Glaciergate: Now the scandal spreads to India

From Christopher Booker's Sunday column in the DT.

I can report a further dramatic twist to what has inevitably been dubbed "Glaciergate" - the international row surrounding the revelation that the latest report on global warming by the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) contained a wildly alarmist, unfounded claim about the melting of Himalayan glaciers. Last week, the IPCC, led by its increasingly controversial chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was forced to issue an unprecedented admission: the statement in its 2007 report that Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 had no scientific basis, and its inclusion in the report reflected a "poor application" of IPCC procedures.

This has become big news in India and Dr Richard North, one of the most outspoken critics of the whole AGW scam, was interviewed on India's leading English-language TV news channel discussing the issue with Dr Vijay Raina, a glaciologist who had also criticised Pachauri.



As Dr North points out, it's another 'follow the money' scandal, and his barbs at Pachauri's penchant for £1,000 suits and high living really hit home.

Drastic Cuts in Carbon Emissions Make No Economic Sense

So says Bjorn Lomborg, in an op-ed for The Washington Times (no, really!)

...trying to force cuts in carbon emissions is a solution that will cost far more than the problem it is meant to solve.

So what does he suggest instead? Well, spending $100 billion per year on green energy research and development with the goal of making green energy as cheap as fossil fuels.

This is much more in-line with this website's thinking. We want a greener future but see no point in hobbling, or even destroying, our economy in pointless and politically motivated attacks on the current (primarily fossil fuel) methods of delivering cheap energy.

Kite Power Generation

The turbine may be the icon of modern wind power generation for now but it could be replaced by the kite in most, if not all, wind generation applications sometime in the next couple of decades.

Here is an excellent summary of developments in this area of renewable energy research from 'Black Hole Sunset' posting at The Daily Politics website.

'Carousel' frauds plague European carbon trading markets

Just a few weeks ago, Europol, the cross-border police force, said that carbon trading fraudsters may have accounted for up to 90pc of all market activity in some European countries, with criminals mainly from Britain, France, Spain, Denmark and Holland pocketing an estimated €5bn (£4.5bn).

"It is estimated that in some countries, up to 90pc of the whole market volume was caused by fraudulent activities," Europol said.

Figures from New Energy Finance show the value of the global market falling from $38bn (£23bn) in the second quarter to $30bn in the three months to the end of September after several countries cracked down.

Read the full article by Rowena Mason at the Daily Telegraph here.

New Earth Solutions Raises £20 million

The fundraising allows New Earth to begin work on its fourth operational site in Leicestershire. The waste treatment site, which will begin to accept municipal rubbish from Autumn 2010, will extract recyclables and convert biodegradable material to a compost-like substance.

New Earth Solutions will use part of the money for the refinancing of its waste treatment facility in Gloucestershire, which it acquired in February this year.

Each site will have a capacity of around 50,000 tonnes of waste a year.

UK Government's Support for Cleantech "takes the biscuit"

The UK doesn't get cleantech and as a result should prepare for brownouts as electricity is cut off on a rotating basis as there will not be enough energy efficiency or generation capacity in the future.

This is according to Simon Daniel, an entrepreneur and CEO of Moixa, a fast-growing renewable energy group writing in GrowthBusiness.co.uk ezine.

Last week President Obama awarded $3.4 billion in grants to support smart grid companies in the USA. Meanwhile in the UK after several days of dithering, the prime minister announced his favourite biscuit was a chocolate digestive.

It's a hard-hitting article and one that not only criticises current government policy but also makes some excellent suggestions. He notes, for example, that innovative companies need to preserve equity in order to raise the significant amount of funding required from Series A and B investors to compete internationally.

Well worth a read.

Solving the Urban Bike Parking Problem

Bicycles are good. And they're one of the few things our incompetent, spendthrift government doesn't tax yet (other than the VAT if you buy one).

The major problems with bike ownership though, certainly in UK cities, are theft and storage. To counter this, a number of funky and clever solutions are being developed.

Here is the 'Bike Tree', a solar powered solution that operates with 'smart cards', and is promoted as a 'clean intermodal transportation system' by its developers.



Another neat invention is the Bicycle Parking Tower from Japan, an automatic storage system for cycles that can hold up to 6,000 bikes. The product is built and constructed by Japanese company JFE, whose engineering works division first started them in 2007.



Similar to the bike tree, retrieval is done with a swipe card and the process takes only 15 to 30 seconds. Of course, construction requires lots of money so its not cheap - current monthly fees in Tokyo run at approx 1,800 yen (£12.00)