Guest post by David Archibald
Next week I am hosting a dinner party at which a Fellow of the Royal Society will be guest of honour – one of the Gang of Four who got the Society to tone down their position of global warming alarmism. So it is apposite to consider the outlook for energy and food supply in the UK. Peak coal production in that country was 100 years ago at 292 million tonnes. The UK’s peak oil production was in 1999 with production continuing to fall rapidly. The UK is now importing almost all of its fossil fuel requirements. It decided to switch to relying upon wind power, but recently found that turbines were lasting only about half as long as the wind industry said they would. The Climate Change Act, effectively de-industrialising the country, was passed in the House of Commons in October 2008 by 463 votes to three, even as snow was falling outside. The winters since that act was passed in 2008 have been particularly bitter, but that is only a taste of what is to come.
The UK imports 40% of its food requirements but is still accepting immigrants while having a high unemployment rate of 7.8 per cent. With respect to the 60% of the food requirement grown in country, the length of the thermal growing season for crops has been calculated back to 1772. The longest growing season in the 241 years back to 1772 was 300 days in 2000. The average growing season in the mid-19th century was 240 days with the shortest growing season being just 181 days in 1859. The world is returning to the climate of the mid-19th century as a best case outcome, as will the UK.
Figure 1: Length of thermal growing season in central England
The Dalton Minimum, caused by Solar Cycles 5 and 6, is evident as well as the 1970s cooling period.
So how much less food will the UK be able to grow when the length of the growing season is reduced by 45%? That is something for the sceptred isle to ponder on. 1859 is significant in that it is the year that glaciers started retreating worldwide in response to a Sun that was becoming more active. One measure of solar activity, the Aa Index, which is an index of the Sun’s geomagnetic activity, began increasing from a low of five in the mid-19th century to a peak of 37 in 2003. It has now fallen back to a level of about 9, even though we are near the peak of Solar Cycle 24. We should draw inferences from natural phenomena, and we should choose wisely from the phenomena available to interpret. The fact that the temperature of the planet has not increased for 16 years is not important in itself, the fact that the Sun has entered a deep sleep is very important.
Figure 2: Aa Index 1868 – 2013
The 1970s cooling period was associated with an interval of a low Aa Index. The Aa Index has returned to the levels of the late 19th century.
There has already been an increase in winter deaths in the UK as some pensioners have not been able to afford to heat their houses. Starvation, on the other hand, is something you can do all year round, irrespective of the season. As the prices of fossil fuels that aren’t oil converge towards the oil price as the oil price itself rises, physically doing anything in the UK will use energy priced as if the energy source was oil. The UK will find itself bidding for the shrinking supplies of oil and grain, the two basic commodities that keep machines and men fed, on international markets as the decade progresses. It can’t do much about what happens beyond its borders, but it could refrain from doing things that harm itself and it could also be trying to move beyond fossil fuels to an energy source that is less ephemeral than the wind. Never mind, the next 20 years will be a cathartic experience for those living in the UK, and character-forming, and testing. It will be a large scale version of the Darwin Awards in which everyone gets to participate by virtue of voting for politicians who vote for things like the Climate Change Act 2008. Choosing politicians via the ballot box always has consequences for one’s standard of living. As basic commodities become scarcer and the planet cools, that choosing may affect whether or not one gets to live at all.
In a way, what is in store for the UK is their just rewards for a lack of faith – a lack of faith in the religion that their forebears gave them courtesy of the King James Bible, a self-loathing of the culture that gave them a high standard of living, even though that was a relatively brief period in the Thatcher years, and a reversion from the scientific flowering that began with Newton to the witchcraft and voodoo that is modern climate science. Individuals with faith are more successful than individuals without faith. That is also true of nations. Just as the Israelites in the desert began worshipping a golden calf to Moses’ consternation, the scientific establishment of the UK reverted to a form of animism, seeing spirits in living things. The high priest of that movement is a scientist by the name of James Lovelock, who recanted upon receiving a bill of £6,000 for his winter heating. The UK nation as a whole is repeating Professor Lovelock’s personal experience – both the bill and the epiphany.
I am very sorry, every word this stupid man said was washed away when he invoked the Bible and Mrs Thatcher.
He invokes coal, but THE MINES WERE SHUT DOWN, BRUTALLY, BY MRS THATCHER.
I REQUIRE him to go and live like an unemployed miner in the Thatcher years. Not for one year, but for the rest of his life.
He will learn, the hardest way possible, that if he lies, he reaps what he sows.
Live a life of unutterable poverty you wretched, twisted, distorted, lying man.
