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By Jo Nova
The world is backing away from renewables
Wow. What a turnaround. President Macron, a man of The Blob, has come right out and blamed the Spanish Blackouts on renewables. No system, he says, can be so dependent on renewables. Everyone knew this, but few in power would say the words.
Back in 2017 this was the man who had a plan to shut down 14 nuclear reactors in France. Today he plans to push through a law to reverse that. At the same time, the current French renewable energy targets have just been dropped by 20%. Instead of building 150GW of unreliable power, the new target will be about 120GW.
Back in April, Spain finally celebrated 100% renewable energy, and within days suffered a national blackout that caused at least five deaths and left thousands without lighting and the internet, and panic-buying petrol and food. The blackout spread as far as Portugal and Southern France.
Macron blames renewable energy for Spain’s national blackout
— By Kieran Kelly, The Telegraph
French president says European neighbour’s deadly power cuts were caused by shift towards net zero
In response […]
By Jo Nova
Burn more oil and coal, save lives and never ever apologize
It’s been a hot ten days in Europe and the Blob-Propaganda Machine is running full tilt. A rapid “analysis” invented a number of excess deaths faster than junk science has ever been done before. So teeth can be gnashed appropriately, never mind about peer-review, who needs that? Thus, extreme heat was said to have killed 2,305 people across 12 cities — 2,305! And with Coupled Voodoo Models we can “show” two thirds of those deaths were because of fossil fuels and “Climate ChangeTM“! This study, note, has not even been published, it can’t be using real data from the event “seven days prior” (June 23 to July 2, 2025) because that won’t be published for weeks or months. It’s all guesstimated from past deaths in other years.
One *handy* thing about rapid analysis like this is that it’s also “too fast” to see if the excess deaths were followed by a lower death rebound, which often happens after heat-waves. A few hot days in a row generally take those who are about to die in the next six weeks anyway, so after the peak, comes the […]
By Jo Nova
The cause of the mysterious oscillations and the big Iberian blackout is still a mystery, and it will take six months before the world has forgotten, sorry, I mean before the official report is finished.
In the meantime, baffled Spanish grid managers, who couldn’t possibly speculate on the cause, have cranked up the nuclear power and the gas, and reduced solar generation for no reason in particular. It’s all very odd, because gas is more expensive, and sun is free.
The Minister accidentally called this “Strengthened Mode” . (Didn’t they used to call it pollution?).
Lest we forget — in the hours before the crash, solar power was providing 60% of the energy, while nuclear power was covering 11%, and gas was just 3%.
Net Zero Spain leans on Nuclear, Gas to keep the lights on after historic Blackout
By Oliver JJ Lane, Breitbart
Spain is running its national power grid in “strengthened mode”, using more nuclear and natural gas in place of the renewables it vaunted before last month’s historic blackout, but still hasn’t said what started the outage.
Bloomberg energy industry journalist Javier Blas, who is Spanish, further […]
By Jo Nova
Is this the Net Zero world we’re aiming for?
It could be a coincidence, but Spain’s grid ran entirely on renewables for the first time on April 16th. Less than two weeks later, at lunchtime Monday Spain and Portugal and even parts of France suffered massive cascading blackouts. Thirteen gigawatts of electricity, about half the grid, suddenly disappeared at 12:30pm. Trains were halted, and people were stuck in dark subway tunnels. A tennis tournament was stopped, flights were cancelled and diverted, and prosaically, as an emblem of the Western World, Spain’s nuclear plants shut too, and are now running on diesel back up. Shops have been stripped, people are fighting over taxis, and landlines and ATMs are down, and even the mobile network failed in Madrid. The mayor of Madrid has urged the PM to declare an emergency and deploy soldiers.
Electricity has been restored to some areas, but the grid operator has said “it could take up to a week to fix”. Other reports say “six to ten hours”.
Notably, Spain has one of the highest proportions of renewable power in Europe — with 50% of the national supply coming from pure unreliable power. Spain […]
By Jo Nova
All that stuff about a 1 in 100 year flood, they have no idea
It turns out the worst flood on the Rhine was not in 2024 but in 1374. On the Severn, in England the worst year for “climate change” was 250 BC. Obviously neither of them were due to man-made oil and gas.
A thousand news headlines have said modern floods were unprecedented, or were 1 in 1000 year events, or were caused by “climate change” and they were all based on just 120 years of data (or less), and they were all wrong.
For some reason, even though climate change is the most important thing on Earth, hardly any researchers were looking for evidence of long term extreme flood events. When researchers finally studied the sediments left at many sites — they found evidence that many ancient floods were just as bad or even worse. At least 12 times, ancient peak river flows were bigger than anything we’ve seen in the instrumental record. (And they’re just the ancient floods we know about, imagine if we put more scientists looking into fluvial sediments?).
The only thing unprecedented about modern floods is the gall of scientists […]
@PGuillermoSerra
By Jo Nova
Oh the Dilemma?
More than 219 people have drowned and another 80 are still missing after the devastating floods in Valencia, Spain. The UN expert climate scientists say that shutting coal plants and building windmills is the best way to stop floods.
Matt Ridley is wondering if removing 133 dams had anything to do with it, or if perhaps they should have built the big dam that was approved in 2001 but stopped by the Socialists in 2004:
Dam shame: what really caused Valencia’s floods?
Matt Ridley, The Spectator
… Valencia had a similarly terrible flood in 1957, in which 81 people died, long before climate change became the go-to excuse for any bad weather. After that flood, to prevent a recurrence, the Spanish government built a string of dams in the hills to hold back water and diverted the Turia river away from the city. For more than six decades the system worked well. Why did it fail this year? Because the unusually warm sea made for an unusually bad storm, say some. Yet charts of rainfall in Spain show no trend towards a higher frequency of more […]
The Socialists in Spain offered bonanza subsidies to build solar plants. People accepted them. Too many people accepted them.
