Quotulatiousness

July 30, 2012

Mongolian eco-toilet scheme quietly closed down

Filed under: Asia, Environment, Health, Technology — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 14:38

From the Guardian:

The ecological toilets installed at Daxing were the design of Sweden’s Stockholm Environment Institute — about five million people use the model worldwide. In China, they are manufactured in the south-coast city of Chaozhou and cost about 700 or 800 yuan (US$100-125). Unlike normal toilets, they separate urine and excrement. In short, you aim your urine at the urine bowl and it is piped to an underground storage tank. And when you sit down, an excrement receptacle automatically pops out. You pull a lever to sprinkle some sawdust over your waste, and then when you stand up it flips over and everything is dumped down an excrement pipe to a tank in the basement. The tank is emptied two or three times monthly.

No water is used for flushing in either case — the cistern is full of sawdust, which residents collect from an office on-site. The toilets are designed to save water, prevent odours, and turn excrement into fertiliser. Fans blow air out of the pipes to the roof, and this is meant to ensure that smells do not enter the apartments.

Yan’s family just couldn’t get used to it. The toilet smelled bad from day one, they said: there was a stench of ammonia throughout the house, sometimes enough to make their eyes water as soon as they stepped into the bathroom. “I could hardly eat at home, and felt miserable on my way back after work,” said Yan. So the family usually ended up eating at Yan’s sister’s house. And their relatives didn’t want to visit.

The excrement bowls, which need to rotate, started to break. Every single house had to have the bowls repaired, and in 60% of households they needed to be replaced frequently. In 2007, Yan’s toilet was changed for one with a retractable tray, but the smells didn’t improve.

If your source data is flawed, your conclusions are useless

Filed under: Environment, Media, Science — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 10:30

James Delingpole on the recent paper from Anthony Watts and his co-authors:

Have a look at this chart. It tells you pretty much all you need to know about the much-anticipated scoop by Anthony Watts of Watts Up With That?

What it means, in a nutshell, is that the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) — the US government body in charge of America’s temperature record, has systematically exaggerated the extent of late 20th century global warming. In fact, it has doubled it.

Is this a case of deliberate fraud by Warmist scientists hell bent on keeping their funding gravy train rolling? Well, after what we saw in Climategate anything is possible. (I mean it’s not like NOAA is run by hard-left eco activists, is it?) But I think more likely it is a case of confirmation bias. The Warmists who comprise the climate scientist establishment spend so much time communicating with other warmists and so little time paying attention to the views of dissenting scientists such as Henrik Svensmark — or Fred Singer or Richard Lindzen or indeed Anthony Watts — that it simply hasn’t occurred to them that their temperature records need adjusting downwards not upwards.

What Watts has conclusively demonstrated is that most of the weather stations in the US are so poorly sited that their temperature data is unreliable. Around 90 per cent have had their temperature readings skewed by the Urban Heat Island effect. While he has suspected this for some time what he has been unable to do until his latest, landmark paper (co-authored with Evan Jones of New York, Stephen McIntyre of Toronto, Canada, and Dr. John R. Christy from the Department of Atmospheric Science, University of Alabama, Huntsville) is to put precise figures on the degree of distortion involved.

July 18, 2012

What is the best way to demonstrate care for the future?

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:29

According to Steven Landsburg, the answer is to cut capital taxes, and he makes a good case:

There are only three things you and I can do to make the future world a better place. First, we can consume less, leaving more resources behind. Second, we can work harder, planting trees, building factories and writing poems that will live on after we’re gone. Third, we can innovate, advancing science and technology so that our children’s children’s children can make better use of the resources they inherit.

As it happens, there’s one key policy variable that drives all three of these things, and that’s the tax rate on capital income (which includes interest, dividends, corporate income and capital gains). Capital taxes are a disincentive to save, and when people don’t save they consume instead. Capital taxes are a disincentive to work and a disincentive to innovate.

