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Bishop Hill
Updated on Jun 4, 2011 by
Bishop Hill
Phelim McAleer has an interesting post about the movie Gasland, in which residents of a US town are famously shown igniting their tap water. The insinuation is that this is something to do with fracking activitiy in the shales thousands of feet below the ground.
Bishop Hill Jun 4, 2011 Climate: HSI Climate: Models Climate: Sceptics Murray Goot of Macquarie University reviews papers on the scientific "consensus" on climate change. This is a reasonably balanced piece and not just because it mentions The Hockey Stick Illusion a couple of times.
In essence Goot's papers looks at the Oreskes and Anderegg papers as well as considering the polls of climatological opinion run by von Storch and Bray and concludes that there is a consensus that the majority of recent warming is down to CO2.
Bishop Hill Jun 3, 2011 FOI Royal Society Tickets are now available (free) for the Royal Society's Townhall Meeting on openness in science featuring Paul Nurse and Geoffrey Boulton.
This will be at the Southbank Centre in London on 8 June at 2:30pm.
Bishop Hill Jun 3, 2011 Climate: Parliament 
H/T to Patagon for pointing us to an English translation of the WGBU report and for making these excerpts from it.
Sustainable strategies and concepts must be developed for this in order to embed sustainable global development in transnational democratic structures, to formulate answers to the 21st century questions regarding global equity and distribution of resources, and, not least, to be able to claim world-wide legitimacy.
Bishop Hill Jun 3, 2011 Energy H/T Decaux for this story from the Scotsman:
SCOTLAND'S oldest university is hoping to become the first higher education institution in the country to generate all its power through its own wind farm.After a three-year investigation and scientific study of wind levels in Fife, St Andrews University yesterday submitted an application for planning permission for the farm, which would be built on farmland six miles from the town.
...The university sees the proposal as a key part of its strategy to offset what it described as the "punitive" national costs of energy.
Still more feed-in-tariffs you and I have to pay for.
Bishop Hill Jun 3, 2011 Bureaucrats Climate: Parliament 
A few days ago we looked at Julia Slingo's climate change paper, which she circulated in the wake of Climategate. A reader recently pointed me to this article in the journal Science and Public Affairs - a publication of the British Association for the Advancement of Science (as the BSA was called at that time). It's by William Waldegrave, a science minister in the last Conservative government in the UK, and is entitled "When scientists advise politicians - how to avoid the pitfalls".
Bishop Hill Jun 2, 2011 Greens Here's another set of proposals being made under the green banner that might give decent liberal-minded people a few sleepless nights: a new crime of "ecocide".
Among the ideas currently gaining currency is adding a crime of ecocide to the jurisdiction of the International Criminal Court (ICC). If this idea is accepted, ecocide would join war crimes, aggression, crimes against humanity and genocide as a fifth crime against peace.
The rationale behind the campaign for a crime of ecocide is similar to that of other ecological legal initiatives; namely, that addressing environmental imperatives requires a seismic shift in attitudes, practices and culture, in both the corporate and political spheres. Catastrophes such as Deepwater Horizon highlight the failure of existing mechanisms to ensure that the commercial world’s financial and economic prowess is matched by a duty of care for the planet on which it operates, and the rights of both its current inhabitants and those yet to come.
I think we can safely file 1 Crown Office Row Chambers under "rent-seekers".
Bishop Hill Jun 2, 2011 Climate: Parliament Climate: Ward Earlier today I tweeted a link to my Peter Phelps story:
#phelps right to warn of dangers of scientific influence. Doesn't make scientists bad people though.
And received this reply from Bob Ward.
Spreading more hatred of climate scientists, I see!
How odd!
Bishop Hill Another petition - this time calling for a moratorium on windfarms.
Sign here.
Bishop Hill Jun 2, 2011 Climate: WG3 Liberalism
Updated on Jun 2, 2011 by
Bishop Hill
Updated on Jun 2, 2011 by
Bishop Hill
Australian politician Peter Phelps has, in that quiet underspoken way that Australian politicians have, compared climatologists to scientists working for the Nazis.
At the heart of many scientists—but not all scientists—lies the heart of a totalitarian planner. One can see them now, beavering away, alone, unknown, in their laboratories. And now, through the great global warming swindle they can influence policy, they can set agendas, they can reach into everyone's lives; they can, like Lenin, proclaim "what must be done". While the humanities had a sort of warm-hearted, muddle-headed leftism, the sciences carry with them no such feeling for humanity. And it is not a new phenomenon. We should not forget that some of the strongest supporters of totalitarian regimes in the last century have been scientists and, in return, the State lavishes praise, money and respectability on them.
Bishop Hill Jun 1, 2011 Energy Commenters on unthreaded have been pointing to a story this morning about fracking operations near Liverpool Blackpool being halted because of a possible link to earth tremors.
A brief Googling suggests that this is possible, but the implications are not exactly scary.
Earthquakes induced by human activity have been documented in a few locations in the United States, Japan, and Canada. The cause was injection of fluids into deep wells for waste disposal and secondary recovery of oil, and the filling of large reservoirs for water supplies. Most of these earthquakes were minor. Deep mining can cause small to moderate quakes and nuclear testing has caused small earthquakes in the immediate area surrounding the test site, but other human activities have not been shown to trigger subsequent earthquakes. Earthquakes are part of a global tectonic process that generally occurs well beyond the influence or control of humans. The focus (point of origin) of an earthquake is typically tens to hundreds of miles underground, and the scale and force necessary to produce earthquakes are well beyond our daily lives.
