Former Conservative Defence Minister Tobias Ellwood MP has made the astonishing claim that changes in sea temperature due to climate change have severely limited Britain’s effectiveness as a naval power. Last week he told Talk TV that “our Type-45 destroyers can now not operate in parts of the world because the water is now too warm now because the engines can’t stay cool”. Did Ellwood let slip a major defence secret in that British warships shut down when local temperatures rise a degree or two, or did he just don a sandwich board and mangle a story to promote a dystopian Net Zero collectivist project? In other words, is he a knave, or just a bit of a berk?
Ellwood was being interviewed on Talk TV’s lunchtime CrossTalk programme following the fiasco at COP28. Your own correspondent was also invited to appear, and the segment can be viewed below starting at around 1hr 52 mins. Time was short and the Conservative MP used it to repeat the rarely challenged mantras that the climate was in crisis, and humanity faced an existential threat. And, it seems, state-of-the-art warships costing hundreds of millions of pounds are apparently immobilised by local weather.
So can the British navy only rule the waves if the sea temperature remains more or less constant? In fact, Ellwood could be referencing a story back to 2016 when it was discovered that Type-45 destroyers stopped working in waters much warmer than Portsmouth harbour. At the time, this was seen as a major design fault. Far from being connected to climate change, it was simply a matter of the installation of the wrong kit, notably a vital turbine intercooler. At the time, the Daily Mail explained that the design fault meant two Rolls Royce turbines slowed down in warmer waters such as the Persian Gulf, and they could not generate sufficient power to run the ship. As a short term fix, all six Type-45 vessels were fitted with extra back-up diesel generators.
Perhaps Ellwood, who was chairman of the Parliamentary Defence Select Committee from 2020-2023, did not get the memo from the Department of Defence in September 2022, noting that HMS Dauntless was back at base after three months testing her new engines “to the limit”. The trials were said to have “gone well”, and delivered a ship “which is now faster, more reliable, greener and ready to embark future weapons”. Again, the question must be asked: Is Ellwood simply making up climate scare stories on a congested TV slot knowing there is no time for him to be pressed on the matter, or does he know something about these trials that is not public knowledge?
One suspects the former since climate alarmists have long become used to spouting doomsday tall tales without the need to explain the science or their underlying political motives. Francis Menton from the Manhattan Contrarian recently wrote about the motives of many energy transition and climate change advocates. As between the options that the advocate is completely incompetent or an intentional fraudster, it might be better to be merely incompetent. “However, often the misdirection is so blatant that it borders on impossible to believe that the author could be so stupid as to actually believe what he or she is saying”, he observed.
The situation is only likely to get worse in the wake of the COP28 fiasco and a growing realisation among general populations that Net Zero is an insane objective that will cause massive economic and societal harm across the world. Dr. Friederike Otto peers into her crystal ball climate model and claims to be able to link individual weather events to long-term changes in the climate. Commenting on COP28, she said, “with every vague verb, every empty promise in the final text, millions of people will enter the frontline of climate change and many will die”. Meanwhile the Guardian reports that some scientists are calling for the power to prescribe climate policy. This power would extend to overseeing policy implementation in the 195 states signed up to COP. Sonia Seneviratne, an IPCC vice chair and co-ordinating lead author since 2012, said: “As climate change becomes worse and worse, it is becoming more difficult to be policy relevant without being prescriptive”.
There is democratic push back against Net Zero in many countries, but the U.K. is singularly ill-served by its current political representatives. Conservative MPs like Tobias Ellwood are fully supportive of the collectivist project, and share many of the society-changing, woke goals of the opposition Labour party. It is no surprise that Ellwood, along with hundreds of clueless MPs, spout climate tosh on every occasion, and have happily nodded through some of the most prescriptive and destructive Net Zero laws on the planet.
Chris Morrison is the Daily Sceptic’s Environment Editor
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