dimmer and dimmer.
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This story would funny if it was not so frightening.
But wait on, it’s only SO2 so maybe it is funny.
More like money in somebody’s pockets . .
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If dimming the sun is going to help the climate, can I start burning off all that polystyrene or should I wait till I get paid to do it?
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Wait to get paid.
There’ll be taxpayer-funded subsidies to harvested.
But if you live in Victoriastan you’re out of luck because they’ve mostly banned polystyrene packaging.
Burning old car tyres will be far more effective to generate smoke and there are literally mountains of them.
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Do we need any further evidence of the psychological collapse of the Western managerial intelligentsia?
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Especially when there are taxpayer funds to be harvested on behalf of the Elites.
Who do you think will own the fleet of aircraft to haul aloft all these aerosols?
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Rumour has it Klaus the Schwab has stepped down from his throne – did someone mention financial shenanigans? – albeit replaced by Mr Nestle himself: perhaps Dr Evil is moving into the aeroplane crop-spraying business…
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I’m glad that the new Emperor of the WEF Peter Brabeck-Letmathe also looks like a James Bond villain, just like Klaus.
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Here he is.
Does he look like a Bond villain or not?
https://x.com/ryangerritsen/status/1914826638816051511
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I vaguely recall the boycotting of Nestle over their attempt to sell baby formula in third world countries, encouraging mothers to abandon breastfeeding. Worked well when the water supply was inferior.
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A nice piece of doublespeak. If they’re more reflective they’ll be brighter from above, but darker for the people living under them.
Suspect all talk of geoengineering is just to weaken resistance to other foolishness: Sign up for windmills or we’ll pump nasty stuff into the air.
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Good point.
Windmills will be offered as the least bad alternative to a dark, cold and gloomy sky full of artificial aerosols.
No one ever said the Left weren’t superb (but evil) psychological manipulators and propagandists.
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Think of the bright side of lithium battery bank fires.
They will generate plenty of sun-reflecting aerosols.
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To mask, or not to mask.
To stay indoors or simply close the windows.
Look mummy, there’s an aeroplane up in the sky
Cough! Cough!
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This is just another dubious scheme like covid vaccines were! We were advised that the vaccines would stop the P2P spread and worse still compelled us under strict rules and questionable Laws to accept the poison that would not cross the blood brain barrier. Both of these assertions have proved false! They have never isolated a covid virus but continue to re-enforce their lies. The medical fraternity that are duty bound to “cause no harm” have facilitated the exact opposite! Thousands of unnecessary deaths have occurred and thousand more will dire prematurely before this catastrophe plays out, if it ever does! As far as spraying another poison into the atmosphere to deflect the suns rays over Britain on the basis that it will remain in suspended animation when we can see precisely what will happen with our own eyes. Just like the chemtrails of high flying jet aircraft and volcanic eruption residue stratospheric winds will quickly disperse whatever they spray! Once again I’m reminded of King Canute the king who famously ordered the tide to stop
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“They have never isolated a covid virus ..”
Has a computer virus ever been isolated?
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‘ …. freakish warming that their models didn’t predict.’
It had nothing to do with shipping, the Hunga Tonga eruption caused a spike in world temperatures. The models didn’t see it coming and in the aftermath couldn’t second guess the ramifications of all that extra water vapour in the stratosphere.
Clearly, if they want global cooling then a reduction of water vapour in the stratosphere should be a rational first step.
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el- Gordo, the useless models also didn’t predict that the world would be 20% greener thanks to all that lovely extra CO2 fertilizer. Indeed, proven by NASA, so no ambiguity there. That the world’s agricultural crop production also keeps increasing due to the same effect. Anyway, I’m going to predict the law of unintended consequences here. The addition of SO2 aerosols will actually increase the world’s temperature, not reduce it, because of some unknown phenomenon the “dim” climatologists didn’t know about. Bound to happen.
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Large volcanic eruptions inject SO2 into the stratosphere and the planet cools for a couple of years, global dimming.
‘Symonds, Rose, Bluth, and Gerlach concluded that stratospheric injection of sulfur dioxide (SO2) is the principal atmospheric and global impact of volcanic eruptions via
SO2 + OH + 3H2O -> H2SO4 (l) + HO2
‘The SO2 converts to sulfuric acid aerosols that block incoming solar radiation and contribute to ozone destruction. The blocked solar radiation can cause global cooling.’ (Oregon State University)
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The UK already has the most intense geoengineering on the planet
Certainly costing billions and over a decade in action
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Half of me is Brit. I want a refund.
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This scenario was the basis of the apocalyptic movie “SnowPiercer”.
