Climate is the overwhelming story of our generation. Each week, this email reports the science, often frightening, and the tech, mostly encouraging. Please share: free sign-up at www.maxaitken.com 

What you need to know

California astonishes: wind/water/solar over 100% most days

What happened? On 34 days of last 42 California generated over 100% power from renewables.
And when the sun doesn’t shine? Batteries kick in: one evening 6GW came online: the biggest single power source. Size of three big nukes 🤯.
Why this matters? We worried about grids & intermittent renewables. No more - though this isn’t easy, or cheap (yet).
Read more: The Cool Down

Floods: Climate change? (Yes)

Science right again? They warned: increasing temps mean more water in air and it’ll drop strangely (@hausfath)
Was Dubai cloud seeding? No, that doesn’t work (The Climate Brink)
Happening elsewhere? Yes: UK winters are getting wetter over time. Last 6 months the wettest since records began in 1871.

Chinese solar production: growth remains nuts

Why this matters? Solar is going to eat everything. China is now doing 660GWe of production a year (that’s 20x UK’s average power demand). 25% growth.
Solar, solar everywhere? Don’t underestimate how big solar will get, how cheap it will be, and that we will put it everywhere. It’s so cheap it’s being used as fencing (Business Insider).

One thing to worry about

The first scientific paper connecting carbon & temperatures was published 86 years ago this month. Will we ever listen?

One thing to be optimistic about

Phenomenal battery recycling, from the (other) founder of Tesla:

• 300 acres site, operating now, will scale to batteries for 1.3m cars by 2028

• Recovers 95% of minerals in an old battery

• Produces new batteries with 20% materials and energy of primary production

• So good that soon “we’ll only have to replace a couple % [of minerals] each year that’s lost in the process”.

Stuff today’s batteries will be in use in a century 🤯. Summary on X, article on Bloomberg.

If you’ve got more time, don’t watch this…

“Climate: The Movie” is a "dazzlingly entertaining film that distils the case against climate alarmism into a succinct 80 minutes." (Toby Young, The Spectator).

Except it’s not. It’s nonsense. Cherry-picked data, highly misleading graphs & outright lies.

Maarten Keulemans takes it apart falsehood-by-falsehood in this thread.

For instance, this temperature graph leaves out… recent temperatures, added in red below 🤕

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