Ross Lea,
UHI article itself was making a fair point. What strikes me with UHI is how many believers seem to think the UHI "problem" is that higher temperatures make the urban environment more dangerous, where the real problem is that it biases the numbers, falsely increasing the global warming trend.

I misread your "toward the end of the piece" and thought you were recommending the comments. Sheesh, what a lot of bickering, and wide-ranging bickering at that. Didn't wade through them all, but was disappointed to see a couple of the ardent sceptics get the odds completely wrong on the famous "Monty Hall problem". OTOH, I enjoyed this comment enough to snip it out (said to Entropic Man):

Lord Kelvin (possibly even smarter than you) calculated long and furiously, coming up with an age for the Earth which was completely and absolutely wrong. Another of this exceptionally gifted man’s statements in 1902 was “No balloon and no aeroplane will ever be practically successful.”

You are simply misguided. So was Lord Kelvin.

He went to his deathbed believing he was right. So will you.

tomo,
Shouldn't get *too* wedded to the "bad batch" notion. My reading of Fenton's piece is that *all* batches appear to be harmful. Bad batches can be blamed on poor manufacture or storage, but if the thing is unsafe in all cases, the harms point to inadequacies in government evaluation. And Jacinta heads for greener pastures.

Fenton's reasoning seems sound: batches didn't see uniform populations. This batch went to a popular retirement town and took out a lot of oldies. That batch went to an outer suburban town with many young families, and took out a smaller number. Both batches were harmful, but the numbers differed.

DaveS,

I am similarly in credit with my supplier (Eon), and they have had the audacity to increase my monthly direct debit payments this month. The notification had a feedback option, so I gave them my feedback, which was along the lines of your comment - it's not my job to improve their cash-flow interest-free. Needless to say they didn't respond, and I see that my monthly payment has indeed gone up.

This morning I received an email telling me that the prices are going up again next month (I knew this would be the case) as the price cap is rising in January. Interestingly, I am also told that my tariff “will no longer come with 100% renewable electricity as standard and your terms and conditions will be updated.”

Of course, my electricity never was 100% renewable – they lied about that, as did so many of the suppliers. I wonder if Ofcom has finally forced them to tell the truth?

@Ross Lea

I intend to resist as long as possible, for that reason. At some point they are likely to declare the existing meter timed out (at my old place the elec supplier automatically replaced the meter every 10 years) at which point there will probably be no alternative, but we'll cross that bridge when we come to it. In the meantime I've realised that I'm over £400 in credit with EDF, I'll ask for it back as I don't consider myself a lender of interest-free money to them. Direct debit billing is very convenient to them...

This from Dr. Roy Spencer.

https://www.drroyspencer.com/

Some interesting comments on the Heat Island effect toward the end of the piece.

DaveS,
Might be interesting to see how high they'll go (not that a *credit* is worth that much; strings attached)

I declined my supplier's offer of a "free upgrade", but received no formal acknowledgement. AFAICT, there's nothing to stop them coming here and installing a smart meter without my permission (assuming I'm not here at the time to take on that role).

Norman Fenton has described his evaluation of conclusions on the New Zealand vaccine outcomes. Mostly reasonable enough, if a bit wordy. The doubts about uniformity are key. Many won't be happy with his concluding paragraph:

What we can probably discount is the claim concerning batches with exceptionally high mortality rates. The claim that these batches were especially deadly due to the contents of the vaccine or its delivery is confounded by their very different age and time of vaccination profiles.

The big hazard is using probability theory for a posteriori analysis at all. He describes a 1 in 10 billion probability as "infinitesimally small". My usual thought is to express such things in coin tosses. It's about the odds of 34 heads in a row. Highly unlikely. But if you toss a coin 34 times and record the sequence you got, the odds of *that* sequence is just the same as 34 heads in a row. Analysing the probability afterwards is nonsense. The probability is now 1: it happened!

Sorry, I know I've waffled on about this here before, but it's one of my bugbears and it'd be good if more people got it. That's why I'm leveraging the huge readership here at BH!

DaveS

Stand firm Smart meters are a blatent attempt at central control. I will resist as long as possible.

Mailman - if you do not vote Conservative, that does not mean you have to vote Labour; there is also Reform. "Ah, but," you will say, "If I vote Reform, then that will split the vote, and Labour will get in by the back door...." Not necessarily; at the last election, the Brexit Party, the precursor to Reform, took their votes from Labour, and had Boris done the honourable thing, and withdrawn his candidates from those seats he was never going to win, Labour would be just a rump of its former self - all the votes that Labour lost did NOT go to the Conservatives. Do not assume that, at the next election, those who switched votes in 2019 will revert to their old ways in 2024; the Conservatives are, quite rightly, going to haemorrhage votes; Reform intends to put candidates in every seat, so just make sure that it is Reform that gets your vote.