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.
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My understanding is that much of the UK coal in the 80’s was becoming unusable due to the sulphur content. A good friend who was in the business at the time told me that the acid rain scare had caused regulations to be put in place limiting the amount of sulphur in coal used in power stations, so the UK coal had to be mixed with imported lower-sulphur coal to become acceptable. So they would blend expensive low-quality UK coal with cheaper imported better quality (both sulphur content and heat output) to achieve a mix that contained enough UK coal to meet the mandates while also meeting the sulphur levels required. This was one (more) of the reasons why the UK coal industry failed.
“The UK imports 40% of its food requirements but is still accepting immigrants while having a high unemployment rate of 7.8 per cent.”
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What a farrago of non-sequiturs. What does the food import percentage have to do with the immigration rate? Indeed, what does it have to do with anything at all in the post?
I don’t know enough about the details of UK unemployment and immigration to comment, but question the relevance to climate statistics.
The “Onward Christian Soldiers’ bit at the end was also irrelevant and provocative.
Not one of WUWT’s better choices of post.
By answering my questions with a question you change the subject and fail to answer even a single one. Of course it is warmer now than in any number of different eras, but especially those well-known and self-evident cooler periods I listed as: (1), (2), and (3). Let’s cut right to the chase: contrary to what you imply, the climate is not static and has always oscillated warmer-cooler in almost every timescale we use (this used to be considered obvious until red leftists posing as green environmentalists decided to use the weather as a political weapon to parasitically suck money out of the veins of the taxpayers and declared war both on common sense and Science itself to further their socialist agendas, but I digress). Plotting the climate history of Earth, if we zoom way out far enough we will see some very long periods of relatively stable (warmer) climate hundreds of millions of years in the past, but when the continents were in significantly different positions. As they reached their current configuration the climate has been much more varied with higher frequency long ice ages and short interglacials. But the continents will continue their unstoppable progression and eventually what we see now will be a forgotten distant memory to any humans still around. This was well known a half century ago, and all it took was one cool period (1960’s to 1970’s) and one warmer period (1990’s to 2000’s) to cause a generation of ‘highly educated’ under-achievers to lose their minds and fearmonger with “The End Is Near! Repent!”. Having grown up watching kooks with sandwich boards make fools of themselves I recognize the pattern.
It is self-evident that the current climate in most places is warmer now than in any of those three mentioned periods. A couple years ago Steve, I suggested to you a simple proof. Go down to 33rd and 5th in NYC and look up at the 1/4 mile tall Empire State Building. Now roll the clock back to 20 KYA and imagine the ice-pack that is 4 times as tall burying you, the ESB, and everything else as far as the eye can see. The climate was not just cooler but substantially cooler for a very long period of time and no amount of coy “how much warmer is it …” will trump common sense. We were able to deduce that the Earth is spherical long before we placed things and people in orbit. What is quite astounding is that with the absolute establishment of ice ages with brief interglacials and the obvious sinusoidal fingerprints with various amplitude and wavelength (multiple climate changes on many timescales) that anyone would still entertain the proposition that the current climate does not fit perfectly onto the plot, somewhere.
Which leads to the obvious, it is up to you Steven to prove that the climate has gone off-book. So once again: If it is actually +1.5° C (err what happened to +1.9° C) since the LIA, then you have to determine what part of that +1.5° C is abnormal and above and beyond normal LIA recovery. Since it is such a small number, and this number is of questionable accuracy for the myriad reasons we see discussed here (averages of averages, different equipment, locations, human error, UHI, intentional corruption of the historical record, etc) you don’t have a lot of room in that small warming delta to assign significant portions to natural LIA recovery and still have enough left over to blame human beings for taking us out of the Little Ice Age.
By continually stating that ‘X amount of CO2 makes Y amount of warming’ followed up by ‘the measured Y amount of warming matches the models’ has you completely boxed in, and I keep noting that you simply cannot bring yourself to state what you really need to say to make the numbers gel, and that is: ‘we are supposed to still be in the Little Ice Age, and thanks to man we are in it no longer.’ Are you ready to state this now or do we continue the game? Finally, after you solve that (2) Little Ice Age riddle, you need to tackle the (1) post 1960’s to 1970’s warmup and of course the large (3) Holocene warmup as well. In summary: Where were we? Where are we? Where should we be (but for evil human intervention)? That is why I said “Good luck with that”. Despite the kitchen sink approach used by the AGW hoaxsters, it sure looks to me like everything fits comfortably within the bounds of Earth history, or what they now call Natural Variation.
