Bishop Hill Aug 26, 2015 Politicians This just in from the deputy leader of the SNP in Westminster:
Scottish Tories to roll out red carpet to "rich people" through GM crops and fracking! No thanks! No GM. No Fracking. No Tories. #VoteSNP
— Stewart Hosie (@StewartHosieSNP) August 25, 2015Words fail me.
Bishop Hill Aug 26, 2015 Media Interesting to see a large splash in the Sun taking a pop at climate alarmism. I think the message may be getting through.
Bishop Hill Aug 26, 2015 Climate: Parliament ;)
A few weeks ago, and unnoticed by yours truly, David Davis MP took a step to address one of the most egregious practices of windfarm operators.
The big companies that build windfarms tend to put each of their developments in a separate shell company, with a small share capital and funding provided instead through a large loan from the parent company. With profits immediately passed up to the parent, the operating businesses will usually have no net assets, which means that if any large liabilities arise there is nothing available to meet them.
Bishop Hill Aug 25, 2015 BBC Climate: WG3 Corruption ;)
The BBC's Matt McGrath has been looking at a new report by a green think tank called the Stockholm Environment Institute. No surprise there - there is a general acceptance among BBC environment journalists that green think tanks are the ones that publish interesting stuff.
The report looks quite good, describing how many of the carbon credits awarded to Russia and Ukraine are actually fraudulent. This is, in itself, not surprising either - I made a similar point in the report I wrote for GWPF on the unintended consequences of climate policy.
Bishop Hill Aug 24, 2015 Climate: WG2 The World Bank's climate change unit put out a tweet about climate threats to Eastern Europe yesterday that caught my eye. This one:
#ClimateChange & rising temps increase #health #risks in several ways: http://t.co/k83V1EJCHU #climateaction pic.twitter.com/MOzNKxzGmS
— World Bank Climate (@wbclimatechange) August 23, 2015
Bishop Hill Aug 24, 2015 BBC Bureaucrats The BBC's decision to part company with the Met Office has provoked a great deal of comment over the weekend (and a cartoon or two as well). Returning to my desk this morning I expected that the story would have run out of legs, but it has just been given a new lease of life via the Today programme.
I've attached the audio file below. Justin Webb was discussing possible reasons for the the BBC's decision and he mentioned that some people had suggested that this might have something to do with the Met Office's stance on climate change. Given that the BBC is now arguably rather more alarmist than the Met Office, however, this seems somewhat counterintuitive.
To be fair it was just a throwaway comment, the aural equivalent of clickbait, and at least one bottom feeder has swallowed it whole.
Bishop Hill Aug 21, 2015 Economics ;)
Enthusiasts for a carbon tax tend to lick their lips at the sheer size of the numbers that have been conjured up out of the economic models. They see a door opening to massive economic changes, with societal change on the horizon too.
Today the door has been pushed back somewhat, with a new paper in Energy Economics by a multinational team of authors led by Zuzana Irsova of Charles University in Prague (there is a preprint here). She and her colleagues have been looking into published estimates of the social cost of carbon and find good evidence of a strong publication bias. You can probably guess which direction the bias is in:
Bishop Hill Aug 20, 2015 Energy: gas Energy: wind Greens Whilst offshore wind is expected to get cheaper as the industry grows, the cost of gas is set to increase due to a combination of rising fuel and carbon prices. Our bills are likely to go up in all future energy scenarios, but the government's own advisers say the best way to limit that rise is through increased renewable energy.
Greenpeace spokesman, September 2013
The gas price has fallen – which makes subsidising nuclear (and offshore wind) much more expensive. Cheaper options for cutting emissions – like onshore wind and efficiency measures have, for various reasons, been parked.
Greenpeace spokesman, August 2015
Which is about as convincing a demonstration as you could wish for of the foolishness of listening to environmentalists.
Hat tip Ben Pile
Bishop Hill 
UNESCO has published a report into Climate Change Education around the world. It's rather sinister, in a bleakly bureaucratic way.
It starts off innocently enough. In the section on England, we learn that the Conservatives are not quite on message, having shifted the focus away from "sustainability" and towards economic growth. I'm not even sure I don't detect a degree of concern from the authors when they talk about the government having brought about a shift "towards science, technology, engineering, mathematics, innovation and management competencies".
Bishop Hill Aug 19, 2015 Energy: gas Energy: oil Adam Vaughan in the Guardian is looking at fracking and rather surprisingly seems to have shifted away from his earlier position. Who can forget his trying to compare the risks to thalidomide and asbestos. He almost seems to be edging towards a position of plausible deniability:
Ultimately, it may just be too early to say if fracking is bad – and what’s bad for one country might not be for another.
