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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Phil’s Dad:
“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. ”
Of course they would. Increasingly, the only method left to keep up the myth of warming is to combine
older short-term warming data,
recent rectal-data warming claims, and
current obvious cooling trends into
“see, weather is getting more extreme (and will continue to get more so), that’s the man-made climate change”. That’s the new line of propaganda from full-time alarmists through media to politicians.
Thus, with all due respect, with the above quote, you actually sound a bit like a semi-Kool-aid drinker.
Central England January temps 1979-2009 graph.
http://s599.photobucket.com/albums/tt74/MartinGAtkins/?action=view¤t=England.jpg
Click on graphic to enlarge.
The World Bank has not a clue what it is talking about. The rising cost of food was driven by energy costs for transportation and packaging, and speculation in commodities as money ran away from other markets like mortgaged backed securities and a sliding stock market as the world economy began to crater following the huge jumps in energy costs. (by the way in real terms grain was more expensive in the 1970’s than it was at the peak of the recent price spike).
The actual cost of the corn in a box of corn flakes was at the time about 5 cents a box, which cost $3.89 a box, even if you doubled the cost of corn the cost of the product due to the grain content would only go up about 1%.
The rising cost of rice and other grains was also driven by growth in china, which encouraged Asian countries to plant rubber trees in place of rice to feed its industrial growth.
Even in the case of corn to ethanol, the corn used is not the same corn used for human consumption, it is feed corn raised to feed animals and for other industrial uses. The ethanol production process only uses the starch component of the corn and leaves all the nutrients and protein untouched in the Dried Distillers Grain and Solubles by product, which is in turn still fed to live stock as a high protein feed supplement. (The DDGS actually has more nutritional value than the original corn due to the supplementation provided by the yeast used in producing the alcohol).
In short ethanol from grain actually produces more food value than the original grain if properly used in a sustainable partnership with livestock growers.
Food for fuel was an intentional disinformation program to use bioenergy as a scape goat to hide price gouging and attempts to force feed grain prices down to subsidized prices instead of fair market value.
Larry
Tom in Texas “For some reason, those windmills remind me of Easter Island”…A sad feeling indeed!: Lonely faces uselessly watching the horizon searching for lost friendly faces…
Hope not these windmills will be find by an archeologist of the future studying the Global Warming “Cargo-Cult”in that remote island once called Britain.
MartinGAtkins,
Your graph of UK January temperatures was carefully cherry picked.
If you look at the entire record, you can see that January temperatures in England during the last few warm winters were no warmer than 100 years ago. And that data doesn’t include the very cold January, 2009.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=pj0h2MODqj3jEcwSEOBk-PA
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/seriesstatistics/uktemp.txt
3) 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.)
I would add.
5) Britain can’t rely on wind power to stay cool in the summer. During the hottest weather the winds are calm (which is one reason why the air temperatures are so high.)
Talking of wind turbines, we have a few near where I live.
I was driving past early last week & one was turning despite there being no wind. The blades were aligned with the plane of the disc & it was being driven by the motor/generator as they have to do to stop distortion of shafts.
I wonder how much power they consume as opposed to generate!
DaveE.
hotrod (08:34:03) :
“In short ethanol from grain actually produces more food value than the original grain if properly used in a sustainable partnership with livestock growers.”
…unless of course the livestock growers, which are necessarily separate entities from the corn growers due to a stupid law (a subsisdy requirement?), can get subsidized regular corn for their livestock cheaper than the ethanol leftovers. How does this work? Are these people, or are they not, in a “sustainable partnership “?
More importantly, it still drives up (Diesel and thus transported goods) prices when you take a gallon of Diesel fuel out of the general supply and use a pile of corn and subsidies to turn it into little more than a gallon’s worth of gasoline substitute.
I bet they can count on warming a lot of their interiors with heat energy saved by fixing up those godawful drafty places that are found everywhere in the UK!
Hi steven,
no, what I’m suggesting is that you tend to have a natural emphasis toward “cold news”, whatever their intrinsic interest or frequency. And after that, people here are shocked when hearing that the global temperature anomaly is going up month after month. And why is the “coldest winter in several decades” now becoming “the coldest winter of the last decade”?
I understand that NH is something more “interesting” to you, but I can’t see how you jump from “this winter has been cold” to “we have to abandon sustainable energies”.
MartinGAtkins (08:15:53) :
Central England January temps 1979-2009 graph.
This pretty much confirms what the Met Office were saying, coolest in 13 years.
Flanagan,
Who said anything about “we have to abandon sustainable energies?” That was your comment.
I meant exactly what I said in the article. Nothing more and nothing less.
Come on, now.
Coal is terrible for the environment. All along its life cylce, it is damaging to the environment, from extraction to transport to burning to dealing with the residual.
Look past the overblown GHG nonsense and witness the environmental toxification coal power causes. Any way you burn it, coal is bad for ecology and health.
“In short ethanol from grain actually produces more food value than the original grain if properly used in a sustainable partnership with livestock growers.”
Jive. Ethanol is burnable filler in our Otto engines. Mileage decreases in direct proportion to ethanol content. I’ve proven this with multiple vehicles and fuel grades for myself.
Moreover, the corn belt will see decreased degree days over the coming 30 years with PDO and soon AMO negative. It was a short-lived farm subsidy scam. Originally, they called it adding oxygen to the fuel as a green marketing ploy.
Aldehyde pollution in areas prone to thermal inversion, like LA, will blow even this putative benefit away.
‘Stonehenge saw it’s heaviest snow in many years’
Its, not it’s.
