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Bishop Hill Mar 10, 2015 Energy: gas Some interesting developments on the UK shale front this morning, with Ineos buying a share in iGas's UK shale assets. The deal will bring a great deal of capital oomph to iGas and gives Ineos a stake in the Bowland shale.
Not a lot of use if they can't drill anything though.
Bishop Hill Mar 9, 2015 Energy: gas Energy: oil Oilprice.com has an interesting and extremely optimistic take on the future of the unconventional oil and gas industry. The pace of technological advances in hydraulic fracturing technology is, it seems, absolutely breathtaking, with people are even invoking Moore's Law:
In the case of the Eagle Ford region, one of the most prolific in North America, rigs are producing at a rate 18 times more efficiently than they were in 2008, and 65 percent more efficiently than they were in 2013.
Technology is whitewashing old school rules. In many ways, Moore's Law has finally arrived in the oil patch.
If this is right then the oil price is not going to shift upwards any time soon. Good news for consumers, but if your livelihood is based on oil production in the North Sea it may be time to think about moving on.
Bishop Hill Mar 9, 2015 Greens Matt Ridley's article in the Times (£) this morning looks at the continuing growth of grain harvests around the world and contrasts this good news with the weasel-worded claims of disaster from environmentalists and scientivists.
The whole thing is worth a read if you have access to it, but I want to pick up on one particular point. It turns out that harvests are not actually increasing everywhere. Th main exception is of course Europe and the reasons are plain:
The fault lies in European officialdom’s perpetual war on innovation in agriculture — its precautionary and bureaucratic de facto opposition, at the behest of what the former environment secretary Owen Paterson calls the Green Blob, to safer pesticides and genetic modification, both of which demonstrably boost yields, save inputs and spare land elsewhere in the world.
Bishop Hill Mar 9, 2015 Climate: IPCC Judith Curry points us to the draft of a paper soon to be published in the Independent Review, the journal of the Independent Institute. Written by two economists, it takes the idea of the big player - a well-established concept among economic thinkers - and uses it to try to explain the groupthink that plagues the climate debate. As the authors explain:
In markets, prototypical Big Players are central banks and government agencies empowered with discretionary policymaking... [M]arkets dominated by Big Players are prone to herding, where market participants, with little reliable information as to the Big Player’s next move, look to what others are thinking and doing.
As far as scientific endeavour goes, the authors suggest that big players can prevent the feedback mechanisms that provide a wide variety of information to "market" participants. And when it comes to the IPCC the situation is even worse:
Professional success in climate science has become more tied to the acceptance of the IPCC’s pronouncements than with the exploration of contrary possibilities; in fact, scientists who profess competing hypotheses are routinely castigated as “deniers” and some have reported unusual difficulties in negotiating the publishing process.
While a large majority of climate scientists are reported as being in general agreement with the AGW hypothesis and with the IPCC’s pronouncements, the accuracy and extent of this consensus has been questioned. The oft-quoted 97% number may be unrealistic and unsupportable, but the general acceptance by the majority of scientists having any connection to climate science seems real enough. This herding is a predictable result of the IPCC’s Big Player presence.
This all seems spot on to me.
Bishop Hill Mar 7, 2015 Greens The Mail is giving the Joseph Rowntree charities a veritable pasting this morning over their financing of organisations sympathetic to terrorism, both Irish and Islamic, antisemitic groups and organisations with an at best ambivalent attitude towards free speech.
It is worth noting however that the Rowntree charities have also been funding some highly dodgy green groups. For example, according to the JR Charitable Trust website, they have recently given £100,000 to WWF, a group that has been accused of funding abuse of tribesmen in Cameroon. They have also recently stumped up another hundred grand for 10:10, of exploding schoolchildren fame and £60,000 for COIN, of "Deniers Hall of Shame" shame.
Joseph Rowntree was, by all accounts, a pretty liberal sort of guy. He'd be turning in his grave if he could see the uses his money is being put to now.
Bishop Hill Mar 6, 2015 Energy: gas Energy: other
Updated on Mar 6, 2015 by
Bishop Hill
After years of campaigning against fracking, Friends of the Earth Scotland have made an extraordinary u-turn and are now vigorously campaigning in favour of the controversial* technique.
This shock news comes to us via the Scottish Government who have announced a £250,000 fund to accelerate development of geothermal energy in Scotland. The press release includes a statement from the minister involved Friends of the Earth's Richard Dixon:
Heating is our biggest source of climate emissions and geothermal energy can play a major part in replacing fossil-fuelled heating. We already know that there is potential to deploy geothermal energy on a very wide scale in Scotland This new funding is very welcome and will help good proposals get moving and attract further investment. Different techniques will have different impacts but geothermal energy is clearly worth serious investigation, and it is great that the Scottish Government is taking the lead in making this happen.
Bishop Hill Mar 6, 2015 BBC Energy: gas According to BBC News, the head of the engineering firm Weir Group has said that the nascent shale gas industry is on the back foot because of all the disinformation that is being put out:
Spin is "beating science" in the debate over fracking in Scotland, the head of the Weir Group has claimed.
Keith Cochrane, chief executive of the engineering firm, said that he feared Scotland would be left behind in the global market place.