Plot: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1706620/
Watch free on Tubi: https://tubitv.com/movies/589397/snowpiercer
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This is probably the greatest example of climate quackery I’ve heard about since the proposal to tether a solar shield to an asteroid to mitigate the amount of sunlight entering our atmosphere.
https://www.sciencealert.com/giant-umbrella-tied-to-asteroid-can-help-fight-climate-change-scientist-says
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Surely the “media” are having a laugh at us ! I read some blogs based in the UK about gardening and such, they seem to obsessed with “chemtrails” whatever they are. Hard to keep a sense of humour some days !
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A few numbers
1. Countries totalling 500 million in population, Europe, UK, Australia, NZ, Canada believe in made made CO2 caused rapid Global Warming. 94% of the world doesn’t think so.
2. The two biggest economies, the US $27.7 Trillion and China $17.7 Trillion 43% of the World $106trillion are burn, baby burn. Oil, gas, coal, steel making. And India, Russia, Brazil etc.
3. But the UK with $3.4Trillion GDP and a tiny 1% of the world’s population is going to reduce their own temperatures by 1C by salting their own fields from the air. Brilliant.
And if you wonder how the UK survives? “The United Kingdom’s GDP is dominated by the service sector, accounting for approximately 79-82% of the total, with the largest segments being government, education, and health, real estate, and financial services.”
The world cannot wait for their success. After all the UK government just stopped China from shutting down what little that remains of their steel industry. Coal has stopped completely. American wood chips are allegedly CO2 neutral and run the place. Soon the UK will be a Green Superpower, like Australia.
The only thing missing is any actual science. The Druids of Anglesea are having the last laugh.
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Why not talk to our experts in the CSIRO who spent 50 years perfecting the salting of clouds to make rain. Surely they have some really useful tips after the fortune invested in overcoming nature. And turning England’s green and pleasant land to brown. Fifty million pounds seems like a bargain.
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Cloud seeding experiments kept people employed at CSIRO from about 1946-1971.
And then people at Snowy Hydro from about 2004-2024.
In about 1976 I saw an ex-CSIRO cloud seeding plane in a sorry non-flying, but restorable state at the regional airport at Molong, NSW. It may have been a Cessna 310.
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Correction, the airport was at Orange but I was staying at Molong.
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The plane was meant to be seedy.
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Some history on cloud seeding in Australia.
https://tottnews.com/2018/06/25/australian-companies-manipulating-our-weather/
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That’s $50 million the Uk doesn’t have and shouldn’t spend.
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But if the CO2-based model is inaccurate, there is a risk of triggering an Ice Age this way. Even Michael Mann calls this a very dangerous idea!
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/mar/12/solar-geoengineering-uk
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If the British government really thinks it a good idea to block out the sun wouldn’t it be more logical for them to save the steel works at Scunthorpe which is under threat of closure and reopen the one at Port Talbot that recently closed? That would have the benefit of enabling us to produce a useful product instead of relying on other countries to produce the steel that we need to build our own tanks for the army. It would also provide real jobs as opposed to the imaginary green jobs.
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21 is now a mini heatwave
https://www.somersetlive.co.uk/news/somerset-news/somerset-mini-heatwave-britain-set-10130801
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So…they want to pump pollution into the air to prevent the effects of other “pollution” ? We still haven’t hit peak stupid but this definitely raises the bar.
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The climate model philosophy is very simple and very effective. The models are continuously tuned to predict everything that they didn’t predict. So you only have to wait until shortly after a climate event to find out why it happened. With the new tuning in place, the models are then likely to predict similar events in future. Whether those predicted events actually happen doesn’t matter, because soon afterwards the models will predict what actually did happen, even if it was a completely new kind of climate event.
They don’t actually call them predictions, of course, they call them projections. What is a projection, I hear you ask. Well, a projection is a prediction that all governments and media can use with absolute confidence. When something different happens, that doesn’t matter because it was only a projection, which is something that can’t be used with absolute confidence, and anyway there’s now a new projection which can be used with absolute confidence.
But all this irrelevant of course. The bottom line is that the climate models are good because a lot of money was spent on them. Anyone who says they don’t work is lying because they don’t have anything better.
[EDIT] That was meant to be a reply to someone but things get a bit jumpy on a phone sometimes.
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You couldn’t come up with satire this crazy but those criminally insane politicians and “ scientists “ are actually doing this !
It is time that political leftism is classified as criminally insane and too dangerous to be put in charge of anything .
The significance of the image only became apparent to me after reading the article .
Simultaneously spending money to do 2 things that have the opposite effect to each other .
The only significant net effect is harm to the economy .
In a country renowned for it’s lack of sunlight where they have spent a motza on solar panels they are now wanting to reduce even further the available sunlight .
The name of science has been sullied by these crazy climate zealots .
Shame on the main stream media for not calling out this madness . The MSM is not fit for purpose and hasn’t been for quite some time .
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£50m? Amateurs!
https://www.eni.com/en-IT/media/press-release/2025/04/eni-and-uk-reach-financial-close-for-the-liverpool-bay-ccs-project.html
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