Conservatives on the ECC

The following are the Conservative members of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee, together with some quotes that should help readers place them. Should we assume that no further scrutiny of this area of policy is intended?

Antoinette Sandbach:

“Biodiversity loss and climate change are clearly happening, and we need to ensure that policy making in this area is science-based and practically focused, rather than endless legislation going through the Welsh Assembly, which sounds good but achieves less than proper and focused policymaking would.”

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More on calcifiers

Updated on Jul 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In response to my comments on her appearance on BBC news, Daniela Schmidt has tweeted some thoughts. Recall that I highlighted some comments she had made in a Geology paper about calcifier exctinctions occurring tens of thousands of years after extreme temperatures were reached, contrasting this with her on-air claim that the oceans were doomed by the end of the century:

My children will be alive in 2100. I would like them to be able to swim above a coral reef and enjoy its beauty. I would like them to be able to eat mussels and oysters and crayfish and if we continue to release CO2 at the current rate this is not going to happen.

Prof Schmidt has apparently told Roger Harrabin that I have misunderstood her work. In a tweet she notes that her comments in Geology represented a citation of other scientists:

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Marshall islands typhoon: weather not climate

Updated on Jul 4, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In my Twitter timeline come a couple of tweets from Tony de Brum Foreign Minister of the Marshall Islands, which is currently in the middle of a typhoon:

Just landed home. Majuro like a war zone. Roofs torn off, huge blackout, ships ashore. On alert for more tonight.

Today in Majuro. My family home battered by the beginnings of yet another cyclone. Climate change has arrived. MinTdB

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Science says one thing, scientists another

Anyone would think there was a big climate conference coming up, because the BBC is pumping out the climate propaganda left right and centre. A couple of nights ago we had Kirsty Wark fawning all over Chris Rapley on Newsnight (from 40 mins) and wondering why good people like him weren't making the policy decisions. Today we have Roger Harrabin on ocean acidification (video here).

The samples are chalky white for millions of years from the fossils of tiny shellfish. That's until this dramatic point 55 million years ago [the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum; PETM], when the oceans suddenly got hotter and more acidic and the shellfish disappeared. It took shellfish 160,000 years to recover and scientists say humans are changing the seas ten times faster than at this catastrophic event...

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Does Labour hate the North?

I missed this news a couple of days back, but it's quite an interesting as a demonstration of the results of the Climate Change Act and the duplicity of the political classes:

Yorkshire’s coal mine to close

More than 400 people are expected to lose their jobs due to the closure of the Hatfield Colliery in South Yorkshire.

It is closing 14 months earlier than scheduled.

According to trade union Prospect, 420 “high-skilled” jobs and further jobs in the supply chain will be lost.

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ECC elections

Results are coming through for the election of committee members for the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee.

As well as the SNP chairman, we now have:

• Alistair Carmichael (LibDem) - a windfarm proponent
• Ian Lavery (Lab), former head of the National Union of Mineworkers
• Melanie Onn (Lab), MP for Grimsby, a centre for offshore wind
• Matthew Pennycook (Lab) - looks like a machine politician, allegedly pro-shale
• Alan Whitehead (Lab), a green

Which means Graham Stringer is no more. No sign of the Conservative members yet.

Polar propaganda

The US Geological Survey is trying on the "polar bears are all going to die" line again, the latest in a long line of attempts to link polar bear populations to summer ice extent (predicted to decline rapidly under global warming) despite all the evidence pointing to spring ice thickness (little affected by small amounts of warming) being the critical factor. In fact it is thick ice that seems to be the problem, causing declines in populations of both seals and the polar bears that prey on them. Polar bears do most of their feeding in the spring, when seal pups are there for the taking; they tend to fast over the summer.

The USGS press release is interesting, revealing that the authors used IPCC models of sea ice extent and then tried to derive future polar bear populations from them (I kid you not). They conclude that all bear populations will decrease in the future except in one region "where sea ice generally persists longer in the summer". And confirming that they are quite clear that it's summer ice that is the issue, there is this:

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The compliant media and the scary stories

The BBC and every other environmental pressure group in the country is reporting the release under FOI of a draft Defra report on the impacts of unconventional oil and gas with considerable excitement. The main theme is encapsulated in the headline: "Fracking 'could lower house prices' says draft official report".

Here, for comparison, is an FT report from 2013 about the effects of the Bakken shale revolution in North Dakota.

City-data.com, which analyses house sales, says the average house or condominium in Williston in 2009 cost $101,906. By 2011, the average was $122,000 – still below the norm for North Dakota. “But since then prices have doubled or in some cases tripled,” says estate agent Arlene Hickel, of Bekk’s Realty in Williston.

A study of home prices in Pennsylvania also found an overall positive effect, with only homes with a private groundwater supply negatively affected (in the UK this would be pretty much nobody). And even here it is worth noting the part that fear plays in this effect. There is no real evidence that shale gas actually affects ground water - there are only environmentalists' scare stories compliantly repeated by a compliant media. When The Economist, once considered a serious publication, puts a "flaming faucet" at the top of a story about shale, you realise that something has gone badly awry.

Update on Jul 2, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Here is the unredacted report. The section on house prices bears reading. You will get a rather different impression to the one you get from the BBC.

The two Ds and their killer plan

Many of the metropolitan chatterati are getting their knickers in a twist this morning over the expansion of London airport capacity. Deep-green Tory MP Zac Goldsmith is threatening to resign his seat in protest over the official Airports Commission decision to go with a third runway at Heathrow.

While the commission has been working away, its chairman Howard Davies has engaged in some interesting correspondence with Lord Deben. I was particularly struck by this letter from Lord D in which he specifies the level of carbon emissions that the aviation industry will be permitted to make:

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