Climate change

Are the Tories right to see Ed Miliband as a joke? On this week’s Spectator cover, Peter Brookes has drawn Miliband as Wallace, with Ed Balls as his ‘Gromit’ sidekick. And on this week’s View from 22 podcast, presented by Fraser Nelson, he and The Telegraph’s Dan Hodges discuss whether people are right to dismiss him as a cartoon figure. Do Labour have any hope of winning the next election with Miliband as their leader? Meanwhile, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be publishing their latest report next week, which appears to show that there has been no statistically significant rise over the past 16 years. Benny Peiser, of

The government is busy quelling worries about the planning process for exploratory shale drilling, following this disobliging article in yesterday’s Observer. The government stresses that its planning guidance document, which was published last month, contains a list of environmental risks that planning officers ‘should address’, together with an explanation of the competences of other relevant government departments and agencies. The government rejects any insinuation that it is placing shale above renewables. Indeed, aides have taken the opportunity to reiterate the coalition’s commitment to reducing greenhouse gas emissions. For instance, paragraphs 97 and 98 of the National Planning Policy Framework suggest that, despite the government’s commitment to a varied energy supply, renewables and low carbon alternatives

On Saturday, 8 June, the research vessel Kaiyo Maru No. 7 left the port of Joetsu, in western Japan, to begin a three-year survey of the Sea of Japan — the latest step in a little-known research programme that in a decade or less could profoundly change the international balance of power. Kaiyo Maru, a 499-ton trawler, is hunting for beds of methane hydrate, a cold, white, sherbet-like substance found off coastlines in Japan and much of the rest of the world. The United States Geological Survey estimates that as much as 2.8 trillion cubic metres of this mixture of frozen water and natural gas may exist. Although only part

Great news on the fracking front. A company called IGas says it’s sitting on a huge shale gas reserve deep below Cheshire. Given the company’s ‘most likely’ estimate of 102 trillion cubic feet of gas, and a potential extraction rate of around 15 per cent, that could fulfil five years of UK gas demand, which runs at three trillion cubic feet per year — half of it currently imported. The other leading player in this field, Cuadrilla, has already claimed reserves of 200 trillion cubic feet in Lancashire, so all told (and subject to lots of caveats) that could be 15 years’ worth of fuel to keep us going until

There’s nothing more irritating then being asked to apologise for something you haven’t done. No, wait, there is: when the person demanding the apology is one of the friends you admire most in the world — and when the alleged victim of your non-existent crime is one of the people you most despise. The friend’s name is Anthony Watts, meteorologist and fellow happy warrior in the great global battle against climate change nonsense. He runs the world’s most widely read climate sceptic website, Watts Up With That?, which got to the Climategate story before I did. Recently, we were both winners in the 2013 Bloggies Awards: he deservedly won best

Enormous thanks to OGT for alerting us all to the brilliant article from the Independent – published on Monday March 20th, 2000. Here’s the first bit of it: ‘Britain’s winter ends tomorrow with further indications of a striking environmental change: snow is starting to disappear from our lives. Sledges, snowmen, snowballs and the excitement of waking to find that the stuff has settled outside are all a rapidly diminishing part of Britain’s culture, as warmer winters – which scientists are attributing to global climate change – produce not only fewer white Christmases, but fewer white Januaries and Februaries. The first two months of 2000 were virtually free of significant snowfall

Just as a follow up to what I was talking about below. Here’s the government’s chief scientific advisor, Sir John Beddington: ‘Professor Sir John Beddington said that time lags in the climate system meant that accumulations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere now will determine the weather we experience for the next 25 years. ‘Climate change is already manifesting itself in huge variations in the weather, clearly illustrated by the way Britain experienced both drought and extreme rainfall last year, he said.’ That’s from today’s Torygraph. I’m sorry, I just don’t swallow it. I’m perfectly prepared to accept that man-made climate change is a reality. But to tie it to

Sir Paul Nurse, the Nobel laureate and President of the Royal Society, has been hitting out at global warming sceptics. In a speech to the University of Melbourne recently, he attacked dissenters from the climate change orthodoxy, declaring that their objections were in reality political rather than scientific: ‘A feature of [the global warming] controversy is that those that deny there is a problem often seem to have political or ideological views that lead them to be unhappy with the actions that would be necessary should global warming be due to human activity. I think that’s a crucial point. Because these actions that are likely to include measures which include

Today brings bad news that Tata Steel is to cut 900 jobs in the UK (at plants in South Wales, North Yorkshire, Teesside and the West Midlands). This is catastrophic news for a government that has announced its intention to rebalance the economy away from financial and professional services in the south-east (and therefore get an hearing electoral hearing in Britain’s former industrial heartlands); but that is only one aspect of the politics at play here. Tata’s statement says: ‘Today’s proposals are part of a strategy to transform ourselves into an all-weather steel producer, capable of succeeding in difficult economic conditions. These restructuring proposals will help make our business more successful