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.
Shale gas in the UK. Whoopee. That’s if the green-inclined left-right-centrist-statist political rabble allow it.
I really like the dislike of the “left-leaning” governments, which shows scant knowledge of UK politics. The UK has not had a “left” or “right” government since the late 1970’s. Now they are all educated to the same level, in the same subjects and in the same establishments. They occupy political parties without being attached to their politics, and use them for their own ends.
Immigration ?
Well, without the influx of immigrants the UK is going to be up the creek without a paddle, given the birthrate of the endemic population is low, and lowering.
Now I await the inevitable attack on the elderly, which is not going to be long arriving given that they are the last minority segment remaining to be stigmatised.
Soon the clarion calls will be heard from those guardians of public morality, the politicians, for old people to lay down their lives for the good of: the country/their children/the environment. preferably before they reach state retirement age.
This is depressing. I have said before that whilst the CAGW debate tends to split along political lines, it would be a lot more helpful to exclude politics as far as possible and focus on the science rather than take every opportunity to further politicise the issue. And religion???!!
For what it’s worth, I grew up in a rural community in SW Scotland that was decimated by Thatcher’s policies. All we got out of her ‘economic miracle with a recession at either end’ was 25% unemployment and a persistent heroin culture that didn’t previously exist. Her long term legacy is that the Conservative party in Scotland is a pathetic rump and in 2014 Scotland will hold a referendum on leaving the UK. I moved south 30 years ago. The mining industry is long gone and the farm I grew up on now has part of the Hadyard wind array on it; this has benefitted the current owner to the tune of £3 million but done nothing for local employment. Thatcher simply played to the Conservative heartlands and beggared the rest of the country. Guess why I feel uncomfortable about being on the ‘right wing’ side of the debate?
Ghost of Big Jim:
Yes many of the very necessary privatization programmes of Thatcher were badly botched. (Sell the track maintenance to different folks than the train operators? Who would think that would work!?) However, all the money losing nationalized industries had put the UK government on the brink of insolvency. The economic malaise was palpable even to this visitor. The National Rail was a good system, but it was bleeding money like crazy. The price of fares never came close to covering the cost of the system, and never will! The nasty little secret that the left never mentions is that large scale mass transit never pays for itself, as it always requires large infusions of tax money to make it work. Thus the government has to subsidize the rail system.
The energy sector is having its trouble due to things Thatcher was not able to get through and which her successors haven’t even tried to fix- more nuclear stations for instance. The North Sea oil fields were always a temporary thing, but the idea of having private companies take the risk and do the work while paying the government royalties is always a more efficient system. (Works great for Alaska when the federal government doesn’t poke their noses into it.)
The union problems of the 1970s are very well documented and when you have what amounts to an attempted communist take-over of the government by economic extortion, the backlash can get nasty. When such a revolution happens there is always turmoil, but the turmoil would have been much worse if the miner’s union boss had gotten control. We like to think we are somehow protected from anarchy by our civilized history, but the result of Thatcher failing to slap down the unions would have seen the UK in the light of Zimbabwe. Government taking the means of production from those who know how to employ it and giving it to the proletariat ALWAYS FAILS. Mass starvation and rioting is the natural result. It can happen in our “civilized west” as badly as it did in Africa, people are people everywhere.
The manufacturing was also bleeding dry in the 1970’s. It moved to where it enjoyed a tax advantage and where the unions weren’t pricing labor out of the realms of profitability. Both of those things were the direct result of 1950’s-1970’s political decisions to capitulate to the unions and build a socialist welfare state. Setting a bone hurts more sometimes than breaking it originally, and you can get used to the low level pain and not using the miss-healed limb, but once full function is returned you find the pain was worth it. British industry was (and is) still in that state, but the welfare state removes the capital that would build an industrial base, and we have conditioned the populace to look askance at the smoke stacks of heavy industrial plants. NIMBY rules Britannia now, and it is spreading its rule to the world!
I don’t know about feeling I’m to blame for voting in politicians who follow the CAGW religion. There isn’t exactly a choice as Con/Lib/Lab all follow it. They are all deaf to the opinions and wishes of the bulk of the population they are meant to represent.
Aiden Donelly at 7.55pm:
Hear! Hear! re. Margaret Thatcher and John Howard. They were both hated by the Lefty ‘Liberals’ who are actually very illiberal when any of their sacred cows is questioned or opposed. They both left their respective countries in better shape than they found them. Being human they made their mistakes too; only natural. As I lived both under Mrs Thatcher’s government in the UK and Johnny Howard’s in Australia I feel entitled to comment on this without being assailed by the hate-fest their names seem to inspire in so many lefties.
I worry about the ability of the UK to produce adequate food for its population in the future. We import far too much.
