iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 11/10/2026

The UK has made great strides in greening its power sectors, but must now drive on with electrifying end-use (esp. in cars & heating) to drive out fossil fuels. What many don’t realise that this process will reduce our primary energy needs by two thirds, from 2400 TWh in 2010 to 800 TWh. 1/

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 08/10/2026

Based on a talk I gave to a lay audience in a village hall, here is an accessible but fully referenced version of an explanation of my view that for the UK 'Greening our energy: sooner than you think' essaysconcerning.com/2026/10/08/g... #Energysky

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

Been out of the studio for tooo long (busy with climate/ energy work), so after a big tidy up I got back in the saddle with a little pen and wash of a much loved street in Bath. I always love the hustle & bustle of people, and the cafe culture. Perfect for ‘cafe art’ 😂

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Jan Rosenow @janrosenow.bsky.social · 07/10/2026

BIG NEWS: Up to 75% of global energy demand could be electrified by 2050 with technologies we already have. Progress is slow and the barriers are mostly political and institutional. Today we launch the Oxford Martin Electrification Accelerator to change that. oxfordmartin.ox.ac.uk/electrification

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 06/10/2026

Is it April 1st? The Tory's are now suggesting autonomous vehicles for rural communities as response to dastardly community Burnham buses. Kapow! Nearly everyone I meet of any persuasion thinks its crazy not have solar on new builds; so the Tory's oppose Future Homes. Kapow! It gets worse 1/

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 05/10/2026

How sad am I, catching up with this session of the Energy Security and Net Zero Select Committee from 2 September, available via iPlayer. Living the dream!

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 04/10/2026

Regarding Wolfram Weimer on climate change, I was going to ask - given the impacts are now clear even to the blind - whether he has softened his angry denialism and obdurate refusal to engage with the facts, evident in his 2007 attack on Stefan Rahmstorf?

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 24/09/2026

A sound wave travelling at 340 m/s uses air as a medium - there is no bulk transport of air which stays in place. Electricity travelling at or near the speed of light uses conductors with free electrons as a medium, but the electrons stay in place - they are just a medium. 1/

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 17/09/2026

I asked Claude: do Synchronous Condensors have better sub-minute response to drop-outs than BESS? A. Actually the opposite is closer to the truth on raw response speed, and it's worth being precise about which "response" we mean, because there are really two different things being compared. 1/

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 16/09/2026

There has been so much chatter about the prophecy that AI has a 10% chance of destroying humanity in the next decade, that it is refreshing to hear the brilliant Tim Harford giving it short shrift in the closing moments of the latest episode of 'More or Less' on BBC Radio 4 (16th Sep 2026). 1/

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 13/09/2026

Jonathan Ford's piece on Radio 4 ‘Can Britain’s Broken Energy System Be Fixed?’ (BBC Radio 4, Currently, 13 Sept 2026) in the end very biased against a renewables dominated power sector. 1/

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Robert Rohde @rarohde.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Let's talk about the weather and climate changes that preceded the Nepali glacier collapse and landslide. It's well known that Nepal is warming, but we can do better and estimate the changes at the 5200m elevation site where the mass of ice and rock ultimately broke loose. A thread. 🧵🧪

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 05/09/2026

From a letter to my MP: "While it is true that the UK will be using fossil fuels for sometime it is not true that this requires further drilling. The IEA has previously stated that no new oil and gas fields should be approved to stay within the 1.5°C target for net zero by 2050." 1/

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 04/09/2026

Thought I'd ask Claude to do a plot of Central England Summer temperature versus a 1961-1990 baseline from 1659 to 2026, with a smoother curve through the noise (LOESS plot). A reminder that the signal is pretty clear. #climatechange #englandwarming

Metoffice HadCET data plotted by Claude using LOESS smoothing - span ≈18% of data (~65-yr effective window)

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 03/09/2026

My latest essay. It's been bubbling away since Allister Heath, editor of The Sunday Telegraph, decided to write a It's Too Late (Stage 5) piece. We shouldn't be surprised but it was still shocking. This is my response. #ClimateChange #FiveStagesOfDenial essaysconcerning.com/2026/09/03/t...

essaysconcerning.com

The Five Stages of Climate Denial – A ‘Telegraph’ Case Study

In a 2013 article, Dana Nuccitelli described the “five stages of climate denial”, which in brief are: Stage 1: Deny The Problem Exists Stage 2: Deny We Are The Cause Stage 2b: Consensus Denial Stag…

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Alice Roberts @profaliceroberts.bsky.social · 27/08/2026

The fallout from the collapse of this glacier - a torrent of mud surging down the valley - killed hundreds of people. Gone, in a flash. Those people were wiped out by anthropogenic climate change. Our governments are simply not responding quickly enough to this disaster which is already upon us.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 22/08/2026

The Tories were happy to stamp their feet and shout that net zero is bad. Now they've made the blunder of trying to write an alternative plan (the rather backward Onward report) that exposes their muddled thinking. 1/

