Major industries were for the first time asked to down tools, and were paid ridiculous sums to switch off or reduce their power consumption. No doubt little men in Hi-Viz jackets were pouring over the Radio Times, trying to predict when exactly the UK coach potato brigade would drag ourselves away from our TV sets to put the kettle on.
The problem was blamed on a combination of unexpectedly high demand, power plant breakdowns and very low wind power output.
The real problem is EU diktats which have forced the closure of coal-fired power stations for environmental reasons, and the UK has been slow to build replacements for nuclear power stations scheduled to close over the next few years.
It is increasingly clear that the green alternatives, such as wind, solar and wave, are unable to fill the gap. Despite this, more useless wind farms are on the way as the Government has foolishly committed to cut greenhouse gas emissions by 80 per cent by 2050. Surely the incident last week should now be ringing alarm bells.
It would be reassuring to believe that somewhere in the bowels of Westminster someone with an ounce of common sense will pipe up and say ‘Enough, we need to re assess the situation’. If not, as Charles Moore said last week, ‘the obsession with global warming will put the lights out all over Britain’.
We recently watched as two perfectly good coal fired power stations were raised to the ground, and now another two are due to be shut and similarly destroyed in the next six months.
Meanwhile China builds a new coal-fired power station every few weeks. No doubt President Xi Jinping on his recent visit was bemused to see what a ‘pig’s ear’ the Government has made of our power generating industry. We have exceptionally high electricity prices, forced up by green taxes to pay for useless solar and wind farms. These high costs and China’s cheap products, have closed much of our remaining steel industry, and only last week the Michelin tyre plant in Northern Ireland.
It is time that politicians stopped listening to “Scientists”, and profiteering green lobbyists, who use improper statistical methods, short-term temperature trends, or faulty computer models to make analytical and anecdotal projections about the significance of man-made influences to Earth’s climate.
Global climate and temperature cycles are a result of a complex interplay between a variety of causes. Global warming started 18,000 years ago as the earth started warming up. Before then ice ages and glaciers had dominated the previous past several million years. It is said we are now in a temporary ‘Reprieve’ from the deep freeze; approximately every 100,000 years the Earth’s climate warms up ‘short term’. These periods are called ‘Interglacial periods’, and appear to last approximately 15,000 to 20,000 years before regressing back to cold ice age climate.
We are now much nearer the end of the current interglacial vacation period than the beginning. And, since the end of the last Ice Age, Earth’s temperature has risen approximately 16 degrees F, and sea levels have risen 300 feet.
We tend to over-estimate our actual impact upon the planet. In this case the magnitude of the gas emissions involved, even by the most aggressive estimates of atmospheric warming by greenhouse gases, is inadequate to account for the magnitude of temperature increases.
This is controlled by cyclical eccentricities in Earth’s Rotation and Orbit, as well as variations in the Sun’s energy output.
If we are on the brink of another Ice Age, the last thing we should be doing is limiting carbon dioxide emissions into the atmosphere, just in case they may have a positive effect in sustaining present temperatures.
Global climate cycles of warming and cooling have been a natural phenomena for hundreds of thousands of years, and it is unlikely that these cycles of dramatic climate change will stop anytime soon. We currently enjoy a warm earth, can we count on it continuing forever? The answer is most likely …no.
Instead of crippling the British economy in order to achieve small reductions in global warming, our resources would be better spent making preparations to adapt to global cooling and global warming, and the inevitable consequences of fluctuating ocean levels, temperatures, and precipitation that accompanies climatic change.
Of the 186 billion tons of carbon from CO2 that enter earth’s atmosphere each year from all sources, only 6 billion tons are from human activity. Approximately 90 billion tons come from biologic activity in earth’s oceans and another 90 billion tons from such sources as volcanoes and decaying land plants.
The United Nations Climate Change Conference is due in Paris at the end of the month. Let us hope the binding and universal agreement will be that ‘Man cannot and does not influence global warming’. So go home, adapt and support your industries. Do not waste time and resources fighting Mother Nature.
Carola Godman Irvine