Roger Helmer MEP

It was obvious to all right-thinking people that no causal relationship could exist between sunspots and the price of grain, and Herschel was lampooned for his work.

Yet today the causal chain in well understood.  A high level of sunspots means a strong solar magnetic field.  This reduces the intensity of cosmic rays striking the inner planets, including the Earth.  Cosmic rays play a role in cloud formation in the upper atmosphere.  Fewer cosmic rays mean reduced cloud cover, more sunshine, higher average temperatures, better crop yields — and cheaper wheat.  Herschel was right.  Solar activity directly drives climate change.

Another astronomer, Walter Maunder, noted that for 70 years between 1645 and 1715, there was a very low level of sunspot activity.  And that period just matches the “Little Ice Age”, when oxen were roasted on the frozen River Thames.

Building on Maunder’s work fifty years later, Dr. Jack Eddy was able to use Carbon 14 data from tree rings to build a proxy record of cosmic ray intensity going back 8000 years — and found a convincing correlation with climate, including low cosmic ray intensity from 1100 to 1250 — the Medieval Warm Period.

Yet now we seem to believe that man and only man, with his CO2 emissions, is responsible for climate change.  But climatologists know that the forcing effect (that is, the climatic influence) of atmospheric CO2, while undeniable, is also logarithmic.  It is a law of diminishing returns.  At today’s level of 380 ppm, further increases in CO2 levels will have a marginal effect.

Nonetheless, the UN climate conference will take place in Bali in December, seeking to agree a new CO2 reduction Treaty to replace the Kyoto protocol, which runs out in 2012.  No one seems to have noticed that Kyoto has been a spectacular failure.  Countries like China, India and South Korea are not bound by it.  Only two countries of the EU 27 are expected to reach their Kyoto targets, and those only for exceptional reasons that will not recur. 

We constantly hear the media (especially the BBC) criticise the USA for failing to ratify Kyoto, apparently unaware that the USA is currently doing better than the EU in restraining CO2 emissions.  The EU is happy to claim the moral high ground for signing Kyoto, but is failing to deliver.
 
So what will happen at Bali?  In all probability, there will be a great fanfare and an announcement of agreement on new CO2 reduction programmes.  But read the small print: it will be little better than an agreement to keep talking.  Certainly the world’s biggest emitters, the USA and China, will not sign up to mandatory targets.

But the EU is already getting its recriminations in first, and dropping broad hints that any failure will be down to the USA.  As a recent Forbes magazine headline put it: “US, not China, main obstacle in climate change talks — EU delegation.”

The fact is that the EU cannot come to terms with the idea that the USA’s AP6 programme is already delivering better results than its own discredited cap’n'trade model.

The public is becoming increasingly disenchanted with climate alarmism.  But even if you think CO2 is the problem, Kyoto is not the way to deal with it.  And I doubt that Son of Kyoto, if it happens, will be any better.

We would do well to worry less about climate change, and more about energy security.  That is the great challenge of the next fifty years.  And a lot of what the Greens want makes sense.  We should certainly be less dependent on imported fossil fuels.  We should develop alternative energy sources — although we need to take a realistic view of their economics.

But we should do two things the Greens hate.  We should plan to use our indigenous coal reserves.  And we should be building nuclear capacity as fast as we can.  Nuclear remains the cheapest, safest, most reliable and secure mainstream base-load generation technology available to drive our growing economies.

For more on Herschel, Maunder, Eddy and the solar impact on climate, see “The Sun Kings” by Stuart Clark.