Carbon footprint follies

Brian C Ransley B.Sc (Eng - Cllr, Tunbridge Wells Borough Council, (Con)

Floods, droughts, heat-waves, hurricanes, deep snow; these and more – if it’s not global warming it must be climate change. The dire warnings for the UK; summer temperatures regularly in excess of 40deg C and summer rainfall DOWN 20%. No more icy winters.

The evidence is all there of course, but it shows the opposite seems to be happening. The increase in global temperatures during the 1990s seems to have stopped earlier this decade; the UK has enjoyed, as is all too normal, two consecutive cool wet summers followed by the coldest winter for 18 years. The jet-stream continues to define our weather; once or twice a decade it decides to flow consistently to the north of the UK and give us a fine summer and possible drought conditions. This hasn’t happened for some years. Whatever the reason for the position of the jet-stream it certainly doesn’t seem to be influenced by aircraft or the increase in the tiny levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere, (which could be the result of the world’s population doubling in 30 years, perhaps combined with the destruction of rain forests). Climate change requires an alteration to the vast ocean currents responsible for world’s weather which would almost certainly be outside of human control in any case.

Yet that doesn’t stop the chorus of carbon footprint specialists now pressing our gullible leaders into a prohibitively expensive programme of carbon emission reductions that threaten to return us to pre-Victorian times. And now possibly the most ridiculous folly of all: the council where officials are going to start measuring the carbon footprint of other staff and hand them a print-out; using council tax-payers’ hard earned money in the process.

As a local councillor I want to encourage energy saving measures such as home insulation and turning off unneeded lights and machines. It’s got nothing to do with global warming, just sensible economics in an era of rising world energy prices. And especially as my predecessors have happily granted development approval on all sorts of flood-risk land we now need flood-defence measures to try to prevent a repeat of the disasters in the Midlands, Yorkshire and Humberside during the summer of 2007 and in the South-East in the autumn of 2000.

The efforts of those more enlightened are being compromised by the siren voices of the ignorant in the positions of influence, my own party included, whose foolish pronouncements, if not silenced, spell danger for the UK and possibly the world.