How is it that an English major falls back onto logical fallacies? If I say “Wet” is better than “Dry” (and it is), there is of course a point where it leads to flooding and is no longer good. “Warm” is better than “Cold”, period. You should at least be able to state that without hedging from glancing at the entirety of human history (I got you pegged as a cynical malcontent, only skeptical of things that are almost absolutely certain, while picking sides in controversial subjects just to aggravate your “opposition”, but I digress again). We know what “cold” is because we see it all the time, “warm”, not so much. Even the hottest places on Earth are habitable (I didn’t say comfortable), and have been forever. My people evolved in those places, other peoples have only made it on the outskirts of real cold like the Arctic circle but not Antarctica, and when push came to shove abandoned Greenland for warmer, and (pardon the pun) greener pastures. It takes massively increased expended energy to survive in cold where food is scarce and warmth must be created, than in the tropics where food and warmth is everywhere. Look at the proof in simple dollars and cents, people live at the equator for free, but those that make it to either pole only accomplish this at massive taxpayer expense and have no chance whatsoever of sustaining themselves there without our continued funding.
This fallacy of extreme scenarios is part and parcel of the belief system of the AGW hoaxsters. I first remember it around the time Sagan lurched into celebrity pop-science and became corrupted by prophetic catastrophicisms (kickstarting Ehrlich, Hansen, Von Daniken and others) suddenly telling us that Venus is in our future due to CO2 emissions. Certainly they must all realize that humans will never be able to raise planetary CO2 concentration to dangerous levels (let alone those on Venus) with the few means at our disposal. I doubt we can get it even into 4 digits ppm, and even if we could it is still absolutely harmless and would only match indoor CO2 levels that humans are commonly exposed to. I have said that one way to really knock the crap out of the phony CO2 scare is to issue everybody air analyzers (perhaps add a CO2 meter to new cellphones?) so all the people can see for themselves the frightening 1000+ ppm CO2 numbers they normally experience in their home, job, or car. Those that remain scared can just run outside and breathe in the tiny 400 ppm atmosphere for relief. The plants will benefit from any increase, of that there is no doubt, well unless you want to challenge this assertion also
Steve, Warm is better than Cold because we use less energy in the former case than the latter (no I don’t count comfort from air conditioners because as a very new invention they are self-evidently NOT required to survive). The energy we use to keep us warm (and to keep the wussies cool) comes from little tiny pin-pricks in the ground, barely penetrating the surface of this giant ball of matter, to suck out drops of fossil remains of long dead plants and animals. When burning fossil fuels, all of it still remains here on earth where it has always been, we just shifted it to a different altitude from below ground to the surface and with a tiny portion of it winding up temporarily in the atmosphere until it gets sequestered yet again into more plants and animals. That’s quite a ballet of true recycling. The alternative is ugly, and was ugly for the hundreds of thousands of years we practiced it. In the past we killed every plant and animal in sight on the surface and in the seas to generate our warmth. I think our current way is better, and so do the plants and animals.
johanna
The UK “enjoys” 30% of its children of foreign birth. Will YOU supply the food, the health care and a complete benefit infrastructure for them please? I need a rest.
@Andyj As an “immigrant” from the UK in Australia since childhood, I’m so glad that I don’t get as much venom shoved at me, as immigrants in the UK get. They provide mainly cheap or highly skilled labour to keep the wheels of commerce turning. And mentioned above, what UK doesn’t provide in food, it imports, mainly from the much maligned EU. That’s made easier by the EU, and the no borders situation. It’s a swings and roundabouts thing. You complain about the immigrants, but don’t complain about the cheap European beers and wines, fresh fruit and vegetables etc that come through easily due to EU. So if you want to blame “immigrants, blame the EU as well for supplying cheap and easy food imports.
Back to my original point – Dr Archibald would have done much better sticking to the science. If that’s the point he’s trying to get across, and his point is good enough, why distract everyone with his drive-by political and religious appeals?
Andyj says:
February 12, 2013 at 3:38 pm
johanna
The UK “enjoys” 30% of its children of foreign birth. Will YOU supply the food, the health care and a complete benefit infrastructure for them please? I need a rest.
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Your comment is as incoherent as the one I quoted, which seeks to draw some connection between the immigration rate and food imports. It makes no sense.
As I and HB have said, the introduction of some bizarre political and religious elements derailed this post completely – your comment being a prime example.
@HB “As an “immigrant” from the UK in Australia since childhood, I’m so glad that I don’t get as much venom shoved at me, as immigrants in the UK get.”
