YOU want to save the planet? You want to stop the world getting hotter and the weather getting worse? Read on. But first, to calm your anxious mind maybe take a look at what’s actually happening.
The world is not getting hotter. It just seems to be warming very slightly. The UK official mean temperature for 2025 is 10.09C, which is precisely three tenths of a degree warmer than last year. That increase, imperceptible to the average human being, might have been expected as it was also the sunniest year since records began in 1910. But never mind the evidence, keep pushing the story. ‘This,’ says the Met Office, ‘is a clear demonstration of the impacts of climate change.’ Can three-tenths of a degree really be called an impact?
The Guardian said it was ‘the hottest’ year and the Daily Mail described it as ‘balmy’. Ten degrees Celsius would only be called hot or balmy by the scientific folk in the middle of the Antarctic winter who gladly shed two layers of clothing when it’s only -20C.
The weather may be getting worse, or it may not. We only have detailed world-wide weather reports from the last 120-odd years and know very little or nothing about what happened for the 10,000 years before that. Have you come across any complaints in your Latin studies about how the storms hampered the Roman legions building Watling Street? No? I thought not. Have you read any harrowing details about the terrible weather in Africa in the 13th century BC? Of course you haven’t.
Still want to help? There are many websites eager to tell you what to do. They mostly begin the same way: first insulate your home then install a heat pump, batteries and solar panels. Maniacal Miliband has just dreamed up (I use those words deliberately) yet another of his whimsical schemes. This time he will seemingly give some of us about half the money we need to do all that so we’ll have cost-free energy for evermore. Except for paying back the interest on the other half.
Clearly he’s realised that there’ll never be enough wind turbines and solar farms to cope with the UK’s growing demand for electricity so wants us all to help. This is the man who said in February 2009: ‘Absolutely we understand the importance of oil and gas . . . If we were really relying on renewables, then we would be putting ourselves in a vulnerable position.’ That seems to have been the last time he had any common sense.
Continuing the feel-good-about-global-warming list (from the United Nations): walk and cycle everywhere, use an electric car only if there’s no public transport. Take fewer flights or better still don’t go anywhere. Eat more vegetables and less meat and dairy. Recycle everything possible – but that’s important anyway.
Before you order the electric car, cancel your week in Spain and swear not another bit of beef will soil your mouth, maybe we should look at what’s really happening.
Official government information for 2024 says that we consumers caused 26 per cent of the UK total emissions. Now we know that the UK’s proportion of global emissions is around 0.7 per cent (the same asEgypt). A little maths brings out that we are contributing 26 per cent of 0.7 per cent, or about one-quarter of the UK’s already tiny total.
Which means that if we gave up everything, ate nothing but vegetables, never used gas or electricity or any kind of carbon-based fuel and stayed permanently at home, the reduction in global emissions would be too small to show up in the data. Think about it. If you’re now asking what is the reason we’ve all been inflicted with this climate hysteria then I’ll tell you.
Once upon a time (December 2015, in fact) there were 40,000 wildly enthusiastic participants at a United Nations climate conference (COP21) in Paris. They produced a legally binding agreement on climate change; the global average temperature increase was to be held at less than 2C above pre-industrial levels and hopefully try to limit the rise to 1.5C by the end of this century. The release into the atmosphere of carbon dioxide and other noxious gases would have to be curtailed drastically.
There was loud cheering as this resolution was adopted by the 195 nations’ representatives. What a glorious achievement, they thought. But 191 of them were quite happy to sign as their country was emitting either nothing or very small amounts. China, the USA, India and Russia were at that time shoving out more than half the global total and still are in 2024.
Re-enter the manic Miliband in 2019 who, with misguided May as Prime Minister, decided that we should be the first major economy to set a Net Zero target in law. And it’s all gone downhill since. Got much worse, in fact. Somewhere, somehow, this became known as ‘the race to Net Zero’ even though the UK seemed to be the only competitor.
Climate zeal was reborn with the 2024 Labour manifesto and its avowed aim (on page 49) ‘to make Britain a clean energy superpower by 2030’. All the turbines, solar farms, heat pumps and electric cars are because we are going for clean power. Then we suffer repeated exhortations about not eating beef, buying a bike and banning all thought of going anywhere near an aeroplane, all because we’re in this ridiculous ‘race’. Yet the UK is one of the 191 countries which are insignificant emitters of greenhouse gases.
None of the emission reductions we might make in both energy generation and private life will have more than the most infinitesimal effect on the global total.
We’re watching the economy being trashed. That’s all.
