Could someone please scrape the Global Warming off my windscreen?
An excellent piece by Specky Editor Fraser Nelson http://is.gd/rqKyjg, titled “It’s the cold, not global warming, that we should be worried about”. Fraser points out that typically in the UK, some ten times as many people (mainly pensioners) die of cold as die of heat. Indeed, he says that since 2003 — the heat-wave that helped push the global warming agenda — 250,000 Brits have died from cold, only 10,000 from heat.
As a matter of public policy, therefore, the government should be ensuring that we have affordable energy, and should be helping people to avoid fuel poverty. This is also UKIP’s objective. www.affordable-energy.eu. But in fact, government policy is doing the exact opposite. In its futile and pointless efforts to mitigate climate change and save the planet, it is deliberately pushing prices up, undermining competitiveness, driving energy intensive businesses off-shore, and forcing pensioners into fuel poverty.
It does this by renewables subsidies, by pressing ahead with grotesquely unrealistic wind energy targets, by closing coal-fired power stations, and by signing up to the EU’s ETS (Emissions Trading Scheme). But worse than that, it’s now just brought in its Carbon Floor Price (because the ETS was failing to deliver sufficiently high prices).
I am horrified by the sheer dishonesty of the Coalition, which is seeking to claim that its policies actually reduce energy costs. They make this preposterous claim in the basis that if you spend a fortune on insulating your home and replacing all your appliances with the latest high-efficiency versions, you’ll use less energy. But the people most at risk, on low incomes or pensions, simply can’t afford to do that, Green Deal or no Green Deal. It’s like saying that bread has gone up 50%, but that bread is now really cheaper, if you choose to eat half as much.
I take issue with Fraser Nelson on only one point. He writes “The reaction to the 2003 heat-wave was extraordinary. It was blamed for 2000 deaths ….. such language is never used about cold, which kills ten times as many people each winter ….. Before long every political party had signed up to the green agenda”. Not quite true, Fraser. There was one political party that didn’t sign up, that campaigns for Affordable Energy, that rejects renewables unless, like hydro, they are economically sustainable. A party that rejects playground technologies like wind farms, and calls for proven, grown-up technologies like nuclear, gas and coal. That party is called UKIP.
Roger Helmer MEP 
There’s nothing new under the sun. So goes a very, very old saying (the actual wisdom of Solomon if you like a bit of Old Testament, and Ecclesiastes was the favorite piece of literature of Ernest Hemingway, and influenced his style). So this could be an introduction punning, or metaphorical, or literal – the climate is a subject of inescapable importance and conversation, never more so than when it is changing, which it normally is – perhaps you remember all those ice ages coming and going that you learned about in school and from the BBC hype-and-climate change programs in the 1970s, if you go back that far? There are some advantages to being older – you have seen all the cons before – and care that much less about what you cannot change.
And going back to the 70s is what this is all about. If you remember the Horizon programs, TIME magazine leading articles, and New Scientist weekly chiller thriller columns, you will be getting dejá vu about now, as the German and Russian scientists who are breaking the warmist consensus bravely make their bid for grant monies based on the ‘global cooling’ scare redivivus. My fave quote from that era is ‘we are overdue for a new ice age’. Or a meltdown, or temperate times, depending on what they can get funded to research. Eventually the truth gets out tho. But I am betting that the warmist propaganda, generating huge amounts of carbon taxes and Nanny State finger-wagging opportunities, will stay the government-funded top of the pops. I am pretty lukewarm about it all on average, unless it puts my taxes up of course, then I tax avoiding action…now where did I put my Bitcoins…
I would like to see if there is any link between the dramatic changes in our weather patterns and the proliferation of windfarms around our coast and on our hillsides.
There is research being carried out in the USA into the turbulence created by them, I bet there is no such within the EU. After all any link would really affect the wind turbine manufacturers and the economy of the country involved. Couldn`t be Germany could it?
On the face of it, I think it’s very nearly as unlikely that wind turbines would affect the weather as that they should affect the climate — but I guess you never know. I’d like to hear of any evidence supporting the hypothesis.
This may be of interest though it is not exactly effecting the climate. Maybe more turbines will solve that. 🙂
http://withouthotair.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/wind-farm-wakes.html
Mr H: It goes far beyond mere dishonesty – it’s now in the areas of corruption and extortion; only physical torture has been excluded.
If fuel-poverty is being neglected because of the focus on renewables, that is one issue.
If wrong choices are being made to combat global-warming, that is another issue.
Neither of these matters touches on the truth or otherwise of global warming.
The issue of more people dying of cold than of heat is irrelevant if more have always died of cold, and the number dying of heat has increased.
If the number dying of cold has increased, and the cause of the drop in temperatures is global warming, an apparently contradictory phenomenon which was predicted ages before this string of cold winters, then we have two consequences of global warming which have to be addressed.
One might be more convinced about your strictures over government climate policies, if you stated that global warming was a problem but that you are concerned about the appropriateness of our responses to it. But you don’t do that, do you?
One suspects, maybe wrongly, that you seek to muddy the waters over issues related to responses to energy problems because you wish to deflect people’s attention from the core issue of global warming.
