You gotta love it when Utopianism meets cold hard physics.

And now with solar minimum which normally runs at cycles of 12~16 years of colder and longer winters it's only going to get worse. I bet you that report does not include the fact the planet is entering another natural cycle of a colder period. The last one hit the bottom of the thermometer in 1971 and started creeping back up until it reached it's peak in 1998. It has startyed cooling since then with much worse to come.

I just hope they cut non-essential services off first in the load-shedding:

Westminster, 10 downing street.

With all the hot air there it's not like their going to freeze.

that has to be a bwahahaha moment.

Sounds like Blighty is on a one way trip back to the mid 70's when the TUC shut down the coal mines.

Not to worry, after the lights go out, rioters will heat the cities by burning cars, government buildings and the greenies offices.

December 1962:
A very cold easterly set in just before Christmas, and parts of the south of England in particular had heavy snow late on 26 December continuing into the next day.

March 1963:
The thaw set in in early March. 6 March was the first morning of the year without any frost anywhere in Britain. The temperatures soon soared to 17 degrees C (62.6 degrees F) and the remaining snow rapidly disappeared.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Winter_of_1963

As much as I may sympathize with your plight in the U.K., I can only hope that the example of wrong-headedness that your leaders have set resonates on this side of the pond. I don't hold out much hope for that however as Obama and Harper seem hell bent on charging down the same rat hole as Europe. My only hope is that the economic crisis delays any gross stupidity long enough for the facts of global cooling to tear the cover off this charde of AGW.
I doubt that it will, but hope springs eternal even in cynics like myself.

I'm wondering how the MSM will spin the news of thousands of elderly people freezing to death in their flats being unable to afford to heat them; it wouldn't surprise me if this was blamed on "global warming".

However, the British do have resources in the form of very obese children whose total mass represents quite a respectable hydrocarbon source. By using them to pedal bicycles connected to generators enough energy to power TV's and computers could be generated. Energy and obesity problems solved simultaneously.

That's funny. Not the article, but the Shell banners long the top and bottom of the article. Now who do you think paid for this study by Capgemini, a for hire think tank?

A spokesman for Capgemini said that unless new power stations are built "the lights will go out".

This would be bad because......
Eurabia is only getting what they voted for. They want to go green with a big Socialist bureaucratic anti-Democratic system. Let them eat it with their white guilt. Let them be a lesson to the World about Imbeciles trying to be politically correct in an economic crash.

So what if the greenie socialists starve in the dark? They are just getting ready for the REAL dark ages when the conversation to dhminitude is complete.

Might be a good time to invest in companies who manufacture hand-cranked LED lamps...

Loki: Thought you were going to go for the Swiftian proposal, but after all, this is a family blog, right?

Still, does anyone else feel like we're living through "Atlas Shrugged" in slow motion?

Uh lib4life an advert in a paper even its online version does not mean that the sponsor of the advert actually paid for the material in the article.

Nice try though.

Lib4life, online adverts are usually triggered by keywords in the content. I'm guessing "energy" in this case.

No doubt that Canaduh is moving in the same direction as the UK twits, led by Dalton "Close all the coal plants" McSquinty's Ontario. If I lived there I would be making sure my collections of sweaters and candles were ample.

Of course, officials in my own province, for all its great endowment of hydro resources, seem to have developed some sort of Dalton-envy and appear to want to go the same direction.

http://news.gov.mb.ca/news/index.html?archive=&item=4795

What’s the problem?

Sharia law, burkas, no power………….Just like home. Nice and cozy.

Lib4life this is not a new story others have been warning about it for years

http://eureferendum.blogspot.com/2008/11/absence-of-leadership.html

The Labour dolts have failed to invest in power stations and have squandered millions on utterly useless wind turbines. Britain used to have vast reserves of natural gas in the North Sea but Bliar in his efforts to meet the bullshit Kyoto targets alled the "dash for gas" and many power stations were built that used natural gas. Now it's nearly gone and we have to import the stuff. No money has been spent on building nuclear plants, and the EU will not allow Britain to build coal powered plants. The lights will be going off in a few years and your witless comment about a Shell advert sums up for me just how retarded most liberals really are.

I'm wondering how the MSM will spin the news of thousands of elderly people freezing to death in their flats being unable to afford to heat them; it wouldn't surprise me if this was blamed on "global warming".

However, the British do have resources in the form of very obese children whose total mass represents quite a respectable hydrocarbon source. By using them to pedal bicycles connected to generators enough energy to power TV's and computers could be generated. Energy and obesity problems solved simultaneously.

KevinB: no, not the "Modest Proposal" type of solution just getting kids to actually exercise and produce power. A person on a bicycle powered generator should be able to produce a steady output of about 500 W which is enough to power a computer. Probably best to charge up a UPS to smooth out power fluctuations which are inherent in this biologic power source. It would probably be a good idea for people to purchase such systems as soon as possible as there is a large investment of energy required to produce the hardware necessary for such personal power generation and likely the availability of generators and batteries will be severely restricted once generating capacity is reduced in the future. This is when ones candle factory stocks will be worth a lot more.