Coal Wars

In 1984, coal miners across the UK embarked on what would become a year-long strike over pit closures. It began on March 5, when the men at one Yorkshire pit, Cortonwood Barnsley walked out in protest against the scheduled closure of their mine. They were joined by miners all over Yorkshire and would learn the following day that at least 20 mines would be closed and around 20,000 miners would lose their jobs. Scottish miners joined the action and within a week half of Britain's 187,000 miners downed their tools.

Margaret Thatcher was 5 years into her stride and did not want a repeat of what happened to Ted Heath's conservative government in 1974, when rolling strikes by coal miners led to major power shortages and electoral defeat. Anticipating trouble, she made sure to stockpile huge amounts of coal at power stations.

The planned closures were driven by economic rationalism. Coal could be imported more cheaply from Columbia, America and even from Australia. Nuclear power stations were also being built, reducing the UK's reliance on coal. The coal miners eventually went back to work in March 1985, effectively losing their battle against mine closures.

After the meltdown of the Chernobyl nuclear reactor in 1986, the nuclear power industry became repugnant overnight. Closure of coal mines continued into the late 1980s and the threat of renewed industrial action loomed as a reemerging nightmare. The solution Thatcher and her advisers came up with: Fund scientists to "prove" the greenhouse effect theory. The results would need to indicate that burning coal would not simply warm the planet, it could lead to disastrous effects. The purpose was to undermine public support for the miners and the coal industry and to present nuclear power as a saviour. It would potentially weaken the National Union of Mineworkers and smooth the way for more nuclear power stations.

"The politicisation of climate science began with Margaret Thatcher. She said to the scientists there's money on the table if you can prove this stuff, so they went away and did that." - Nigel Calder, former editor of New Scientist. "They came out with the first report which was very simplistic and ignored any reference to the sun despite the consensus of the day about the sun's role." This led to the birth of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and a new climate science base with a great emphasis on the concept that changes in the composition of the atmosphere was the main driver of climate change.

Moving ahead to the present day, the nuclear agenda continues its unhealthy alliance with "global warming." Up to 15 new mines are on the drawing board to begin production in the next few years in Australia and an increasing number of journalists are book ending their climate change stories with demands that we must consider turning to nuclear power as the 'clean green alternative.' Mike Stetekee goes as far as suggesting we should "take back the waste from (overseas) nuclear power production and bury it in outback Australia...if the alternative is to burn up under climate change, it may be the best option going." (Weekend Australian 18-19/4/09)

Dennis Shanahan makes the point: "The irony of putting a higher price on coal is that the environmentalists bring nuclear into play as a viable economic alternative. And that's the political argument as well. Anything that is an economic alternative becomes a political alternative." (Australian 25/7/09)

Crying Wolf

The global warming juggernaut has for some years been driven by computer models created using selective information and a substantial leap of faith about the significance of carbon dioxide, a trace gas in the atmosphere. Some scientists advise that nothing has occurred in the past century outside normal climatic variation. However the media attention and devotion of the green movement is squarely focused towards the scientists making extreme claims describing apocalyptic weather conditions, in the not far off future. Of course it is all our fault and the solution is to provide climate scientists with ever increasing funding.

Professor John Cristy, a climatologist and lead author for the IPCC, admitted in 2007, "We have a vested interest in creating panic because then money will flow to climate science."

Late in 2009, a number of scientists in the upper echelon of the IPCC were caught cooking the books when hundreds of emails were released to the media and general public It is unclear whether they were hacked into or circulated by a whistle blower. The scientists discussed tampering with data to hide a recent decline in global temperatures, resisting FOI requests, bullying editors of science journals who had published material from dissenting scientists and destroying raw data. It was not a good look.

Within weeks of this scandal, it was also revealed that claims that a significant portion of the Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035, as included in previous IPCC reports, came from a telephone conversation with an obscure Indian scientist in 1999, which found its way into a New Scientist article.

How Warm Is It?

Not as warm as it was during a significant portion of both the Medieval Warm Period and the lesser known Roman Warm Period. It seems some scientists are in denial of this and are attempting to rewrite history. Even the "threat" of a slightly warmer planet is based on a distortion of history. It is when the planet cools that at least some human communities tend to run into strife.

The Medieval Warm Period extended from around 900AD to 1300AD. The Vikings settled Iceland and Greenland and Lief Erikson established a settlement in Canada. They grew barley in Greenland north of the Arctic Circle. They planted trees, produced vegetables and farmed cows and sheep. England had over a hundred vineyards and agriculture flourished in Britain and across Europe. If the weather was as cool as it was in the 16th and 17th centuries it is unlikely William the Conquerer would have made his move for control of Britain.

The Vikings sailed through parts of the Arctic that are now permanently under ice. We know this from the Icelandic Sagas which include a thousand years of written weather records describing such things as the presence of ice and the length of the growing seasons. It has traditionally been accepted that the temperatures were 2 to 3 degrees warmer in those times, than today.

