The Independent appears to have repented of its indulgence of Martin Durkan’s quackery, publishing a report on various scientists usually considered to be “climate sceptics” whose work Durkan misrepresented or even falsified. Dr Friiss-Christensen said that a graph he had produced some years ago showing the link between fluctuations in global temperatures and changes in…
Read More The Indy takes a holiday in saneSo Lord Browne is gay. Who knew? Well, I did, simply because people have googled and hit this site at a rate of 20 a day since March, 2004. Think digital privacy doesn’t matter? Think again. But let’s ask another question. Back in 2005, BP killed a dozen workers at its Texas City refinery, in…
Read More MoralityBacon Butty piles on to one of the notions I criticised here. Food miles are, if anything, less useful than embodied energy as a policy target – after all, a whacking 22 per cent of CO2 attributed to UK food transport originates from sea and air transport. Obviously, the first place to start, especially as…
Read More More silly metricsOne good thing about blogs is that it is difficult to get away with the standard techniques of dishonest debate. Resort to straw-man arguments, and you almost always collect a bucket of shit in short order. In national newspapers’ opinion pages, not so much. Dominic Lawson, Sunday Torygraph editor, wants the world to know he’s…
Read More Dominic Lawson: Intellectually DishonestSebastian Junger has a spectacular report in Vanity Fair on the MEND guerrillas in the Niger Delta. Seriously, read the whole thing – we have corrupt warlords, men with Czech machine guns, huge outboards, and a crazy look in the eye, communiqués issued by a mysterious online presence, people in the US phoning their friends…
Read More Never get out of the boatIn Louisiana, they’re rebuilding old oil rigs as platforms for an offshore wind farm. This is about the coolest thing I’ve heard in years. When do we start doing this in the North Sea? It’s not like we haven’t got enough dead shipyards. On a related issue, Lotus seems to be enjoying a new flush…
Read More Oilrigs to turbinesDoes the idea of “embodied energy” convey any useful information whatsoever in the vast majority of its applications? I ask because I recently read about the difficulties faced in calculating this metric. For the uninitiated, it means the energy consumed in creating one unit of product X. People concerned about climate change and the supply…
Read More Useless metric of the decadeWell, I haven’t read the IPCC report yet, but I can report that I got my hands on an advance copy of Tim Worstall’s reaction to it. Here goes: Those scientist chappies are awfully clever. But what about this tangential issue? Here’s what the MSM isn’t telling you: if you make entirely different assumptions that…
Read More IPCC: First ReactionTwo items on Wired make me think. In the first, our attention is called to a project at Loughborough University that’s making robots build houses, spraying concrete and gypsum on formers. The encapsulated air makes for very high insulation R-values. But what it reminds me of is my dad, who once said one of the…
Read More This is the house that hack builtJames Glanz of the NYT reports at great length on the electrical siege of Baghdad, with detail, network maps, and more. Great. Obviously, this being a blog, the primary meaning of this is an excuse to moan about the press. Why didn’t Glanz (or anyone else at the NYT) report on this back in 2004,…
Read More Electricity – let it wash all over me! Or not