This is not a plea for lowering taxes in general, and it’s not a plea for making the tax system either more or less progressive. (If you want to soak the rich, there are plenty of things to tax besides capital.) As a matter of fact, this isn’t even a plea for lowering taxes on capital. It’s simply an observation that if your goal is to leave a better world for our descendants, then your best bet is to support lower capital taxes.

H/T to Tim Harford for the link.

July 16, 2012

If this forecast is accurate, we’ll all be nostalgic for global warming

Filed under: Britain, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:05

In his Telegraph column on the current weather in Britain (and what it may or may not do to the Olympic schedule), Boris Johnson shares a long range weather forecast that is chilling — literally:

I have just been on the blower to my old chum, Piers Corbyn, the world’s foremost meteorological soothsayer, and he sounds like Jeremiah with an ingrown toenail. This is the same Corbyn, with a first-class degree in physics, who decisively beat the Met Office in 2010 and accurately forecast the cold and snowy winter — and I am afraid he has been bearish about this summer from sometime in February or March.

According to Piers and his team at Weather Action, we all underestimate the role of the sun. This is set to be just about the wettest July on record, he says, and that is mainly because of things taking place in the nuclear fireball millions of miles away from earth. “Sometime too bright the eye of heaven shines,” says the Poet, and often is his gold complexion dimmed. This is one of the dim moments. The old boy is suffering from some kind of solar acne, called “coronal holes”, and on July 12 he apparently emitted a colossal flare — a cosmic spurt of X-rays and other charged particles; and, by a process that we (or at least I) do not fully understand — perhaps because rain droplets form more easily when there are charged particles around — this distemper in the celestial orb is helping to cause the current inundations.

For the sake of completeness, and so that no one can later accuse me of concealing the bad news (what did he know about the weather, and when did he know it?), I should say that Piers has a general thesis that the current phase of grim weather — cold, snowy winters and wet summers — is just the prelude to something yet more bracing. We are heading, he says, for a mini Ice Age. These wet Julys and frosty Januaries are part of the opening drum roll of a cold period that will set in over the next decades.

Some say it will be upon us by 2045, some say by 2030. Looking at the pattern of the last few years, Piers Corbyn now thinks it could be sooner than that. He does not say that sabretooth tigers will roam the streets of Newcastle. He does not say that the Thames will freeze at London Bridge and that we will have fairs on the ice — unlikely, given how fast the river flows these days. But he does believe that it will get nippier, and that we will see the kind of cold period last experienced in the late 17th century and early 18th century.

July 15, 2012

Individual data points are less important than trends

Filed under: Environment, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:06

Remember the summer of 2001? It was a media feeding frenzy on the highly appropriate topic of sharks: shark attacks in US coastal waters were the third-most reported news item. But the media was calling attention to a “trend” of increasing shark attacks that didn’t actually exist. 2001 was actually a lower than average year for shark attacks. Warren Mayer explains the similarities between 2001’s “Summer of the Shark” and 2012’s heat wave:

This summer we have been absolutely bombarded with stories about the summer heat wave in the United States. The constant drumbeat of this coverage is being jumped on by many as evidence of catastrophic man-made global warming.

[. . .]

Trend, you say? Doesn’t a 100-year high temperature in and of itself imply warming? Certainly not. I believe this will prove to be an exaggeration, but for a moment let’s assume that this heat wave has created the hottest June in 100 years for half the Continental US. That seems pretty extreme, right? But the Continental US is about 2.5% of the world’s land mass. Just by math, in a stochastic system with a stable mean, a land area of this size somewhere should have a 100-year high month about five times a year! One data point about one small patch of the Earth having a hot month tells us nothing about trends.

[. . .]

What the Summer of the Shark needed, and what this summer’s US heatwave needs, is a little context. Specifically, if we are going to talk about supposed “trends”, then we should look at the data series in question over time. So let’s do so.

