Welcome To Green Europe

Tens of thousands of trees have disappeared from parks and woodlands this winter across Greece as the crisis-hit country’s impoverished residents, too broke to pay for electricity or fuel, turn to fireplaces and wood stoves for heat. --Nektaria Stamouli and Stelios Bouras, The Wall Street Journal, 12 January 2013

When the mercury falls, the theft of wood in the country’s woodlands goes up as people turn to cheaper ways to heat their homes. With energy costs escalating, more Germans are turning to wood burning stoves for heat. That, though, has also led to a rise in tree theft in the country’s forests. The problem has been compounded this winter by rising energy costs. The Germany’s Renters Association estimates the heating costs will go up 22 percent this winter alone. --Spiegel Online, 17 January 2013

This is your future. Huddled around wood stoves to keep warm because electricity is too expensive because of subsidies paid to rich people who own wind farms and solar panels. -–Sunshine Hours, 19 January 2013

Germany’s consumers are facing record price rises for green energy. Especially for small household budgets – with real incomes more or less stagnant for many years – energy costs are becoming increasingly intolerable. In 2009, Germans spent about 100 billion Euros for energy – an average of 2,500 Euros per household. Social campaigners and consumer groups complain that up to 800 000 households in Germany can no longer pay their electric bills. --Focus Magazin, 15 October 2012

Between 2008 and 2012, 6.8 million jobs in construction and industry were lost across the EU, according to BusinessEurope. Heavy industries like steel and chemicals say much can be achieved by adjusting existing policies on energy and climate which they claim has been destructive. --EurActiv, 21 January 2013

The sun could be on the threshold of a mini-Maunder event right now. Ongoing Solar Cycle 24 is the weakest in more than 50 years. Moreover, there is (controversial) evidence of a long-term weakening trend in the magnetic field strength of sunspots. Matt Penn and William Livingston of the National Solar Observatory predict that by the time Solar Cycle 25 arrives, magnetic fields on the sun will be so weak that few if any sunspots will be formed. Independent lines of research involving helioseismology and surface polar fields tend to support their conclusion. “If the sun really is entering an unfamiliar phase of the solar cycle, then we must redouble our efforts to understand the sun-climate link,” notes Lika Guhathakurta of NASA’s Living with a Star Program. --Nasa, 8 January 2013

When the solar acne diminishes, it seems that the Earth gets colder. No one contests that when the planet palpably cooled from 1645 to 1715 — the Maunder minimum, which saw the freezing of the Thames — there was a diminution of solar activity. The same point is made about the so-called Dalton minimum, from 1790 to 1830. And it is the view of Piers Corbyn that we are now seeing exactly the same phenomenon today. Of course it still seems a bit nuts to talk of the encroachment of a mini ice age. But it doesn’t seem as nuts as it did five years ago. I look at the snowy waste outside, and I have an open mind. –Boris Johnson, The Daily Telegraph, 21 January 2013

No doubt the climate is changing. But it has become common knowledge for some time that the climate has recently developed differently than predicted. The warming has stalled for 15 years. “The standstill has led to the suggestion that global warming has stopped,” NASA admit. There are plenty of plausible explanations for why global warming has temporarily slowed down. However, the number of guesses also shows how imprecisely the climate is understood. --Axel Bojanowski, Spiegel Online, 18 January 2013