Humankind is lucky to have the climate moderately warm up from one of the coolest periods since ice was a mile thick over Chicago. Ask the Irish and Scots how the last minimum worked out for crop failures and famine. The oceans are cooling they are heat sinks. Sun cycle 25 is predicted to be very inactive, just hope it doesn’t sync with the Bond cycle.
People, people! David Archibald is lampooning those who tie climate change to religion and politics! It’s a satire! Very subtle, I agree, almost too subtle to detect, but when warmist blogs pick up this post to lampoon it themselves, Archibald will be able to say, “Gotcha, ya suckers!”
(Moral compass indeed. Facepalm.)
Sorry it is ridiculous to turn global warming alarmism into a left right issue for the simple reason that both those on the left and right are profiting from the alarmism.
As far as James the First is concerned he was just another pervert? Didn’t he believe he was gods representative on earth.
Sorry Mr Archibald conflating religion and politics with science doesn’t wash with me and the science of your article is devalued by it.
@ur momisugly S Meyer … and if a frog had wings …. (The second crop would have to enjoy the same warmth as the first crop – two summers.)
@ur momisuglyS Mosher. From the CET series, warming to 2011 from;
1740 3.9 C
1750 1.0 C
1779 0.3 C
Is 1750 special? Does looking at the temperature difference between any two years mean anything?
As this thread already debates science, religion and politics I join FauxScienceSlayer (4.55 pm) in adding the contribution of our debt-based banking system and its recent crash to the current deindustrialisation of Britain . It takes money from the poor (eg farmers) and moves it to rich investors. People lose their houses and they are sold to buy-to-let owners. Investment banking takes clever people who might be doing something useful and employs them in banking scams. Barclays will today swear that they have reformed. Let us wait and see!
Had me until the last paragraph since the ‘witchcraft and voodoo or modern climate science’ are little different from the witchcraft and voodoo of any other religion.
We are already eating horses labelled up by the supermarkets as beef!
Has Urban Farm Island (UFI) effect skewed these growing figures?
“THE MINES WERE SHUT DOWN, BRUTALLY, BY MRS THATCHER.”
I recall a war on the democratic process started by the extreme left who had gained control over the Unions that ‘represented’ or rather ‘used’ the workforces in the nationalised industries.
The destruction of industrial efficiency was so complete that energy supplies and public services could no longer be maintained whilst the private sector collapsed too and the nation headed towards bankruptcy and chaos.
People voted for Thatcher because she held sensible views about work, efficiency, social responsibility and sound money.
She saved us.
Not only the length of the growing season is important also the stability of the weather. One big hailstorm on the wrong moment during the growing season could be enough.
David’s piece can be well proven by looking at the Met Office CET record to 1772
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/hadobs/hadcet/
There has been a dramatic fall in temperatures which I have commented on in a jocular fashion in as much I now find it impossible to grow such things as outdoor tomatoes which I could a decade ago. In my garden in the South West-the warmest part of the country- Frosts have become common with the result that my semi tropical outdoor succulents curl up their toes and die.The BBC farming today programme routinely talks of farmers abandoning warm weather crops planted in optimism a decade ago . History doesn’t seem to be taught much these days and our periodically warming and cooling climate seems to be unrecognised by the authorities. Here is an item from the 1930’s
“This is what a farmer from Buchan in North East Scotland, one of the snowiest parts of lowland Britain, wrote in the agricultural section of my local newspaper during the exceptionally mild winter of 1933/34.
“1934 has opened true to the modern tradition of open, snowless winters. The long ago winters are no precedent for our modern samples. During the last decade, during several Januarys the lark has heralded spring up in the lift from the middle to the end of the month. Not full fledged songs but preliminary bars in an effort to adapt to our climatic change”
It then goes on to say
“It is unwise to assume that the modern winters have displaced the old indefinitely”
and also
“Our modern winters have induced an altered agricultural regime”
That description sound pretty much apt for the winters today. Hence there has been no change since that era. This current winter has been remarkably snowless in my area but not a patch on 1933/34 when there hadn’t even been a flake falling by this time and daffodils were in full bloom by the fourth week of February.”
Its not just crops we need to deal with but the deliberate forcing up of heating costs which is making it diofficult for all but the rich to heat their ho,es. . We badly need a Plan B to deal with the frightening consequences of cooling but instead seem fixated on an out of date plan A.
tonyb
Re
HB says:
‘I don’t wish to be unfair to a fellow Aussie, but this post is blatantly and unpleasantly political. It seems to be trying to appeal to a lowest common denominator in right wing UK politics.’