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

I have a Schumacher Briefing pub. by @schumacherinst.bsky.social which joins the dots! 'Is the UK approaching a Clean Energy Tipping Point? — Exploring the UK’s Clean Energy Transition using a Systems Thinking approach' Link in comments Fig here shows Reinforcing Loops from Causal Loop Diagram

From: Is the UK approaching a Clean Energy Tipping point?, Richard Erskine, The Schumacher Institute. https://www.prepareforchange.org/tsireadings/briefings/uk-clean-energy-transition/

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 13/08/2026

Listening to BBC Radio 4 Today. I'm in shock! A positive discussion about Universities. What next, a positive story about the huge strides already made towards net zero?! God forbid. @bbcnews-uk-rss.bsky.social

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 11/08/2026

Just a reminder. The heating of our planet is like a ratchet. Every tonne of man-made greenhouse gases we emit adds an increment of warming. A statement true today and every day: 'this will be regarded as a cool year in coming years', and repeat; until we stop emitting. =====> heating

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Rage Against the Miocene @organiccarbon.bsky.social · 09/08/2026

Fires and deaths rightly get headlines, but it is food shortages and skyrocketing prices that will exert the greatest long-term threat - poor nutrition and health, greater poverty, the class divide becoming a chasm. news.sky.com/story/uk-rec...

news.sky.com

UK record for number of days above 30C broken, as new heatwave approaches

Temperatures of at least 30.6C were recorded on Sunday, bringing the total number of 30C days in 2026 to 35 - a new UK record. Farmers are warning of a crops "disaster" and food shortages as a fifth h...

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Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

You mean like this? It's a bit misleading as it looks like variance has increased, but that's an artifact of the rapid warming trend. But the limited overlap gives you a sense of how different the climate is. I'll update the graphs in September when we have the JJA data in for 2026

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Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 10/08/2026

European summers aren't what they used to be! Grey curve is the climate of 1950-90. Every coloured line is a summer since 1991. Every one since 2005 sits beyond the 95th percentile of the curve. This isn't a shifting #climate. It's already a new one! 🤯🥵 Plot inspired by Barriopedro et al. 2011

Distribution of European summer temperature anomalies, June to August, over 25°W-40°E, 35-70°N, land only, the region used by Barriopedro et al., relative to 1961-1990, from ERA5. Grey bars show the 41 summers from 1950 to 1990, with a normal curve fitted through them, centred near zero. Coloured vertical lines show every summer from 1991 to 2025, shaded yellow through dark red by year, and almost all of them fall to the right of the grey distribution. The ten warmest are labelled, with 2024 furthest right at 2.74°C and 2022 next at 2.54°C. A dotted line marks the 95th percentile of the 1950-1990 distribution at 0.76°C.

Both run long, which is fine, since alt text has no practical limit and screen reader users benefit from the detail.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 03/08/2026

Getting tired of voxpops where people are asked "what do you think about the heatwaves?" - inevitably you get someone say "oh, it's called summer isn't it - stop moaning". Reminds of a French & Saunders sketch. Leg blown off with shotgun, 'hospital? noooo! fuss and nonsense'. #heatwaves #climate

still from a French & Saunders sketch - includes one of the ladies cutting her finger off and feed to the dog; recounting being run over by her land rover; getting shot by someone with a shotgun … all shrugged off with a 'stuff & nonsense'. It's a parody of a kind of reaction common amongst, let's call them, middle Englanders.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 31/07/2026

Net Stupid: A Telegraph Reader's Lament(2010–2040), 5 verses We scoffed at wind and sun as toys, too feeble to be real, Barely worth a mention on the national energy deal. Then somehow we'd too much of it — the grid, they said, would choke, No "inertia" left to speak of. We didn't get the joke 1/5

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 28/07/2026

A chat on my local climate WhatApp: A: "I have just read the Tim Stanley article in the Telegraph. He attacks the "online Right" for climate denial. Could this be a bit of a turning point to get back the polical consensus?" B: "Lord I hope so." 1/2

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 23/07/2026

Now of course any Government has to 'balance the books', but it does seem that 'fiscal rules' now seems to dominate all other framings of policy, at least for Journalists. The default response to any announcment is 'where will the money come from?' as the reporter's whip out their spreadsheets. 1/2

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 22/07/2026

My new normal lawn has looked like this about this time of year for the last few years. Farmers crop yields down, and harvesting early this year www.farminguk.com/news/farmers... What happened to that Matt Ridley 'carbon dioxide is a plant food so the more the merrier' talking point? 1/2

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 21/07/2026

@miattafahnbulleh.bsky.social congratulations on becoming Energy Secretary. My money was on you, my hope too.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 19/07/2026

Argentina thankfully lost - they displayed such negativity, fouling, and play acting. Spain kept their cool despite the provocation 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 18/07/2026

Football commentators are so tiresome. England 4-0 up against France at half time and all they can do is talk about "what might have been" in the last match. Is half glass empty a national trait or just curmudgeons like Dan Murphy?

