Hansen's direst forecast?

The Daily Beast recounts James Hansen's latest prognostication of doom, under the headline 

Climate seer James Hansen issues his direst forecast yet

The immediate thing that struck me was that this must be some pretty far-out stuff, because Hansen has issued some truly blood-curdling predictions in the past. So what is it this time?

James Hansen’s new study explodes conventional goals of climate diplomacy and warns of 10 feet of sea level rise before 2100.

Click to read more ...

Greenpeace and the Labour party

David Rose has an explosive story about David Mills, the husband of Labour party bigwig Tessa Jowell. It is damning for Mills, who seems to be linked to a major money launderer and to "a criminal network dumping toxic and radioactive waste in the oceans". 

What caught my eye about the story was that this was all uncovered by a team at Greenpeace. Rose takes up the story:

The report into the dumping of illegal toxic waste, seen by this newspaper, was the work of a three-year probe by a team from Greenpeace International. It said Mills – whom it described as ‘a figure of substance in the London legal profession’ – set up UK companies owned by Swiss financiers who funded this illegal trade.

Click to read more ...

More polar bear poop

Another day, another misleading piece on the alleged dangers of global warming. This time it's an article by Matt McGrath, which sexes up claims made in a new paper about polar bear metabolisms:

Polar bears are unable to adapt their behaviour to cope with the food losses associated with warmer summers in the Arctic.

Scientists had believed that the animals would enter a type of 'walking hibernation' when deprived of prey.

But new research says that that bears simply starve in hotter conditions when food is scarce...

Polar bears survive mainly on a diet of seals that they hunt on the sea ice - but increased melting in the summer reduces seal numbers and as a result the bears struggle to find a meal.

Click to read more ...

Greens trashing the environment part 625

According to the Committee on Climate Change's recent report, soils in the south-west of England are facing a problem:

Changes in crop type are reducing the risks of soil erosion in some areas. The area under high erosion risk crops such as potato and sugar beet has fallen while there has been an increase in the area under low erosion risk crops such as oil seed rape. However, this has been partly offset by the five-fold increase in the area of land under maize between 1988 and 2010, which is potentially increasing soil erosion risk in some parts of the country, particularly the south west of England.

And why has there been a five-fold increase in maize?

Click to read more ...

Minority Report and the polar bears

Polar Bears International has launched its programme to help the recovery of the thriving population of the said beasts. In their post, the team have helpfully explained some of the problems they faced:

...our team faced a unique task: to create a recovery or management plan for a species whose primary threat is largely in the future, not the past.

I can see how that would be a problem. It's rather like something out of Minority Report, but instead of precrimes solved by precogs we will have premelts dealt with by prethinkers.

Click to read more ...

Casual smears at RTCC

A year or so ago I caught the people at the Responding to Climate Change website fabricating a story. They had claimed that an island in the Solomons was being evacuated due to climate change but a little research showed that it was due to a tsunami. RTCC had simply tried to appropriate the story for "the cause".

Today I find that RTCC editor Ed King has done a drive-by smear on Matt Ridley, alleging that he is the owner of a coal mine. The insinuation is fairly clear - that Ridley argues against decarbonisation in order to protect this business interest. Of course as readers here know, all subsurface energy assets in the UK are the property of the state so it it is not even possible for Ridley to own the coal under his land. Moreover the mines there are operated by H.J. Banks Ltd: Ridley is therefore neither owner nor operator. In fact he only receives a wayleave from Banks for access to the site.

Click to read more ...

Muddy, or waters?

As noted yesterday, Lord Deben is concerned about the loss of peat soils in East Anglia. According to his CCC report:

Peat soils have high organic content (over 50%) and as such tend to be very fertile. Such land provides a comparative advantage for intensive high-value cropping, including vegetables, salads and horticulture.

Click to read more ...

Green donations splurged on swanky HQ

A couple of years back, WWF moved out of the converted industrial unit in Godalming that it had occupied for 20 years and settled into a smart new headquarters in Woking, a building that has just been shortlisted for the Stirling Prize for architecture. You can see why they might prefer this to a converted industrial unit.