It ought to be noted that Britain does not have a right wing element, all the mainstream political parties here are left wing to a greater or lesser degree. Socialism is the de facto belief of most Briton’s.
Re Rhys Jaggar comments:
Rhys your anger is understandable, but not entirely based on an accurate understanding of events. The mine workers had for some time expolited their position to hold the rest of the nation to ransom, achieving under the astute Mr Gormley great rewards. Under his successor, the politically ambitious, Mr Scargill they went a step further in openly contesting for power with the elected government of the day, in Mrs Thatcher they faced someone who had enough backbone to face up to the challenge. That this saw the industry eventually decimated and a way of life for many communties destroyed is profoundly sad, but it is a responsibility that must be shared, not borne by one side.
Steven Mosher says:
wow. I gues the longer growing season is due to UHI. or maybe it is getting warmer
I regularly mention Rural Heat Island from tree and hedge removal (= reduced boundary layer mixing = increased surface warming), increased field drainage (= reduced humidity and hence increased temperatures), increased irrigation (= decreased albedo and other effects), large scale reductions in agricultural burning (= reduced black and organic carbon solar absorption and scattering), increases in multi-cropping (decreased albedo).
And then there is downwind changes in urban aerosols and large changes in rural fuel use = reduced aerosol emissions.
Since 1900, and especially 1950, IMO there have been larger anthropogenic climate effecting rural changes than urban changes.
@Patrick Guinness Frank:
“British MPs make no laws; they are merely local EU-directive implementers. David Cameron isn’t a PM. With respect to powers, it’s unlikely he has even the legal powers of an American state governor.”
American State Governors have rather a lot of power. Each can command a small Army. (That can be “Federalized” as the National Guard). Typically a State Guard unit has trucks, artillery, some tanks and even jet fighters; among other “toys”. For example:
http://www.txsg.state.tx.us/
They also have a small navy… note the “maritime regiment” listed here:
To give an idea of the size, this is the “Air Component”:
So about the size of some small countries… Oh, and the Governors control the budgets and can issue executive orders in most States. The way were are (supposed) to be structured is as a collection of Independent States with a minimal Federal Government. That the Feds have overgrown their mandate and are doing a big power grab does not diminish the power of the Governors… There’s a whole lot more they can do too. New York budget is $132.6 BILLION for 2013, just to give an idea what they control…
Oh, and the “Several States” can, should they so desire it, abolish the Federal Government and make a new one by calling a Constitutional Convention.
So I’m not sure what all your P.M. can do, but I think our Governors have a whole lot they can do. Can your P.M. call up an army and decide how to spend $Hundred Billion budgets? Issue executive orders? I imagine the ability of a Governor to shape legislation is about on a par with the UK PM, though. (Or perhaps more? As State Law stands until overturned by Federal Law or the Supreme Court…)
@S.Meyer & Sleepalot:
The usual way of measuring growing season is “Degree Days”. The number of days over some threshold temperature. More is pretty much always better. Every plant has a minimum temperature to get started ( Oats are just a few degrees above freezing while some plants need soil temps over “warm spring day” to start). So warmer also lets you grow different plants, while the ones you have ripen faster and grow bigger.
Per “double cropping”: The limit case is places like California and Phoenix Arizona where we can grow something in all seasons if desired. ( 4 crop seasons a year are possible ). Theoretically even more if you use “short season crops”. Barley is very short season as is Buckwheat. IIRC, about 50 or 60 days. Radishes can be harvested in 25 days. So using crops like those you could get multiple crops in a year already. (Modern hybrid sweet corn can be as fast as 50 days, while old kinds took closer ot 110 days).
So one can plant short season cold tolerant crops, like Buckwheat, at the end of a growing season after warm season at the start, and still have enough time left to plant ‘winter wheat’ that overwinters even in a place like the UK. It would require a lot of “inputs” to the soil, but could be done. (If it is profitable is an entirely separate issue… and if a farmer could stay sane trying to do it all is yet another…) Many such crop rotations are possible. (It is not at all unusual for folks in The South to have a three crop rotation in a year, for example. Up north in the USA, double cropping is frequent, but with more cold tolerant types.)
Probably the bigger issue for the UK would just be how wet the fields get. If things are a giant mud puddle, it is hard to use equipment… So often the crop cycle is time to the rain cycle. Harvest to be done during a dry phase. Planting done at first “dry enough to plough but still wet enough to germinate and grow”. That, BTW, is where California and especially Phoenix shine. As both are low rain areas with irrigation, we can get equipment in the field most any time.
