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Russia makes about $300 billion in gas and oil exports each year. For a tiny tenth of a billion dollars it fed western activists in NGOs* and successfully stopped fracking development in the UK (and some parts of Australia apparently). It’s what you call a stupendous investment.
Matt Ridley lays out just how game changing the discovery of shale fracking could have been for the UK, and how easily the politicians and system was exploited and fell over:
The Plot against Fracking, The Critic
When the shale gas revolution first came along, some environmentalists welcomed it, and rightly so. …
But then the vested interests got to work. Renewable energy promoters panicked at the thought of cheap and abundant gas.
The Russians also lobbied behind the scenes against shale gas, worried about losing their grip on the world’s gas supplies.
It’s all so predictable…
The Centre for European Studies found that the Russian government has invested $95 million in NGOs campaigning against shale gas. Russia Today television ran endless anti-fracking stories, including one that “frackers are the moral equivalent of paedophiles”. The US Director of National Intelligence stated that “RT runs […]
Wired reports that Climate Change is worse for women
Who knew? Not only are all past droughts and floods wiped from history apparently climate change makes men invisible too:
The struggles are coming fast, and they’re coming hard. For farmers, drought or even just less reliable rainfall means crop failure and less water for cattle. Landslides from stronger monsoons wipe away farmland. Living alongside rivers is increasingly perilous, as stronger—yet often less frequent—storms flood communities.
So men walk 120 extra kilometers and women walk 30 fewer kilometers, and this is “worse for women”:
All terrible crises in their own right, but exacerbated by underlying societal norms. In East Africa, for instance, men in pastoral communities have traditionally wandered 15, maybe 30 kilometers from home in search of water for their cattle, returning to their families periodically. But with climate change, now they’re having to travel up to 150 kilometers. Before, women would go with the men and milk the cattle, using the product both for their family’s own nutrition and as an extra source of income, and heading home as needed. Now that the men have to cover much greater distances, the women end up staying […]
This is striking new finding by ABC journalist Ann Arnold that for some reason has not yet been published in a science journal.
Some mystery remains, however as to which dataset could rule out any and all fires in the last 30,000,000 years, or indeed which dataset could prove that those forests and trees have existed in the same place continuously. We keenly await more details on the high resolution sedimentary pollen and missing ash deposit that could show that there were never fires, not one, especially during the Miocene when Antarctica thawed around 24 million years ago and stayed hot for ten million continuous years.
It’s all the more remarkable given that temperatures have varied in the Antarctic by 15 degrees Celcius over the same period, and for 20 million years out of the last 30, it was even hotter than today.
Scientists keenly look forward to seeing those error bars, though one critic, Dr Hyperbowlie suggested the p-values “might be greater than 1. ”
Global Temperature estimates over the last 65 million years.
Bushfires devastate rare and enchanting wildlife as ‘permanently wet’ forests burn for first time
Ann Arnold, ABC, Saturday Extra
These forests have […]
Western Australia is a giant experiment: Even the Energy Experts are saying solar is jeopardizing the grid — it’s “dumb”
Watch this space — blackout coming, 3 years and counting…
The Western Australian grid is a separate island from the rest of the nation. It’s roughly a 2.5 GW system for 2.5 million people. WA is getting into trouble faster than nearly anywhere else. Solar PV is now up to …. something larger than 850MW (which is the size of the coal fired generator). The ABC doesn’t tell us what the real figure is (according to the AEMO it’s around 1300MW, and growing at 120MW a year). There are no interconnectors to rescue WA, just the taxpayer or hapless electricity consumer.
Unreliable solar is now the largest single generator in the Western Australian grid. It’s not only bad because there are no other states to dump the excess energy on, or to save the state, but despite the vast size nearly everyone lives within 100 kms (60 miles). So when the sun peaks for one it nearly peaks for all. When the clouds roll over, especially when those nice north-south aligned fronts roll in, it covers most of the […]
In comments Peter Fitzroy claimed Clive James was no skeptic:
There is lots about scepticism, but no thing to say the Clive himself was sceptical about Climate Change. It should be remembered that he was primarily a wordsmith, and would write about anything for money.
I did, he is sceptical, but he does not link that to a personal position. But you will, no doubt. You really need the context, and that is, that he would take any topic, and any view, if there was money in it. His autobiography is chock full of this sort of stuff, much to the angst of his compatriots who were never cast in a favourable light.
Digging himself totally in..
Yep, proves my point, he would write anything for money, and to stir the pot. All this article does is rehash 10 years of anti science media, there is not one ‘fact’ that has not been debunked, countered or proven to be an outright lie.
Let’s cremate this meme and spread the ashes of what was pure baseless speculation…
Jennifer Marohasy, editor of what may have been his last major work, tells me that Clive James […]
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JoNova A science presenter, writer, speaker & former TV host; author of The Skeptic's Handbook (over 200,000 copies distributed & available in 15 languages).
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