Climate change

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 of this vast deposit is accessible, methane hydrate — ‘ice that burns’ — may be the Earth’s single biggest fossil-fuel source.

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 new nuclear stations get built and someone designs a wind turbine that works in the lightest of English breezes.

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 science blog (for the third year running); I was named best political blogger.

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 in much of lowland Britain, and December brought only moderate snowfall in the South-east.

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 what was, last year, perfectly normal weather is facile and deceiving.

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.

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 and sustainable.

Tim Yeo is now posing as a friend of the consumer. Launching the latest report from the Energy and Climate Change Committee this morning, he attacked the Treasury for ‘refusing to back new contracts to deliver investment in nuclear, wind, wave and carbon capture and storage’. The report argues that could ‘impose unnecessary costs on consumers’. The basic logic of his claim is this: investments are more expensive when they are riskier. Investors expect to be compensated for the risks being taken with their money. If the Government offers guarantees that reduce the amount of risk energy companies run by investing in expensive sources of energy like offshore wind, then those firms can invest at a lower cost.