Guest post by Steven Goddard
The UK has been experiencing the coldest winter in several decades, and hopefully policymakers have learned a few basic lessons from this. Here is my wish list, which seem painfully obvious.
- Britain can’t rely on global warming to stay warm in the winter.
- Britain can’t rely on solar power to stay warm in the winter. There just isn’t enough sun (which is why it is cold in the winter.)
- Britain can’t rely on wind power to stay warm in the winter. During the coldest weather the winds were calm (which is one reason why the air temperatures were so low.)
- Britain can’t rely on Russian natural gas to stay warm. The gas supply was cut off for weeks due to politics.
The only large scale energy supplies the UK can rely on in the near future are coal, oil and a small amount of nuclear. So next time you see a “coal train of life” remember to wave at the driver. And I hate those ugly, motionless windmills popping up all over the countryside.
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Coal is 100% organic.
Coal is 100% natural.
Coal is 100% good.
The British once ruled the world. Now they are the puppets of European climate busybodies and their own homegrown climate ideologues. Maybe it’s time for a revolution. Or maybe the once great nation will lay down in the snow and die.
It’ll be a pretty ironic day when the “Greenies” in Britain have to admit that they’ve used coal to keep warm during the winter, because their “sustainable energy” was so “sustainable” that it didn’t provide enough energy and Global Warming’s “faster than we ever dreamed in our wildest imagining” acceleration didn’t bring enough “catastrophic and apocalyptic” warming.
For some reason, those windmills remind me of Easter Island.
OT:
AP Interview: EPA near ruling on greenhouse gases
WASHINGTON – EPA administrator Lisa Jackson says the agency is moving toward regulating the gases blamed for global warming.
In an interview Tuesday with The Associated Press, Jackson said the agency will decide whether greenhouse gases are a danger to human health and welfare, the legal trigger for regulation under federal law.
Jackson said the Environmental Protection Agency owes the American people an opinion, after years of the Bush administration not taking a position on the matter — a track record that she referred to as a deafening silence.
“We are going to be making a fairly significant finding about what these gases mean for public health and the welfare of our country,” Jackson said.
Recent EPA decisions have hinted that the agency was leaning toward using the Clean Air Act to regulate the gases, a step the Bush administration refused to take despite prodding from the Supreme Court.
_____________________________________________________________________
I think a legal fund needs to be set up to block / postpone this action.
Any ideas?
The next time some greenie complains about coal-fired heat sources, tell them to travel to the hinterlands of China and try to stay warm on electric heaters plugged into a windmill.
Will the last person to leave the UK please turn out the lights?
Oh. My bad. They’ll all be turned off long before the last person leaves if Steven’s points aren’t heeded.
Heads up, US of A!
Those ‘ugly, motionless windmills popping up all over the countryside’ will be lasting monuments to the stupidity of the current British government.
The only pleasure they give me is knowing they’ll be around for years… their rotting hulks reminding those responsible of their own incompetence.
I wonder how much of the lack of solar/wind apply to US in the winter. We seem to have a lot of wind in many parts of the country. But I heard they fling ice chunks.
I am still living on fossil fuel.
“…ugly, motionless windmills …”
Drive the highway between Mojave, CA and Bakersfield, CA through the Tehachapi wind turbine farm and see acres of motionless windmills. They have been there for years, presumably destroying the raptor population.
Steve says; “The UK has been experiencing the coldest winter in several decades, and hopefully policymakers have learned a few basic lessons from this.”
As your friendly policymaker I hope so too.
Here’s my list;
1/ I suspect this is weather not climate.
2/ I agree with your points 1-4.
3/ Insulating homes against extreme weather saves 50 times the CO2 per pound spent that energy from wind does and 300 times that of Solar (photovoltaic). Subsidising insulation for all would be a sound policy which ever way the climate changes.
4/ As we run out of our own oil we must find alternatives for the same reasons we can not rely on overseas gas.
Don’t give up on us Steve.
And in the future there will be great towers that harvest
the wind! and then….and then….wooden shoes!
RIGHT ON, STEVEN. THERE ARE SOME SANE PEOPLE LEFT!
Ed Scott,
California has some unique circumstances which produce a lot of wind at the boundary between the cold, wet Pacific air and the hot, dry desert air. (Ideal bird chopping conditions.) And I’ve never been in Wyoming when it wasn’t windy.
England also tends to be breezy, but not during Arctic cold snaps – when electricity is needed the most. That was my point.
The sad thing happening in the UK is that excess cold related deaths have gone up 7% in 2007. There will be more when the counting is done for 2008. Why? The cap and trade has made fuel and electricity too expensive for many people so they die of cold. It’s called fuel poverty and a more deaths to add to the greenies death toll. Soon to be seen in the US and Canada.
