The Maunder Minimum, Global Warming, and the Queue at the Petrol Station

It's a funny old world, indeed it is. In this country and elsewhere, our political agenda is being driven - in large part - by the twin concerns of "energy security" and the environment.

Because of the government's stated desire to encourage us out of our cars, and to "reduce emissions" in the process, we pay eleventy billion million pounds in tax on the fuel we buy. Passed a BP station this morning with the price at £1.019 per litre. Ker-ching. I bet they don't pay this much tax in China, Gordon.

Breaking the £1 a litre mark is a big thing, as anyone who's bought/sold on eBay knows. You go through a psychological barrier, and the sky's the limit.

I'm surprised this hasn't been more common, over the past few days, what with the rules of supply and demand. Our international reader may be interested to learn that, far from putting people off, the high price of fuel in the UK seems to be making people queue to buy more of it, even when they don't actually need it.

The most effective protest against high fuel prices is not to buy it at the higher price. Shop around for the cheapest station in your area and go there. Or just don't buy fuel for a day or two. But the merest mention of another protest at oil refineries (a repeat of the one 5 years ago), and we have panic throughout the land. (By the way, did you know that the so-called "blockade" a few years back wasn't, in fact, a blockade? It was just tanker drivers not crossing what they saw as a picket line. A "fuel strike" rather than a "fuel blockade".)

I filled up Monday lunchtime, because I needed to. And because I'm working from home again on Friday, I won't need to worry about it again till Sunday, or even Monday lunchtime. Que sera sera, as Doris put it.

Anyway, that's by way of a long pre-amble. What I started out to say is that I don't believe that this government really believes in global warming, the Kyoto Protocol, or the need to reduce emissions. I don't think they're that dumb. I don't even believe the environmental lobby believes in it, not really. They're a lobby, so they have to stand for something, but really they're just making a living like everybody else. Some people get jobs, others just find a bandwagon and jump on it.

What this government does believe in, like all governments, is tax. Smokers know this only too well. Past a certain point, the price of cigarettes can go as high as you like, but it won't stop people smoking. All the people who were going to stop smoking have stopped. If the government cared about smoking, they would rigourously and aggressively target the ways in which new smokers are recruited (yes, we're talking about children). But they don't. They just want the tax.

Same is true of motorists. Longtime readers of the now-archived Roadrage Blog will know that there are many radical and sensible ways in which traffic congestion can be reduced and carbon emissions cut. Home working incentives, for example. If you work in an office at a 'puter and you have broadband at home, working from home on one day a week is an eminent possibility. A strong enforcement of speed limits, and the police targeting tailgating and middle-lane hugging on motorways would reduce accidents, congestion, and emissions.

But they want the tax, don't they? So here we are and here we are and here we go, as Doris Day didn't say.

Something I heard on the radio on the way home yesterday intrigued me. And being the kind of James Burke groupie I am, I thought I'd draw a line between Gordon Brown's speech to the TUC yesterday, the queues at the petrol stations, and the current high levels of solar activity.

To quote Woody Allen, "Stay with me on this, because it's brilliant."

The Times, being a Murdoch title, doesn't like to exagerrate news stories, so we can take it as read that Sunspots on the horizon threaten to cripple satellites and networks is true and accurate. There's a lot of solar activity, lots of sunspots, and a solar flare that will disrupt communications and do strange things to networks. Our office network went down a couple of weeks ago, in a bizarre and hard-to-replicate incident. Bad for business, and quite scary. Listening to BBC 5Live on the first day of the Test, they kept losing their connection, over and over again, which is another thing you can put down to sunspots.

Solar activity has an 11-year cycle, which is great. Not 7 years, so you can't fit it to your human age cycles; and not 10 years, so it doesn't fit neatly into decades, but 11 years. And high levels of solar activity - as there have been for several years - means that the sun is hotter, and that the Earth is hotter - did you know that?

Here's another intriguing fact. In the 17th Century, so it goes, there is evidence to suggest that there was very little solar activity, and that, as a consequence, the world was a colder place. This was a period known as "the Little Ice Age," during which rivers froze that normally wouldn't, and snow stayed longer on the ground. Here's an academic paper from 1998, by John E. Beckman, and Terence J. Mahoney:
The Maunder Minimum and Climate Change:
Have Historical Records Aided Current Research?

We are all familiar with the 11-year sunspot cycle. One familiar factor is the effect of solar activity on short-wave radio communications. During sunspot maximum high-energy protons and alpha particles from the Sun affect the ionosphere, reducing its effectivity as a mirror from which short radio waves are reflected round the world, disrupting transmissions for days at a time. The association with the presence of large numbers of dark spots on the solar disc is widely known, and well understood, and it is also clear that such maxima repeat every 10 or 11 years, with minima between them... Even more specialized, at least until the need to understand climate change pushed it to the fore in the 1980's, was the belief that the present solar cycle might not be a permanent feature of solar behaviour. The key impulse here was the work of Eddy in the late 1970's, focused especially on the historical period between 1645 and 1715, for which there is evidence that sunspot activity was strongly suppressed or virtually absent. If this is accepted as true, it has strong implications for our ideas of how magnetic fields in stars are produced. Of more impact, it might go some of the way, even all of the way, to explaining the observed pattern of global warming of the Earth in the last decades of the 20th century.

(Emphasis added).
That's right. Global warming could be caused by sunspots. Probably is, in my opinion. Not SUVs, not power stations, not carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

We live in the world, the world is a planet orbiting a star, which is very hot, sometimes hotter than at other times.

But they want the tax. Don't they? But how is our high-tax economy supposed to compete with China, Gordon? And to the students who mashed Jeremy Clarkson in the face with a custard pie on Monday, when he went to pick up his honorary degree at Oxford Brookes University, I say this: what if he is right, and you are wrong?

The oil will run out, that much is known. We may, in our lifetimes, end up living much as they did in the 17th Century. If it gets as cold as it was back then, we will probably have to chop down trees to burn them for heat. What about those emissions? But the argument that we should be paying high tax on fuel "because of global warming" is spurious. Let's have some honesty here. The motorist, like the smoker, is an easy target: ker-ching. They should, and probably will, also target junk food for high taxes. And chocolate, and all our other addictions, like Chinese microphones and guitars.

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