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Dr. Aaron Thierry @thierryaaron.bsky.social · 16/07/2026

Here's Andy Burnham committing to a fossil fuel phase out and the @fossiltreaty.bsky.social last year. The science is extremely clear, we already have far more fossil fuels than can be burned if we are to stay within the Paris #climate targets & prevent catastrophic warming.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 14/07/2026

Watching the France - Spain game the commentators are comparing how well the attacking side is keeping the defence contained using their 'press'. Le Monde and El Pais have a lot to answer for!

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 12/07/2026

Not for the first time, I'm sure the police are overjoyed to find Nigel Farage offering his politically motivated opinions. They will do their work investigating the murder of Anne Widdicombe without his noises off. It is nothing to do with stirring up trouble to distract from his own troubles.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 09/07/2026

Yet another spasm of posts about fusion achieving some goal, but lacking an honest caveat. The goal of ensuring the end to end process from grid power in to grid power out yields a net power gain, not a massive loss, is still so far off it is irrelevant to addressing man-made global warming.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 07/07/2026

I’m wondering if Belgium should send Trump a box of chocolates for accomplishing the dual feat of firing up their team while demoralising his own through his crude and crooked intervention. #fifa #worldup

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 02/07/2026

I’m working on a systems thinking ‘causal loop diagram’ connecting energy, electrification, climate impacts (nature, agriculture, health), national security, extreme weather, nature, etc using a causal link diagram - I’ll try to get it published but interested in who else has published similar work.

Richard Erskine working on ‘greening our energy and national security’ causal loop diagram (2 July 2026).

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 01/07/2026

BBC Radio 4’s ‘More Or Less’ this morning (at 15’40” into programme) totally demolished the ridiculous story - that repopulating Whales is a major solution to climate change by sequestering carbon - that has been around for a years but has been reinvigorated by the not so clever bods at the IMF. 1/

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 30/06/2026

The best bit during the game was commentator “whoever loses is going to be leaving the Americas 🧐 although I suppose Paraguay will be staying whatever happens” (or words to that effect). Almost as good as David Coleman’s “there are players all over the field!” from 1978 if I recall correctly.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 28/06/2026

This Global Weirding episode from 7 years ago by @katharinehayhoe.com is still unsurpassed in how it answers the question of "what's the big deal with a few degrews?". It combines engaging metaphors with plain english, all underpinned by scientific insight. Please share. youtu.be/6cRCbgTA_78?...

youtu.be

What's the Big Deal With a Few Degrees? | Global Weirding

YouTube video by Global Weirding with Katharine Hayhoe

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 26/06/2026

The Comma, and you can see why it is called that from its underwing, is my favourite butterfly and always loves to rest on our garden steps handrail. It always gives me joy seeing it return, for another year, as it did this evening. 1/2 @savebutterflies.bsky.social #comma #nailsworth

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 14/06/2026

A couple of quickie watercolours in small sketchbook. The first using minimal gear on windy Manorbier Besch. The second a view of Penally from the beach path done in ‘street art’ style. #pembrokeshire #manorbier #penally #watercolour

Sketch of Manorbier Beach by Richard Erskine

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 11/06/2026

When I talk to lay people about retrofit - be it heat pumps, insulation or solar - they often feel it difficult to get practical actionable information. It can be a bit too high level in some cases or too technical in others. On social media it is the usual back and forth claims and counter claims.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 10/06/2026

This is an impromptu exchange I had with Claude AI on consciousness. I have to admit to a glass of wine, whereas Claude was completely sober. Needless to say, I feel it was a draw! essaysconcerning.com/2026/06/10/w...

essaysconcerning.com

What is consciousness? A discussion with Claude

The following is a discussion I had with Claude AI, Sonnet 4.6 – The larger font italics text are my prompts, the rest is Claude. In answering a question, how many nodes of the Sonnet model a…

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 24/05/2026

Is there anything more sublime than Sandy Denny singing her song Who Knows Where The Time goes on this rendition by Fairport Convention on the History Album. Rediscovering a love of the simple pleasures of vinyl. No track switching algorithms, just enjoying a work of art as it was conceived.

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Climate Change Committee @thecccuk.bsky.social · 20/05/2026

📣 Our ‘A Well‑Adapted UK’ report is live. How do we protect our way of life from the biggest climate risks we face today? www.youtube.com/watch?v=sLU7... ⬇️

youtube.com

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Michael E. Mann @michaelemann.bsky.social · 18/05/2026

Future carbon emissions scenarios will be determined by politics. The warming *associated with* those scenarios will be determined by physics. If you fail to acknowledge the fundamental difference between these two things, you're either as dim-witted or dishonest (or both) as Donald Trump.

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EssaysConcern @richarderskine.bsky.social · 19/05/2026

So the Greens won with a plumber, so now Reform come up with a plumber in the Makerfield by-election. Is this a weird kind of mirroring behaviour at work or what? All we need now is for Burnham to prove he can clear a blocked u-bend and it’s game on.

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