CLIMATE scientists at the time were unanimous – by the 1970s it was crystal clear that the planet had been cooling for three decades.
This fact led to various ice age scares in the media, but on a more serious level the authorities were very concerned about a return to the Little Ice Age conditions which had persisted until the late 19th century. In particular they were extremely worried about the world’s ability to feed itself following the abundance of food which the warmer early 20th century had brought.
Since then, of course, the climate establishment has done everything to cover up those concerns, and eliminate the 30 years of cooling by tampering with the temperature record. But they can’t get rid of the wealth of literature written at the time by climate scientists such as H H Lamb, who must be turning in his grave at the antics of his successors. Nor can they hide TV documentaries, such as the BBC’s The Weather Machine, broadcast in 1974. Unfortunately there is only this short clip available now:
But we do have the full video of the US version:
It starts by recognising the fact that the world was in the middle of a cooling period, and goes on to provide a litany of weather disasters, droughts in Africa, India and the US Midwest, floods in Bangladesh and deadly tornadoes, all the direct consequence of global cooling.
Cool summers and shorter growing seasons posed real dangers to food security.
It then examines how ice cores from Greenland identified the warm periods during Egyptian and Roman times, as well as the Middle Ages, and how these were interspersed by much colder interludes.
The decades-long period of cooling after the war, and the extreme weather it brought with it, are an embarrassment to the climate establishment because it all coincided with mounting global emissions of CO2. That is why they are so desperate to expunge it from the record.
At the end of the video, YouTube added their mandatory health warning, even though it is totally contradicted by the documentary itself!
Why solar power can never work in Britain
THERE was another puff piece for the solar farm industry the other day in the Telegraph, no doubt co-ordinated by the renewables lobby, waxing lyrical about how wonderful and cheap solar power is.
The naïve journalist who wrote it clearly does not understand the difference between ‘capacity’ and ‘generation’, for instance claiming that the EU’s solar power capacity target of 672 GW is ‘roughly equivalent to 200 large nuclear power stations.’.
You cannot of course compare a solar farm that runs at maybe 15 per cent of capacity with a nuclear plant that runs at 100 per cent.
The problem with this solar rollout is that it makes us and the rest of Europe almost totally dependent on China, who last year supplied 97 per cent of the continent’s solar panels, on the back of cheap coal power and slave labour. As a consequence, the European Solar Manufacturing Council (ESMC) has warned of a looming ‘wave of bankruptcies’. Without these heavily subsidised panels from China, solar power would be twice the price.
But there is one overriding reason why we cannot rely on solar farms in this country or the rest of NW Europe either. In winter months, solar output falls to virtually nothing. During December 2023, for example, all the solar power connected to the GB electricity network (ie excluding rooftop) supplied on average only 297 MW. This was just 1.8 per cent of the total solar capacity of 16.45 GW:
https://www.solar.sheffield.ac.uk/pvlive
Even if the government quadruples solar capacity, as planned, you are still looking at only a tiny amount of power, given that total demand will probably top 80 GW. Four times nothing is still nothing! You will need to back up every MW of this solar power with dispatchable generation.
Nobody in their right mind would spend tens of billions on something which works properly for only half the year.