More or less bonkers

Alex Cull has posted a transcript of yesterday's More or Less show on the BBC, which had a segment on climate refugees. It seems that Labour's Chris Bryant has been citing a study that has long since been debunked and which is so embarrassingly wrong that even COIN and the UN have disowned it.

What Chris Bryant was quoting in his speech was a kind of adding up all of the people who've been displaced by any kind of natural disaster, and labelling them "climate refugees". And that's problematic for a number of reasons. Firstly, because the relationship between natural disasters and climate change is complicated - it's certainly true that climate change might be making some of those particular disasters more likely, but it's certainly not the case that we can attribute all of those individual displacements to climate change alone.

Well worth a read.

Green propaganda can be dangerous

Via Barry Woods comes this story from Sail-World.com. It seems that a number of yachts have been attempting the North West Passage, no doubt some of them with a view to "raising awareness of global warming", but have come unstuck as this year's melt has been much smaller than expected freeze has come early.

The Northwest Passage after decades of so-called global warming has a dramatic 60% more Arctic ice this year than at the same time last year. The future dreams of dozens of adventurous sailors are now threatened. A scattering of yachts attempting the legendary Passage are caught by the ice, which has now become blocked at both ends and the transit season may be ending early.

Apparently there is a cruise ship which may be in need of assistance too. Disturbingly, nobody seems to be quite sure if there is an icebreaker in the vicinity.

Read the whole thing.

Update on Aug 30, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Blimey. Apparently there's a bunch of jet skiers out there too.

Update on Aug 31, 2013 by Bishop Hill

An expedition to row across the North-West Passage has been abandoned.

Coexistence

Grist is vying with Propublica to be the most disreputable commentator on shale gas, with an article today about the sudden appearance of what they initially called a "fracking rig" in a suburban location in Colorado. As readers in the comments were quick to point out, there is no such thing as a fracking rig - what had appeared was a drilling rig, and the article was quickly corrected:

When my wife and I pulled into a relative’s subdivision in Frederick, Colo., after a wedding on a recent weekend, it was a surprise to suddenly find a 142-foot-tall drill rig in the backyard, parked in the narrow strip of land between there and the next subdivision to the east. It had appeared in the two days we’d been gone.

However, the article is at pains to insinuate that the rig will be illuminated at night for the foreseeable future - nowhere in the article do you learn that the drilling rig is a temporary feature of a shale gas well, one that will disappear just as quickly in a few weeks' time.

Click to read more ...

Eastern gas

Updated on Aug 29, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Over the last few days there has been a steady stream of good news about Eastern European shale gas. At the start of the week, it was reported that Estonia has become self-sufficient in power, having exploited oil-bearing shales near the Russian border. Meanwhile, on the exploration front, test fracking results in the Ukraine have been very positive and there is also good news from Poland, a country widely cited as demonstrating that a shale gas revolution can't take place in Europe.

Click to read more ...

Frack on

The Telegraph has the shock news that a bunch of Balcombe villagers have stuck their heads above the parapet and called for fracking to go ahead:

Sixty residents in Balcombe, West Sussex, have put their name to a letter in support of fracking and criticised the anti-fracking campaigners who continue to mount daily protests in a camp on the outskirts of Balcombe.

Their letter states: "Having regard to the outlook for energy prices, energy security, and importance to the national economy, we believe that we, in common with other communities, should accept and facilitate this 'new' technology."

The villagers believe that despite the "relentless propaganda", exploratory drilling or properly-regulated exploitation will not "unduly damage" the environment.

They're probably all in the pay of big oil.

A pickle

The must-read post this morning is Judith Curry's coverage of a new paper by Kosaka and Xie in Nature. The paper received some attention yesterday, the BBC reporting that it explained the 21st century temperature plateau, saying it was due to...

natural cooling in part of the Pacific ocean.

Although they cover just 8% of the Earth, these colder waters counteracted some of the effect of increased carbon dioxide say the researchers.

But temperatures will rise again when the Pacific swings back to a warmer state, they argue.

Click to read more ...

He's off

Long time BH sparring partner Leo Hickman has announced that he's leaving the Guardian and heading for pastures new. He is to take up the role of chief climate change advisor to WWF. I'm sure we all wish him well.

Obviously the Guardian is in pretty dire financial straits, so shedding of staff is no great surprise, but it may also be symptomatic of the continued demise of the environmental journalist, a profession that should never have existed in the first place.

Killing the carbon targets

GWPF reproduces an FT article which suggests that the government is under pressure from engineering companies who want to see the UK's unilateral carbon targets reduced. Apparently senior Conservatives are keen to see the targets killed off, something that could happen if a review by the Committee on Climate Change finds that the UK is moving much quicker towards decarbonisation than the rest of Europe.