Matt,
We have been warming since the last Ice Maximum, plus the small amount of warming caused by additional CO^2. This has stopped and perhaps regressed since the Sun began it’s current “nap”. Would this not be cooling attributrd to the quiet sun?
Rhys Jaggar says:
February 11, 2013 at 11:20 pm
He invokes coal, but THE MINES WERE SHUT DOWN, BRUTALLY, BY MRS THATCHER.
WRONG! The mines were shut down by the miners going on strike. The NCB announced plans to shut 20 uneconomic mines, which would not have affected overall production of coal. The fact is that by facing down the attempted dictatorship of the NUM, Margaret Thatcher, and the elected government of Britain broke away from a near dependency on coal. Unfortunately, nuclear capacity was not built up sufficiently, and we now have those damn windmills sprouting up all over the place. Probably the best PM we’ve had in modern history, but not perfect – who is?
@ur momisugly E.M.Smith says:
February 12, 2013 at 3:15 am
Thank you, Mr. Smith! You have answered both of my questions (about temperature optimum and feasibility of double cropping), plus some that I did not think of asking (such as limitations on double cropping other than growing season length).
🙂
With your permission, I’ll bookmark and save your comment for use in future discussions about this topic.
Best,
S.
A question above asking for the source for the growing season chart, it looks to have come from this document.
https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/48647/1715-summary-report-on-the-change-of-thermal-growing.pdf
As a 13 year old I remember watching the winter of discontent on TV …. life is about trade-offs unfortunately and becuase of the massive trouble the nation was in after the 1970’s the fall-out was dramatic – Thatcher left the country in a massivley better state than when she took over. That there were millions whose conditions were not improved does not mean there were many millions more whose conditions were. We cannot judge political success by reviewing only individuals, or specific industries, we have to view the nation as a whole.
The rabid hatred of her has always been an example of Alinskyist tactics being deployed successfully. Very few can be as evil as she is regularly made out to be.
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.
Two things become immediately apparent:
1. Anything can be made to work IF you spend enough money on it, never mind if it is unsustainable. That Dr. Lovelock can’t afford his winter heating bill is just a consequence of his own unsustainable existence.
2. Which brings us to point 2, the Econuts have declared repeatedly that there are too many people on the earth to support sustainably. Therefore Dr. Lovelock you must sacrifice yourself to the Gia by freezing to death. Those who can not afford to heat their homes in the winter or survive the heat of summer without air conditioning need to die and do so for the good of the planet.
“If they would rather die,” said Scrooge, “they had better do it, and decrease the surplus population…” Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol
The culling of the unsustainable ones has begun. If you will not die by freezing winters or sweltering summers (France with no air conditioners in old age homes), then terrorists will blow you up. What better way to deal with the obesity epidemic than to raise the price of food. It is no accident, they are all called the GREEN revolution.
Owen in GA.
Britain was in a dire state in the late 1970s (I know, I lived through it – I was born in the 1950s). This was still a lot to do with WW2 (which was only 30 years earlier, and we were still paying for it) but also a lot to do with communist unions and a disquiet among the Left and the working class. What Britain needed was investment and a dismantling of the power of the unions. There is far too much to talk about here on a climate forum, but Britain didn’t need Thatcher (although I admit that the Falklands would have bee lost if she hadn’t of been in power). We DID NOT need to sell off our utility companies, nor our railways. The very fact that we are still paying for the railway ‘sell-off’ is testament to that. We are now in the laughable position that we may need China to build nuclear power stations for us, while we currently pay German and French companies to provide us with gas and electricity! You could NOT have made this up on a political-comedy show and got away with it – and it’s all thanks to Thatcher. Our manufacturing industry suffered from the unions, but from Thatcher also. She was twisted and lacked overall vision, even though she loved Britain. She refused to listen to advisors, and that was her ultimate downfall. For Britain, on balance, she was a disaster.
@ur momisugly S. Meyer says: February 11, 2013 at 9:17 pm
and
@ur momisugly Sleepalot ” says: February 11, 2013 at 8:08 pm
Yes I’m a farm boy and extra warm days or heat units are critical to the variety of corn you plant (not so much for wheat). A warmer varietal corn gives higher yields it is critical for corn farmers to pick the correct varietal based on the amount of heat and moisture expected that year or in the particular area you are farming (the further north you are determines the heat units varietal you choose).
University of Guelph paper on corn varieties and heat units.
http://www.plant.uoguelph.ca/research/homepages/ttollena/research/assets/Crop%20Heat%20Units%20for%20Corn%20and%20Other%20Warm-Season%20Crops%20in%20Ontario.pdf
P.S. higher CO2 also increases corn yields http://www.co2science.org/articles/V7/N30/B1.php .
sleepalot, wake up warmer and more CO2 is better !
With Maggie ministers knew their place:
Margaret Thatcher celebrates by treating her Cabinet to a meal at a restaurant:
Waitress: Would you like to order, sir?