Then the Socialist-rulers realized they could not pay them all. But the solar panels had been built. The debts were all accrued. All that was left was for investors to learn the true value of surges of surplus energy at the same time of day.
Sadly people faced losing their homes, in what must have been a grueling realization.
If only Socialists could do maths, they could have seen this coming. It’s not even quantum mechanics, it’s just arithmetic.
If only investors researched their investments and remembered that if it looks too good to be true, everyone else will pile on, and supply will wildly exceed demand, especially because no one really wants extra electrons for lunch.
Teach the children. The government should not be picking winners, but if it does, buy something else.
h/t Jim Simpson
9.8 out of 10 based on 54 ratings
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In March 2020 a group of doctors working in nursing homes in Toledo, Spain faced a new pandemic with no effective treatment plan. They figured out their own protocol as best they could with what can only be described as freakish success. In nearby Albacete when Covid struck 1084 nursing home residents, 303 of them died, a 28% fatality rate. But in Toledo, of the 90 patients in nursing homes under Doctor Blanco’s care, only 6 died, and they all died before the team figured out their own new treatment plan. Of the 84 residents who were then treated with antihistamines like Polaramine, all 84 would make it. Every single one, even though their mean age was 85.
It seems too good to be true. Antihistamines are used to calm an overactive immune system (itchy, sneezes and runny noses) but they are not known for their anti-viral activity, though it turns there is some.
And while the antihistamines are possibly very helpful, the whole treatment protocol was so much more, and also included nasal washes, antibiotics, and prednisone, as well as something called “respiratory physiotherapy”. Somehow these doctors, saints or geniuses, had figured out a combination that […]
Junketees are on the move
Last week tens of thousands of officials, observers, and hanger-on-erers began their annual migration. To make the journey some 26,700 climate junketees used a form of petroleum and one caught a boat. Currently they are immersed in the seasonal two-week harvest before they migrate back. Most delegates are collecting dollars, while others provide cash and collect Global Frequent Fashion Points instead.
Ponder that 11,000 athletes took part in the last Olympic Games and that’s only held once every four years. The COP events are the Olympics of government games.
Robert McSweeney of Carbonbrief analyzes the UN Lists to find out which countries sent the most people. This year the junketee migration largely started in Africa, was headed to Chile, but somehow ended up in Spain. In 2019 the countries saving the world were the Côte d’Ivoire with 348 delegates, and both types of Congo with 293 and 163 delegates each.
This breaks down into: 13,643 people representing specific parties, 9,987 from observer organisations – such as scientists, business groups and various non-governmental organisations – and 3,076 journalists.
Marvel that 3,000 journalists have gone there yet we already know what they will write.
It’s […]
Cheap energy might save more lives than expensive “climate-changey” energy?
Researchers looked at 47 major cities in Spain, from 1980 to 2015 and checked 554,491 deaths. Even though temperatures have risen, less people are dying of heat in Spain. Apparently human ingenuity, energy and air conditioners were more than able to keep up with climate change. The population is older but less vulnerable to heat now than it was forty years ago.
Air conditioners rose from 5% of the population to 35% during the study period.
Oh the dilemma — to save lives, should we build more windmills to try to change the global climate or aim to get 100% of households access to an air conditioner?
Welcome to the dire threat of climate change:
The relative risk of death fell as temperatures rose (According to the model used). See the caption below.
From the Discussion in the paper:
The temporal evolution of heat-related mortality risks here found is, in general, consistent with those reported by previous studies in some other countries [12–15], which provide evidence for a decrease in vulnerability to climate warming despite the ageing of societies. For example, in Spain, the proportion of people […]
Remember, all developed countries are going Green, and Clean Energy is everywhere. It’s only (insert your country) that is falling behind.
When you hear this, think of Spain. It is so green it’s just passed a tax on solar panel generation, so solar users finally pay for grid backup. This Spanish government has been building a renewable future with so much enthusiasm that their wind industry is described as “striken” and it’s estimated that the current government there has cost “65,000 green jobs”.*
That solar tax:
“The tax will be introduced in the next six months, according to a statement from the Ministry of Industry, Energy, and Tourism. It will apply to solar power systems with a capacity of over 10 kilowatts.
The Ministry said the tax is intended to ensure that solar panel users contribute to the cost of maintaining the country’s electrical grid, as they use it as a backup supply. “
They’ve been trying to get this tax through for a long time. It’s described as unpopular by the usual suspects and, improbably, as a tax on the “Sun” (but will the sun pay, I wonder?). Supposedly, I imagine, the indignation […]
Spanish Translation – The Skeptics Handbook I
I am delighted to announce that finally, after drafts have been sent between three continents, the Spanish translation is ready to share. With over 330 million native speakers of Spanish, I expect it will be one of the most popular of all the translations.
Download the 1.2Mb emailable version.
Thanks especially to Víctor González García in Mexico, who did most of the work and coordination, and with editing help from Pepe Salama in Spain.
Please send links to this page or to Pepe’s blog page to your Spanish speaking friends, so they can download copies from either site. And consider PePe’s page as the main home for discussion of the Handbook in Spanish.
There is a larger 7Mb version here for printing.
All translations and versions are available on this page.
Volunteers have translated the first Skeptics Handbook into German, French, Norwegian, Finnish, Swedish, Turkish, Portuguese, Danish, Japanese, Balkan and Spanish. The second Skeptics Handbook is available in French and Turkish.
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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