Of course, under Lord Deben's stewardship the review is unlikely to come up with the required answer, and the Liberal Democrats represent something of an immovable object on this front too. They are, not to put to fine a point on it, willing to throw granny from the train (or let her freeze to death anyway) in order to keep their green voters.

Click to read more ...

Masters and Dessler do climate sensitivity

I chanced upon Andrew Dessler's video on climate sensitivity a few weeks ago. 

At the time I sent it to Nic Lewis to see what he made of it, but I think he was away at the time and it slipped my mind. This morning, however, I was reminded of it by this response from Troy Masters. I would say that the case for low climate sensitivity is still looking pretty strong.

Taxing Air

When you think about it, it's rather surprising that nobody has ever put together a good layman's explanation of the weaknesses in global warming science. It's only with Bob Carter and John Spooner's Taxing Air that this gap in the market has been filled.

And they have filled it with considerable style in my humble opinion. This is a hugely readable book, with short accessible summaries of each subject addressed, crisp direct prose and enlivened throughout with Spooner's cartoons. The publishers have splashed out on a colour interior, so the friendly effect is maintained throughout.

With its focus very much on the global warming newbie, the book is unlikely to bring anything new to many BH readers, but those who come here without scientific backgrounds will probably find it useful. And it should form the backbone of everybody's Christmas present lists.

Excellent stuff and congratulations are due to the authors.

Buy direct here or from Amazon here.

Fracking roundup

Updated on Aug 27, 2013 by Bishop Hill

There's quite a lot of newspaper coverage of fracking this morning, which will no doubt be of interest to readers.

In the Telegraph, Robert Mair, who headed the inquiry by the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering into the technology, gives a level-headed summary of the risks - such as they are - and the responses.

Neil Hamilton, the eccentric Tory turned UKIP bigwig, has a green-bashing piece in the Express

Click to read more ...

A life propagandic

The BBC's Life Scientific strand today featured Joanna Haigh, the Imperial College physicist who studies links between the sun and the climate, although she is not above a bit of propaganda for the greens either.

The programme was excruciating. One reader emailed to say she'd switched off after hearing about two minutes of it. We heard about how much easier it is to predict the climate than the weather, with not even a question mark raised over the failure of the climate models to predict the climate in recent decades. There was a section that could best be described as a promotional podcast for the IPCC. And there was an extended section in which Haigh bemoaned the climate "deniers" closely followed by others in which she was lauded by a colleague for her outreach efforts to those who dissent from the climate mainstream and another in which she told us how hard she tried to be polite. The lack of self-awareness was almost comical.

Once again, the BBC has done a full-scale propaganda piece for the IPCC and the green movement. The spirit of the Cambridge Media and Environment Programme is alive and well within the corporation.

The audio, for those with strong stomachs, should be here in the next couple of hours.

The widening war on...sand

When I wrote about Propublica's rather dishonest rebranding of sand as "crystalline silica" the other day, I thought what I'd stumbled across was just a particularly egregious example of the green tactic of making everything sound scary in the hope that somebody will be convinced.

Not a bit of it.

Writing at Forbes, Christopher Helman reveals that there is a fullscale environmentalist war front directed at sand mining. And not only that, but it appears to have had some effect.

Towns like Winona, Minn are now facing calls for the monitoring of silica dust and diesel fumes emitted by the sand mines. There’s a real concern that when tiny particles of airborne silica are inhaled and get lodged in the lungs they could lead to silicosis.

Click to read more ...

Ads

OK, I did it. Put ads on the site. No, I don't like it either, but the effort I put into it needs to pay, so this is the way it will have to be. (If anyone wants to offer me large sums of money to take the ads off again, I'm all ears!)

For me, it looks OK in Firefox and IE10. If anyone has problems let me know in the comments here, telling me which browser and version you are using.

The Lib Dem energy policy document

Over the weekend the Liberal Democrats published a new policy paper on how they envisage the energy market developing the next time they are in government. The document gives the impression of having been put together by a spotty teenager and perhaps one with mild learning difficulties. It is at once scary, laughable, naive, daft and soft in the head.

From it, we learn that Liberal Democrats intend all kettles and cookers to come with two sets of heating elements:

Households can maximise the use of electricity by prioritising flexible, or semi-flexible, electricity demands according to urgency or by enabling non-time-sensitive equipment to switch on when power is available. High energy using appliances like cookers and kettles can be designed with two levels of heating elements to select, based on the best match to the power available.

Click to read more ...