Meanwhile the Telegraph has stepped back boldly in the opposite direction, with an article from commodities editor Andrew Critchlow that has apparently been penned from a position of almost total ignorance about the whole subject (read it and you'll see what I mean).
Bishop Hill ;)
Paul Thacker. Image from, erm, the Harvard Center for EthicsJudith Curry is looking an article at PLOS by Paul Thacker and Charles Seife about freedom of information as it applies to universities. The authors are focusing on attempts to investigate industry funding of researchers in the area of genetically modified organisms, but also cover well-known FOI requests for information from climatologists. They tread a fine line between trying to argue that it was OK for Michael Mann's work to remain secret and arguing that in general it should be open to concerned citizens.
There is an interesting twist to the tale, when Thacker and Seife discuss a Keith Kloor article about a University of Florida GMO researcher named Kevin Folta, suggesting that Kloor had failed to mention that Folta was a paid consultant to Monsanto:
The article also does not report on an email titled “CONFIDENTIAL: Coalition Update” from the researcher to Monsanto in which the scientist advised Monsanto on ways to defeat a political campaign in California to require labeling of GMO products.
Bishop Hill Aug 18, 2015 BBC ;)
Back in 2011, we had fun at BH with the remarkable story that the BBC's commercial arm was accepting readymade programming from green groups and PR agencies, either for free or for negligible cost (see here, here, and here). This story has now reemerged after Ofcom received a complaint about the practice of illicit sponsorship of current affairs programmes.
According to the Ofcom report, over a two-year period between 2009 and 2011, BBC World News accepted no fewer than 186 different programmes at low or no cost without telling the audience.
Each of the programmes was approximately 30 minutes in duration. All were funded by not-for-profit organisations operating largely in the areas of developing world issues and environmental concerns.
Bishop Hill Aug 18, 2015 Climate: Parliament 
Hints are emerging that the government here in the UK is preparing to make further cuts in departmental spending. DECC is apparently first in the firing line.
The Energy and Climate Change department...has started to talk to its staff about the need to have a smaller workforce in future. The department is not yet talking about specific redundancies, but it is preparing for bigger cuts due in the comprehensive spending review, which will be unveiled on 25 November.
There are even suggestions that the department might close completely, with its duties split between Defra and BIS.
It would certainly be useful if all of the green tendency could be "locked away" in Defra, leaving the practical types to concentrate on keeping the lights on.
Bishop Hill Aug 18, 2015 Climate: carbon budget 
Environmentalists and some of the more eccentric members of the scientific community like to allude to the possibility that the Arctic permafrost will melt, releasing a methane time bomb into the atmosphere which will inevitably end in runaway global warming and an apocalypse. There is even an Artic Methane Emergency Group featuring our old friend Peter Wadhams, among others, and with headlines along the lines of "The Arctic is rapidly heading for meltdown".
It's a good story, and no doubt good for business too, but unfortunately somebody has gone and spoiled it all:
[N]ew research led by Princeton University researchers and published in The ISME Journal in August suggests that, thanks to methane-hungry bacteria, the majority of Arctic soil might actually be able to absorb methane from the atmosphere rather than release it. Furthermore, that ability seems to become greater as temperatures rise.
Bishop Hill Aug 17, 2015 Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 A few days ago, there was a rather good article in the Conversation about fossil fuels and development. Written by Jonathan Symons, it covered themes that are favourites at BH, most notably that there is a trade-off between expanding access to electricity in the developing world and emissions targets:
...if the US Overseas Private Investment Corporation were allowed to invest in natural gas projects (not just renewables) it could roughly triple the number of people who gained electricity access from a US$10 billion investment. Whereas a renewables-only portfolio could supply 30 million people, natural gas could reach 90 million and generate around ten times as much electricity.
The comments thread featured a series of critical responses from Andrew Glikson, an Australian geologist who has caught the eye before, most notably when he protested the willingness of an Australian theatre to put on a performance of Richard Bean's The Heretic. This earlier thread also bears looking at. The thrust of his comments can be summarised as "But climate", but they are worth looking at in more detail because Dr Glikson has some truly astonishing views:
A very large part of the poor populations referred to in the article live in low river valleys and delta prone to flooding extreme rainfall, torrents originating from mountain regions and sea level rise, as is the case of mega-floods in Pakistan, Bangladesh and low-lying islands, associated with climate change. The “option” of developing higher standards of living based on fossil fuels is therefore short sighted and no more than a Faustian bargain....