The limit to the advantage of more heat is Phoenix. Look in the Sunset Garden Book and you will find it has summer marked with a heat warning and the statement that you can only grow heat tolerant crops then. Things like Tomatoes… I was there one summer when the airport was shut down as the tarmac was melting in the sun… 125 F downtown, more on the tarmac. That is your “upper bound” for heat. (But they get a great winter growing season in exchange and you CAN still grow heat tolerant crops in the summer… they have a lot of citrus too.)
So until places are as hot as Phoenix Arizona, more heat gives more crop. Then you have to be hotter than that to start having production fall off. Or put up shade cloths over the fields. (We do that for berries here in California).
Not a farmer, but grew up in Farm Country in a Farm Town of 3328 persons with a Dad who was a farmer as a kid and sold farms for a living… Worked on farms as a kid too… Went to an Ag School for college. Very interested in agronomy systems and intensive gardening…
BTW, as temperatures cool and growing seasons shorten, you can to some extent swap to cold tolerant and shorter season crops. Barley and Buckwheat are a couple of common ones. Barley, for example, is grown in Alaska… I cover it a bit here:
https://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/01/11/grains-and-why-food-will-stay-plentiful/
For example, on Buckwheat, I quote a paper about it being a 60 day crop:
while for Barley we have this interesting bit:
Now you know why the Scots grow so much oats and have barley for making Scotch 😉
Both are cold tolerant and relatively fast growing.
There are other crops that are used for hot and dry places. Like tepary beans and millet. So we can adjust to most any climate from ‘not quite desert’ to Alaska… but generally the more degree days you have, the more total production you can get, and faster too. Up to about 110 F to 120 F ( 44 C to 49 C ) when it gets slower from heat stress.
The luxury of leisure to pursue nutty things is a hallmark of Western capitalism.
Any wagers whether “Frankenfood” will be forgotten when they have to set done to an endless number of pine bark soup, pine bark stew, weed salad alongside clay bread. Not sure how they’ll keep warm in winter though. Maybe scrubbing lichen off rocks.
It appears the only real issue the Brits have is to determine their body count each year.
It was at thatcher’s instigation that the IPCC was set up. During her reign the greens moved from the lunatic fringe of politics to center stage. Right wingers who blame the left for all things green choose to forget this.
@Vukcevic:
Perhaps because winters are getting fewer days over the centuries?
http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/solar/Season_Lengths_23K.png
from:
http://individual.utoronto.ca/kalendis/seasons.htm
discussed:
http://chiefio.wordpress.com/2013/02/11/interesting-change-of-season-length/
Precession and change of orbital eccentricity are making N. Hemisphere winters shorter and summers longer. I think that matters…
@All:
I’m rather surprised at the rabid anti-religion on display. Are folks that unable to accept difference from others? That unwilling to just “accept that that is them” and let it pass?
My spouse is ‘very religious’, me ‘not so much’ and rarely attended church once escaped to college. Yet we “get along” just fine by accepting our differences. One kid is ‘building a church’ as they feel called to do it. The other, well, can’t remember the last time I saw them in a church. ( I think it was when someone died or was getting married…) Yet we all ‘get along’ by accepting each other. It isn’t all that hard…
@Walter Horsting:
It ought not. I think that this paper:
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/3814.full
Pretty much shows what drives that cycle and we’ve got a good while to the next one.
It then has a graph:
http://www.pnas.org/content/97/8/3814/F2.large.jpg
showing peak “mixing force” in the LIA at about 1629 A.D. (point A) along with other cold peaks at 1770 A.D. and a lower one in 1974 A.D. We are presenting in a low mixing (warm) period and don’t get back up to a cold mixing peak until 2133 A.D. and even that is only about like 1974 A.D. It looks like 3107 A.D. for the next L.I.A. excursion to extreme cold sufficient for a Bond Event. (One hopes that a Sleepy Sun is not sufficient to do much more than make a 20 year cold slap across the face of the Warmers… 😉
Pat Frank says:
February 11, 2013 at 6:50 pm …
Thank you. As a Brit who lost relatives fighting for our sovereign freedom and democracy in two world wars, I am also disgusted that the traitors from Ted Heath onwards have paid a fortune in UK tax-payers money to buy our serfdom and our servitude in to a profoundly anti-democratic European Union which stands utterly opposed to the same rule of law (descended from natural and common law) from which the USA and Canada’s own laws were also created. We are subject to EU law which has no democratic mandate and in which justice is turned upon its head. Where rights are not rights, but are grants from an elite which can be altered on a whim. The EU is a foul and tyranical regime which we in the UK are fighting hard to free ourselves from.
Johnny Hooper says:
February 11, 2013 at 7:30 pm
RockyRoad says:
“Do you know the word they use for those, like you, who are intollerant of other’s political or religious beliefs? It’s political or religious bigotry.”