You are no doubt made to feel warmly welcome by the aboriginal community. Or is their view similar to that of Canada’s Indians, most of whom candidly admit that they should have killed the settlers when they first arrived — except of course it was the settlers who had the guns, so it was the settlers who killed most of the Indians either with their guns or with their diseases.
As to the settlers in Australia, of course they welcome additions to their population since they are so few occupying such a huge landmass and need to build a powerful economy quickly in order to secure the territory.
Whether immigrants to Britain get “venom shoved at them” I couldn’t say, but there is nothing of that in the article you are commenting on. What the author points out is that Britain’s population exceeds the carrying capacity of the land and that excess population can be attributed to the mass post-war immigration. Whether this is a matter for concern is arguable, but only with people who can understand a simple argument, which neither you nor Johanna seem capable of doing.
“Carrying capacity of the land?” What does that mean? In SustainaSpeak, it tends to mean whether or not we could all live on tiny farms, with chooks and veggie gardens, and outdoor drop dunnies. Back to the C17th. Give us a break.
Any chance your ancestors were immigrants, BTW? If so, no doubt they passed a “sustainability” test before they were allowed in.
@Blade says: February 12, 2013 at 3:34 pm
10/10. Fantastic post. I have taken the liberty of saving it to wave at my warmer friends. You articulate what I have never been able to put into words. Many thanks.
It get’s worse. While feeding the masses EU horse meat lasagna, it appears that a few gobkeys have also crept into the mix. It’s only a matter of time before the alarmists introduce “Soylent Green.” After all, soy + green has to be good, right?
Vukcevic, Ted Heath didn’t tackle the unions, that was the trouble, he only played at it. Even Thatcher went about it the wrong way. using MI5 it would have been possible to undermine the leaders of the troublesome unions with a simple dirty tricks campaign. Oh yes, I realise that the Left (and the wets) would have been up in arms about any such campaign, but it would have been necessary, as certain union leaders were clearly running a communist campaign of their own. To this day I still cannot understand why MI5 didn’t get involved. It is MI5’s job to secure the country, and these union leaders were a clear threat to democracy and even the stability of the country. On that basis alone MI5 would have had a mandate, or at least a mandate that could have been cobbled together to satisfy even those within the Cabinet who weren’t made of the ‘right’ stuff. Between them, the unions and Thatcher left this country in a mess that we’re still trying to crawl out of. Tony Blair only added to it with his immigration policies and a failure to tackle the welfare benefit culture. Even Ian Duncan Smith (IDS) is only really playing at it to placate the Liberals. The only way to get Britain back on its feet is to tackle immigration, end the welfare dependence, and boost industry. NONE of those three are currently being done, though IDS is fiddling with the middle one.
David Archibald wrote:
And I predict that this will be a dire disappointment for David Archibald, because the faithless (like me) are not going to get punished for what he thinks are their misdeeds.
The world climate will not return to the state of the mid-19th century in the lifetime of you humans here, or in this century, or within thousands of years in the future, if there is a continuing increase in greenhouse gases in the atmosphere from anthropogenic emissions and no opposite climate forcings counter their effect (the decrease in direct solar radiative forcing is too small, even if the sun returns to a Maunder minimum like state). I am going to look forward how the world is going to look like in 500, 1000, or 10000 years from here, and what the uncontrolled terraforming process done by you humans will have done to it. It is an interesting global-scale experiment.
Even the claim of the alleged “halt” or “stop” in global warming for the last 16 years has been a non-fact in the data so far (that could change, although I doubt it, based on the currently available data). The “skeptics” are fooling themselves by drawing conclusions from noise. So far, the temperature record for the surface and the troposphere have been within the range of variability of data that are a combination of an intact warming trend plus fluctuations.
Tamino has some nicely illustrating graphs on his website with respect to that:
http://tamino.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/2012-updates-to-trend-observation-comparisons
And the temperature record of the recent years is also still within the 2-sigma range of all the individual predictions done with the CMIP3 models.
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2013/02/2012-updates-to-model-observation-comparions/
One variable where the models have been doing badly is the Arctic sea ice. The accelerating multi-decadal Arctic sea ice melt in Nature, a strong indicator for the ongoing global warming, is much worse than predicted by those models.
Most of you have become too excited too quickly. Perhaps less religious conviction, or less political or ideological preconception, instead a more objective look at the data and results from research published in the peer reviewed specialist journals of the field, and proper application of tools like statistical analysis can be helpful for you at this point.
