Bishop Hill A clean bill of health for shale?
Feb 4, 2016 Energy: gas 
Environmentalists like to claim that unconventional gas developments are going to cause us all to die of cancer or asthma. It's fair to say that few of these claims are quite as bonkers as Friends of the Earth saying that the sand used in fracks is a dangerous carcinogen. However, while the other claims are not quite that absurd, they are not exactly grounded in good science.
A paper published today in a journal called Science of the Total Environment describes a review of the evidence for actual health impacts from unconventional gas and conclude there is little evidence of adverse health effects that you would want to describe as "firm". Of the 1000 articles the authors reviewed, fewer than 100 were considered worthy of further attention based on the quality of evidence presented. Only 7 could be considered "highly relevant". Health impacts were mostly "inferred rather than evidenced".
So you can understand why they would conclude:
Current scientific evidence for [unconventional natural gas development] that demonstrates associations between adverse health outcomes directly with environmental health hazards resulting from UNGD activities generally lacks methodological rigour.
But I think you could guess that anyway.
Reader Comments (96)
The 350,000 is extrapolated from a representative sample of 4032 people,
And includes people who touched a wire, fell off a chair and got bruised.
raff, your friend who was into bodybuilding did a lot of steroid abuse aswell? Dodgy dietary supplements? Presumably you have evidence it was due to tuna, not the tins?
This is Green Blob Globsheet.
Phil Clarke - to presuppose something before asking a direct question is foolish or intentionally biasing an exchange. To not see the distinction between a presupposition and a question is also foolish. You do not know if I'm married. I know you comment. I do not indulge in violence. One can draw conclusions from a lack of response but it is wise to check - so: "do you have any qualifications or professional skills relevant to the subjects you comment on?"
rhoda - from previous interaction and question I have already formed the opinion the Phil Clarke's comments lack supportable content, either from sources of logical argument. This was again demonstrated by his lack of awareness with regard to smoke, something that has been around "a long time". Hence my question seeking to understand his motivation for commenting - does he have some hidden qualification or relevant experience which prompts him to comment, even when wrong?
I am a Chemistry graduate and Chartered Accountant
Oh no, hang on ......
Phil Clarke BS(c)
Then you lost the desire to be sceptical. Shame. Or did you go to UEA?Direct question dodged twice.
Bye bye (again) Phil.
(as a btw - I think a chemistry BSc would qualify you to discuss some aspects of smoke, just not the kind you specialise in.)
@ Phil Clarke at 5:01 PM
"The 350,000 is extrapolated from a representative sample of 4032 people,
And includes people who touched a wire, fell off a chair and got bruised."
You obviously failed to read or chose to ignore:
Data supplied by Fire Statistics Great Britain, made available by the Department of Communities and Local Government (DCLG)
It would be reasonable to presume that the victims of the less-serious injury you described were amongst the 2.5 million people receiving a mains voltage electric shock per year (15+)
PS - despite your return to this posting, why have you ignored:
Harry, you missed Phil's joke.
I am actually one of the 2.5million, in that I got a shock during the year. I was fixing a kitchen mains outlet that was intermittent and I had removed the kitchen circuit breaker. While tightening the screws holding the cable I felt a tingling and thought it was just the fridge on the same circuit discharging. I finished and plugged in the microwave and to my surprise it went beep. The socket turns out to be on a different circuit, not the one for the rest of the kitchen. Lucky me (maybe unlucky for you)!
Are these the same environmentalists that are quite happy putting up wind turbines near residential areas and to hell with the health of those people?
I'm going to ahead and answer yes to my own question and therefore conclude with 97% certainty that health of the humans is not one of environmentalists' main concerns.
Raff - the dangers of assumptions eh? The safe approach is to check - glad you lived to learn! ;-)
Further to my comment at 7:05 PM
@ Phil Clarke at 5:01 PM
"The 350,000 is extrapolated from a representative sample of 4032 people,
And includes people who touched a wire, fell off a chair and got bruised."
Here's one:
http://postimg.org/image/ogekcs5wp/
Phil Clark
"SandyS - 35 years is not new and the record was also broken at another location."
