William sent in this one. Britain fires up coal power station because of the hot weather – see https://www.yahoo.com/finance/news/britain-fires-coal-plant-weather-185612922.html … it seems the National Grid was forced to switch to coal as a result of a surge in demand for fans and air conditioning units – or that is the projected excuse. However, air conditioning is something only the elite enjoy in the UK, the sort of people who protest at Just Stop Oil rallies. Air conditioning is much more common in the US, the source of the article. The real reason hoves in when you read further. High temperatures reduced the amount of energy generated from solar panels. It seems the higher temperatures go the less reliable are solar power arrays. This fact has generally been hidden from the public, and more angst has been spent on wind turbines that do not turn when the wind is not blowing – or are switched off when it is blowing too hard. The government might wake up to the unreliability of renewable energy one day – but not much chance of that happening at the moment as too much money is being made. Remember that when your electricity bill drops through the letter box – or you download it online.
At https://phys.org/news/2023-06-sun-solar-maximum-nasa-flagship.html … the Sun will reach solar maximum in 2032, in the middle of the next solar cycle. It offers an opportunity for NASA to prepare a mission to study the sun’s behaviour at maximum as the current Parker probe is not designed to look at everything – and has raised more questions. This time, NASA is thinking of 4 different probes at 4 different points in the solar system in order to observe the Sun at La grange points in the earth-sun system. Each probe would have a spectrograph to capture light and magnetograph to detect magnetic fields associated with CMEs [solar explosions of energy]. Presumably, this may be a major nail in the overdue coffin of climate change. The bottom feeders have another 8 or 9 years of sucking up at the trough.
Over at https://phys.org/news/2023-06-astronomers-true-nature-quasar-sdss.html … astronomers have investigated a quasar known as SDSS J0823+2418 and their findings are on the preprint server arXiv – see https://doi.org/10.48550/arxiv.2306.04041 …