“When people on average earnings start to fall into ‘fuel poverty,’ it is clear that Britain is in the grip of a living standards crisis,” leads the UK’s Daily Express of Oct. 12. “On current trends every British household on a middling income will be defined as living in fuel poverty within four years . . . add in the bills for running a car and the picture becomes bleaker still . . . All the old complacent assumptions about Britain being a securely prosperous country must be jettisoned.”

One-fourth of British households may be forced into “fuel poverty” by 2015 as the British government raises electricity and gas taxes to invest in more high-cost renewable energy—especially high-cost and erratic offshore wind turbines.

“So it is time for Britain to abandon unilateral and unrealistic targets for cutting CO2 emissions, especially where they will only be achieved by investing a fortune in prohibitively expensive ‘renewable’ sources of energy,” concludes the Daily Express.

The costs of British electricity have doubled since 2004, and are expected to rise another 20 percent this year. The German Deutsch bank predicts another 25 percent rise by 2015 as the UK pours billions of public dollars—from both the Treasury and higher consumer billing—into the big steel barges and the tall turbine towers.

“‘Radical policy change’ may be necessary to protect millions of struggling families from the biggest household price shock since the 1970s,” writes Sean Poulter in the Daily Mail of Oct. 12, quoting London financial analysts. Meanwhile, Poulter says, with the worst unemployment figures for 17 years, the Institute for Fiscal Studies found families are about to endure their biggest income drop in over 35 years (a collapse which, incidentally, brought Margaret Thatcher to power).

Put another way, the British cost of electricity is rising about six times as fast as British household incomes, according to David Blair in the Financial Times of Oct. 11. He predicts the steady rise in electricity and gas charges could force the government to reconsider spending L200 billion on new infrastructure by 2020, especially that big expansion of wind power.

“If the rate of increase continues, it would concentrate minds even further and energy costs would rise potentially to the top of the public’s agenda and therefore of the political agenda,” Blair quotes David Hunter, an energy consultant. Mr. Hunter described the costs as “eye-watering.”

Meanwhile, Lord David Young, the former UK Secretary for Trade and Industry, said in the London Times, “No one can doubt that we are going through a period of global warming. A few weeks ago I was at an Inuit settlement on the west coast of Greenland where they have seen five months of sea ice a year reduced to less than a month. . . . Cold weather [persisted in England however] between the 15th and 19th centuries when the Thames would freeze over and frost fairs were held. It was said in Roman times, when we were going through a warm period, that English wine was famous. . . . Our climate is always changing”

Lord Young warns, “in an age of few political beliefs, the cause of climate change [has become] an end in itself. . . . Only recently the Government Chief Scientist, no less, forecast that by the end of the century, Antarctica would be the only habitable continent.”

But he notes that there has been no global warming trend since 1998. “Are we absolutely certain that the main cause of global warming is carbon and has nothing to do with the output of the Sun, or any of the other theories?” he asked. “It would be unfortunate if history recalled that we solved a problem that in the end did not require a solution by tipping [Britain’s economy] into a depression.”

CHURCHVILLE, VA—Just as congress is set to tax fossil fuels out of the U.S. economy, the New York Times has reasserted its utterly foolish demand that we tear out existing hydroelectric dams—the dams that  provide most of our renewable energy in the form of water-generated electricity..

Hydroelectric dams produce 8.5 percent of our power, and it’s all carbon-free. That’s nearly five times the deliveries from our erratic solar panels and wind turbines. Now we’re supposed to tear out hydroelectric dams just as every other key energy source is ripped away by a rapacious congress? 

 

What in the name of glitzy/ditzy Manhattan is the former “national paper of record” trying to do to the American people?   

 

The Times anguished on July 7^th that we’ve only torn out “only” 430 of the nation’s evil river-killing dams. It specifically mentions tearing down four power dams on the lower Snake River. The reason?  The Times says that will “protect salmon on the West Coast.” 

 

Nonsense. Hasn’t Andrew Revkin, the Times’ science writer, heard yet about the Pacific Decadal Oscillation discovered in 1996? Salmon numbers dropped radically in the Columbia after 1977— as the salmon catch surged upward in the Gulf of Alaska. The ocean currents had redistributed the fish food in the open ocean, delivering the food species to different destinations in a 50–60 year cycle that shows up brilliantly in the salmon catch records of both fisheries. The PDO also impacts catches of halibut, sardines, anchovies and other fish Pacific-wide. The fish species weren’t in danger, though some of the fishermen’s livelihoods were.

 

The PDO is highly correlated with sea temperatures in the northern California Current, and linked with prevailing winter wind direction in the northern Pacific. Southeast winds are warming. Northeastern winds cool.

 

Mr. Revkin should be up on this, because the PDO has also dictated recent global temperatures; the Pacific is the planet’s largest heat sink. When the Pacific and Atlantic cycles are in sync, as they were from 1976–98, the earth’s temperatures soar.

 

What drives the cycles? Let’s take a wild guess that it might be the sun. The sunspots began predicting the 2007 global temperature decline eight years before it happened. Since 2007, world temperatures have lost 30 years worth of their previous warming, snowpacks have increased, and ski seasons have lengthened.

 

• June in Manhattan averaged 3.7 degrees cooler than the recent norm—the coldest average since 1958.¹
• Phoenix was 8.5 degrees below the recent norm.²
• New Zealand’s National Climate Center announced, “Temperature:  Lowest ever for May for many areas, colder than normal for all.³
• The satellite temperatures? “June 2009 saw another — albeit small — drop in the global average temperature anomaly, from +0.04 deg. C in May to 0.00 degrees C in June, with the coolest anomaly in the Southern Hemisphere.” ⁴  
• Global temperatures are down 0.74 degree C since Gore’ movie opened in 2006. ⁵

 

The PDO fell from 1890–1924, rose from 1925–1946, fell from 1947–1976, and rose strongly from 1976–1999. Global temperatures followed the shifts. Both the PDO and the Columbia salmon have been stuttering since 1999, but NASA’s Jason satellite confirmed last year the PDO has now shifted cool. These short-term shifts are superimposed on the moderate, solar-linked 1,500-year Dansgaard-Oeschger cycles that run back at least a million years.

 

The planet has been through all this before—without any cap-and-tax penalties on human endeavor.

 

DENNIS T. AVERY is an environmental economist, and a senior fellow for the Hudson Institute in Washington, DC. He was formerly a senior analyst for the Department of State. He is co-author, with S. Fred Singer, of Unstoppable Global Warming Every 1500 Hundred Years, Readers may write him at PO Box 202, Churchville, VA 24421 or email to cgfi@hughes.net

 

Sources:

 

1. National Weather Service, July 8, 2004.www. forecast.weather.gov.

 

2. National Weather Service, July 1, www. forecast.weather.gov.

 

3. New Zealand National Climate Center, press release, June 2.

 

4. Roy Spencer, University of Alabama/Huntsville, drroyspencer.com

 

5.  Roy Spencer, University of Alabama/Huntsville, drroyspencer.com