Jan P Perlwitz says:
February 13, 2013 at 6:13 am
…I am going to look forward how the world is going to look like in 500, 1000, or 10000 years from here, and what the uncontrolled terraforming process done by you humans will have done to it…
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‘you humans’?
hmm…
….
I KNEW IT!
Now for the only remaining question: Is Jan Perlwitz part of an indigenous species or is he an extraterrestrial?
Jan P Perlwitz says:
” The accelerating multi-decadal Arctic sea ice melt in Nature, a strong indicator for the ongoing global warming,”
Arctic sea ice melt accelerated since the warming stalled. It is actually an indicator for more frequent negative NAO conditions.
“Carrying capacity of the land?” What does that mean?
It’s a standard concept in population biology. Look it up.
Any chance your ancestors were immigrants, BTW? If so, no doubt they passed a “sustainability” test before they were allowed in.
I love this kind of nonsensical argument. It shows how empty the liberal mind really is. Sorry Johanna, I don’t wish to be unkind, but you really should read some history, biology and economics and try to figure out how a few things work: you’d then be able to deploy real arguments instead of pointless gibes.
Concerning immigrants to North America, there has never has been any question of the ability of the continent to support all the settlers who have arrived since Columbus, so your attempt to ridicule concern about overpopulation as the result of mass immigration to a small European county by comparison with the situation of immigrants to N. America is absurd.
@CanSpeccy This is the problem becasue Dr Archibald strayed from science. He started with growing seasons, then threw in the immigration red herring. It just provokes all sorts of emotional responses. And now you’re accusing people of being not being able to understand concepts. You see? If he’d stuck to science we wouldn’t have this.
Reminds me of this written several years ago SLEEPWALK TO STARVATION
@HB: This is the problem becasue Dr Archibald strayed from science.
There is surely a lot at WUWT that is not science, but WUWT is none the worse for that. The climate debate, after all, is of wide interest only because it has political and ethical implications. Mostly, the argument centers around issues raised by those who are convinced that climate change will have catastrophic consequences for the biosphere and that mankind is the enemy.
What David Archibald has argued is that it is not anthropogenic climate warming that is the real danger, but the genocidal ideas promulgated by the Club of Rome, and others.
What he states in his final paragraph is certainly debatable and will undoubtedly be debated for years to come. But it is certainly not illegitimate to raise those issues. The politically correct argue otherwise, but that only reveals the weakness of their position, which they are not prepared to defend. Instead, they deploy illegitimate arguments intended to prevent the expression of ideas opposed to their own.
If we allow raising questions about the climate change circus to become portrayed as kneejerk right-wing groupthink it’s too easy for the lazy left-leaning media to convince those who are socially progressive, yet fiscally conservative, to dismiss it as such.
And they’re the thinkers we’re trying to convince here. Not trying to bash.
Yet this is pretty much the state of play right now. And, unfortunately, there’s an element of truth in it. It’s gone disgustingly tribal.
So please your redneck views on non-christians/gays/immigrants/American spelling/young people/hippies/the UN/etc, can you just keep them to yourself and not make this blog such an easy target to discredit. The second you bring politics or religion into it, you lose.
If you still don’t get it: you know how you instantly dismiss any demonstration based on the look of the rent-a-crowd? Well in this case, that’s you. Is that any clearer?
If we allow raising questions about the climate change circus to become portrayed as kneejerk right-wing groupthink…
What are you trying to say here? That if what is said here might be portrayed by the politically correct as “kneejerk right-wing groupthink” it shouldn’t be said whatever it’s merit?
And why should you assume we are trying to convince the “socially progressive”, whoever they may be. Why can’t someone who is “socially conservative” comment here. If the “lazy left-leaning media” misrepresent what is said, so what? They always do that whatever you say if it’s not in accordance withe the line they have to push.
So please your redneck views on non-christians/gays/immigrants/American spelling/young people/hippies/the UN/etc, can you just keep them to yourself
So you are calling the author of this WUWT post, which passed the Editor, a “redneck” because he comments on a perceived relation between the decline of Britain as a viable nation and changes in the national culture. But what he says, although it has little to do with climate, is perhaps well worthy of comment. He suggests Britain’s decline is related to the abandonment of religious faith that has provided the moral basis of society in the British Isles for more than a thousand years.
In particular he says “Individuals with faith are more successful than individuals without faith. That is also true of nations.” That’s an interesting assertion, which could even be put to some kind of empirical test. The atheistical Soviet Union didn’t turn out too well did it, being destroyed eventually by the devout Muslims of Afghanistan. Not a conclusive argument, I agree. But I see not reason to censor all such discussion.