July 14, 2012

Flood policy and personal responsibility

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Government — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:03

James Delingpole on the British government’s latest announcements on flood policy:

Yesterday it was reported that the Coalition had decided we should all be liable for the cost of flood damage, regardless of where we live. This puzzled me, as the Coalition’s decisions so often do. The only way it would make any kind of sense would be if you believed a) flooding is a new and unnatural phenomenon resulting directly from late 20th century Man Made Climate Change or b) that everyone is now so stupid they cannot be trusted to act in their own best interests and that it is therefore government’s job to hold their hands and wipe their bottoms for them from cradle to grave.

To discount a) you only have to go somewhere like the River Severn, just below Worcester Cathedral, and look at the flood marks on the wall. Many of the most dramatic inundations happened in years long before “man made global warming” was even a sinister glint in Al Gore’s eye. This isn’t to say that the cost of flood damage hasn’t risen to unprecedented levels these last few decades. But that has more to do with our insane practice of allowing property developments to be built on flood plains, together with our unfortunate habit of paving and tarmacking everything (such as the front gardens we would once have kept as front gardens) which means that in times of high rainfall floodwater is likely to accumulate in drains more rapidly. Plus, of course, we’re all richer — so there’s more expensive property for flooding to damage.

But it’s the b) aspect I find more worrying because of the way it rides roughshod over the most basic principles of free market economics. Can we really assume that when anybody buys a house by a river — or near a floodplain — they don’t do so in the full knowledge that flood-risk is one of the prices they pay for their pleasing waterside ambience? The very idea is a nonsense. Buyers, being rational, will factor this into their calculations: “OK, so it will be great for fishing and swimming and boating. But getting insurance will be a bugger and we’d better not keep anything too precious on the ground floor.” These complexities will be reflected by the market. While the value of the property may be enhanced by its attractive location, it will simultaneously be decreased by its flood-damage potential.

July 13, 2012

A more accurate title would have been The Locavore Delusion

Filed under: Environment, Food, Health, Media — Tags: , , , — Nicholas @ 08:58

Rob Lyons reviews the new book by Pierre Desrochers and Hiroko Shimizu:

The fundamental question underpinning both those earlier papers and The Locavore’s Dilemma is this: if local food is so great, why did a globalised food system develop at all? The answer, as Desrochers and Shimizu argue, is that the creation of a worldwide trade in food reduced prices, increased variety and improved security of supply. If there is a problem with this world market in food, they argue, it is that it is not open or far-reaching enough.

The online eco-magazine Grist ran an interview with Desrochers earlier this month. In a follow-up piece, readers came up with responses to the interview. One of these responses provides such a neat summary of the arguments in favour of local food that it is worth repeating in full.

‘I am a local-food advocate for many reasons: Taste: An heirloom tomato picked that morning runs circles around a hybridised tomato picked two weeks ago in Florida and gassed so it turns red en route; Quality: the better the soil and the farmer, the better the food; Nutrition: food sheds nutrients after it is picked. The longer it takes to get to market, the less nutritional value it has, comparatively; Transparency: I like knowing how my food is grown and harvested. I visit my meat producer; try that at a CAFO [concentrated animal feeding operation]; Environmental: A minimisation of the use of chemicals that wash into waterways, creating algae blooms, choking out life, or killing beneficial insects, including honey bees; Sane stewardship: I like to support farmers who create more naturally fertile soil, which is better able to resist pests, floods, and droughts; Pleasure: I buy local food at my farmers’ market because it’s more pleasant to do so than going into an air-conditioned grocery store. I see neighbours, chat with farmers, taste before I buy. Economic: I want my food dollars to support my local economy; Humanity: Animals and humans are treated better on the small farms I know than they are on the large ones; I value green open spaces: Supporting local farms with my money encourages those farmers to maintain those green open spaces rather than selling off to developers.’

As Desrochers and Shimizu explain, these ideas are either not necessarily true, are matters of personal taste or, more often, are completely wrong. Instead, the authors argue, ‘the available evidence convincingly demonstrates that long-distance trade and modern technologies have resulted in much greater food availability, lower prices, improved health and reduced environmental damage than if they had never materialised. Indeed, more trade and ever-improving technologies remain to this day the only proven ways to lift large numbers of people out of rural poverty and malnutrition.’

