Robert: I'm content with an approach that's (a) true and (b) works.

Robin Guenier,
I have no great beef with the "I am not a scientist" part. It's the "so I don't know" that I'd avoid. It implies that scientists *do* know (or at least *can* know). Judith Curry is a scientist who says that the "complexity monster" turns a lot of the certainties into maybes.

Sufficient, I think, to get straight to the point, not refer to scientists at all and start with a confident "I don't know".

Robert: the advantages of the 'I'm not a scientist' approach are that it's true and that it works. See
this .

Robin Guenier,
That's a pretty good response. One reservation: I'm not keen on the inverted appeal to authority — I'm not a scientist so I don't know — it rings of the Trust The Science mantra. Scientists don't *know* either. Religion deals in certainties, science is nullius in verba.

My predictions of "friendly fire" were from my own attempts at reductio ad absurdum arguments against climate alarm. The moment they'd see the words "Assume x is true", the ardent believers: "of course it's true, why do you doubt it?", and the ardent unbelievers: "but it's NOT true!", and the later logical implications part of the argument was ignored by both.

Again, I wish you well with your efforts to derail the Net Zero madness. As you say, maybe it's far enough from the central articles of climate faith that you won't be dismissed as a blasphemer. Your more diplomatic manner might help too. As is often the case, my expectations are a good deal lower than my hopes.

Another possible line of attack on Net Zero is the trial run. Today Jo Nova has an article on Alice Springs and its 50% renewables by 2030 ambitions. Pretty modest compared to national rhetoric, but underpinned by lessons from experience.

The problem with learning from small scale experiments is how people scale them up. It's so easy to imagine economies of scale, the magic of Moore's Law, the wind is always blowing somewhere, etc., so of course the small prototype is far *too* small.

tomo,
Your link was mangled. Googling turned up this article which was a good yarn. I remember reading an article many years ago on the Honda S600 saying what fun it was: that you got to drive at 12,000 rpm like an F1, but on ordinary streets and at legal speeds. That engine upgrade no doubt changed that.

tomo - although I've had a lot of comments on my essay, so far there's been no 'shrill name calling' nor any 'contrived emotive claims'. That's probably because my audience has so far been largely sympathetic. But I do regularly make some of my points in places that are far from sympathetic and, on the whole, I find that opponents just go quiet. And that, I think, is simply because I try to confine my comments to easily verifiable fact. Name calling (shrill or otherwise) just looks silly in response to my observation, for example, that there are far too few skilled electrical engineers to meet Net Zero's requirements or that the extensive mining and mineral processing operations required for renewables are causing dreadful human suffering throughout the world.

I feel strongly that, as it’s possible to make an irrefutable case for abandoning Net Zero without, as I said to Robert, going anywhere near the ghastly and highly emotional area of climate change science, that must be the way to go. Otherwise you'll be dismissed as a 'denier' giving your opponents the perfect excuse for ignoring your views on the practicalities of the policy. And it's those views that matter: the overriding priority must be to get rid of this disastrous policy.

Robert: I've had a bit of that. My answer:

'I daresay you’re right – I’m not a scientist so I don’t know. But what I do know is that, if it’s possible to make an irrefutable case for abandoning net zero without going anywhere near the ghastly and highly emotional area of climate change science ‘debate’, that’s the way to go. This essay is an attempt to achieve that.'

tomo,
Thanks for the links. Owens Magnetic was interesting, though I'd have liked to have had more detail on what those various settings actually did. Were they just changing the current to fixed electromagnets, or were they bringing other sets of magnets into play?

Hadn't previously seen the Robin Guenier article. I wish him well with it. I'm afraid our side is a little prone to the "Judean People's Front" problem where unless you argue the case on the exact points I argue it on, you're part of the problem. I anticipate Robin will get a fair bit of Yeah Net Zero's rubbish, but why push that when CO2 isn't a problem anyway.

Listened to John Anderson interviewing Helen Joyce on the mad business of "transitioning" children. It was already fairly familiar from a number of Brendan O'Neill interviews, but there was one bit that gave me a wry laugh. Apparently, the NHS embeds your sex in your personal identifier(*). People who "transition", are therefore issued a new NHS id, which (madly enough) makes all their previous records inaccessible. Researchers are unable to do before and after comparisons of the person's state of physical or mental health. I suspect this amnesia was accidental, to begin with, but now seen as a convenience.

(*)Embedding attributes inside an identifier is generally a bad idea because attributes can change and you don't want to be changing identifiers; in their defence, the original devisers of NHS identifiers probably thought sex wouldn't be changing.

Had a skim around for info on Toyota's turbine hybrid work. It seems to be one of those circular topics where all the articles have a lot in common. Anyhow, this one gets it across reasonably well.

Now fit modern developments in batteries and electric motors to that setup and it could have a lot of appeal. Might even work for heavy transport.