According to the MET Office, this past winter in the UK was actually much warmer than an average winter of Charles Dicken’s childhood. They inadvertantly made the case that it could get much worse.
>Britain can’t rely on global warming to stay warm in the winter.
Britain is a cold place in winter. It will take a good 10C of warming before it has warm winters. By then sea level will be near 70m higher or nearly so, the tropics will be uninhabitable and we will be fighting between us for real estate in the Arctic and Antarctic.
Also.. lets not get carried away with England. It not been particularly cold (it more that previous winters have been unusually warm http://ds.data.jma.go.jp/tcc/tcc/products/climate/monthly/TanmMIn0901.gif ), and the northern hemisphere has been very warm overall (http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/NHeman.html) and http://junkscience.com/MSU_Temps/Warming_Look.html .
1. The place for wind energy generation is where it is WINDY. Those places are;
a. Western Scotland and the Western Isles
b. The Lake District.
c. North Wales.
Even there it’s not windy ALL the time, but when the weather is foul (and August – February is fairly windy most years) this can be useful in provided a significant part of energy needs for those parts of the country.
2. Coal – we have masses of it and masses of unemployed people. Seems a no-brainer, doesn’t it?
3. Hydro-electric is also justifiable where it RAINS A LOT and there are MOUNTAINS. We’ve already got quite a bit of that in Wales and Scotland.
4. Wave could work in the Bristol channel, but it’ll be a while before it’s economic.
However, building houses properly is the key. I’ve lived in Europe where it is colder in winter and hotter in summer and they know how to build houses properly. We don’t. Or if we do, we won’t. The next 50 years should be about replacing poor quality housing stock with high quality energy-efficient houses.
In the meantime, I agree that insulation is the key.
Ethanol is a mixed bad. As hotrod mentioned the statements blaming the food shortage on ethanol are way overstated. Whether ethanol is a “good” choice for energy is a separate question.
I don’t like any subsidies and that is the only thing making ethanol viable. Hopefully, future bio-fuels, like algae, will be able to exist on their own. I still like the idea of trapping coal plant emissions and feeding the CO2 to vertical algae farms. All that is is basic recycling.
I believe improved recycling and continued technological improvements make coal a good energy source. It appears some people think we can’t reduce emissions or do anything other than shut them down. That idea is essentially anti-scientific as we’ve always improved these kind of things in the past.
This is kind of a common theme among warmers. Ignore the potential for technology to solve any problems.
Again, to soothe the troubled of mind….
According to Met Office data, during the last 100 years January temperatures in the UK declined for the first 50 years, and then recovered for the last 50 years. Recent warm winters were no warmer than they were 100 years ago. The warmest January on Record in the UK was 1916.
http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=pj0h2MODqj3jEcwSEOBk-PA&hl=en
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/seriesstatistics/uktemp.txt
At current rates, it will take about 21,000 years for sea level to rise 70 meters, which is considerably less than it rose over the last 21,000 years.
So what evidence is there that the CO2 pipeline temp signal is not building strength within the weather noise?
So once again we are asked to prove a negative. Nice try.
What evidence is there that “the CO2 pipeline temp signal is …building strength within the weather noise?”
@Steven Goddard (06:00:37) :
this is the almost record breaking station in melbourne, situated in the middle of one of the busiest streets in australia and with a documented history of UHI.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2007/10/23/how-not-to-measure-temperature-part-33/
or got to google maps and enter:
2 La Trobe Street, Melbourne
UHI: 1950-1990
http://mclean.ch/climate/Melbourne_UHI.htm
There are two serious sources of energy that IMHO are capable of being harvested very economically and are highly suited to the UK – kite wind power and tidal power. We’ve got material on this on the rest of our website, and would have developed a lot more last year but I was so mad at the unseen hijacking of Climate Science, that I did a skeptics primer instead – click my name.
Kite Jetstream Wind Power – this reaches right up into the constant jetstream, is FAR more efficient than windmills, is far less visible too, and is apparently highly suitable for UK and Holland. Watch the video.
Tidal power – there are many different forms being developed now; of especial interest to us are the tidal reef (Bristol Channel) and the tidal flow turbine (needs strong local current, not Bristol Channel)
DJ (12:19:42) :
>Britain can’t rely on global warming to stay warm in the winter.
“Britain is a cold place in winter. It will take a good 10C of warming before it has warm winters. By then sea level will be near 70m higher or nearly so, the tropics will be uninhabitable and we will be fighting between us for real estate in the Arctic and Antarctic”.
DJ,
You will not live the day for this scenario to happen.
It’s filed under F = Fantasy
JP (11:53:07) :
According to the MET Office, this past winter in the UK was actually much warmer than an average winter of Charles Dicken’s childhood. They inadvertantly made the case that it could get much worse.
Charles Dickens, 7 February 1812 – 9 June 1870. Didn’t he live during the LIA? (1450 AD to about 1850 AD) Another quantitative statement made by the Met Office!
Flanagan (09:33:56) :
no, what I’m suggesting is that you tend to have a natural emphasis toward “cold news”, whatever their intrinsic interest or frequency.
I suspect that it is because the whole premise behind AGW is that the world is warming, caused by man, CO2 is cited as the primary driver behind the warming, catastrophically, BUT there is a lot of real world evidence that suggests CO2 is not the primary driver, but it looks like natural influence is. When cold events go against the “warming” then I think there is more of a tendency to publish them than warming events, which is covered by the MSM.
Know I know your response will be something along the lines of “weather events are not climate” but given the above reasoning, I would hope that you will understand why these cold events are more published here than warming events.