The politicians are nervous

In a sign that politicians in the leafy Weald are getting nervous about exploitation of the shale deposits under their constituencies, former planning minister Nick Herbert has spoken out about his concerns.

"People don’t know – people are worried about the implications and they don’t have enough information to judge how damaging it will be.”

Mr Herbert said ministers had a duty to explain what the effects would be on local communities which are inadvertently sitting on large deposits of shale gas.

He added: “It is the fear of the unknown that is exacerbating local concerns. People understand the national arguments about the need for secure and cheap energy but they just don’t know how much this is going to damage the local environment.

The headline on the article says that Herbert describes fracking as the biggest threat to the countryside, although these words do not appear in the article itself. Most of his worries seem to be more about fear of the unknown than a settled perception of a threat. If he really said that fracking is the biggest threat facing the countryside then he is of course talking nonsense, given that there are several oil wells in the region already and that almost nobody is aware of them.

That said, while the media are hyping the impact of the small band of protestors at Balcombe, Herbert and his colleagues in the House of Commons will remain nervous and will feel duty bound to give voice to their constituents' concerns. Perhaps somebody should send him Matt Ridley's report on shale gas.

Balcombe heats up

With test drilling now under way in Balcombe, the war of words is heating up. As one would expect, the Luddites at the Guardian are stirring any pot they can find, and Damian Carrington's story focuses on allegations that Cuadrilla trespassed on private land while undertaking geophysical surveys. Mountains and molehills are words that spring to mind, and one is left with the overwhelming impression that there is another side to the story too.

Meanwhile, Twitter also remains dominated by greens, with barely a squawk from anyone in favour, but at least Cuadrilla have now made themselves heard - CEO Francis Egan is interviewed in the Mail on Sunday (scroll down here) and does a pretty good job of relaying the facts.

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The validity of climate models: a bibliography

A reader sent me some correspondence he had received from the Met Office. He had been enquiring about what evidence Prof Slingo et al had of the validity of the output of GCMs, and received in return the following bibliography:

Airey MJ, Hulme M, Johns TC (1996) Evaluation of simulations of terrestrial precipitation in UK Met Office/Hadley Centre climate change experiments. Geophysical Research Letters 23:1657-1660

Allan RP, Ramaswamy V, Slingo A (2002) Diagnostic analysis of atmospheric moisture and clear-sky radiative feedback in the Hadley Centre and Geophysical Fluid Dynamics Laboratory (GFDL) climate models. Journal of Geophysical Research-Atmospheres 107:7

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The Strata

I recently came across an image of the Strata, a skyscraper in south London with built in wind turbines.

Now wind turbines are gobsmackingly inefficient - we all know that - but the idea that you would make them still less efficient by preventing them from swinging round to face into the wind seems almost to defy belief.

To make things worse, it seems that the noise they generate has led to their being switched off most of the time.

Still, it will stand as a monument to the idiocy of environmentalists.

Gore drops Mann

Anthony has a really interesting post from a spy inside one of Al Gore's Climate Leader training programs. Read the whole thing, but I thought this was particularly interesting.

Al Gore himself went through the entire slide show that we are supposed to use as his “Climate Leaders.”  Quite honestly, there is nothing new here, EXCEPT that there is no trace of the “hockey stick” graph that was so central to “An Inconvenient Truth”!! Amazing, considering how central that was to their arguments!

Google and dissent

A group of Google Science Communication Fellows have written to their benefactor explaining that the company should not be supporting Oklahoma Senator James Inhofe because of his views on climate change.

...in the face of urgent threats like climate change, there are times where companies like Google must display moral leadership and carefully evaluate their political bedfellows. Google’s support of Senator James Inhofe’s re-election campaign is one of those moments.

The thrust of the fellows' argument is that Inhofe is trying to prevent them getting their way on the climate change issue. However, their presentation of the issue as a moral one seems to rely on an argument that Inhofe is a bad man. And why is he a bad man? Well, because he is trying to prevent them getting their way on the climate change issue.

So what it boils down to is that the fellows want Google to stop funding people who disagree with them. This behaviour suggests that they are unsure of their intellectual ground, but also bears a close resemblance to that of the Climategate authors, plotting to unseat journal editors and have dissenting scientists fired. This is the modus operandi of the activist and not the scientist.

So in the wake of Tamsin's article on trust, I wonder who on earth is going to believe a word of the academic output of any of these people?

A new look at the carbon dioxide budget - Part 2

David Coe's post on problems with the official carbon dioxide budget generated a lot of interest and more than 100 comments. David and I have therefore decided to bring forward publication of the second part of the paper, in which he sets out a new approach to these questions. 

The paper itself is attached below. For those who are interested, David is also making available the data behind the key figures:  Figs 2.4 and 2.5 and Figs 2.6 and 2.7

Coe paper - Part 2

Tamsin and the hornet's nest

I've been otherwise engaged in the last 24 hours so I missed all the excitement over Tamsin Edwards' post at the Guardian's Political Science blog, in which she calls for scientists to steer clear of political advocacy.

I believe advocacy by climate scientists has damaged trust in the science. We risk our credibility, our reputation for objectivity, if we are not absolutely neutral. At the very least, it leaves us open to criticism. I find much climate scepticism is driven by a belief that environmental activism has influenced how scientists gather and interpret evidence. So I've found my hardline approach successful in taking the politics and therefore – pun intended – the heat out of climate science discussions.

Judith Curry has an excellent round up of the responses around the web.