No, that's wrong
Honister has only been recording since 1992, and then only intermittently, while Thirlmere only dates back to 1995.
These were confirmed by the Environmental Agency.
There have been of course many such automatic stations set up in mountainous regions by the EA in recent years, and for very good reasons - to provide data that can help predict floods.
It is therefore inevitable that we will continue to get more and more "unprecedented" rainfall claims from around the country.
Wow Phil, smelly odours huh? Damn, that sounds like a killer to me!
Quick, let's stop ALL human activities that can cause smelly odours.
Cow farming, dog owning, chemical industry, solar panel factories, prius production facilities, mining, water purification plants, hospitals, greenpeace headquarters'
I have a lot of sympathy for poor old Phil Clarke, Raff, EM, and ATTP. They are obviously convinced that the end of the world is nigh and the Russians, Chinese, Indians, Malays etc are just not reading their jibberings on Bishop Hill.
With the contribution of about 2% of world emissions from the UK against China and India who are increasing their emissions by more than that per annum it does not seem that time spent on Bishop Hill is very productive. Perhaps they could go and tell Putin to stop selling oil and gas, or go to China and stand in front of the National Peoples Congress building and tell them to stop building coal powered plants and buying petrol and diesel cars and trucks.
Maybe they should tell Modi that the health, wealth and prosperity of his people don't matter when set against their crappy climate models that predict exactly what their programmers tell them to predict.
It must be tough being one of the enlightened ones when nobody takes any notice of them. Powerless, impotent, ineffectual, inadequate, ineffective, useless, weak, feeble. Perhaps we could take pity and hire them a bus (wind powered wooden one with bamboo mat seats of course) to take them to Red Square where they could really make a difference.
As for the Dork and Aila. I wish I knew where to get some of the stuff they are smoking.
Ah well, back to living my life along with the other 60 million people in the UK who really to not give a tinkers fart for the Climate Catastrophists and the Green Blobbies.
Paul H
On your blog you stated Honister has been working since 1970; and you cited a paper that stated
t. For the Honister Pass raingauge, these values had already been computed from the data available at the site, comprising daily records from 1970 to 2004
Rewriting history?
And like it or not, the 20 year old Thirlmere station also broke the previous 24 hr and 48 hr records and December as a whole set new rainfall records all over the place.
You'll do yourself an injury bending over backwards like that.
@Wijnand, Feb 4, 2016 at 7:33 PM
Plus cutting grass, using garlic, cooking/baking.....
George Moonbat writes in The Gruniard:
Sorry to mislead, I am in fact a member of the House of Lords (in my own head anyway), I hold an MA in Classics, a diploma in journalism and I am a liveryman of the Worshipful Company of Broderers, an Officer of the Order of St John of Jerusalem, a Knight of Honour and Devotion of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta
Over qualified to demolish an entire scientific discipline, I'd say.
With the contribution of about 2% of world emissions from the UK against China and India who are increasing their emissions by more than that per annum
You really need to keep up with current affairs.
China's 2015 carbon emissions fell for the second year running, by an amount equal to all of Poland's, while total power consumption increased, writes Lauri Myllyvirta. Credit goes to the massive expansion in renewable energy, with a record-breaking 47GW of wind and solar capacity added.
http://www.theecologist.org/News/news_round_up/2986943/chinas_renewables_drive_down_co2_emissions.html
@Raff, Feb 4, 2016 at 4:30 PM
A balanced diet is the most healthy. Too much consumption of many foods can have deleterious side effects. Bodybuilders tendency to use illegal steroids is not conducive to good health.
Let's do a Phil C/esmiff and post a copy&paste quote rebuttal
Tuna mercury poisoning:
Mercury And Tuna - Setting The Record Straight
The science shows that there is no reason bodybuilders should cut tuna out of their diets due to the current mercury scare.
@ Phil Clarke at 8:48 PM
Sadly, it is you who ".... really need to keep up with current affairs."