Thatcher: Yes. I will have the steak.
Waitress: How would you like it?
Thatcher: Oh, raw, please.
Waitress: And what about the Vegetables?
Thatcher: Oh, they’ll [turns to the Cabinet] have the same as me!
Thatcher: Geoffrey (Howe) , you’re a complete imbecile. We can’t have a quick war just to win votes! Though, now that you mention it, look into it, will you?
(Cecil) Parkinson: Do we have any other business?
Thatcher: I bloody well hope not; we’ve sold it all off!
Thatcher: We have to get rid of Enoch (Powell). There is no room for racists in the Conservative Party – we’re choc-a-bloc as it is!
And finally,Thatcher: I do not know anyone who has got to the top without hard work. That is the recipe. … Everyone should have a Willy.
Big Jim,
This is much more than a climate forum. The first item on the mission statement is “life”. Much as most of us would prefer to not deal with it, politics and the political mistakes of the past and present are part of life that we either deal with or become victims of. You are right that Thatcher made mistakes, but I am not sure you have identified the correct ones relevant to the problems. We will disagree on the details, but Britain needed something to kick it in the backside and she did. Maybe not always in the right direction, but to some degree that is an effect of the parliamentary system of government. Even if you have 100% all the correct answers (not saying she did), if you can only get your caucus to go along with 90% of them, you can’t do the last 10% without risking handing power over to those you disagree with 65% of the time (My estimate is left and right usually agree on about 35% of issues – if we could just leave government to only that 35% we’d probably all be better off). So leaders have to back off and dilute good ideas to “buy support”. Part of her problem was she was speaking a foreign language to the common people. Since the 50’s, socialism had become more and more of the standard language of politics and education and she was talking about doing things for yourself, not looking to big brother government to do it for you. Doing things for yourself is how Britain got to have an Empire on which the Sun Never Set (OK there were drawbacks to empire as well – it’s expensive for one) . The idea of grabbing a challenge and shaking it into submission was a guiding principle of Britain for 300+ years. Somehow, after WWII that spirit seemed to shrink in upon itself to the point that I am not sure the Brit of 1900 would recognize the folk from his same village in 2000.
On the RR, check the inflation adjusted budget when it was a government entity against the current subsidy, I think you will find now is less. (though not by much as that privatization is one of the examples of how NOT to do privatization).
The energy thing is something we are all struggling with. We got so sidetracked in the 90’s by the “green energy” boondoggle that investment in REAL energy systems (like nuclear) got derailed. By the early 2000’s we had demonized “carbon” so much that we started actually decommissioning coal fired plants without building replacement capacity. Appliances are a good deal more efficient now than they were, but not enough more to make up the difference.
I just ask for policy based on hard fact that can be demonstrated to be true. We get too much pie in the sky from both left and right on important matters of the day.
Rhys Jaggar says:
February 11, 2013 at 11:20 pm
He invokes coal, but THE MINES WERE SHUT DOWN, BRUTALLY, BY MRS THATCHER.
WRONG! The mines were shut down by the miners going on strike. The NCB announced plans to shut 20 uneconomic mines, which would not have affected overall production of coal. The fact is that by facing down the attempted dictatorship of the NUM, Margaret Thatcher, and the elected government of Britain broke away from a near dependency on coal.
Response, I suspect your view of modern history is somewhat one sided. The coal mine closures accelerated after the miner returned to work and after Thatcher had won her victory. Lets face it, Scargill was pretty inept as a leader, but he was right about one thing when he said Thatcher was determined to close down the UK s coal industry. The UK has vast amounts of coal reserves, but Thatcher felt it was better to close the mines, make miners redundant and import coal than to allow the powerful miners unions to dictate politics.
The decision of the Thatcher government to downsize the coal industry was surely motivated by the fact that British coal — which the electricity generators were at that time obliged to buy — cost roughly twice as much as imported coal. However, there seems no doubt that Thatcher sought to gain politically by demonstrating toughness, amounting to ruthlessness, in dealing with the miners’ union. The bitterness engendered among those whose communities were destroyed as a result, is brilliantly portrayed in Mark Herman’s movie, Brassed Off.
The idea that Margaret Thatcher’s government was in some way responsible for Britain’s present climate and energy policies is absurd. It was probably the most firmly science-based government in British history. The Downing Street think tank during Margaret Thatcher’s time was headed by John Ashworth, a brilliant Oxford-trained biochemist. Chris Monckton was a member of the staff, and Margaret Thatcher, a chemist by training, took a huge and competent interest in scientific issues.
Some reactions to this article illustrate the effect of the longstanding ascendancy of the atheistic liberal-left on the mental functions of the left. It has turned them into the party of the stupids, largely incapable of responding to points of view other than their own except with expression of impatient intolerance, or outright hate speech.