The Roman Warm Period was similarly warm and possibly even warmer. It extended from around 250BC to 450AD. Ian Plimer suggests the warming in Europe resulted in temperatures 2 to 6 degrees higher than today. Equatorial temperatures were likely around 2 degrees warmer.

Italy experienced much less snow than in the 20th century. North Africa was wetter and was a foodbowl for the Roman Empire. The Romans planted extensive olive groves in the Rhine Valley in Germany. They cultivated citrus orchards as far north as Hadrians Wall in the north of England. The wine industry flourished.

The fall of the Roman Empire coincided with a drop in temperatures and descent into chaos and famine in Europe. It was typified by disastrous crop failures and marauding murderous gangs moving around Europe in search of food. The Little Ice Age (1,400 to 1,800) was also calamitous, Geoffrey Blainey claims there was cannibalism in parts of Europe in the early part of the cooling. Whole towns in France and Switzerland were destroyed by encroaching glaciers. The settlement in Greenland was either disbanded or perished.

It is often implied or claimed that the 20th is unusually warm or that warming in the past 50 years has been unusually rapid. Neither of these claims can be backed by evidence that is cross-referenced and substantiated by multiple data sources. Evidence of unscrupulous scientists tampering with data or being overly creative in the way they draw up graphs to display a certain view or trend detracts substantially from the credibility of the AGW argument.

Sunspot Activity

Sunspots were first observed through a telescope in the early 1600s and Galileo was one of the first to observe them. They helped broaden the understanding of the solar system, for example, they showed that the Sun rotates on its axis. Records were kept of sunspots and their annual variation since about 1650. In the late 1800s Edward Maunder closely examined this variation and found an astonishing correlation with the weather.

He observed that when sunspot numbers were low, the climate seemed to cool. One particularly quiet period- from 1645 to 1715 is now known as the Maunder Minimum. It correponds with one of the coldest periods of the Little Ice Age. The Thames River in England would regularly freeze in the winter during those years.

By contrast, the past 50 years have seen the highest number of sunspots and hence magnetic activity observed in the past 350 years.This has translated to higher temperatures during some decades. Curiously over the last several years a dramatic decline of sunspot numbers has occurred and the northern hemisphere has just experienced two consecutive winters of rare severity. At times this has been highly problematic.



Much of Britain was brought to a standstill due to unusually large snowfalls and freezing temperatures for many weeks of the recent winter. It was the same story in America. Three thousand traditional Mongolian herders lost all their stock due to temperatures dropping to minus 40 degrees.

The April 17 edition of New Scientist contains an article expressing the views of climate scientists adamant that the low sunspot numbers are reflected in the recent cooler weather. The writer Stuart Clark suggests if this trend were to continue we may be on the verge of a mini-ice age. We will have to wait and see.

Comparisons between variations in solar activity and temperatures in the Arctic between 1880 and 2000 show a strong correlation between the two.

Astute climate scientists may be wise to pay greater attention to sunspot trends, their 11 and 88 year cycles, in their quest to predict future weather.






John Cristy: "It is my turn to cringe when I hear overstated confidence from those who describe the projected evolution of global weather patterns over the next 100 years, especially when I consider how difficult it is to accurately predict that system's behaviour over the next five days. Mother nature simply operates at a level of complexity that is, at this point, beyond the mastery of mere mortals- such as scientists- and the tools available to us." (Australian newspaper 4/11/2007)

Jon Woodlands

References:

• Jeavans, C. 'The Miners' Darkest Year' ,BBC News online, 4/3/2004
• Kinder, A.J., 'Edward Walter Maunder His Life and Times', Journal of the British Astronomical Association, Vol 118 (1) pp21-42, 2008
• Maunder minimum, Wikipedia
• Willson, R.C., Total Solar Irradiance Trend During Solar Cycles,pp21 and 22, 'Science', 1997
• Durkin, M., 'The Great Global Warming Swindle', Channel 4, U.K., 2007
• Calder, N., Wikipedia
• Stetekee, M., 'Storing up Trouble', Weekend Australian, 18-19/4/2009
• Shanahan, D., 'Chain Reaction', Weekend Australian, 25-26/7/2009
• Cristy, C., 'Mother Nature's Inconvenient Truths, Australian, 4/11/2007
• Crawford, C.,'Snowmageddon', Daily Telegraph (Sydney), 8/2/2010
• Cauchi, S., 'When the sun goes quiet Earth shivers', Sun Herald, 13/9/2009
• Clark, S., 'Quiet sun puts Europe on ice', New Scientist, 17/4/2010
• Peden, J.A.,(ed), 'The Great Global Warming Hoax?', The Middlebury Community Network

Books:

• Plimer, I., 'Heaven and Earth Global Warming: The Missing Science', 2009
• Bryson, R.A. and Murray, T.J., 'Climates of Hunger', 1977
• Blainey, G., 'A Short History of The World', 2000

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References