According to the UK Met Office in 2025 we experienced the coldest January temperatures for 15 years. I wonder how much colder it has to get to satisfy the Greenies among us. Our national news media have been claiming that 2024 was the hottest year on record and that it was over 1.5 degrees C above the pre industrial norms. How accurate is this claim? Well, firstly the satellite based temperature measurements used to support this claim have only been with us since around 1980. These measurements do indicate an increase in temperatures over that period but it is very small and well within the normal temperature variations experienced by planet Earth throughout its history. Indeed the recorded temperature increase is within the potential error range of the measurement systems.
The size of the matrix used to obtain global average temperatures is too large to take account of local hot or cool spots. Measurement accuracy is also affected by variations in reflectivity resulting from activities such as deforestation, buildings and roads construction and so on. Satellite measurement data have to have calibration factors applied to them. These factors may or may not be totally correct. Data we can rely on includes the fact that we have just experienced the lowest January temperatures for 15 years and that the hottest temperature ever recorded and verified by the World Meteorological Organisation was 56.7C on 10th July 1913 in Furnace Creek California. These facts are not compatible with claims that we are experiencing global warming due to industrial CO2 emissions. Of course, of themselves they do not prove that CO2 emissions are not causing climate change. But they should raise some doubts. So let's look at some real proof. What cannot be disputed is that the infra red absorption spectrum of CO2 is almost saturated. See below from an article by Dr. Steven Schneider:-
This phenomenon of saturation was discovered by Professor Angstrom in 1900 and subsequently confirmed by many others.
Today, there are about 420 ppm CO2 in the atmosphere. In comparison to the Ordovician period of severe glaciation, when carbon dioxide levels were between 10 and 22 times today's levels.
Therefore the suggestion that increasing CO2 concentrations will cause catastrophic runaway global warming is a scientific impossibility. Think of a sheet of red cellophane. Take the sheet and look through it. Everything looks red because the cellophane is absorbing or reflecting the orange, yellow, green, blue, indigo and violet components of visible light. Only red gets through. Now add another sheet of the same cellophane. Things look much the same. Everything still looks red and it is only very slightly dimmer than before due to the tiny amount of internal absorption of red light. The cellophane can't absorb or reflect any more of the other components of visible light because it has already reflected or absorbed all of them! The same is true of Carbon Dioxide. It has already absorbed almost all the infra red wavelengths of heat that it can. Just like the cellophane it can't absorb any more so the infra red wavelengths that it doesn't absorb go straight through just like the red light through the cellophane. Adding more cellophane or more CO2 just won't change anything.
Water vapour is by far the most significant greenhouse gas being responsible for around 95% of the greenhouse effect, It is water vapour that is mainly responsible for preventing the Earth's surface from freezing over, not CO2. The role of CO2 in increasing Earth's surface temperature is very small and as shown above is already very close to its theoretical limit.
Therefore if we as a global population increase or reduce our CO2 emissions it will have no noticeable effect on the global climate. The pursuit of Net Carbon Zero is thus completely pointless. Of course it won't happen. It certainly won't happen while China is still building 40 new coal fired power stations and mining or importing billions of tons of coal! It won't happen while Donald Trump is in the White House authorising a massive oil and gas drilling bonanza to provide US industries with cheap energy.
But what about renewable sources of energy?
We have already seen that current renewables such as solar panels and wind turbines are more expensive hence the subsidies required to make them viable. Last winter we almost completely depleted our natural gas reserves because the sun did not shine much and there was insufficient wind to drive the turbines. Backing up these intermittent power sources with nuclear power is one possibility but nuclear power is also more expensive than fossil fuel generated power. Of course, once we have enough nuclear power to provide a complete back up service for renewable power generators we might as well turn off all our solar and wind power generators as it costs about the same to generate power from a nuclear power station as it does to leave it idle.
Hydrogen has its enthusiasts and possibly has a place in powering large trucks where batteries would be too heavy and for electricity power generation when the sun is not shining and the wind is not blowing. Note that the generation of hydrogen needs electricity to separate it from oxygen in water. That is fine if we have surplus electricity. Then when we burn the hydrogen, it joins up with oxygen to form water again. Obviously we don't get quite as much energy back as we used to generate the hydrogen but this process is an alternative to batteries for large scale energy storage. The hydrogen can also be used to make synthetic hydrocarbon fuels to run existing petrol and diesel engines. The key point to understand is that all these options are significantly more expensive than fossil fuels. So why bother? We have enough fossil fuels to keep us going for the next 250 years or so. Maybe longer if we discover more reserves. Yes, it is good to study alternatives for the time when fossil fuels become scarce and expensive but we do not need to deploy them at scale yet. That will only continue to make our industries less competitive and our people poorer.
Successive UK governments have severely damaged or destroyed this country's coal, steel and aluminium industries through energy policies that have made the cost of energy in the UK higher than almost anywhere else on Earth. They have also seriously damaged our automobile, cement and plastics industries and they are on a mission to destroy our oil and gas industries. All this economic destruction is taking place in pursuit of a pointless and unattainable goal to achieve net zero carbon dioxide emissions. Government ministers blindly continue to pursue this false narrative with little or no regard for the damage they are causing.
How much longer are we going to tolerate the destruction of our industrial base and the collapse of our living standards caused by these arrogant zealots?