I don’t care. What he said offended me as an atheist skeptic who can’t think of a single person under the age of 60 who would tolerate a good word said about Thatcher.
David Archibald made a perfectly valid point about the false gods of the greenies. As for Margaret Thatcher, she certainly had her faults but your friends must belong to a very narrow-minded group if none of them would tolerate a good word about her. On the principle that “birds of a feather flock together” you are probably as narrow-minded as your friends.
Finally, I don’t know what nationality you are but your comments about Thatcher suggest that you are British. I have absolutely nothing against Americans spelling “sceptic” with a “k” instead of “c” but, even allowing for the fact that this is an American created blog, I am offended by British people who do not use British spelling.
Ha ha.
Further in his Guardian interview:
A few more frigid winters and cool summers should turn most Britons into pragmatists and sceptics.
” jim bishop says:
February 12, 2013 at 3:53 am
It was at thatcher’s instigation that the IPCC was set up. During her reign the greens moved from the lunatic fringe of politics to center stage. Right wingers who blame the left for all things green choose to forget this.”
No, we are aware of Thatcher’s role in arguing for the IPCC. Thatcher was always focused on fact based policy, not emotion based. Her ministers have recalled how she always insisted on them bringing her the facts before any policy was finalised.
At the time when she was in power, the AGW consensus was that there was no consensus and we did not know yet what the situation was. So she was right to use whichever side of the argument’s facts, were still valid, in pursuit of her political policy aims. Squashing the Coal Unions was an important part of that and our economy in the UK was saved, by her taking on union might and stopping the Unions from holding our economy hostage as they had been doing throughout the bleak days of the 1970s.
Since then more and more facts have emerged, which the left have conveniently ignored and the right have understood and accepted. (at least the right wingers in the population as a whole, if not their corrupt political leadership, Cameron et al). So today it is the ideologues and zealots of the left who ignore facts and hold on to an increasingly debunked alarmism. It is the left who are hanging on to all things green and destroying their own credibility. It is the left wing “ecomentalists” who support destroying ancient natural forests of Borneo, pushing the orang-outang to the brink of extinction in the wild, in order to grow palm oil for “green bio-fuel” to name but one example of the self-defeating lunacy of the left-wing-green-ecomentalist.
So it is appropriate to keep blaming the left for all the lunacy of the greens, for the left moved in on the reasonable efforts of the earlier environmental movement as envisioned by Greenpeace founder Patrick Moore. The left’s communists and political agitators decided to use environmentalism the ideal tool to attack and destroy industrialisation in the west. Their pursuit of that goal has never allowed facts or reason or logic get in their way. This is why right wingers rightly blame the left for the idiocy of the climate change alarm movement, for as more and more facts emerge, as we observe more and more what is happening on this real, tangible planet, the more we see that the alarm of lefties is not warranted, that the actual science shows that there is no cause for alarm and the more we see the delusional lefties trying, with more and more desperation, to force their models to be real and for the planet to be wrong, which it will be any day now and warming will suddenly take off and catapult back up.
That is why “right wingers” blame the left, in spite of Thatcher’s understandable and pragmatic role in the 1980s.
I think Mr Archibald is losing it – assuming he ever had it. Talking of just rewards for a lack of religious belief (for being realistic and not hanging on to childish and unprovable beliefs?), and comments about the (nightmare that was) the Thatcher years. Thatcher sold off all our energy, water, and railways. We now have to pay our utility bills to FOREIGN-OWNED companies! And we GIVE money to railway companies to run the networks even though it was sold off! She destroyed our coalfields and decimated our manufacturing industry (together with the unions, that is). I don’t think I’ve ever been incensed by one of WUWT’s contributing writers before today. Mr Archibald is either seriously ill or very ignorant.
When plotting the aa-index, one should add 3 nT before the year 1957 to compensate for a known [and accepted] calibration error.
I think this post and the above responses it has evoked, almost entirely relating to a political or religious issue or standpoint, is both interesting and important.
It is abundantly clear that “climate change” is and has been since its inception in the 1970’s not about science – as a body of knowledge – but about Values, Belief, Culture, and societal structure.
These have affected the comprehension of what is required for an intelligent response to reality – giving “post-normal science” – along with every other facet of existence.
Climate will not be understood over the next 10 years. What happens to humanity will depend on what Values – scientific and otherwise – are applied to “climate change” now and over the next few years.
To understand and reveal the “thinking” that has generated the culture of the post 1960’s world – in all facets – is the only hope. Science can do only so much.