Andrew Neil nails Hammond lies on the cost of Windfarms

In a magisterial blog Andrew Neil picks apart claims by Philip Hammond that,

"onshore wind [turbines] doesn't need subsidy anymore, onshore wind can pay its way."

The thing is that Hammond's lazy claim is just one of many from this government. They have such a brainslack approach to renewables that they say anything, with or without evidence and expect to be believed.

The problem is that Andrew Neil smelt a rat.

Well, we've heard nothing from Mr Hammond's department but this is what we've had from the Department for Energy and Climate Change:

“The current high oil price, and the increasingly clear evidence on climate change, underline the need to move away from fossil fuels.
Onshore wind is one of the cheapest forms of low carbon energy and the UK has a massive natural resource to exploit.
There is no direct public subsidy, but wind energy does benefit from the Renewables Obligation.”

The first sentence is irrelevant to Mr Hammond's claim.

The second would suggest that onshore wind is so cheap and so plentiful that there is no need to subsidise it.

The third sentence confirms that there is indeed a subsidy to onshore wind turbine operators via the legal obligation of electricity companies to buy electricity at artificially high rates (and then pass on the extra cost to us, the electricity consumers).

I think that Mr Hammond has, as they say on t'interweb, been owned.

Caveating the caveats

The Huffington Post is linking to a Reuters story about a panel of Climate change types talking about that which they talk about. Headlined,

Heavy Snowfalls, Extreme Storms Linked To Climate Change, Scientists Claim

the story fails to live up to its bidding.

This winter's heavy snowfalls and other extreme storms could well be related to increased moisture in the air due to global climate change, a panel of scientists said Tuesday.

They 'could well be related' to cream cheese. Though I doubt it.

What we seem to have here is some scientists saying that weather is related to climate, about as uncontroversial a statement as one is likely to see. The only chap linking this directly to man is one Mark Serreze,

The only underlying explanation for these events is climate warming due to heightened greenhouse gas levels, Serreze said

and boy does he have form.
"The Artic is screaming"

"The Arctic is screaming," said Mark Serreze, senior scientist at the government's snow and ice data center in Boulder, Colo.

Just last year, two top scientists surprised their colleagues by projecting that the Arctic sea ice was melting so rapidly that it could disappear entirely by the summer of 2040.

This week, after reviewing his own new data, NASA climate scientist Jay Zwally said: "At this rate, the Arctic Ocean could be nearly ice-free at the end of summer by 2012, much faster than previous predictions."

Three years later he appears to wind his neck in a little,

In 2007, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic declined rapidly. The drop from the previous year was so precipitous that it garnered worldwide attention and media coverage. In the last couple of years, the extent of sea ice in the Arctic, measured by the amount of square miles it covers, has recovered. This series of events, which underscored the year-to-year variability of the measurement, has made researchers cautious about describing events in the Arctic.

“In hindsight, probably too much was read into 2007, and I would take some blame for that,” Serreze said. “There were so many of us that were astounded by what happened, and maybe we read too much into it.”

I wonder how long it will take him to retract this time?