It's irrelevant what what China's emissions do in the short term, they could double, triple, quadruple, so long as they honour the only commitment they've made:
[My bold]https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/2015/09/25/us-china-joint-presidential-statement-climate-change
Aha! I see we are honoured by the pretender Lord Phil Clarke of Brenchley. But I bet you can't play a piano or compose a Turmuhrglockenspielmelodie in honour of a greater man than you. No, but blowing your own trumpet.....expert.
@Raff, Feb 4, 2016 at 1:26 PM
Every human activity has a risk. We do not need expensive government - taxpayer money tree - funded studies to look for new risks. The correct policy is to allow anything which is not unlawful. If that results in an unexpected consequence, investigate and mitigate against that. The wrong policy, advocated by the Green Blob, is to prohibit all new activities unless they can be proved to be risk free which is almost impossible.
Phil & Raff: Please prove neither of you commit bestiality, necrophilia, peadophillia, terrorism, murder, organised crime or any other illegal activity.
Phil Clarke: Your comment about China's CO2 emissions falling. Allow me use your kind of riposte to my/our links: "Greenpeace? You must be having a laugh!"
The article uses such caveated language as to make it opaque. Right up front it says:
"Likely"?It then goes on to aver that 2014's drop in emissions was only 0.7%. Say what? Then, it goes on:
More caveats!This is pure wishful thinking by GP. They are trumpeting the tiny growth in PVs so as to play down the enormous growth in coal power. To be blunt, I would not believe a Greenpeace Energydesk bulletin if they told me tomorrow is Friday.
And for those who don't like your links, this is the summing up GP offered. I leave it others to fisk it - I can't right now, I'm laughing too much:
Sorry, I missed one. At the very end of the report one finds this statement:How can China's emissions be declining if this statement is true? IE: "Emissions are still on track to peak and decline...."
@Joe Public, Feb 4, 2016 at 2:40 PM
EU, Greens, the modern left etc always utter the mantra "saving one life is worthwhile" to justify new laws, bans, restrictions, limits, taxes etc. Thus, electricity should be banned. Oh, hang on, that means banning defibrillators which save lives. EU, Greens, the modern left etc now in continuous loop argument with themselves.
Perhaps a better descriptor for EU, Greens, the modern left inc Mr Slippery with their "if not liked tax/ban/make illegal" actions is .... Fascists
.
Phil C and Raff,
Why should electricity not be banned when banning it would reduce risk, serious & minor injuries & health service costs and also save lives and the associated costs of preventable deaths?
Oh, do keep up
Rapid growth in global CO2 emissions from fossil fuels and industry ceased in the past two years, despite continued economic growth. Decreased coal use in China was largely responsible, coupled with slower global growth in petroleum and faster growth in renewables.
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/vaop/ncurrent/full/nclimate2892.html
We don't need no steenkin' fracking.
Controlled directional drilling started in the 1930s, when the first relief well to kill a blowout was drilled in the Conroe oilfield in Texas. Steerable bits driven by mud motors are a 1990s phenomenon, but at Wytch Farm they were soon making extraordinary records.
One of the more remarkable horizontal wells I recall was drilled to an Oseberg satellite about 5 km away from the platform - with the well having to stay within an impermeable stratum that was in places no more than 1 metre thick. The technology feats are truly astounding.
Many apologies, I've come to my senses. I do in fact hold a Degree in Women's Studies, University of Toronto (1989).
And I smell of strawberries.
I am sure all the denizens of BH will agree that this is sufficient to rubbish the reputation of the thousands of professional climate scientists who authored the IPCC report.
Phil C,
Sure, that's more than enough evidence of intellectual clout to see a good many of them off. Put on a dress (dare I assume that you're not actually a Philippa?) and you could be a lead author in a matter of hours. Diversity quotas, see?
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/01/20/ipcc-nobel-laureates-lack-scientific-credibility/
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/07/27/how-the-ipcc-defines-distinguished-scientist/
Disgruntled people tend to respond to requests for feedback more than content ones. 678 pages, 232 respondents to a questionnaire, and the big strawberry struggles to fill a small column with negative remarks. Big Yawn.
