The latest dictat to be issued by our masters on the continent is that we must stop using normal light bulbs and start buying expensive energy-saving bulbs instead.

We’ve got a mixture at home and I’m afraid I don’t like the energy-saving bulbs.  For a start they cost a damn sight more than normal light bulbs and while they do last a lot longer than normal bulbs, I have a 5 bedroom house and that means a lot of light bulbs!  It wouldn’t be so bad if they were as good as normal light bulbs but they’re not.  Energy-saving bulbs are dimmer than normal light bulbs and they start off even dimmer until they “warm up”.  We’ve got a pair of uplighters on one wall of the living room – one of them has a normal candle bulb in and the other has an energy-saving bulb.  The energy-saving bulb comes on about a second after the normal bulb and it’s not as bright.  It also stucks up about 4 inches about the uplighter whereas the normal bulb sticks up about an inch above the light but that’s what it’s supposed to look like.  Of course, you can buy energy-saving candle light bulbs but they’re at least a fiver plus post and packing.

This is all part of the obsession with being “green” or, as Channel 4 put it, the “great global warming swindle”.  The truth of the matter is, forcing people to use energy-saving light bulbs isn’t going to save the world from global warming for the simple fact that it’s not happening!  The average temperature of the earth has been decreasing since the 1940’s according to the met office and the receding polar ice caps that are supposedly “proof” that global warming is happening are nowhere near the state they were in a thousand years ago when the Arctic circle was north of Greenland.  The data shown in Channel 4’s documentary, the Great Global Warming Swindle, demonstrates a clear link between the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere and the temperature of the earth but – and this is the key thing that there so-call experts neglect to mention – the temperature of the earth goes up first and the amount of CO2 rises to co-incide with the temperature increase some 100 years later.