Report Claiming Net Zero Will Cost UK Trillions Retracted Due To 'Factual Errors' 118
A report that hugely overestimated the cost to the UK of reaching net zero emissions has been retracted by the thinktank that published it. From a report: The Civitas pamphlet published on Thursday claimed to offer a "realistic" estimate of the cost -- $5.4tn -- and said "the government needs to be honest with the British people." However, factual errors were quickly pointed out after publication. The most serious error was the confusion by the report's author, Ewen Stewart, between power capacity in megawatts (MW) with electricity generation in megawatt hours (MWh). As a result, he presented an unrealistic "$1.57m per MWh" figure for the cost for onshore wind power. The true number is more than 10,000 times lower at about $60.3 to $84 per MWh. Another error was mixing up billions with trillions. A statement on the Civitas website said: "This report has been taken down from the website because it was found to contain factual errors, it is undergoing revision and a fresh process of peer review. A revised report will be released when this process is completed."
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I was watching live when the BBC gave up on the billion/trillion thing. This was somewhere around 1990.
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More like the 1970s:
1974 - British prime minister Harold Wilson explained in a written answer to the House of Commons that UK government statistics would from then on use the short scale.... The BBC and other UK mass media quickly followed the government's lead within the UK.
Wikipedia [wikipedia.org], Hansard [parliament.uk]
Peer Review (Score:1, Troll)
This report has been taken down from the website because it was found to contain factual errors, it is undergoing revision and a fresh process of peer review.
So who reviews the peer reviewers?
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Everyone can when the report is published. That's how science works
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Everyone can criticise, but who will pay attention to the criticisms?
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Publish the criticism in a journal and get it peer reviewed, andit will be paid attention to.
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that explains all the studies that cant be reproduced; all the attention everyones paying
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It's just what you anti-science climate change deniers do.
pfft, anti-science... why can you simply not care? if it meant people like you got swept away in a flood it wouldnt be all the bad
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> Everyone can when the report is published
Well, if you pay the entrance fee, and remember to cancel it before it auto renews into a subscription.
No Peer Review (Score:5, Informative)
So who reviews the peer reviewers?
There was no peer review in the first place. This was a "think tank" report, not a scientific paper.
(Where the word "think tank" is a circumlocution meaning "political lobbying corporation.")
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So who reviews the peer reviewers?
There was no peer review in the first place. This was a "think tank" report, not a scientific paper.
(Where the word "think tank" is a circumlocution meaning "political lobbying corporation.")
Ultimately, it was the general public, specifically the British news media who peer reviewed it and found it, to be frank, total bollocks.
When the UK media, who are notoriously bad at science reporting (and the Guardian isn't even the best of a bad bunch) can spot your errors within minutes you've really don't a terrible job of a hatchet job.
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This is the UK, clearly the peers in the House of Lords to the peer review.
GigaWatts!!! (Score:4, Informative)
1.21 JiggaWatts!!! (Score:1)
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Confusing power with energy (Score:3)
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Facepalm for the "journalists" who parrot press releases from Tory lobbyists and billionaires.
Let us all take a second to edumacate them using simple words even a 6th-grader can understand:
- Big units can be deceiving (in more ways than one): A petawatt over a femtosecond is a fraction of a Wh.
- Battery capacity isn't a primary source of power. It's like an energy bank that charges the cattle prod you zap your underpaid employees with.
- Power is what the spinny and glassy things make. The energy you pay
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It's important to remember that the Tory papers and journos *don't give a shit* about the factual errors. They already used the wrong info to persuade yet more readers that net zero is impossibly expensive. Those readers aren't going to pay attention to the corrections and retractions.
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Sure, and so are you. I change my mind relatively rarely. But I'm at least conscious of these biases and try to push myself to think about whether I'm indulging them
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The author was an investment banker. So:
- Definitely not qualified
- Ought to have a brain
- Ought to be able to crunch numbers and see if they pass a sniff test
- But ibankers are wildly arrogant and narrow-minded. See also: PE guys
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Is a freshman-level error. Whoever this author is, he has no business authoring a paper on this topic. Not. Qualified. Not that it matters in this era of alternative facts.
