On Wednesday morning, a story headlined Wind ‘can revolutionise UK power’ appeared on the BBC News website. Note the quotation marks; the age old device that hacks love so dearly when they know that what they are about to say may not withstand scrutiny.  These are the opening paragraphs:

Wind has the power to revolutionise the UK’s electricity industry, according to a study published on Wednesday.

Research from analysts Poyry says that the UK can massively expand wind power by 2030 without suffering power cuts or a melt-down of the National Grid.

The cost of electricity would then be determined not by consumer demand, but by how hard the wind is blowing.

When it is windy power will be so cheap that other forms of generation will be unable to compete, the report says.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8127177.stm

Well that’s good news, or is it? Read the rest of this entry »

The Woodland Trust (WT) and the Countryside Council for Wales (CCW) have declared that the primary reason for the recent culling of mature beech in Coed Aber Artro was to encourage the regeneration of Atlantic Oak Woodland as part of the Meirionydd Oakwoods Habitat Management Project. The need is arguable; however, with their declarations in mind, it would be useful to note what is actually apparent on the ground within Coed Aber Artro.

Coed Aber Artro at the time of the felling                                                              Photo: Stephen Coll

If you follow the public footpath east from Llanbedr, on through the WT area and beyond to the Cefn Uchaf campsite, the woodland comprising Coed Aber Artro can be broadly divided into five sectors.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Thursday, the Met Office launched its new report on global warming, UK Climate Projections 2009 otherwise known as UKCP09. This is based on the output of Hadley Centre climate models that predict temperature increases of up to 6°C with wetter winters, dryer summers, more heatwaves, rising sea levels, more floods and all the other catastrophes that one would expect from similar exercises in alarmism.

What makes this report different from any of its predecessors is the resolution of the predictions that the Met Office is making. They are not just presenting a general impression of what might happen globally during this century, or even how climate change could affect the UK as a whole. They are claiming that they can predict what will happen in individual regions of the country. Apparently there is even a page somewhere on their website where you can enter your postcode and find out how your street will be affected by global warming in 2040 or 2080, although I’ve failed to find it.

All this is rather unexpected. In May last year, I posted here and here about a world summit of climate modellers that took place at Reading University. On the agenda was one very important problem for them; even the most powerful super-computers that have been developed so far are not capable of running the kind of high resolution models that they claim would allow them to reduce the degree of uncertainty in their predictions and also make detailed regional predictions that policy makers would like to have so that they can build climate change into infrastructure planning.

Here are a couple of excerpts from the conference website: Read the rest of this entry »

Now that the dust is beginning to settle after the elections for the European Parliament, it’s worth asking what part ‘the most serious threat facing us today’ played in the results. Surely climate change must have been in the forefront of most people’s minds as they made their mark on the ballot paper?

Here are the results for the main contenders:

Of the six parties at the top of the list, only one has climate scepticism as a stated policy, and that is UKIP, who came second ahead of the ruling Labour Party for whom the crusade against global warming is a major priority. (For those who are not familiar with UK politics, UKIP’s main policy is withdrawal from the EU.)

The Liberal Democrats, who arguably take an even stronger line on saving the planet, than Labour, lost ground.

The Conservatives, whose pronouncements on climate change attempt to match Labour’s, only increased their share of the vote slightly at a time when they are almost certain to form the next government and were expected to do much better.

So where did all those people who are so concerned about ‘the most serious threat facing us today’ make their mark on the ballot papers? Read the rest of this entry »

Mike Hulme, Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia and founding director to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, has been in the news again recently. His new book Why we Disagree about Climate Change has led to sceptics - who I suspect have not read it - welcoming him to their fold. Even the Daily Mirror, which is not a publication that one might choose to rely on for scientific information, has reviewed the book. So has this eminent scientist who has been at the heart of the climate debate for decades really changed sides?

It is certainly true that he wrote an opinion piece for the BBC News website in 2006 warning his colleagues not to exaggerate their findings in order to attract attention. He even went further and condemned the conference - and associated media campaign - which Tony Blair used as a launch-pad for his newly discovered commitment to the crusade against global warming:

The Exeter conference of February 2005 on “Avoiding Dangerous Climate Change” served the government’s purposes of softening-up the G8 Gleneagles summit through a frenzied week of “climate change is worse than we thought” news reporting and group-think.

