Discussing the severe weather on Radio 5 Live


Last night, just after 10pm, I appeared for the first time in a live national interview with Stephen Nolan on Radio 5 live to discuss the severe weather. Thousands upon thousands of people have had a miserable time over the past few days: it’s an important issue.

We covered quite a lot of ground, but I made these three key points:

  • This exceptionally severe weather has also caused chaos across Europe (FT.com – £): the UK is not alone.
  • When snow this heavy falls, you have to plan to drive on it and that means winter tyres. Winterising all emergency vehicles, airport vehicles, lorries and private cars would cost a fortune, so we need to be sure it is an investment worth making.
  • We have a simple question to answer, “Is this much snow the new normal?” A great deal of money has been spent on climate science: climate scientists now need to tell politicians whether our climate is going to be warmer or cooler.

I believe the programme will be available to listen again here.

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Comments & Responses

4 Responses so far.

  1. Nick says:

    You: Will the climate be warmer or cooler?
    Climate Scientist: Yes.
    You: Well, which one?
    CS: It doesn’t matter, either way we’ll claim it’s due to climate change.

    • ChrisM says:

      I quite agree, there is so much grant money available.

      Quite a few Solar scientists are now saying we are going into a Dalton Style minimum, this will almost certainly mean some years of winters like this. If so we need to be re-appraising climate science and the role of the met office. The government also needs to be building nuclear power stations faster and really look carefully at how poor Wind turbines really are at providing the amount of power we need, because we are not going to have enough power to stop old people suffering from fuel poverty and the country “Brown Outs” (power cuts).

  2. ChrisM says:

    Steve, Further to my earlier comment I have a suggestion, look at this page http://www.bmreports.com/bsp/bsp_home.htm every day for a month, it shows the amount of electricity generated by various means. Look at the percentage generated by wind in 24 hours. Today (a very cold day) only 0.2% and then get the figures of what all those turbines we are told should be generating and then earn your MP’s money by asking how they can possibly do what the the minister and the companies that own them claim they can.