How dare you. The author here is a Think Tank. TANK dammit. Can you imagine how much thinking you have to do to be labelled a Think Tank! I mean I think of myself as an above average thinker. I often ponder the universe we live in on the thinking throne trying not to breath because the bathroom fan isn't working right now. But even I consider myself a mere Think Miata Roaster rather than a Think Tank. Who could be more qualified?
It'll stils be cited (Score:5, Insightful)
Indeed... (Score:5, Insightful)
The report followed Rishi Sunak's recent climate speech, in which he called for an "honest" approach to net zero that ends "unacceptable costs" and changed policies in order to slow the pace of the UK's climate action.
The Civitas report was covered by the Sun, the Times, Daily Mail, Daily Express and the Spectator.
By Monday the Express had removed its article, while others had added footnotes but kept the pieces online.
Basically, it is now a political truth.
Despite the fact that back in 2020, the UK government's official adviser, the climate change committee, calculated a net cost of 0.3 trillion pounds - by 2050.
I.e. Annual cost of 10 million pounds. Or just shy of 1% of UK's 2021 annual budget of 1.045 trillion pounds.
Simply drowning all those inbred royal parasites in a bathtub (or a pool... what ever is at hand) would save them ten times as much.
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Sorry... that's 10 million pounds - but with a B.
Sadly, drowning inbred royal parasites would not cover the costs of going net zero.
But that's not a reason against such an approach!
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10B pounds is less than 500,000 cheap EVs (per year), to replace a total of about 33 million cars (a small percentage of which are already EVs)
And that doesn't count the power plant upgrades / new solar/wind installs and grid upgrades to produce and deliver enough new electricity to replace all that gasoline.
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Will the car last 25 years? IIUC they're generally being made so that only the manufacturer can repair them, and the manufacturer would rather sell new cars.
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Will the car last 25 years?.
The timescale of 25 years wasn't the lifetime of the car but rather the approximate period between now and 2050, the period the report covers.
Re: Indeed... (Score:1)
I didnâ(TM)t know doubling or tripling the purchase cost of a car is trivial. The problem with most climate scientists is they have no clue how economics work, you canâ(TM)t claim to predict what the weather will be within n years when you simultaneously wave away all economic problems and predict resources in your solution will be at zero cost.
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Equivalent cars are, sure you can get a tiny Chinese EV that's basically an oversized motorcycle, but when I want to replace my family sedan, which comes in at $30k for an ICE (new), I'd have to put down at least $90k for a Tesla.
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10B GBP is peanuts. It's only about 1.3% of the yearly tax receipts.
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It'll be referred to, and amplified more and more like a shitty game of telephone. Like the "Prius is worse for the environment than a Hummer," article which I STILL see being referred to 4th hand, but it's become even more idiotic with the garbled passing down through generations of "research doers."
Re:It'll stils be cited (Score:5, Interesting)
both online & in official political discourse. Lies like this don't just go away. They fester like old wounds improperly sealed.
There was this infamous bus: https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cros... [warwick.ac.uk] Fun fact: Civitas is now registered at the same adress as the vote leave campaign https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
factual error (Score:5, Insightful)
We made a factual error. We completely made a wrong estimate of what the political blowback would be.
Re:factual error (Score:5, Insightful)
We made a factual error. We completely made a wrong estimate of what the political blowback would be
...to our telling complete lies.
So many people lie these days we thought nobody would notice.
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I mean, the actual government of the actual day is busy rolling back a huge swathe of its net zero commitments as we speak, so the notion that this report has caused political blowback, as opposed to mightily amusing various Twitter peeps who quickly pointed out its idiocies, embarrassing Civitas enough that they actually retracted, is in fact more stupid than the original error. Well done you!
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Despite a tendency to run on, at least he had both a subject and a verb in all his sentences and most of his subordinate clauses.
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Why, thank you. I should say that the running on was deliberate. I was just doing it for a tiny bit of fun.
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It's amusing that you think you can infer I care this much based on the mere fact that I wrote a long sentence.
And I'm perfectly at ease with a long sentence with six commas in it. I'm also at ease writing short sentences. I am content to use formal and informal styles, to use ordinary words, swear words, obscure words. If you or others struggle to read it, tough titties.
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We made a factual error. We completely made a wrong estimate of what the political blowback would be.
