In a remarkable few minutes this evening, BBC Radio 4’s flagship news and current affairs programme with Evan Davis (PM) spent some time (at just under half an hour in) discussing the current cold and snowy weather, and talking about the problems suffered by old people at this time and the pressure cold weather (plus people falling on snow and ice and injuring themselves) adds to the winter woes of the NHS. Then Mr Davis went on to discuss the weather with Liz Bentley, Chief Executive of the Royal Meteorological Society, before giving us this short interchange:

ED: When people talk about Britain moving to Net Zero, Liz, and having more electricity, and more of it powered by wind, they sometimes say the problem is gonna be in January when you get a week of very cold weather and no wind, and then you’re not gonna have enough electricity to heat everyone’s homes. Would this be one of those weeks? I think it’s called the dunkelflaute…

LB:…Yes….

ED:…the windless cold weather.

LB: Yeah, so, actually we’ve had quite a bit of wind this week, and that’s been I think a problem, particularly across Scotland – a lot of drifting of snow because of the wind and blizzards as that snow gets blown around. So, we haven’t seen the kind of complete calm conditions that you often get in those, as you described, where, you know, it’s very cold, but also very calm. We have had the wind this week. But, you know, inevitably, those will become periods of time when we will have issues from renewables, particularly wind energy, when the wind just drops out completely, but no, it wouldn’t be an issue this week…..[my emphasis].

I was still recovering from shock at a prime time acknowledgement by the BBC of the dunkelflaute problem for renewables when Mr Davis moved on to talk about the attack on energy infrastructure in Berlin by “radical left anarchists with a strong bent towards climate protest” (in the words of his interviewee) and the problems that has caused to local residents in freezing weather conditions.

Did the earth just move?