Godfrey Bloom

A few blog posts ago, I made the point that what concerns us most is not climate at all, but weather. Weather is what we actually have to put up with. When we leave the house to go to work in the morning, it hits us in the face, stops the car working, and makes the road hell. On the other hand, occasionally – not often enough – it is pleasant. Climate, though, is something abstract. It apparently takes teams of scientists to tell you what the climate is, never mind what climate actually means. It is my view (and many others, of course) that this abstract concept has become highly politicised.

I have been even more persuaded of my position this week. I’ve been looking into wind farms yet again. Wind farm sceptics (they’re not all climate sceptics, by the way) are concerned that often the wind doesn’t blow. Electricity is hard to store as is wind. So you need to have the same generating capacity in conventional hardware as you have with wind. I.e. you still need to build just as many conventional power stations as you would if you decided not to build a single wind farm. These plants will remain redundant, yet will still have an operating cost. Worst still, in order for wind to be commercial viable, you have to subsidise windfarms a whopping 250% of the cost of the electricity (based on a 2MW turbine). The economic argument just doesn’t stack up to anyone with even half a brain. But on this occasion, I was more interested in what would happen to people if the turbines stopped, as often they do, when there is a cold snap. (Cold snaps are usually accompanied by high pressure, meaning no wind).

What I found was quite a shock. Forget what happens if the windfarms fail. Forget about windfarms altogether for the moment. Let’s just concentrate on what actually happens when it’s cold.

According to the Office of National Statistics (ONS),

In the winter period of December to March 2008/09 there were an estimated 36,700 more deaths in England and Wales, compared with the average for the non-winter period... . This was an increase of 49 per cent compared with the number in the previous winter 2007/08. This is the highest number of excess winter deaths since the winter of 1999/2000, when excess winter mortality was nearly a third higher than in 2008/09.

Here is the graph they provide

According the United Nations, climate change allegedly kills 150,000 people a year. I find that figure hard to believe, because it turns out that people are being killed by things like malnutrition, which is blamed on climate change. But if we decide to accept it, for the sake of argument, these 150,000 deaths occur in a region much, much larger than the UK, and from a population much much larger than the UK’s. That figure is one that Greens like to bang on about. But look, every year in the UK, between 25 and 50 thousand people die prematurely, because of the cold. That’s between a sixth and a third of the global number of people allegedly being killed by climate change, yet the UK is just 1% of the world’s population.

I’m not going to use these deaths to make a cheap point about wind farms. The fact that we have our priorities terribly, terribly wrong speaks for itself. We fail the elderly population in this country, and our politicians are trying to get away with it by pretending to be ‘saving the planet’. There should not be a single death from cold in this country.

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