If you're assuming mal intent, the political blowback was the point. Clearly, the only politically-motivated reason for publishing a report that exaggerates the cost of getting to net zero using renewables is to discourage the attempt to get to net zero using renewables.
If anything (assuming mal intent), the wrong estimate was how hard people would look into the details to identify the "errors" that justified the exaggerated conclusion.
I think it's more likely that it was just shoddy work. Conflating wa
First, they came for our dialup (Score:2)
Then they said climate change was a commie hoax. Next, they said it wouldn't be too bad. And now we have heatwaves, cold snaps, floods, forest fires, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels, and collapsing tundra forests.
I just wanted some internet without ads or dropped carriers because someone picked up the phone to download a dithered 640x480x16 picture of 1994's swimsuit edition model.
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> And now we have heatwaves, cold snaps, floods, forest fires, shrinking glaciers, rising sea levels, and collapsing tundra forests.
No, now you have noticed them because they are now newsworthy.
All those things existed before your grandparents were born.
They havnt changed. Not one bit.
Oh and yes, glaciers will melt after the ice age that CREATED them has gone. Ice tends to do that.
shocker (Score:1)
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> that barely require maintenance
Why did you include wind in that list? They need loads of maintenance. Hydro-electric also. Moving parts.
Solar wins on not having any but they still need cleaning and the inverters do tend to die.
Was Michael Bolton (not the singer) involved? (Score:2)
Me (Score:1)
Embarrassing (Score:1)
But just just another in a long list of embarrassing fuckups of the UK. But no need to fret about it, just go have a pint at the pub until this all blows over.
Facts (Score:2)
Yeah, the thinking tanked big on this one.
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1 billion = 1,000,000,000,000
Only cool kidz wanting to sound like US kidz say 1 billion - 1,000,000,000
I guess they aint coolz
Language differences (Score:1)
Other errors aside, a billion in the UK is traditionally the same as a trillion in the US.
A UK billion is thus a million million. A US one is one thousand million.
The US definition is quite popular in the UK due to the onset of the internet and US specific terms (my own brother used to count pocket money in dollars when he was little lol) however like we have a mix of imperial and metric units, some of which are used merely as tradition, such as a pint of beer or a pint of milk weras all other liquids like
Re: Factual errors? (Score:5, Insightful)
Or is it because someone called them out on their bullshit and you're an idiot? It takes a special kind of stupidity to conclude that redacting a paper for being unambiguously wrong is some kind of leftist plot.
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It's good work if you can get it.
Re: Factual errors? (Score:2)
I never believe anything I read on dotslash. [./] ;)
Now slashdot [/.] I might believe.
Punctuation matters!
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I guess if your goal is to make the world a better place for future generations, it's hard to ever be satisfied
Re:Factual errors? (Score:5, Insightful)
You are making the assumption that Net Zero will be a big cost.
It will. But as the article points out, Net Zero in the UK might require a investment of ~1T, it will give us a clean energy supply, more efficient homes and so forth, all of which will save us awful lot of cash which reduces the overall expenditure. At the same time, at least if we keep going, the overall impact is that, as well as saving the planet, we will live in a more peaceful and less polluted environment ourselves, as well as ensuring that the UK population is highly skilled in all the things that we need to know about Net Zero. And which would you rather have skills in for the future: drilling oil, and building a wind farm?
Thinking about the future is a fundamental part of being human. I doubt that you are focused on the present day as you say you are.
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Re: Factual errors? (Score:2)
Good point. He is pretending to be someone who despises the ladder he climbed up on, like he was born into adulthood. But he is likely faking it. No one I know genuinely hates kids. At least not for long.
He also most definitely isn't still a child. Because children actually *like* other children, even when pretending.
Re:Factual errors? (Score:5, Insightful)
And what about the generations here NOW....?
Getting the numbers wrong by a factor of ten thousand is not going to help your case when you're arguing that renewable energy is too expensive.
Even the error of writing "billion pounds" where he meant "million pounds" is small by comparison, only wrong by three orders of magnitude.
But numbers have never been the strong point of climate deniers. Why bother checking your numbers when the answer comes out the way you want it?
Re:Factual errors? (Score:5, Insightful)
Apparently, even basic arithmetic has a distinct liberal bias!
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The problem is that this kind of unbridled egoism is exactly what is causing the problems in the first place. You are the problem.
