So we are going to get another generation of nuclear power stations. There is absolutely no economic justification for this. Greenpeace calls it the heist of the century. The sole cause is that we have to do something to combat global warming.
Yet there has been no global warming at all (according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) for the last 15 years when computer models of the climate confidently predicted there would be between 4 and 6 degrees centigrade warming in the next century. 15 years is one sixth of a century so we are entitled to ask what happened? How come the climate is not one degree warmer?
Those from the 'it ain't half hot, mum' school of climate activism will tell you we just had the warmest year ever. That may be true according to some figures, if you squint and lie on your side (metaphorically speaking) when examining the data sets.
But if the computer predictions had been right the change to the world over the last 15 years would have been dramatic and catastrophic. You wouldn't have needed to interpret the figures. We should have experienced as much warming in that period as in the whole of the previous century. And yes it is hot but what we've seen is a plateau, not the steep rise depicted in that infamous documentary 'An Inconvenient Truth'.
The upshot of this fantasy is that we now have many new nuclear power stations to threaten us and fracking.
Not surprisingly the biggest fans of the global warming myth these days are the captains of the international corporations so the house journal of big business, The Economist, is a great believer in global warming!
Those who argue at least we got windmills and solar panels out of it, are just plain wrong. I was a journalist working in the energy industry when climatologists were predicting an ice age, not global warming. At that time there was so much interest in solar panels ('free' energy) that we considered starting a magazine solely for the industry. Pity we didn't.
The country now faces the enormous unnecessary expense of a thriving nuclear industry, the secrecy and attacks on civil liberties that nuclear always brings, the possibility of an accident (there have been several at Sellafield), as well as the chance that if there is a Tsunami (all these things are built on the coast and a super tidal wave is overdue in Europe) much of Britain will become uninhabitable.
