BBC metropolitan elite, moi?

Result confirms my suspicion about uncaring ignorant Britain the moment you step outside of London.

Gaia Vince is not amused

Lomborg axed

The Australian media reports:

The University of Western Australia has cancelled the contract for a policy centre that was to be headed up by controversial academic Bjorn Lomborg after a "passionate emotional reaction" to the plan.

The Federal Government had pledged to contribute $4 million to the Consensus Centre, a think tank that was to use methods similar to those used by Dr Lomberg's Copenhagen Centre.

If you are an academic, dissent on climate change or climate change policy will lead to a loss of your livelihood.

You have been warned.

DECCline and fall?

I was half-jokingly suggesting that we should start a campaign to have Owen Paterson made the next energy and climate change minister - in reality I can't see Cameron having the gumption to stand up to the green blob for even five minutes. However, Jonathan Jones points me to an interesting post at Ruth Dixon's blog, which raises an interesting possibility:

For what it’s worth (and based entirely on gut feeling) I don’t think the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will survive to the end of the forthcoming 5-year parliament. I predict that its functions will be returned to their original departments (out of which DECC was carved in 2008). Energy will go back to Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and Climate Change will go to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

If energy were to be transferred to BIS, it would at least give the country a chance of dealing with the energy supply crisis without having any practical policies choked off at source by the blob. It's a good idea.

Which probably means it will not happen.

Give us this day our Davey toast

So there was an election yesterday, an event that has been occupying other people rather more than it has me. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the government always gets in.

Still, it's worth surveying the results so far as regards prominent parliamentary participants in the climate change debate. The good news is that Ed Davey is history, while prominent questioners of the climate consensus such as Graham Stringer, Peter Lilley, Owen Paterson and Douglas Carswell have all retained their seats. Caroline Lucas remains, as do fellow members of the climate-very-concerned contingent Zac Goldsmith and Barry Gardiner.

A good day to bury bad science

The University of Bristol has a high tolerance for hoary old tosh, but you have to wonder if they have not been just a bit embarrassed by Stefan Lewandowsky, whose oeuvre could best be described as "Goebbels with graphs". How else do we explain the fact that they have elected to do the press release for the great man's latest psychological petard on the day of the general election? A good day to bury bad science?

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, from Bristol’s School of Experimental Psychology and the Cabot Institute, and colleagues from Harvard University and three institutions in Australia show how the language used by people who oppose the scientific consensus on climate change has seeped into scientists’ discussion of the alleged recent ‘hiatus’ or ‘pause’ in global warming, and has thereby unwittingly reinforced a misleading message.

What insight! What erudition!

What a waste of money.

Update on May 7, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Observations about the UK election don't apply to this paper published today, which is written by two Americans, but it's just as bad as Lew's by the looks of it:

Environmental communication researchers have focused on the role of media frames in the formation of public opinion. Yet, little is known about how citizens incorporate such frames into everyday conversations. We address this issue by examining the stream of Twitter conversations about climate change over two years. We demonstrate that hoax frames that question the reality of climate change prevail in the US, particularly in “red states” compared to the UK, Canada, and Australia or “blue states” in the US. We also investigate the use of terms, “global warming” and “climate change.” We find that red states prefer “global warming” to “climate change” compared to blue states and “global warming” is particularly associated with hoax frames

There's something about Bristol

There is a really violent undercurrent to this election:

Vandals targeted a Conservative MP days before the election by deliberately flooding her garden with 1,300 litres of sticky oil.

Last week cars belonging to Ms Leslie and her elderly father Ian, 70, were daubed with paint and the words 'Tory Scum' were scrawled along the bodywork.

Charlotte Leslie has written about her shock at finding that vandals had punctured the oil tank in her garden, causing her parents' entire heating supply for the year to seep into the ground.

The thuggery seems to have been prompted by Ms Leslie's support for unconventional oil and gas development. In other words it's the environmentalists again.

What goes around...

Environmentalists have two main features to their modus operandi.

• Making up tall stories
• Trying to suppress dissenting views

One of the ways in which they try to achieve the second of these aims has been through complaints to media and advertising "regulators", bodies that they have tended to wholeheartedly support.

