Public views of shale gas

James Wilsdon points us to a fascinating paper published by some of his colleagues at SPRU. Laurence Williams et al have conducted a series of focus groups with members of the public in Lancashire to see what they make of fracking. The views exhibited are something to behold.

Participants came from one of a restricted number of groups:

• allotment holders
• ex-miners
• wildlife trust employees
• mothers of young children
• industrial history society members
• parents of university students

Click to read more ...

Debunk alarm - Josh 336

There's been a minor kerfuffle of bruised feathers on Twitter today about the speedy way our host debunked the latest paper from the LSE. It does seem that blogs are increasingly agile in spotting duff science - something I am fairly sure is a good thing and should be universally approved of.

Cartoons by Josh

Integrity and scholarship at the LSE

Bob Ward and the Grantham Institute are jumping up and down this morning about a new paper the Institute has published. It's fair to say the conclusions of author Fergus Green, as reported in the Grantham Institute press release are striking:

Countries will benefit economically from almost all of the actions needed to limit global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, according to a paper published today (PDF) (13 July 2015) by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science.

The paper suggests that individual countries have large incentives to make ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and to agree to strong collective action at the United Nations climate change conference in Paris in December.

Remarkable stuff, I'm sure you will agree, overturning much of what we thought we knew about the economics of global warming mitigation. It's even more surprising when you learn that Mr Green is not an economist at all, but a post-graduate student who was until recently a lawyer at a firm in Australia.

Click to read more ...

Gray lady

The BBC for once has published a story that could credibly be seen as justifying its taxpayer funding - a fascinating profile of the head of ethics at the Cabinet Office, Sue Gray. The misdeeds of civil servants is something of a theme at BH, but I was particularly interested in this story because as far as I can tell it was Ms Gray who cleared Lord Deben's appointment as head of the Committee on Climate Change despite knowing that he had a conflict of interest.

The story paints a picture of an over-powerful Whitehall official, who seems to operate with an almost total disregard for the law, particularly on FOI. This would not be the first time we have come across public sector officials behaving like this - recall for example the breaches of the law by UEA. Nor is it the first time we have noted the almost complete lack of any consequences suffered by the perpetrators.

Update on Jul 13, 2015 by Bishop Hill

There is a related story here.

Hot spot or not - Josh 335

It is good to see Christopher Booker writing about the 'hottest day of the year' in the Telegraph again. Paul Homewood's excellent posts, on which his article is based, are well worth reading.

The story starts here, with more here, and Booker's first article, followed by more doubts, some Met Office spin, then a belated response, comment moderation, and finally more Met Office spin. It's quite a saga.

Anyone would think they are trying to hype every possible weather event they can. I wonder why?

Cartoons by Josh

Keeping the heat out

An article in the Mail tells the story of the number of people - apparently large - who are choosing to decamp rather than continue to live in their ecohouses.

When Emma Taylor was offered a two-bedroom apartment in an award-winning block of flats, she couldn’t wait to move in.

Newly built, she was informed the building had been constructed to such high eco-standards that it would cost just £1 a week to heat. Unfortunately, as she’s discovered to her extreme discomfort, keeping warm is the least of her problems.

Because unlike most Britons, 23-year-old Emma has come to dread the summer months. Her ground-floor flat in Coventry is so well insulated that when the sun shines the temperature inside rockets — regularly over 25C, a point at which experts say health can suffer.

Click to read more ...

Truth and the green

Among the environmentally concerned, playing fast and loose with the actualité is seen as a tactic that delivers good results quickly and it's easy to see why: environmental correspondents are almost to a man (or woman) signed up members of the green movement and can be relied upon to repeat even the grossest misrepresentations.

As a good example of truth-telling among the green fraternity, take a look at the column written by Catherine Porter in the Toronto Star, in which she describes a "run-in" her nine-year-old daughter had with sceptic writer Ezra Levant. Then take a look at Levant's video response:

Unbelievable.

No, it's natural variability

In the wake of Karl et al's frantic tweaking of the global temperature data in order to get the pause to disappear, a new paper by Nieves et al, also in Science, comes up with a different theory to explain what's happening, this time putting it down to natural variability:

Recent modeling studies have proposed different scenarios to explain the slowdown in surface temperature in the most recent decade. Some of these studies seem to support the idea of internal variability and/or rearrangement of heat between the surface and the ocean interior. Others suggest that radiative forcing might also play a role. Our examination of observational data over the past two decades shows some significant differences compared to model results from reanalyses, and provides the most definitive explanation of how the heat was redistributed. We find that cooling in the top 100-meter layer of the Pacific Ocean was mainly compensated by warming in the 100- to 300-meter layer of the Indian and Pacific Oceans in the past decade since 2003.