By stage-managing the new language of catastrophe, the conference itself became a tipping point in the way that climate change is discussed in public.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/6115644.stm

In the same article he said that:

The language of catastrophe is not the language of science. It will not be visible in next year’s global assessment from the world authority of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)

This seems to have been a triumph of hope over experience. No one who has consulted the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report could be left in any doubt about the intention of the authors to create alarm, and this was reinforced by the press campaign that accompanied its release. Since then, Hulme has been prepared to criticise the IPCC process too.

Read the rest of this entry »

The poet Anne Stevenson has known and loved the Aber Artro woods for many years. She has very kindly permitted me to reproduce a poem from Anne Stevenson: Poem 1955-2005, published by Bloodaxe. Photographer Dave Newbould shares Anne’s concern about what has happened at Aber Artro.

Read the rest of this entry »

According to an article at Times Online, the London School of Economics has recieved a £12 million donation to set up a new institute to study the economics of climate change. The philanthropist concerned is Yorkshire born Jeremy Grantham, founder of a  £55 billion investment fund called GMO. He is clearly a very successful investor and has endowed the Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment, from which the funding comes, with £165 million of his own money.

Grantham grew up in Yorkshire and went to university in Sheffield before moving to America in 1968 to take an MBA at Harvard. However, his decision to invest some of his foundation’s money in Britain was not a nostalgic one. It followed the publication of Lord Stern’s report on The Economics of Climate Change and it is now Stern who heads the LSE institute.

Those choices are already paying dividends. The LSE’s research seems likely to play a key role in this December’s UN negotiations in Copenhagen where world leaders will seek agreement on cutting greenhouse gases.

Times Online

Grantham clearly takes ‘the environment’ very seriously. Here is what he told The Times about why he is being so generous:

“Because climate change is turning into the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. I wanted to invest my money in places where it might actually help tackle that problem,”

“We are destroying the planet. We are in the middle of one of the greatest extinctions of species Earth has seen. If it continues unchecked, humanity will soon be running out of food and water.

“What it means is that the environment, especially climate change, is going to be the central issue for all society, including business, politics and the economy. Capitalism and business are going to have to remodel themselves and adapt to a rapidly changing and eventually very different world.”

Times Online

These views extend far beyond the world of mainstream science, all the way to the wilder shores of environmental activism and alarmist propaganda; not at all the kind of speculation that you would expect a respected academic institution like the LSE to be associated with. It would also seem that Grantham has a pretty low opinion of anyone who is not either a scientist or, presumably, a financier like himself:

“Humanity is largely innumerate,” said Grantham.

Read the rest of this entry »

On Friday evening I visited a beautiful beechwood near our house that is famous for its display of bluebells at this time of year, but I didn’t go there to admire wild flowers.

At half-past-six on a wet, gloomy and cold evening, about thirty-five local people gathered round a rather nervous looking representative of the Woodland Trust who had arranged the meeting. He was supposed to explain to us why his organisation, which is supposedly dedicated to preserving woodland, had decided to decimate a place that we had all come to love and treasure. For the last eighteen months or so the scream of power saws has polluted the aether as beech trees whose age can be measured in centuries rather than decades were felled.

There is something special about a beech wood. The tall, grey, arching trunks, and the canopy that their branches form, are reminiscent of the columns and vaulting of an ancient cathedral. Peace and stillness is to be found in such places, and people tend to speak quietly, in awe of the majesty of their surroundings. Read the rest of this entry »

Professor Bob Carter will be giving a lecture at 11.00 am on Wednesday 20^th May 2009 in the City of London. This is not a public event, but I understand that it may be possible for some members of the public to squeeze in.

If you would like to attend, then please let me know in a comment and I will put you in touch with the organisers.

In April, the BBC told me that my complaint about the out-of-context splicing of phrases from President Obama’s inaugural speech in a Newsnight report by Susan Watts would be considered by the Editorial Complaints Unit. They have now replied at some length: Read the rest of this entry »