Let’s take those arguments for local food, one by one, using (though not exclusively) the arguments in The Locavore’s Dilemma.

July 3, 2012

Bad news (for panicmongers, anyway)

Filed under: Economics, Environment — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 08:32

In the Guardian, George Monbiot (known to his detractors as “The Great Moonbat”) admits the terrible truth. He was wrong, again:

The facts have changed, now we must change too. For the past 10 years an unlikely coalition of geologists, oil drillers, bankers, military strategists and environmentalists has been warning that peak oil — the decline of global supplies — is just around the corner. We had some strong reasons for doing so: production had slowed, the price had risen sharply, depletion was widespread and appeared to be escalating. The first of the great resource crunches seemed about to strike.

Among environmentalists it was never clear, even to ourselves, whether or not we wanted it to happen. It had the potential both to shock the world into economic transformation, averting future catastrophes, and to generate catastrophes of its own, including a shift into even more damaging technologies, such as biofuels and petrol made from coal. Even so, peak oil was a powerful lever. Governments, businesses and voters who seemed impervious to the moral case for cutting the use of fossil fuels might, we hoped, respond to the economic case.

[. . .]

Peak oil hasn’t happened, and it’s unlikely to happen for a very long time.

A report by the oil executive Leonardo Maugeri, published by Harvard University, provides compelling evidence that a new oil boom has begun. The constraints on oil supply over the past 10 years appear to have had more to do with money than geology. The low prices before 2003 had discouraged investors from developing difficult fields. The high prices of the past few years have changed that.

June 30, 2012

Thai farm workers arrested for “causing global warming”

Filed under: Asia, Environment, Food, Government — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 10:29

A weird little story from Thailand:

PHETCHABUN – Early one Thursday morning, a gun was pointed at Ms. Kwanla Saikhumtung, a 34-year-old mother, because she was farming.

The man who pointed the gun was one of ten armed officers from Phu Pha Daeng, the local wildlife sanctuary in Lomsak district. After observing the villagers for three days, the officers finally informed Ms. Kwanla and twelve fellow villagers from Huay Kontha that they were trespassing on wildlife sanctuary land. They demanded that the villagers come to the police station to talk with them.

They refused. The villager that hired them paid taxes on the plot, leading the villagers to believe they had a right to work the land, and they worried about finishing their work.

[. . .]

This incident was the beginning of a seven-year-long legal battle, pitting Ms. Kwanla against the Thai government. She and the other twelve villagers — the youngest only sixteen at the time — were first charged with trespassing.

The real shock, however, came when they were slapped with a 470,000 baht fine for contributing to global warming under the charge of causing environmental damage.

[. . .]

The Royal Forestry Department (RFD) fined the villagers for cutting down trees and farming, drawing from the 1992 National Environmental Quality Act which forbids “destruction, loss, or damage to natural resources owned by the State.” Their fine was determined according to a formula used to calculate environmental damage. The formula measures the increase in temperature caused by cutting down trees. Any increase in the land temperature shows ‘global warming’. In essence, cutting down trees to farm corn leads to global warming.

The Huay Kontha villagers have a running joke, “Because we pick the corn, the world gets hotter.”

The charges that Ms. Kwanla and the other villagers face shed light on an emerging trend in Thailand. Land dispute issues are becoming increasingly common. According to Pramote Pholpinyo, coordinator of the Northeast Land Reform Network (LRN), there are currently 35-40 “global warming” cases against villagers in Thailand, with charges amounting to almost 33 million baht.

H/T to Anthony Watts for the link.

June 27, 2012

California primed to make bad decision for “good” reasons

Filed under: Environment, Food, Government, Health, Science, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 00:05

California’s already bad economic situation could be made even worse by mandating that genetically modified foods be labelled to call attention to themselves:

The American Medical Association resolved this week that “there is no scientific justification for special labeling of bioengineered foods.”