Here's what came out of the sausage factory:-
The Committee concludes that the IPCC assessment process has been successful overall and has served society well. The commitment of many thousands of the world’s leading scientists and other experts to the assessment process and to the communication of the nature of our understanding of the changing climate, its impacts, and possible adaptation and mitigation strategies is a considerable achievement in its own right. Similarly, the sustained commitment of governments to the process and their buy-in to the results is a mark of a successful assessment. Through its unique partnership between scientists and governments, the IPCC has heightened public awareness of climate change, raised the level of scientific debate, and influenced the science agendas of many nations.
Mind you, she takes a good duck photograph.
http://www.tripodgirl.com/2011_1/fancy_quacks.php
Phil Clarke does nothing for his credibility with selective quotes and data from often wrongly attributed sources
Incomplete quotation, the source for which is actually a paper by Stewart et al.</.a>
His statistics and assumptions on Chinese coal consumption and global emissions do not accord with the data in BP's energy statistics. He also shouldn't read too much into a slowdown in global CO2 emissions growth - a phenomenon which has been seen in the major recessions of the mid 1970s, early 1980s, early 1990s and not least in 2009 after the banking collapse.
CO2 emissions growth rate chart that got lost in the HTML error.
It doesn't add up....
It is amazing how much of climate science is based on dodgy science and statistics. The remainder is fabricated, underpinned by foundations of fresh air, reinforced with concocted consensus.
@It doesn't add up.
"The technology feats are truly astounding"
Yeah but who pays for it ?
The colonies .......
You should realise this given your internet title .
Observe M2 creation in peripheral Europe.
In a debt money system the static or declining nature of their monetary systems is truly catastrophic.
Today I will mostly be a TV meteorologist and climate blogger. I started a degree in electrical engineering and meteorology, but did not graduate. I've made a handful of forays into the scientific literature, most recently I announced a game-changing paper on the US surface record.
That was in 2012, will 2016 be the year we publish? Stay tuned.
Modernization theory and its post war development .
Its critic - dependency theory ( only partially correct)
The flaw of both views , that "development" is always progressive and linear.
https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=HritTdFbP-s
Phil Clarke. Please learn to read. Just to help you...When the right hand side of a graph is going higher than the left hand side it normally means it is going up. When I say "China and India" I mean "China and India"
http://climateactiontracker.org/countries/china.html
http://climateactiontracker.org/countries/india.html
You remind me of a sheepdog who used to rush out of a farm and chase my car every day on the way to work. After a few months of this I stopped one day and got out and confronted the animal. "There you are," I said, "You've got what you wanted. What are you going to do with it." So it slunk off and never chased my car again. So what would you do if you got what you profess to want.? You witter away on here day after day quoting inane crap from dubious sources all in support of a position that you would not have the skills to survive if you actually managed to keep our fossil fuels in the ground. Why not go and do some good if you really believe? Go and picket Putin. Stop him exporting gas and coal. Why waste your time on an obscure little blog? Oh yes...of course you are paid for posting aren't you. Can't deny it. There is as much evidence to support that theory as to support that the sane amongst us are paid by the fossil fuel industry. Anyway, nice talking to you but I have to go out in my diesel truck along tarmac roads to a concrete building to buy imported food. PS I won't respond to any more of your wittering. I have nothing but contempt for people like you and I am sure you feel the same about me. After all, I worked for 30 years in the oil industry and 10 years for our Great British Government. That bastion of truth and integrity.
Ivor .. the observations part of those graphs seem to end in 2010 and 2012 respectively.
Climate scientist Corinne Le Quere from the University of East Anglia, in the United Kingdom, says there's one main reason for the good news: "It's mostly down to China's use of coal," she says.
China burns an enormous amount of coal — creating an enormous amount of CO2. But as China has started to deal with its air pollution problem, and the country's economic growth has slowed, "all of a sudden, it looks like their use of coal in 2015 actually has gone down," Le Quere says.