You can see his point, particularly as the BBC has provided a perfect example of the spin Mr Cochrane was talking about, accompanying the story with a box that is indistinguishable from the worst kind of environmentalist disinformation. Has anyone else noticed that this same set of half-truths accompanies almost every BBC news story on unconventional oil and gas?
I have pointed this out to more than one senior journalist at the BBC and while they didn't dispute that it is misleading they don't seem to feel they have any responsibility to see it corrected because they were not personally responsible for authoring it.
Your taxes at work.
Bishop Hill Mar 5, 2015 BBC Climate: WG2 Once again demonstrating the curious ability of environmental NGOs to get their press releases reported by the BBC, the corporation has today decided that the big news on the science front are claims issued by a US green group called the World Resources Institute. According to the BBC:
The number of people affected by river flooding worldwide could nearly triple in the next 15 years, analysis shows.
Climate change and population growth are driving the increase, according to the World Resources Institute (WRI).
In the UK, about 76,000 people a year could be at risk of being affected by flooding if defences aren't improved, it says.
Bishop Hill Mar 5, 2015 Climate: Parliament Climate: Sceptics Quotes Mr. Grijalva’s letters convey an unstated but perfectly clear threat: Research disputing alarm over the climate should cease lest universities that employ such individuals incur massive inconvenience and expense—and scientists holding such views should not offer testimony to Congress. After the Times article, Sens. Edward Markey (D., Mass.), Sheldon Whitehouse (D., R.I.) and Barbara Boxer (D., Calif.) also sent letters to numerous energy companies, industrial organizations and, strangely, many right-of-center think tanks (including the Cato Institute, with which I have an association) to unearth their alleged influence peddling.
Richard Lindzen in the Wall Street journal
Bishop Hill Mar 5, 2015 BBC So, I have now managed to watch the BBC Horizon show looking back at the way the corporation has covered the climate change issue since its beginning.
The first thing to say is that it was clearly from the same propaganda-lite stable as Climate Change by Numbers, with official lines on the climate issue repeated dutifully and unquestioningly from beginning to end. The only point at which the litany was interrupted was a segment on the effect of clouds from Tomorrow's World which was interesting and scientific and - icing on the cake - was even rounded off with presenter Helen Czerski noting that the effect of clouds was still unsettled.
Bishop Hill Mar 4, 2015 BBC Here's an open thread for those who want to discuss the BBC Horizon show on climate change coverage.
Bishop Hill Mar 4, 2015 Ethics Shub Niggurath has been hard at work, following up some oddities in the disclosures Joe Romm and colleagues made in a journal article about their funding. It's fair to say that the chief witchhunter seems to have been well and truly hunted down himself:
Not only do Koomey and Romm fail to disclose funding, they expressly state the opposite trying to morally berate a fellow scientist.
Bishop Hill Mar 4, 2015 Energy: gas “I HONESTLY thought it was a joke,” says Sandy Pinney. She means the threat that Windsor, her hometown, along with 14 other towns along New York’s border with Pennsylvania, may secede and join Pennsylvania. But it is deadly serious.
The towns are in New York’s Southern Tier. They sit on top of the Marcellus Shale, which is full of natural gas. New Yorkers, unlike their Pennsylvanian neighbours, are not allowed to tap the gas because of a state ban on hydraulic fracturing (fracking) announced by Andrew Cuomo, the governor, on December 17th.
It's remarkable that these people in New York State can look at their near-neighbours' homes being destroyed by earthquakes, their drinking water poisoned, their livestock killed, their domestic appliances turned into flamethrowers and they actually want to share in the carnage! And they are saying that if their political leaders prevent it then they are willing to jump ship and transfer their allegiance to Pennsylvania in order to ensure that they jolly well can have their lives ruined.
Some people eh?
Bishop Hill Mar 3, 2015 BBC Climate: Models Climate: other
Updated on Mar 3, 2015 by
Bishop Hill
I almost gave up on Climate Change by Numbers last night. By ten o'clock I was flagging fast and not really getting a lot from it which is a pity because it could have been brilliant.
The presentation was really well done. I thought the decision to have three different presenters paid off in spades and the producers did well to come up with three such engaging people - Norman Fenton, Hannah Fry and David Spiegelhalter - to front the show. I liked the style of having them completely separate and avoiding the cheesy infills that TV people seem to like so much. The decision to get just a little bit closer to the maths was a good one and the radical step of showing equations on screen seemed like a bit of a breakthrough.
Josh 
Posted by Josh
I thought the BBC 4 programme 'Climate change by numbers' started well (and I am a big fan of Hannah Fry). But sadly it descended into the usual climate change innuendo and alarm.
The first number was fine - 0.85˚C is not scary and not catastrophic.
The second number, 95%, was, as ever, vague and hand wavy. So the 50% of the warming since 1950s we've caused amounts to... maybe 0.3˚C? So not that much after all. And the pause continues. And Arrhenius was wrong about the ice ages. And there's lots of uncertainty. How is Chelsea doing?
Worse was that by the third number the programme had left the planet and decided that the 0.3˚C warming had magically turned into 1˚C warming and we simply must do something about it. Or else.
Nice try BBC, great start by Hannah but it needed a medic by the end. At this rate I'm not sure the patient will make it all the way to Paris.
The number 63 comes from here.