Click to read more ...

All change at the SMC

Here's something I missed last year. There has been a major clearout of the board at the Science Media Centre, with Nature's Philip Campbell, Bob Ward and Simon Singh departing to be replaced by names who are all less familiar (although Dorothy Bishop has recently been in the news as a ringleader in the the Huntwitchhunt). As far as I can see the changes took place last summer.

Not sure I've noticed much change in their output though.

Props away

So, rather remarkably, George Osborne has decided to knock away some of the props holding up the leaky old edifice that is the renewable energy industry. It seems that subsidy junkies will soon no longer be able to claim exemption from the climate change levy. Gratifyingly, the bigwigs at RenewableUK say that it is "a punitive measure for the clean energy sector" and if ever there was a sector that needed a bit of punishment it is green energy, which would have no existence at all were it not for the money extracted from poor consumers that they have persuaded politicians to hand over.

However, some of our green friends seem relieved that it wasn't worse. In particular the Levy Control Framework, which specifies an ever-rising amount that energy companies can extract from consumers in order to meet the requirements of government policy, is set to remain, although some reckon it could be reviewed later in the year.

The markets seem quite sure that this is going to hit the renewables sector quite hard, with Drax shares collapsing, but what it means for consumer prices is anyone's guess. Until the whole machinery of energy sector intervention is torn down, we will never know.

Sutter thread

CNN's JD Sutter - the author of that piece the other day that alleged the Marshall Islands are going to disappear - wants to talk to sceptics. How nice!

The comments are yours sir. I'm hoping you will tell us why you are telling your readers these things about Pacific atolls.

[Preemptive comments by others will be deleted. Let's wait until the man himself has chimed in].

Update on Jul 9, 2015 by Bishop Hill

From the silence, I guess this could be one of those "new dialogues" that upholders of the climate consensus are always on about. Oh well.

Fracking green - Josh 334

Last Sunday Christopher Booker wrote a brilliant article "Why are greens so keen to destroy the world's wildlife?" He says: 

When Professor David MacKay stepped down as chief scientific adviser
to the Department of Energy and Climate Change (Decc) last year, he
produced a report comparing the environmental impact of a fracking
site to that of wind farms.

Over 25 years, he calculated, a single "shalegas pad" covering five
acres, with a drilling rig 85ft high (only needed for less than a year), 
would produce as much energy as 87 giant windturbines, covering 5.6
square miles and visible up to 20 miles away.

Which made me think: where would you rather live, in a county full of giant turbines littering the countryside, killing eagles and bats and producing unreliable electricity, or one with a small discreet gas tap somewhere?

Cartoons by Josh

Sokal hypothesis confirmed

Well, you really can't keep a good man down! Having written a bizarre paper ("Moon Landing") that drew conclusions from a sample size of zero,  having then written a follow up paper ("Recursive Fury") that libelled anyone who thought that his first effort was at all odd, and, moreover, found that the head of climate impacts at the Met Office was a conspiracy theorist, Stefan Lewandowsky was ultimately forced to retract the latter.

Undeterred, the great man has decided to put this magnum opus to good use, apparently setting out to confirm the Sokal "no-threshold" hypothesis for publishing gibberish in academic journals. Yes folks, he has managed to get "Fury" republished, this time at the open-access Journal of Social and Political Psychology, triumphantly confirming that there is no paper too daft to be published in the peer-reviewed literature.

You just have to laugh. Academia eh?

Met Office still brazen

Readers may recall the paper I wrote for GWPF on the problems with the UKCP09 climate projections. These were demonstrably unreliable: the predictions were formulated as a weighted average of possible future climates, but it was discovered that only unrealistic future climates were taken into account. Readers may also recall that this has all been acknowledged by the Met Office, but that they are refusing to acknowledge that it is a problem.

Astonishing then to see that the Met Office is still pushing UKCP09, with a new paper in Nature Climate Change, dutifully (and inevitably) picked up by the BBC:

Click to read more ...

Learned societies and Stalinism

Marcia McNutt, the editor of Science magazine and the author of a recent, moderately bonkers editorial about climate change (discussed by Judith Curry here) has been nominated to be the next head of the US National Academy of Science.

OK, so "learned society led by politically active environmentalist" is not news, but what about this.

Under Academy's bylaws, other candidates could be nominated by NAS members, but that has never happened. McNutt’s name will be presented to the full membership for formal ratification on December 15, the Council said.

Yes, that's right. The NAS uses the electoral system pioneered by Stalin and popularised by the Kim family and the Royal Society: one member, one vote, one candidate.

When will they learn?