The association has long-held that nothing about the process of recombinant DNA makes genetically engineered (GE) crop plants inherently more dangerous to the environment or to human health than the traditional crop plants that have been deliberately but slowly bred for human purposes for millennia. It is a view shared by the National Academy of Sciences, the World Health Organization, the Food and Agriculture Organization of the U.N., the European Commission, and countless other national science academies and non-governmental organizations.

And yet Californians will consider on their November ballots a law that mandates cigarette-like labeling of food derived from GE plants. Proponents claim to promote opportunities for consumers to make informed choices about the foods they eat. But to build support for the measure, they have played on consumer fears about a promising technology that is nevertheless prone to “Frankenfoods” demagoguery. If successful, they may well imperil the ability of Californians, and consumers around the world, to choose a technology that scientists contend could end hunger and malnutrition, lift hundreds of millions from poverty, and reduce the environmental impact of feeding an evermore populous world.

June 21, 2012

Even Mother Jones is coming around on genetically modified crops

Filed under: Environment, Food, Science, Technology — Tags: — Nicholas @ 10:11

Sarah Zhang points out that people who want less damage to the environment should support GM technology in farming:

Genetically modified Bt crops get a pretty bad rap. The pest-killing Bacillus thuringiensis (Bt) bacteria protein these plants are bioengineered to make has been accused of harming monarch butterflies, honey bees, rats, and showing up in the blood of pregnant women.

Just one problem: None of that is true. (Click on any of those links to see a scientific refutation of each claim.) Seven independent experts in genetically modified crops I spoke to all confirmed that the science shows Bt crops to be safer than their alternative: noxious chemical insecticides.

[. . .]

But just as we do not blame a murder on, say, a knife, Bt technology is not to blame for the ills of industrial agriculture. After all, knives are pretty handy in the kitchen when we use them properly. Even critics will acknowledge that Bt crops have led to a sharp decrease in insecticide use, which is a huge net positive for the environment. Broad spectrum chemical insecticides kill often and kill widely, wiping out “natural enemies” that are helpful pest-eating critters like spiders. A massive 20-year study just published in the journal Nature found that using Bt cotton in China to control cotton bollworms closely tracked with a rebound in natural enemy populations, which in turn keep out secondary pests like aphids that usually proliferate when chemical insecticides kill the bollworms.

If that last sentence sounds complicated, it is. Integrated pest management is about recognizing the interconnected complexity of these ecosystems of plants and all the insects living on them. The Nature study found that pest control through Bt cotton even had spillover benefits to the non-Bt soybeans growing around them. Natural enemies like ladybugs, spiders, and lacewings keep pests unaffected by Bt at bay. “Maintaining the biological control agents we already have is one of the cornerstones of integrated pest management,” says William Hutchison, an entomologist at the University of Minnesota. In addition, a 2010 study by Hutchison in Science (PDF) showed that American farmers of non-Bt corn actually reaped two-thirds of the economic benefit (read: additional profit) from nearby Bt-related pest suppression.

June 19, 2012

British “researchers” call for starvation diets to meet carbon targets

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Health — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 11:04

There’s only so much “mad” you can tolerate in the ranks of your “scientists”, and these guys are more than a bit over-the-top:

A famous mad professor who has previously called for Britons to starve their children into dwarfism so as to ease strains on the planetary ecosystem has reiterated his arguments, this time insisting that the amount of surplus flab carried by the human race will soon be equivalent to having another half-a-billion people on Earth.

Regular readers will be familiar with Professor Ian Roberts of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine already: he and his colleague Dr Phil Edwards wrote a paper in 2009 in which they suggested that it would be a good idea for Britons and Americans to model their diet and physique on that of the “lean” Vietnamese, as this would assist in such things as meeting British government carbon pledges. Lightweight Vietnamese people, according to the two scientists, not only need less food but use less energy to move themselves around.

