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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Statistics
https://dailysceptic.org/2025/05/24/maternity-hospital-evacuated-after-solar-panel-fire/
Keep them off your roof.
30
Denmark 🇩🇰
World’s first carbon tax on livestock will cost farmers $145 per cow.
https://www.9news.com.au/world/worlds-first-carbon-tax-on-livestock-will-cost-farmers-100-dollars-per-cow/48a94ca0-c946-4d8a-afe3-430fc2f089a6
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NPR really hit publish on this headline
https://notthebee.com/article/npr-really-hit-publish-on-this-headline
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Ignoring the obvious threats.
NERC’s latest reliability assessment is unreliable
By David Wojick
https://www.cfact.org/2025/05/22/nercs-latest-reliability-assessment-is-unreliable/
The beginning:
“The North American Energy Reliability Corporation (NERC, rhymes with jerk) has just released its 2025 Summer Reliability Assessment (SRA). NERC is a quasi-federal agency under the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission (FERC, also rhymes with jerk).
NERC’s mission is to keep America’s grid reliable, which it has clearly failed to do. The nonsensical language in the SRA helps explain this failure. There is a deep fallacy that lets NERC systematically avoid saying how bad things really are.
This fallacy is the dangerously misleading use of the word “normal.” Here is a good example (out of many). Their basic finding is that “all areas are assessed as having adequate anticipated resources for normal summer peak load conditions.”
This sounds very reassuring, as does the whole report. The fallacy is that there is no such thing as “normal” summer conditions for a given day, week, month, or season. They really mean average conditions, and these are rare, not normal.
Here is an analogy to make the point. Suppose I work downtown and eat lunch at a lot of different places. Maybe twice a month I eat at Arby’s. It would be wildly false to say I normally eat at Arby’s since I eat there less than 10% of the time. “Normally” implies most of the time.
In the same way, average weather occurs less than 10% of the time, so it is wildly false to refer to it as normal. Moreover, the weather will often be worse than average as far as stressing the grid goes, sometimes far worse.
So NERC should truthfully say something like this: “All areas are projected to have adequate resources for normal summer conditions, but it is highly likely that conditions will be worse, including far worse.”
This is not reassuring at all, as it clearly calls for caution, which is how bad things really are.”
Lots more in the article, including NERC’s ridiculous depending on wind and solar to meet peak need.
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