I recently covered the report on shale gas by a consortium of environmental organisations headed by the RSPB. I described the report's claim that a study of a shale gas field in the Colorado had found significantly elevated noise levels, and noted its failure to report that the underlying study was actually a model simulation.
Commenters observed that the longer, technical version of the report did in fact describe the Colorado study correctly, and I wondered at the time if this was an isolated discrepancy or whether the short version was systematically hyped up. I have had no time to investigate further but was interested to see this blog post on the website of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology (CEH), who had reviewed the long version of the report.
Dr Andrew Singer, a soil, water and air pollution scientist from CEH was contracted by the consortium partnership responsible for the report to spend four days to review its scientific content. His role was to provide an independent peer review of the science case put forward in the evidence report’s’ literature review; this was not a systematic review. Dr Singer evaluated the evidence in the report in a similar manner to that used for many literature review papers in scientific journals.
Dr Singer did not examine, or review, the ‘Are we fit to frack?’ summary report published alongside the evidence report. This summary report made ten recommendations related to the potential environmental impacts from the shale gas industry which have been widely reported including on BBC Online.
I have emailed Dr Singer to see if he had become aware of other discrepancies between the two versions, but he tells me that he has not even looked at the short version.