And China's CO2 emissions have, consequently, dropped a startling 4 percent this year.
http://www.npr.org/2015/12/07/458543432/small-surprising-dip-in-worlds-carbon-emissions-traced-to-china
It may be a blip, and India's emissions (one quarter the size of China's) are still rising, but it is important to make accurate statements.
Phil Clarke: In your cite upthread from Nature (Jackson, Canadell et al) you quote:
- and you seem to take that to mean that MM CO2 emissions have peaked, even falling. Wrong. You misunderstand what the sentence means - and the chart that goes with it. It means that 'rapid' growth has ceased, not that all growth has stopped. In fact the chart accompanying the statement shows quite clearly that growth continued into 2014 and is only showing a decline in 2015 based on a projection, not real figures.The thing is, with "steenkin' frackin'" the use of shale gas would reduce CO2 emissions even more - assuming that CO2 is the driver of climate change, which I doubt.
Phil Clarke
There are no published statistics for this year yet, and I doubt there is much for last year either - certainly not from China.
The UK won't even be publishing provisional statistics until March.
So your statement is based on supposition at best.
Global numbers for 2014 are here
Corinne Le Quere whose team publish the annual Carbon Budget is provisionally talking about a 0.6% drop in 2015 globally in large part driven by a drop in China's emissions. They published a paper in Nature Climate Change on Dec 7, which I linked to above. Its paywalled but here's hte key Figure
http://www.nature.com/nclimate/journal/v6/n1/carousel/nclimate2892-f1.jpg
Bloomberg New Energy have analysed economic and power generation numbers and these indicate a 2% drop from China.
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-01-20/china-emissions-from-power-likely-fell-2-in-2015-as-coal-curbed
BBC article about you up, didn't it Phil? People with real experienceof living near wells that have been tracked for decades. Sum of problems
Nada
Zero
Zilch
Odour factor
Nada
Zero
Zilch
Eh?
I keep getting visions of a workman driving out of the gates of drillpad and stopping an incoming lorry, winding his window down and saying to the lorry driver:
"I'd give it a couple of minutes if I were you."
JP
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/news/article-2227344/Shale-gas-redraw-economic-map-Britain--price-houses-nearby-wells-fall-24.html
Feb 4, 2016 at 10:24 PM | Unregistered CommenterPhil Clarke
Oh dear Phil I am afraid that you are now on my list of unreliable sources. You claim that global emissions of CO2 have fallen for the last two years but the Nature article you referenced disagreed with you.
Their graphs show growth in all the recorded years but since the figures for 2015 were not then available, they inserted a red blob on the graph indicating a projected fall not an actual fall.
Should have gone to Specsavers.
Dung
I never actually said that, However it is a simple matter to show that China's emissions fell in calendar year 2014. The data for last year is indeed still being collated, however I linked to a couple of analyses of economic, coal production and power generation data that indicate a fall over the year, and when Corrinne Le Quere's group published an analysis in December, the associated article included:-
China has emerged as the world’s biggest carbon emitter after 25 years of astronomical growth. Despite huge investments in solar, wind and other renewable energy sources, the country has not committed to a peak in its emissions until 2030. But the new projections show that China’s emissions are likely to decrease by 3.9% in 2015.
“Time will tell whether this surprising interruption in emissions growth is transitory or a first step towards emissions stabilization,” Le Quéré and her colleagues write in their Nature Climate Change analysis. Nevertheless, they say, it represents a welcome break from the idea that CO2 emissions increase in lock-step with economic growth.
From <http://www.nature.com/news/global-greenhouse-gas-emissions-set-to-fall-in-2015-1.18965>
But, tell you what, I will pay GBP 25 to a charity of your choice if China's CO2 emissions from fossil fuel in 2015 turn out to be greater than 2014.
As long as you agree to pay GBP 25 to Greenpeace or Friends of the Earth if they are not
Deal?
Phil C
I am not likely to actually bet money on that since China's economy is in free fall atm. China has also jumped up to the world average of renewables 'installed capacity' (a tiny amount) and so it is possible that emissions in China could fall this year. However I repeat that the figures you referred me to showed no decrease in global emissions or even in China's emissions.
You still need a trip to Specsavers ^.^