Leif Svalgaard says:
February 12, 2013 at 5:51 am
“When plotting the aa-index, one should add 3 nT before the year 1957 to compensate for a known [and accepted] calibration error.”
Leif can you expand on this a bit. What do you mean by ‘add 3 nT before the year 1957’?. Thanks. Is there an exact value and does it have to be applied to both the Greenwich and Melbourne records?
If there are known [and accepted] calibration errors, why is data with calibration errors available to the public. I’m not happy about spending hours studying and looking at data from what are supposed to be “trusted sources” only to find out the data has known errors.
Considering that the Holocene has seen a series of fluctuations between Little Ice Ages and Warm Periods with an average period of well over 1,000 years for each pair or cycle, that would constitute a very unusually sudden turn around. More likely the sun is in the weak part of a shorter cycle and we have hundreds more years of natural warming.
On the topic of the UK coal reserves, they are still large, but for political reasons will not be exploited. Nearly all of the UK mines have been closed and sterilised, so that they can never be used again. Despite this, there are still huge reserves of coal in place where mines have never been sunk.
Before it was closed down, the National Coal Board used to put out estimates of the coal reserves. All references to these estimates have been removed from the net, except for one, which I found deep hidden on the DECC website. I posted the link to the report on the James Delingpole blog, but the link was immediately removed from the DECC site.
But not before I had taken a copy of it;
Britains coal reserves, the real figures;
There is;
(1)Coal “in place” – the total coal originally in place in the UK defined as coal seams over 2 ft thick and less than 4000 ft deep and there is;
(2)”Recoverable Reserves” – that proportion of coal in place in known coalfields which could be used by established technology.
The figures quoted against these definitions was as follows:-
i) Coal “in place” – 190 bn tonnes (excluding coal at depths greater than 4000 ft and coal beneath the North Sea).
ii) Recoverable Reserves – 45 bn tonnes
In 1990, a presentation by British Coal Corporation (BCC) to the Department of Energy on coal reserves referred to the latest estimate of 45 bnt as technically recoverable reserves but that the amount workable was dependent upon the economic circumstances at the time of working.
It also stated that recoverable reserves from existing mines and certain new mine projects was currently assessed at between 3 bnt and 5 bnt.
In 2006 total UK coal consumption was 61.85MT.
Forty five billion tonnes divided by 61.85MT = 727 years.
Long before Margaret Thatcher become PM, Edward Heath confronted the trade unions. In 1973 a miners’ work to rule resulted in daily power cuts and a three day working week. Heath called election on the issue of “who rules the country” and lost. Some years later Margaret Thatcher, was also supposed to be an easy target but it didn’t work out that way.
During both strikes I worked for a TV company, huge amount of visual and audio information was coming in; confrontations, inflammatory statements and threats from both sides, which was never broadcast.
From many comments in the media at the time and in the later years it was obvious that no clear unbiased assessment can be presented without enraging one or both sides.
I lived in a mining area during the miners’ strike. Thatcher’s politically inspired destruction of the UK coal industry was socially and economically disastrous. It made us dependent on foreign energy when we could have been self-sufficient; and it helped to create the permanent underclass of the unemployed and unemployable which has been a permanent drag on our economy ever since.
Thatcher was also one of the principal architects of the AGW scam. Oh, and she gave Christianity a bad name. In fairness, however, her successors have been even worse.
@Rhys Jaggar says: February 11, 2013 at 11:20 pm
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.
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No need to shout.
Some facts to consider with regard to that shouting, however.
1. Scargill was as much at fault for the mines being closed as Thatcher. He and his ego betrayed the miners, and he thought himself so smart that he gave away the game to Thatcher.
2. When this happened, we hard started importing coal from Poland. The cost of the coal and the transport of it was significantly cheaper than the cost of production of our coal.
3. Why should the consumer pay more for their coal than they have to? Why should industry pay more for its energy than it has to.
4. Agreed, it wasn’t pretty – but Scargill could have parleyed; he refused to and the rest is history.
5. History will judge Scargill badly.
@Walter Horsting says: February 11, 2013 at 11:34 pm
Humankind is lucky to have the climate moderately warm up from one of the coolest periods since ice was a mile thick over Chicago.
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Indeed. Given it seems that it was warmer in all three preceding Holocene warm periods, this lay person can’t understand what the problem is. We are extremely fortunate to be enjoying such mild and benevolent climes, yet a significant percentage of the informed world is running around screaming that the sky is falling in. Some sort of mass hysteria, I guess? My bones are getting old. I like it warm. I really do NOT want another LIA thank you.
Carbon Sponge Could Soak Up Coal Emissions
Feb. 11, 2013 — Emissions from coal power stations could be drastically reduced by a new, energy-efficient material that adsorbs large amounts of carbon dioxide, then releases it when exposed to sunlight.
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2013/02/130212100602.htm