When your job is to produce renewable energy and when you are responsible for almost 1500 employees, what made you decide to write such a detailed book about the global warming debate?
This was directly related to my work. Every year RWE invests 1.2 billion euros in RWE Innogy. But in 2009 there was little wind in the UK, the Netherlands, Germany, Poland and our profits went down. During the annual meeting, Jürgen Großmann, the CEO of RWE, said to me: ‘I give you so much money, but you bring back too little, what’s going on?’ I said there is no wind. He said ‘come off it!, next year I don’t want to hear the same excuse’. But 2010 was again not very windy as was 2011. However, the climate models of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the UN body which coordinates international climate research, editor) said the rise of CO2 concentrations would lead to more wind in Northern Europe!I started looking in the scientific literature and found out the lack of wind had nothing to do with CO2 and global warming. In our region the weather is influenced by the North Atlantic Oscillation (NAO), a natural cycle with a period of about 60 years. For 30 years you have more wind in the winter, for 30 years less. And if there is less wind the winters are colder, like they were in 2009 and 2010. I published my findings in an op-ed in Die Welt in 2010. I was criticized by Stefan Rahmstorf, a well-known and influential German climate scientist. Sebastian Lüning then wrote in a reaction on Rahmstorf’s blog there was some merit in my analysis. I discovered that Lüning also worked for RWE and that we actually worked in the same building in Hamburg. We decided to team up and two years later we finished the book.
Thats only a small part of this lengthy read. If you are interested in reading "Facts" then you should study this article, its not a technical read, its easy to understand and should suit most people.
http://www.europeanenergyreview.eu/site ... eb&id=3681
) then you most likely never will.