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And this affects me how....?
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That is exactly how a psychopath would reply...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Re: Factual errors? (Score:2)
You are helping to make the world shittier and also complaining that the world is shitty.
Should you care? That's subjective. But is there any value to anything you say? Objectively not, since your cognitive dissonance is showing, and it's showing us that your logic is non-existent.
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Look to the past, with miserable conditions for kids. What ended it, aside from the few rich who played the corruption game?
The worst case scenario isn't as bad for kids as any of that.
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I guess if your goal is to make the world a better place for future generations
theres nothing more cringe than comments like that
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I know right? Feels really awkward when someone explicitly states the goals you're against and they look like good things
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It was because they hired a political guy most likely to try and claim it cost too much, and they doofus couldn't do basic math. So, I know you dind't read the summary, but the cost should be 10,000 times lower!
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It's worse than that. The author was an investment banker for *30* years. An investment banker who's so motivated by the goal he wants to reach, he fails to do basic due dil on his quant work.
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Since the math was challenged just about immediately after the report was made public, I suspect you're being unreasonable. Perhaps it will cost what you claim, but I don't know of any serious claim that it will do so. (OTOH, corrupt graft could make your claim an actual truth.)
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Re:Factual errors? (Score:4, Insightful)
And you know this... how?
You may be right, you may be wrong, but this is not a thing you decide with intuition or gut feelings. You crunch the numbers.
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I missed the part where they had offshore wind farms, nuclear reactors and electric cars in the medieval times... Pretty sure the insulation codes weren't up to par either. So what the fuck are you talking about?
Re:Factual errors? (Score:5, Funny)
I think he's saying that without electricity that's cheap 24/7, we'll have to go back to watching TV by candlelight like they did in the middle ages.
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Remember, never underestimate the bandwidth of a donkey cart carrying a crate of USB thumb drives!
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I thought it was pigeons?... ..You know, a donkey cart filled with pigeons?
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I think he's saying that without electricity that's cheap 24/7, we'll have to go back to watching TV by candlelight like they did in the middle ages.
...and hand-cranking to get Tinder going. Those were the days.
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Re: Factual errors? (Score:2)
Some not at all arbitrary point based on sustainability. But we don't have to have a hunter gatherer lifestyle, just that level of net impact on the ecosphere.
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Clouds [Re:Here's a fact related to this topic.] (Score:5, Insightful)
None of the climate models account for fucking clouds! None of them!!!
These days they all do [www.ipcc.ch]. In fact, not only are clouds modeled, they're actually measured!
I know it's not worth trying to inform anonymous cowards, but you might try learning a little about climate science in this century instead of last century. Start maybe with https://www.ipcc.ch/report/six... [www.ipcc.ch]
Re:Clouds [Re:Here's a fact related to this topic. (Score:5, Insightful)
Yes, but it doesn't seem to have helped that much to reduce uncertainty in the models.
Correct. But the original anonymous coward's post's statement is nevertheless wrong. Climate models incorporate clouds.
Also, the fact that science includes error bars and estimates of uncertainty is a feature, not a bug. That's one sign by which to tell real science from fake: fake science doesn't admit uncertainty.
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None of the climate models account for fucking clouds! None of them!!! This Net Zero agenda is really Net Zero population growth.
The Net Zero Agenda sounds like a desire to make the movie "Children of Men" a true reality.
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Since the premise of Children of Men is that women globally become infertile, there is nothing in the Net Zero Agenda that would do that. There may be a very slight chance that paleo viruses thawing out of the permafrost from unaddressed Climate Change might cause an infertility plague. However there is a very strong chance that unaddressed climate change will cause hundreds of millions of climate refugees from tropical areas rendered uninhabitable by excess heat or increasingly violent weather.
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> None of the climate models account for fucking clouds! None of them!!!
I remember when the IPCC finally figured out it was probably a good idea to consider the oceans.
As a teen entering his 20's having come fresh out of school I thought that it would be bloody obvious that modelling the oceanic effect on global climate was, you know, a big deal. I mean it only covers 7/10 of the entire globe.
The IPCC's oficial statement about clouds basically says that they dont exist as they cant understand how they w
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So, I suppose you have a real analysis with some actual numbers to back that up?