All the hype by government and the media about reducing CO2 emissions to ‘save the planet’ doesn’t overcome the fact that there is no consistent correlation between increasing atmospheric CO2 levels with enhanced global temperatures. Any dumb scientist can clearly see this when they look at a graph recording the official values of those parameters for the period 1945 to 2015. After the Second World War when industrial activity took off, atmospheric CO2 levels ramped up quickly but, unfortunately for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s ‘consensus’ group of scientist vigorously pushing their theory of CO2 induced climate change, temperatures generally declined, in some cases quite dramatically, or held steady between 1945 to 1979 and 1998 to 2015 contrary to the ‘consensus’ theory.
An alternative theory for climate change that has been proposed many times through man’s time on earth, linking it with solar events, has recently been given new impetus by numerous scientists during the past 30 years, especially by a Danish research group. They proposed the theory that the climate was influenced by the interlinkage between the bombardment of earth by cosmic rays from the solar system, sunspot magnetic forces and the formation of cloud cover in the lower atmosphere: fewer clouds lead to a warmer earth and vice versa. They were able to prove their theory by conducting a laboratory experiment, called the SKY project. Several research groups have shown solar radiation and cosmic rays correlated much better with the climate’s temperature than does CO2, going back 10,000 years in one case and 500 million years in another.
The very prestigious CERN Laboratory, the world’s largest sub-atomic laboratory based in Switzerland, has confirmed the Danish conclusion with their CLOUD Project. It is ironic that one of the most sophisticated laboratories in the world has, apparently, also confirmed an observation made by the astronomer, William Herschel, in 1801, that the number of sunspots correlated with the price of wheat: few sunspots were noticed to give cold weather from which poor yields resulted and subsequently led to increased prices, and vice versa for increased sunspot activity.
Dr G Cochrane, Dunblane
Do the maths
Should the proposed pumped storage facility at Coire Glas Power Station be approved? It will take many years to complete at a cost somewhere north of £1.5 billion. The proposers, SSE, are asking the UK government to provide the funding so we must look at this as a UK rather than a purely Scottish endeavour.
If we believe all we are told then by the time Coire Glas is up and running UK winter peak electricity demand will be in the region of 180GW, half of which will be from wind.
Let me remind readers that power output from wind turbines depends on the cube of wind speed. For the non-mathematical that means if the wind speed drops by half, the power output drops by eight times – a not unusual occurrence. Coire Glas will have a reserve energy capacity of 30GWh which would take care of less than a half hour of the foregoing example – and will of course then require recharging.
A McCormick, Dumfries
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