Unfortunately, as we pointed out at the time, this would not merely have been a matter of Britons shedding some flab. In order to match the Vietnamese on weight, Brits would also have to lose four inches or so of height. Extrapolating from Roberts’ and Edwards’ figures, in fact, the people of the UK would need to shrink to a Hobbit-like stature barely over three feet to meet the more ambitious governmental carbon goals.

Oh, and in case you still think BMI has any scientific validity, here’s your disillusionment of the day:

Unfortunately the entire edifice of their argument is based on the long-discredited Body Mass Index (BMI), a frankly bizarre method of assessing how fat people are which was developed by an obscure Belgian social scientist without any medical qualifications in the early 19th century. The BMI assumes that healthy human mass goes up in proportion to the square of height, a patently absurd suggestion given that human bodies are three-dimensional rather than flat 2D shapes. All other things being equal a human’s weight should go up related to the cube of height — and indeed they aren’t equal. Any engineer will point out that cross-sectional area in support structures (feet, leg bones etc) needs to go up in direct proportion to weight carried, adding still more heft than a cube law would as height goes up. This is why elephants are not simply scaled-up dogs, and dogs are not simply scaled-up insects — they have proportionally thicker legs and other supporting structures and come out much heavier.

As one would expect, then, it has been confirmed by several recent studies among the taller populations of the modern-day developed nations that a BMI assessment of “overweight” should really be assessed as normal or healthy, while the previous “normal” range ought in fact to be dubbed “underweight”, as it has negative health consequences similar to being “obese”.

By suggesting that the human race — including the taller peoples — needs to shift into the outmoded BMI “normal” range, Roberts and his fellow public-health experts are advocating a course which would cause more health problems: scarcely what they are paid to do.

June 17, 2012

Narrow specialization, but very wide assumed knowledge

Filed under: Economics, Environment, Politics — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 09:11

Tim Worstall on the problem when specialists in one area pretend deep understanding of radically different areas:

Regular readers will know that I’m perfectly happy to take what the climate scientists tell me about climate science. Where I start to stray from the path of green orthodoxy is those same scientists then tell us the economics of what we ought to do about it all. Something they are not competent to comment upon as they really don’t understand the economics. I do accept the economics of climate change as laid out by the economists who have studied the economics of climate change. William Nordhaus, Nick Stern and so on, tell us that if the climate science is right then a simple revenue neutral carbon tax will be the solution.

That’s fine by me. But it does still puzzle me as to why the not economists feel competent to pronounce on the economics of climate change. Are they intellectual supermen who can master two widely different subjects? Simply succumbing to politics: something must be done, this is something, do this? [. . .]

Which leads us to our conclusion. The reason the scientists are so in conflict with what the economists of climate change are saying about the economics of climate change is simply that the scientists are entirely ignorant of what the economists are saying. And I’m afraid that, despite the popularity of the stance among politicians, ignorance is not a notably successful form of governance.

Imaginary “planetary boundaries”

Filed under: Environment, Food, Politics — Tags: , — Nicholas @ 00:08

Matt Ridley on the shift in emphasis for the Rio+20 conference:

The Riocrats now have a new tack, which will dominate next week’s discussion: planetary boundaries. An influential paper in 2009 written by Johan Rockstrom of Stockholm University and 28 colleagues argued that there are nine thresholds, crossing any of which will trigger collapse of the Earth’s life support systems: land-use change, loss of biodiversity, nitrogen and phosphorus levels, water use, ocean acidification, climate change, ozone depletion, aerosol loading and chemical pollution.

The trouble with this approach, according to a new report by Linus Blomqvist, Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger of the Breakthrough Institute in San Francisco, is that, for six of these measures, “there are no global tipping points beyond which these ecological processes will begin to function in fundamentally different ways. Hence the setting of boundaries for these mechanisms is an arbitrary exercise.”

