In Camden, North London, a homeowner did something that would strike most of the people in the world as entirely unremarkable: he fitted two air conditioning units to the rear of his flat so that his family might sleep more comfortably through a spell of hot weather. Camden Council’s planning enforcement officers thought otherwise. They ordered the units “permanently removed”, ruling that the installation breached the borough’s “cooling hierarchy” policy, and advised the resident to rely instead on open windows and balcony doors. This was no isolated bureaucratic misfire. It happened during a stretch of hot, dry weather of the sort Britain has seen periodically for decades, one that produced some locally exceptional readings elsewhere on the Continent but nothing that anyone who sweated through the summers of 1976 or 2003 would call unprecedented.
What was unusual was the accompanying body count. Researchers at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Imperial College London and the Met Office announced more than 2,700 estimated deaths across England and Wales attributable to the May and June heat, a figure duly repeated across the press as established fact.
As my colleague Ben Pile points out, it was nothing of the sort. The 2,700 figure was not a count of bodies but the output of a statistical model estimating how many deaths would statistically not have occurred at lower temperatures – a hypothesis presented to the public as an observed fact. Britain’s own official mortality statistics show that cold weather kills roughly
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The word will get out…Uk not a place to visit in the summer. Should do wonders for the economy.
108f today
The house is a cool 76 with the ceiling fans circulating chilled air.
Relaxing!
The idea of a cooling hierarchy is interesting. A family home may be a workplace, or a place of education. To our rulers I expect it is merely a cell in the hive, in which we pupate.
In 2018 I was living in a flat in Brisbane with ducted aircon running throughout the night. I find that most aircon in the UK has been designed / installed by the incompetent.
“… developers to minimise reliance on “energy-intensive” cooling…”
And yet air-con is a heat pump which we are urged to install to save the planet because they are less energy intensive.
Tumble dryers must now have heat pumps because they are less energy intensive.
So heat pumps, is they is, or is they ain’t less energy intensive?
And the three cardinal questions:
In this instance, Ai is not Artificial Intelligence, its Actual Ideology (or Idiocy or Imbecility) whichever you prefer
Absurd Ideology?
All this nonsense perpetrated by faceless bureaucrats who are working in comfortably air conditioned offices.
“Claire Coutinho, the former UK Energy Secretary, called the Camden enforcement action absurd” yet the London Borough was enforcing rules brought in when her party was in government. Yet again we are expected to blank out the 14 years of Tory government. We won’t.
I suspect this has more to do with political control than even their Net Zero policies. Similar contradictions exist in water supply: we had a wet spring yet we have hose pipe bans because successive governments brought in 10 million people but built no additional resevoir capacity; the public have to suffer for it and the PR spin says it is climate change.
Applying basic statistics to the published mortality data here’s the expected vs actual death rates for males and females 85+ years 2020-26. A death rate increase of 0.1% of the population is about 65 males and 100 females.
We can zoom in to look at 2025-26.
2700 extra deaths my eye.
^ Typo: A death rate increase of 0.01% of the population is about 65 males and 100 females…
It does not alter the analysis.
Clarification: The data are death registration rates. Death registrations are typically a week later than the death.
Method: The ‘expected’ baseline was generated by taking a straight line trend from 2010-2019 and averaging deviation each week from that trend (ten year baseline). Project the trend line forward and apply the average deviation per week.
The assertion that Europe does not lack the electricity supply to cool is homes may be true now, but it won’t always be so, with the onward march of renewables. There will inevitably be blackouts, either planned (e.g. South Africa’s load shedding) or unplanned (e.g. Spain).
We need governments to stop pushing their unachievable net zero goal, get out of the way, and let us decide how best to deal with our weather.
You seem to be calling for individual liberty and choice. That could be dangerous.
Indeed – taking responsibility for your own actions… scary stuff (to a government it seems)
Simone Rossi, CEO of EDF has said that we already have enough electricity as we have to curtail generation and should not add more. A stumbling block in the UK is that our electricity is the most expensive in the World and we would have to decide between cooling and eating.
It’s the patchiness of the supply that’s the problem. On a breezy, sunny day we have too much electricity and have to try offloading it on our European neighbours. At other times we have to import it over the interconnectors at premium prices. Averaged out we may well have enough, but at particular moments we don’t.
Yes, exactly!
I’m confused, if I place my a/c unit in my living room with the exhaust hose through the window to my balcony I’m destroying the climate but if I put the unit on the balcony and the hose into the living room I’m saving the planet?
Does my machine have AI that I’m not aware of?
No, your machine has people for that sort of thing.
A perfect example of how idiotic this whole thing is. I learnt this about 20 years ago when sorting out an advertising contract with a company producing air source heat pumps. “How do these things work?” I asked. “It’s basically just air con in reverse” he replied.
And what in your fridge.
The evidence we are ruled – and ruled I’m afraid we are – by idiots and sociopaths abounds everywhere.
The first is not approved by the Net Zeroid Greenstapo, the second is and soon to be mandatory.
‘The Enlightenment’ much of it was unenlightened. I know that because I can look around my world today and see anti-reality b.s all around me.
“Europe does not lack the technology, the electricity supply or the wealth to cool its homes. What it lacks is a governing philosophy willing to concede that comfort, like any other good, is for the person paying for it to decide in a free market. “
True.
The governning theology of Statism mandates that plant-food causes climate and that your air-conditioner has killed Gaia (or your Mercedes). Such nonsense can be traced directly back to ‘the Enlightenment’ and of course ‘The Science’. You will do what you are told to do. See the Rona plandemic for a runbook example.
Good point. The enlightenment was the beginning of the end of understanding what we cannot understand very much at all.