From Benny Peiser's Global Warming Policy Foundation

There were fewer than 100 protesters left tonight at a potential fracking site as they finally admitted defeat to the police. More than 1,200 activists had brought exploratory shale gas drilling to a halt on the edge of the village of Balcombe, West Sussex, at the weekend. But after officers from more than 10 police forces pushed back campaigners from the site’s entrance allowing lorries to enter on Monday, they left in their droves. --Ryan Kisiel, Daily Mail, 22 August 2013

One [green] group in Surrey set up to encourage sustainable living has come out in favour of exploration and fracking, the process which may have to be used in future to extract the oil and gas. Transition Dorking says it has surprised even itself. It supports community responses to climate change and shrinking supplies of energy. But it looked at the evidence and came to the conclusion producing fuel locally may be less damaging to the environment than importing fossil fuels. "There's no reason why fracking, if it is properly regulated, should not be a perfectly normal part of oil industry operations," said spokesman Nick Wright. --Sally Nancarrow, BBC News, 23 August 2013

Horsham Skeptics in the Pub held a public meeting on Monday August 12 where hydraulic fracturing, a controversial energy extraction technique, was discussed with several expert guest speakers at the Tanners Arms in Brighton Road. “Every community in the UK will have a view on whether they like it or not. There is no form of energy generation that is cost free for those who are affected. Everyone should know the pros and cons so a rational decision can be made,” Dr Peiser said. “We are sitting on cheap energy but we are going to the most expensive form of energy,” he explained. --West Sussex County Times, 20 August 2013

A handful of protesters have seemingly been allowed to threaten Britain’s entire energy future. What we are looking at here is nothing less than a new Battle of Britain — one which, if this overcrowded country is to survive as an industrial power, we simply can’t afford to lose. --Christopher Booker, Daily Mail, 20 August 2013

An unreleased draft of the U.N.’s next major climate report reportedly states that scientists are more certain than ever that man’s actions are warming the planet — even as the report struggles to explain a slow-down in warming that climate skeptics have seized upon. Global surface temperatures rose rapidly during the 70s, but have been relatively flat over the past decade and a half, according to data from the U.K.’s weather-watching Met Office. Climate skeptics have spent months debating the weather pattern, some citing it as evidence that global warming itself has decelerated or even stopped. “The absence of any significant change in the global annual average temperature over the past 16 years has become one of the most discussed topics in climate science,” wrote David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation in June. “It has certainly focused the debate about the relative importance of greenhouse gas forcing of the climate versus natural variability.” --Fox News, 20 August 2013