Until, that is, those bodies start coming up with the wrong answers. Or, worse still, when their opponents adopt the same approach. Given the other part of the green MO noted above, environmentalists are of couse wide open to retaliation and today brings the satisfying news that Greenpeace have been well and truly hoist with their own petard:

Click to read more ...

The academic highlands

There's a new professor at the University of Queensland...

Hedge funds snap up free money from UK poor

From a correspondent in the world of big finance (edited for clarity).

The current appetite from US hedge funds is for UK solar. Indeed most asset managers want to get their hands on these assets. In a low-yield world, they offer >15% returns for the risk (which is mainly regulatory). The UK has little development risk, so as you well know, it's a redistribution of taxpayer money into the hands of hedge funds under the guise of climate change mitigation. Given that Ed Milliband created the DECC and with the likely failure of the Tories to gain a majority, they see little regulatory risk after the election. What we find appalling is the lack of awareness in the MSM over these transactions and the flow of money from poor to rich.

[To my correspondent: I tried to respond to your email, but the message bounced.]

Fracking chemicals found in space

The New York Times is reporting today that fracking chemicals have been found in drinking water in Pennsylvania.

Fracking chemicals detected in Pennsylvania drinking water

An analysis of drinking water sampled from three homes in Bradford County, Pa., revealed traces of a compound commonly found in Marcellus Shale drilling fluids, according to a study published on Monday.

The paper, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, addresses a longstanding question about potential risks to underground drinking water from the drilling technique known as hydraulic fracturing, or fracking. The authors suggested a chain of events by which the drilling chemical ended up in a homeowner’s water supply.

In related news, BH learns that health food stores are selling fracking chemicals to unsuspecting customers! Housewives have been washing their children's clothes in fracking chemicals! And fracking chemicals have been detected in deep space, worrying evidence that the oil industry is taking over the universe.

Sheesh.

Your money or your lights

Keith Anderson, the head of Scottish Power has an article in the Herald in which he reveals that his company is willing to take steps to keep the lights on. But only if a large enough bung is sent Scottish Power's way.

One thing that remains constant in this period of change is security of supply. To help achieve this, ScottishPower is investing around £8 billion over the next five years, mainly in renewables and networks. But with renewables, the wind doesn't always blow, so having sufficient flexible back-up generation is vital. We plan to invest in further gas-fired generation to do exactly that. And 50 years after our Cruachan pumped storage plant first provided the benefit of instant generation to meet demand peaks, we intend to double its capacity if it proves economic to do so with appropriate incentives.

The next 12 months are going to be rather interesting.

Who would have guessed it? Green studies indoctrinate not educate

I would have loved to be there when Brown University environmental studies student Jaqueline Ho suddenly realised that the course she had (presumably) forked out oodles of cash for was not actually an education at all. It turned out to be just a very expensive brainwashing exercise. Can you imagine the look on her face?

At Brown, ideas first planted by [Bill] McKibben were reinforced in courses where she read classics by Aldo Leopold and Garrett Hardin, along with recent books by Van Jones and Elizabeth Kolbert.

With these authors anchoring her understanding, it was easy for Ho to believe about climate change “that fossil fuel corporations were to blame, that we had a suite of low-carbon technologies we could deploy immediately, and that grassroots solutions held promise,” she recalls.

Click to read more ...

A comfortable chat

Lord Stern was on the Today programme this morning, for a chat about his views on saving the planet. The rottweiler John Humphrys suddenly came over all lapdog.

Strictly for the dedicated.

Stern Today prog

Off the agenda

Channel Four's Jon Snow wonders why climate change is off the political agenda.

Having seen his video, I think I know why.

Creating distance

On the previous thread, Richard Betts argued that nobody was arguing for shifting resources from dealing with the problems of the present and towards the (hypothetical) problems of the distant future.

As evidence to the contrary, I give you firstly the reaction to Bjorn Lomborg's arguments - namely that we should focus on problems like clean water, malaria and access to energy in the developing world today. For this he has been subject to what can reasonably be characterised as a hate campaign by environmentalists.

Secondly I give you Bob Ward, who described a Matt Ridley article calling for a focus on energy access for Africa as "extreme nonsense":

Click to read more ...