“That the global temperature standstill (observed from 1997 to the present) could continue to at least 2017 would mean a 20-year period of no statistically significant change in global temperatures. Such a period of no increase coming at a time when greenhouse gas forcing is rising will pose fundamental problems for climate models”
http://www.thegwpf.org/met-office-forecasts-global-temperature-rise/
This seems to be good news. But the article acknowledges that green house gas forcing raises global temperatures. That means that in a tiny fraction of time the industrial world has produced forces that alter global temperatures. Dr Whitehouse seems to argue that there are forces at work that are immediately correcting the situation. Presumably he might already be in possession of detailed knowledge of what those forces might be, just like the scientists who have worked diligently to understand how warming might work. If such counteractions exist and are manifesting themselves already without any doubt, we can to some extent breathe a sigh of relief. Remember however, that early predictions of the effects of global warming always stated that the most obvious result would be wider variations in weather patterns. Remember also that many climate-change-deniers have been found grotesquely wanting in their reasoning, not marginally at fault as has occurred with its proponents.
It is true that the issue of deaths from cold is different from the issue of anthropogenic global warming. But the arguments go in series: first, there is a strong case, increasingly recognised, that “greenhouse gases” have a much smaller effect than predicted, and in the view of many scientists, essentially trivial compared to other factors (especially the Sun). Second, there is a strong case that the actions we are taking to mitigate climate change will not succeed even in their own terms. Wind farms don’t achieve significant emissions reductions. And third, we are undermining our competitiveness. If we stick to our “green” policies, our economy will shrink, and other less green economies will grow. This is a lose-lose-lose policy. A recent release from Bjorn Lomborg (who buys the basic man-made global warming theory) suggests that by 2100, the €100 bn that Germany has spent on green initiatives will have delayed global warming — by a whole 37 hours!
This came home to me very strongly this week.
My wife and I, both OAPs have, thanks to the government, managed to insulate our house properly, but we don’t have the heating on in the day. We just put on more clothes.
On Tuesday, I didn’t bother to wear enough clothes and have been flattened ever since with man-flu. Old age is actually very dangerous if you don’t see the problem and do something about it immediately.
In all fairness to everyone, the gulf stream has been under discussion by the AGW people for some years now and this cold snap is caused by that.
Mike,
Did you mean Gulf Stream or Jet Stream?
THORIUM POWER STATIONS!!
I cannot stress this enough.
China and India are going ahead full steam but the UK is saying “We’ll see…” smh
Thorium is plentiful in the UK. We even have stores of it from conventional nuclear power stations as “waste” which is fuel just waiting to be used. Imagine that… using our nuclear waste as fuel… no more crying about where to dump it when we can use it and burn it in the reactor.
The USA had a four year test run Thorium power Station that ran like a dream Big Nuclear Industry. with the help from President from Nixon to Reagan, have pushed it aside to safe-guard their profits. Is that all we are now; cash-cows for corporations to make profits?
Thorium power Stations – Smaller, cheaper, safer and abundant. 1,000 years of electricity security and the massive reduction of our nuclear waste as it’s turned into fuel, and thusly, electricity!
It would be madness not to build them!
One upon a time, Britain lead the way with technical know-how in the nuclear field. Now we’re being left behind by India?
UKIP are crying on about shale gas and coal-burning power stations. Time to look forward too!
LFTR, LENR, clean-burning bio-fuels from cannabis hemp bio-mass will guarantee energy security to industry, homes and vehicles on this island for the next 1,000 years. Not something to be dismissed on a whim, especially when it’s already got the attention of a number of MPs and Lords/Ladies in the British “green” sector; as well as being applauded as part of the non-proliferation treaty (which we currently adhere to by burning our Pu surplus).
Why is the icon near my “name” in the form of a green Nazi cross?
What’s that all about? LMAO
“….They make this preposterous claim in the basis that if you spend a fortune on insulating your home and replacing all your appliances with the latest high-efficiency versions, you’ll use less energy….”
And even if we did, how long before we recouped the the cost of them with energy savings – I wouldn’t mind betting that dear old uncle Ed (Davey) hasn’t taken that into account. His claims are so ludicrous I wonder that he has the nerve to voice them in public.
It’s the economics of the madhouse but no one (especially not the unspeakable BBC) ever seems to challenge him!
Wind farms do not reduce CO2 or gas in power stations. Therefore, they have no use in reducing green house gases.
Ed Davey and his eco loonies, are so inept, I wouldn’t allow them to be in charge of a school tuck shop.
Just read another gem from the BBC – the increase in Antarctic sea ice is due to……………yes I’m sure you’re ahead of me on this one………..GLOBAL WARMING!!!
You really couldn’t make this stuff up – oh, and it’s not an April fool joke!
Meanwhile the hypocritical Clegg is flying off to Davos for a holiday.
Apparently saving the planet is only for the little people.
http://notalotofpeopleknowthat.wordpress.com/2013/03/30/hypocritical-clegg-off-to-davos/
The UKIP and climate science… Is Christopher Monckton still touring Australia telling his misleading myths?