The BBC is at it again – another front page story about global warming from a mathematics professor whom they describe as a “top scientist.”
The battle against climate change can only be won “in the hands of the many, not the few”, a top scientist has said.
Jacqueline McGlade, head of the European Environment Agency (EEA), warned the current approach left the public sidelined as “silent observers”.
Political and business leaders were not able to tackle the problem without help from ordinary people, she added.
Professor McGlade said environmental policies would also benefit from data based on public observations.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/7892992.stm
Just don’t report it if you are cold.
Phil’s Dad,
I have heard politically correct politicians state that they did not need _______ because of global warming. This fill in the blank statement included things such as:
Road Salt
Snow Fences
Snow Plows
Cold Weather Clothing for various departments
Natural Gas Contracts
Winterizing Various Buildings
New Furnaces
Snow Days Built into a School Calendar
and many others.
Unfortunately, many of these people think that they are doing the public a service by saving resources. The results of the naive policies have cost us more than just money, many are injured and killed by such myopia challenged people. Too bad it is those they try to serve that suffer.
“For some reason, those windmills remind me of Easter Island.”
Tom in Texas (18:26:51) : Your words may prove all too prophetic. The phrases “Motionless idols to unknown Gods” and “Collective insanity” also have some synergy here.
The UK’s weather is highly dependent on the Gulf Stream which is approximated by the AMO index (SSTs in the North Atlantic).
The AMO in January has gone negative for the first time in 7 years and the overall trend indicates it is cycling down now. These trends last decades so I’m it seems colder weather is in store now.
http://img90.imageshack.us/img90/118/amoanomalyim4.png
Richard P,
Agreed.
It is pretty embarrassing how badly we coped with a few days of snow, particularly in the south. The cost to the economy far outweighed a goodly supply of any of the items in your list.
In any event I would not use global warming as an excuse for any of it. Even the most strident warming alarmist would claim that extreme weather events are more likely not less. We should have been and should be prepared.
Steven, are you aware this cold winter was called by the webmaster at (the currently broken) http://www.wacv.co.uk? A Hale Cycle winter, occur every 22/23 years for the UK based on the solar cycle. Makes you wonder why the Met Office can’t spot such a simple pattern. I’ll contact him to see if he will post here. We are most predisposed to colder winters when ENSO conditions are neutral or slightly negative. I wonder where the Met got their warm signal from, or whether they were just forecasting by trends and statistics rather than employing any actual meteorology. It wouldn’t surprise me.
“In any event I would not use global warming as an excuse for any of it. Even the most strident warming alarmist would claim that extreme weather events are more likely not less. ”
I have heard about this winter
1) It would have been even colder without global warming
AND
2) Global warming makes extreme weather more likely so this is consistent with warming.
It is incredibly bizarre what sort of logical contortions AGWers get themselves into when doublethinking about climate.
Phil’s Dad (18:54:50) :
Since the earth has been in a cooling trend for years you could safely stop calling these harsh winters “weather”.
Global warming is not happening. Please check the data. The earth is in a cooling trend.
I’m not going to ask you to check the science on co2 and if it has the power to change climate. My side has been asking your side to do that for years. We can see these admonitions aren’t being heard.
UKIP
I have heard similar.
My point of course is that, which ever path climate takes, these things will happen and we must be ready for them. This is, I think, what Mr Goddard says in wish list number 1. (Either way)
Yep, been through there in the winters of 2004 and 2005. Not all were motionless, but most were. Beautiful country, but the windmills seemed pretty pointless.
If this sunspot cycle trend line is systemic (likely to last through cycle 24), and the connection between cooling and lack of sunspots is valid, then this winter was just a picnic compared to the winters ahead for the next 9-13 years.
On a side note, an AGW follower on our floor was talking today about the “extreme” heat wave in Australia. Of course, this is already being blamed on AGW. It’s funny how if there is a cold snap the AGW people say you’re not allowed to cherry pick a particular weather event. But then, if it happens to be a warm spell, well then it’s OK to cite that as a symptom of warming. I decided to look up some information on this and came across this web site:
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/NaturalHazards/view.php?id=36900
It contains a map of the temperature departure from the mean values. Of interest is that the web site is labeled as “Exceptional Australian Heat Wave” yet it is obvious from the graph that it could just as easily have been labeled as “Exceptional Australian Cold Wave” since half the country is under anomalously cold temperature deviations as extreme as the warm trend in the south. The fact that most Australians live in the southeast corner of the country is really the only reason why this hysterical type reaction was drawn. If the trend had been reversed would anyone have noticed?