A good example is land-use change. The Rockstrom paper suggested that if human beings convert 15% of the land surface of the Earth to cropland, the world will pass a tipping point, because as marginal land gets exhausted, a small increment in food demand would produce an accelerating increase in cultivation. Currently we cultivate about 11.7% of the land. Yet there is no evidence that anything special happens at 15%. In the words of Steve Bass of the International Institute for Environment and Development in London, “If anything, the opposite has probably been more true: Converting land for farming and for industry has clearly delivered a great deal of well-being.”

[. . .]

The “boundaries” approach needs to incorporate the possibility that, thanks to technology, fossil fuels and minerals, people are already living more lightly on the land than we did in the past.

June 16, 2012

James Lovelock interviewed in the Guardian

Filed under: Britain, Environment, Media — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 11:28

James Lovelock, who is perhaps best known for his “Gaia” theory, gives a somewhat surprising interview to the Guardian:

“Adapt and survive,” he says, when asked why he has decided to move. After more than three decades living amid acres of trees he planted himself by hand, he and his wife Sandy have decided to downsize and move to an old lifeguard’s cottage by the beach in Dorset. “I’m not worried about sea-level rises,” he laughs. “At worst, I think it will be 2ft a century.”

Given that Lovelock predicted in 2006 that by this century’s end “billions of us will die and the few breeding pairs of people that survive will be in the Arctic where the climate remains tolerable”, this new laissez-faire attitude to our environmental fate smells and sounds like of a screeching handbrake turn.

Indeed, earlier this year he admitted to MSNBC in an interview reported around the world with somewhat mocking headlines along the lines of “Doom-monger recants”, that he had been “extrapolating too far” in reaching such a conclusion and had made a “mistake” in claiming to know with such certainty what will happen to the climate.

[. . .]

Having already upset many environmentalists — for whom he is something of a guru — with his long-time support for nuclear power and his hatred of wind power (he has a picture of a wind turbine on the wall of his study to remind him how “ugly and useless they are”), he is now coming out in favour of “fracking”, the controversial technique for extracting natural gas from the ground. He argues that, while not perfect, it produces far less CO2 than burning coal: “Gas is almost a give-away in the US at the moment. They’ve gone for fracking in a big way. Let’s be pragmatic and sensible and get Britain to switch everything to methane. We should be going mad on it.”

Lovelock says the political fallout from the Fukushima disaster in Japan last year means that the chances of a surge in nuclear power generation are dramatically reduced. “The fear of nuclear is too great after Fukushima and the cost of building plants is very expensive and impractical. And it takes a long time to get them running. It is very obvious in America that fracking took almost no time to get going. There’s only a finite amount of it [in the UK] so before it runs out, we should really be thinking sensibly about what to do next. We rushed into renewable energy without any thought. The schemes are largely hopelessly inefficient and unpleasant. Fracking buys us some time, and we can learn to adapt.”

The reaction in Germany to Fukushima — which announced within weeks of the disaster that it was to shut down all its nuclear power plants by 2022 — particularly infuriates Lovelock: “Germany is a great country and has always been a natural leader of Europe, and so many great ideas, music, art, etc, come out of it, but they have this fatal flaw that they always fall for an ideologue, and Europe has suffered intensely from the last two episodes of that. It looks to me as if the green ideas they have picked up now could be just as damaging. They are burning lignite now to try to make up for switching off nuclear. They call themselves green, but to me this is utter madness.”

Nestled deep into an armchair, Lovelock brushes a biscuit crumb from his lips, and lowers his cup of tea on to the table: “I’m neither strongly left nor right, but I detest the Liberal Democrats.”

[. . .]

Lovelock does not miss a chance to criticise the green movement that has long paid heed to his views. “It’s just the way the humans are that if there’s a cause of some sort, a religion starts forming around it. It just so happens that the green religion is now taking over from the Christian religion. I don’t think people have noticed that, but it’s got all the sort of terms that religions use. The greens use guilt. You can’t win people round by saying they are guilty for putting CO2 in the air.”

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