The webpage for the award is rather cagey about what this swank has cost, saying that the figure is confidential. Fortunately, building.co.uk has some details for us, so as well as learning that WWF have chosen to build their HQ on a podium above a carpark - whatever happened to greens' enthusiasm for public transport? -  we can also learn that this was all achieved at a cost of £13 million.

I'm sure small donors to the green cause are grateful that their money is being spent carefully.

Soiled reputation

In the Mail this morning I read about Giant Hogweed, a particularly nasty plant that can cause horrific burns that take years to heal. I also read that the plant is easily controlled with glyphosate.

This afternoon I read that the Soil Association is trying to ban glyphosate.

Rotten timing for that announcement guys.

Deben diggin' in the dirt

Lord Deben has been speaking at a food industry conference, still exhibiting the pronounced eccentricity we have noted in recent months:

Lord John Deben, a member of the Government’s climate change committee, said there would need to be some ’fundamental changes’ in how the [food] sector operated.

A recent report by the committee warned the UK was in danger of seeing a reduction in productivity because of the damage caused by intensive farming practices.

Lord Deben said soils were degenerating ’so fast it is visible’.

"So far the agricultural community has been blind to what is happening.

"In 30 years the Fens will not produce because of what we have done to it," he said.

Click to read more ...

HH Lamb's scepticism confirmed

A new paper (£) in Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change caught my eye on the Twitter feed this morning. With a title of "Ways of knowing climate: Hubert H. Lamb and climate research in the UK" Janet Martin-Nielsen's paper sounded as if it was going to be a direct response to Bernie Lewin's GWPF report on Lamb's work, but a look at the paper suggests that to the extent that it is such a riposte it is so feeble as to hardly warrant the description.

Certainly it covers precisely the same ground as Bernie's paper, documenting Lamb's career step by step, describing his focus on natural variability and his distrust of computer models and even featuring many of the same excerpts from Lamb's books that Bernie used. The riposte to the sceptics, such as it is, comes in the closing section, which opens with a quote from a piece that Bernie wrote for BH about how Lamb should be seen as a proto-sceptic, follows up with a claim that allegations about the misdeeds of CRU have been shown to be "wrong" (based on the Oxburgh report!!), before heading onward to the meat of the case:

Click to read more ...

SNP "not against" shale

The Herald (£) is reporting that Ineos boss Jim Ratcliffe has had private assurances from the SNP that they are not against shale gas development, confirming the view I had formed that the Scottish moratorium was simply a way to kick the issue into the long grass until after the election.

In some ways though the SNP have painted themselves into a bit of a corner. "More evidence is needed" they said before the election. This means that some kind of a fig leaf is going to have to be formulated to allow them to argue that the aforementioned evidence has been obtained. I wonder what it will be?

Quote of the day, unimpressed edition

Pope Francis should certainly be commended for his desire to deal with poverty in the developing world, but it is hard to see how he hopes to do so without economic growth and fossil fuels, both of which he thinks are unnecessary evils.

The Bishop of Chester is unimpressed with the papal encyclical

Oil brings development to Africa

The Economist describes how a major oil find in Northern Kenya has brought the possibility of development to an area that was once far from the benefits of civilisation. With oil prices low, it's all on hold for the moment, but even so, benefits have started to flow:

If and when it happens, Turkana will get its first paved roads, power stations and water treatment plants. Yet the knock-on effects of the oil boom are already evident and reach well beyond infrastructure. Drillers have found not just oil but reportedly also several large underground aquifers that could supply the bone-dry region with water for decades. Pastoralists might in future be able to grow crops. A man with a jerry-rigged distillery in a thatched hut near Tullow’s camp says: “We thought oil would bring us jobs and it’s done that—at least for some. But it’s so much more, both good and bad.”

Click to read more ...

Shale gas coolness

While looking for something else I came across this (promotional?) video for a new drilling rig for shale gas operations, which claims huge efficiency gains because it can partially assemble itself and also walk from one well to the next.

Which I thought was pretty cool.