Another voice

Gathering the threads

Auberon Waugh

One never knows quite how seriously one should take the acid rain scare. Looking out over the Somerset country- side, it is hard to see any obvious sign of devastation. Change and decay is all around, of course: there are fewer frogs than there used to be, but then it has been a wonderful year for mushrooms, berries and autumn fruit. No doubt the frogs will come back to carpet the lanes with their squashed bodies, just as ladybirds came back with a vengeance ten years ago. Trees are doing well, and there are plenty of fish.

On the evidence of our senses, the acid rain scare might appear no more pressing than occasional premonitions of another Great Ice Age which surface from time to time in the national newspapers. These are usually attributed to some hitherto un- known don in some provincial university, but those of us who remember the Great Rees-Mogg Ice Age of 1976 can recognise the symptoms. In spring of that year, it may be remembered, we suffered a brief cold spell which caused the great and good Rees-Mogg to study the burrowing habits of earthworms in his garden and pro- nounce that the Pleistocene Epoch was about to resume. The heatwave which followed lasted four months, killing all the elms and a large proportion of beeches.

The latest fashion is to say that the new Ice Age will be ushered in either by nuclear war or by collision with some asteroid. One such asteroid is cruising towards a close encounter in December, but in the year 2115 it will come so close as to pass between us and the moon. Should it come down, it will make a crater 100 miles across, throwing thousands of tons of dust and rubble into the atmosphere . . .

People in saloon bars are telling each other that the original Ice Age almost certainly started from such an encounter, or possibly from a gigantic volcanic explo- sion — a few even wink and say they would not be surprised if the people in Lost Atlantis had developed hydrogen bombs.

In fact nuclear war now seems the favourite candidate for bringing back the Ice Age. A certain Dr Michael Kelly, of the climatic research unit of the University of East Anglia, has assured us that after a nuclear attack the temperature in England would drop by some 15 to 20 degrees centigrade, so that in summer it would hover around freezing point, in winter sink to below 20 degrees of frost. The ground would be permanently covered with ice; livestock and crops would perish; survivors would be reduced to hunter-gatherers in the twilight and the casualties might be greater than those of the nuclear attack. Or so says Dr M. Kelly, of the Universi- ty of East Anglia. I do not know what his politics are, nor have I any reason to suppose that he would allow them to influence his scientific judgment. One might imagine that he knows rather more about the subject than I do. But even he says that this dust will shut out the sunlight for only several months, whereas the Pleis- tocene Epoch, otherwise known as the Great Ice Age, is generally thought to have lasted at least two and a half million years.

At any rate, I decided to consult the writings of Professor Karl W. Butzer, of Chicago, who is often cited as the best man on climatic change. He does not feel that debris in the upper atmosphere reduces temperature, and might even increase it by acting as a sort of relay point for the sun's radiation. The evidence for supposing that dust clouds can reduce temperature comes from observation of a minuscule fall in temperature after the catastrophic volcano explosions of 1883 and 1912, but Professor Butzer points out that this evidence is discredited since temperatures were falling some time before the explosions. He places no credence whatever in the suggestion that the Pleistocene Epoch was caused by volcanic eruption or collision with an aster- oid and attributes the change between glacial and interglacial episodes to varia- tions in the earth's orbit.

So it looks as if we might be excused if we take Dr M. Kelly's theories with a pinch of salt. A few months of cold might have the effect of culling some oldies, but it would scarcely bring about the end of civilisation as we know it.

This will not, of course, prevent all the clergymen, lefties, wimmin and funkies from seizing upon this idea of a nuclear freeze as a further reason for surrending to the Soviet Union here and now, before any such unpleasantness can occur. A good example of this process at work was to be seen in the BBC's revolting film Threads. So let us look at the current acid rain scare and see if it can be put to any similarly useful purpose on our own behalf.

According to the Commons Environ- ment Committee Report on acid rain, the sulphur dioxide from our coal-fired power stations is falling as diluted acid on the Scandinavians and destroying their fish, their forests and their historic buildings. The report seems particularly concerned about historic buildings. Of course there are hundreds of historic buildings in Scan- dinavia and we are quite right to be worried about them. Think of all those amusing statues by Gustav Vigeland in Frogner Park, outside Oslo, which inspired

Bernard Levin to a new understanding of the universe. It would be terrible to think of all their testicles falling off. Someone might be seriously hurt.

So the question arises, what should we do about it? The Commons Environment Committee merely recommended the spending of £2,000 million on some sort of apparatus which would filter the smoke from our coal-burning power stations. Of course, any Commons committee always would recommend spending vast sums of money. The trouble with this solution, as the Central Electricity Generating Board pointed out, is that it would add 10p in the pound to the cost of electricity and make our industry even more uncompetitive. Electricity already costs 25 per cent more in Britain than it does in France; the reason for this is that France has been going full steam ahead with the building of nuclear power stations, while Britain has continued to rely for the most part on coal. By 1990, 75 per cent of electrical power in France will be supplied by nuclear power stations, against 16 per cent in Britain. What has prevented an effective nuclear programme in Britain, needless to say, has

been the representations of the coal indus- try orchestrated by the usual Soviet- inspired chorus of clergymen, lefties, wim-

min and funkies whose wails have been

succeeded in touching a chord in honour- able, Luddite, conservative hearts. When we read of the alleged casualties of Sella-

field, do we forget all the casualties of Aberfan, not to mention the unforgettable

coal disasters of 1860 (243 lives lost), 1862 (47 lost at Merthyr Tydfil, 60 at Barnsley), or 1878, when 265 out of 397 perished at Ebbw Vale?

In fact coalmining may nowadays hold fewer risks than farming, but you would

not think so to hear the noises the miners

make when they demand more money, and all these noises, as I say, can be put to good use with a little effort. There is no reason

to suppose that the casualties of nuclear power will ever approach those of coal, the cost is much smaller, the damage to Scan- dinavian fish, trees and historic buildings less alarming.

We have plenty of time to move over to nuclear power and the investment will be well justified, unlike money spent on smoke filters. On top of the appalling cost of electricity in Britain, we pay £1.3 billion

in direct subsidy to the coal mines — more, than the salaries of all the doctors and nurses in the health service, the equivalent of 281/2p on a gallon of petrol, £2.50 on the

old age pension. Even now, four new power cables are creeping their way under the Channel from the French grid which will apparently be able to carry a load equal to a power station burning six million tons of coal a year. The great lesson of the

coal strike is surely that we must never, never, again rely on anything except the greed and bloodymindedness of these di- luted human residues in their unpleasant village communities.