Watts Up With That?

Not to mention that (retail) electricity prices went up like crazy and are now at up to 50 cents/kWh if you sign new contracts. 35 cents/kWh are pretty amazing already…

The depiction has a breakdown of taxes also and the trend is what I remember. I must admit I’m not 1000% sure whether the page that links it is great though:
https://wattsupwiththat.com/2022/01/13/german-household-electricity-prices-reach-new-record-high-in-2021share-of-green-electricity-falls/

That did the industry in Germany a real solid: https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Schlaglichter-der-Wirtschaftspolitik/2022/02/16-konjunktur-wirtschaftliche-lage-in-deutschland.html

Compared to 2015, it is down by 10% or so:
https://www.bmwk.de/Redaktion/DE/Schlaglichter-der-Wirtschaftspolitik/2022/02/16-konjunktur-wirtschaftliche-lage-in-deutschland.html

Now, I certainly advise caution how to interpret these figures and how inflation is factored in, etc. are big factors. Having several family members across Germany working in industrial production, there is a common theme that “production is shifted abroad at scale” though… Also keep in mind: the industry didn’t pay these 35 cents/kWh prices, those were what consumers paid…

The past 17+ years of political failure did the German working class a real solid. When the head of a state advises people to “use a sponge and not shower so often to preserve hot water” it’s almost surreal that a government charging 45+% of tax of a countries GDP is unable to ensure people have…

No, quite a lot of scientists have made such claims about coral reefs over time. Not all and some have refuted those claims too, so the media is certainly to blame for presenting a false consensus. But for example:

https://wattsupwiththat.com/2016/06/03/expert-scientists-exaggerated-coral-bleaching-story/

(original is paywalled)

Activist scientists and lobby groups have distorted surveys, maps and data to misrepresent the extent and impact of coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, ­according to the chairman of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, Russell Reichelt.

A former head of Greenpeace Canada famously turned on his old employers and started arguing that coral bleaching predictions related to climate change (ocean acidification, back then) were wrong:

https://fcpp.org/sites/default/files/documents/Moore%20-%20Ocean%20Acidification%20Alarmism.pdf

Many papers on ocean acidification, said to be caused by
rising man-made CO2 levels in the atmosphere, predict that
it will result in the mass extinction of marine species that
employ calcification, including corals, shellfish and many
species of plankton, and that this, in turn, will result in the extinction of many other marine species.

It cites some examples:

Even scientists one might expect would be more moderate in their tone employ alarmist language. An example from the journal Trends in Ecology and Evolution: The anthropogenic rise in atmospheric CO2 is driving fundamental and unprecedented changes in…

The IPCC is supposed to summarize the state of the existing literature, but it was born political, tends to attracts eco-activists of all sorts and relies more than it should on "grey literature" - unrefereed "reports" written by ecological organizations. The IPCC also to some degree generates the consensus it is supposed to be merely reporting on, in that the lead authors have been known to push specific articles into print supporting "their side" of things and delay articles supporting "the other side" with IPCC deadlines in mind so that their side gets the last word. That's one part of the process where excess alarmism gets to creep in. On the other side, your sources are correct that the result then gets massaged into acceptability. The "summary for policymakers" in particular is the result of political compromises - various country's representatives argue about it and then the rest of the document in some cases gets rewritten to reflect what the summary says, leaving nobody happy.

Nonetheless, the IPCC documents aren't terrible and do tend to be worth reading if you really want to know what's going on.

On being "past skepticism": The most credible skeptics tend to be "lukewarmers". They believe reality is a bit more complicated and uncertain than has been portrayed, they tend to suspect climate sensitivity is a lot lower than the models predict and they tend to be suspicious of doomsday claims generally. But almost nobody at this point doubts "CO2 is a greenhouse gas"…

The variations in surface temperature we have seen in the modern era are nothing compared to what we've seen in the recent geological record. Moreover, insects are very sturdy throughout the geological record, so it's very difficult to believe that less than 1C change in a century could cause this (the end of the last glacial period saw a 7C swing in just a few hundred years). It's pretty clear that climate change is not the stressor causing this.

EDIT: Allow me to expand.

As to climate, it's an extremely complex system about we have shockingly little information in the grand scheme of things (30 years' worth of satellite data!), lots of models whose predictions have been atrocious, and besides, Earth's climate has a number of negative feedback loops, like the water cycle. We also know that CO2 and temperature in the geological record are linked, with CO2 changes lagging temperature changes, which rules out CO2 as a cause of past temperature changes. Just a very small change in cloud cover along the equator can cool down an overheating Earth, or warm a cooling Earth (depending on the direction of the change). (Readers who are curious about that should read Willis Eschenbach's work over on https://wattsupwiththat.com/.)

But insects? We have a very plausible cause: our use and overuse of chemicals in farming, from fertilizers, to insecticides, to herbicides (which nowadays are used to kill the crops themselves as part of the process of ripening and picking them). We…

It doesn't work like that. The null hypothesis is that natural processes fully account for observed temperature data. In order to generate enough thrust to escape the gravity of the null hypothesis, you must do the following, according to Karl Popper (cribbed from here [1]):

1) Describe a difficulty or gap in scientific knowledge, a "general problem", clearly defined, and show that the problem needs to be addressed.

2) Formulate a hypothesis, a "tentative theory", addressing the general problem, stated as clearly as possible in the language of science, which is mathematics.

3) Try to invalidate the tentative theory, and apply a certain scientific ethic described by Richard Feynman in his famous essay "Cargo Cult Science"[2]

I'm not sure the "general problem" has even been established. From 1880 to 2015 the Earth's temperature has gone from 288 K to 288.8 K, a 0.3% increase. So first of all you need to prove that the Earth system is not able to keep the climate stable.

Then you need to prove that recent increases in temperature are fundamentally different from past increases in the same system, i.e. the current interglacial period of the last 10,000 years. Again, this is not conclusive at all.

Then you need to prove that CO2 plays a huge part in the recent temperature changes. Correlation does not imply causation. Two independent variables can both increase and you have not proven that they are causally linked (beyond the first-order effects of course). All we have so…

We drilled down to 12km of true vertical depth in 1989 (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kola_Superdeep_Borehole) as a scientific project, and since then there’s been a handful of commercial oil drilling projects that have hit similar lengths (but crucially not true vertical depth, they go shallower and then go sideways), and some oil extraction projects do drill deep holes looking for oil and then don’t actually extract it because there’s other easier targets.

The best indicator for whether we can harness this water might be something like “what is the deepest true vertical depth that we actually operate commercial-scale extraction projects at”. A quick scan didn’t provide any easy answers, but https://wattsupwiththat.com/2019/04/17/the-worlds-deepest-oil-well-how-bad-science-spreads-on-the-internet/ sounds knowledgeable (at least, aware of TVD vs length) and claims actual extraction at true vertical depths of 20k to 28k feet in the Gulf.

So commercial extraction tops out at ~9km and the limits of scientific exploration top out at ~12km. Ringwoodite is found 50x deeper than that, at 450km. Safe to say it’s well outside our reach.

The other issue is that oil is extremely amenable to extraction: it’s a big high pressure balloon of liquid deep under the earth, we essentially just poke a hole in it and it pumps itself to the surface. Ringwoodite is a solid material, we would have to transport it up that 450km ourselves, and once we have it’s still only a few percent water…