Saturday
Dec172011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill David Colquhoun on the data debate
Dec 17, 2011 FOI David Colquhoun has posted some thoughts on the data openness debate the other day, and is clearly rather taken with Josh's cartoons.
Reader Comments (27)
Who wouldn't be rather taken with Josh's cartoons? Only some miserable old git with no sense of humour.
David Colquhoun seems like a real scientist.
Thanks for that Bish. My daughter has been agonizing over the MMR for my grandson and David Colquhoun's explanation in the blog article has finally helped me explain to her what had gone on. Like many, she finds it hard to distrust! Having spent a couple of hours following the links she is currently a spitting wildcat! Dads can sometimes be correct :-) !
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-16191900
Bishop get looking into this one
If we prove theres spin on this we can do more damage than climategate 2
Jamspid:
That report by the "in the pay of Gov't" CCC is a big load of bo££ocks. It has come to the opposite conclusions from truly independent engineers. Trust the BBC to give it coverage and ignore the independent reports.
"It is a myth that peer review ensures the quality of what appears in the literature."
Don't we know it!
Re: Jamspid
What all of these reports have in common is that they depend upon large decreases in energy use by the consumer (through energy efficiency). They then use this theoretical decrease as an offset against the cost of renewables to claim that price increases wont be so bad. The report referred to by the BBC needs household electricity consumption to drop by an extra 19% to meet their most optimistic forecasts. The reason I'm saying an extra 19% in efficiency savings is because their worst forecast is a 20% increase in household bills which include an unspecified amount of efficiency savings.
Jamspid/Philip Bratby
At first sight Kennedy is comparing apples with pears.
The cost of the investment is being passed on in higher fuel bills especially (as Consumer Focus and Citizens Advice point out, and as I have blogged about repeatedly) to the poor who are pushed in increasing numbers into fuel poverty. The putative benefits are not financial.
The question of insulation and/or fuel economy is a red herring. If I had turned my central heating down by 1 degree every time the government had had a new economy campaign I would long since have needed to install industrial refrigeration units to get down to the new figure! And I would probably have died of hypothermia by now.
The other stated benefit — reduced reliance on imported fossil fuels — marks Kennedy out (as I said about Phil Bentley of British Gas [http://standstoreason.wordpress.com/2011/10/18/its-a-gas/]) as either a fool or a knave.
If he doesn't know about the Bowland shale gas he is the one; if he does and is deliberately refusing to acknowledge its existence for whatever reason then he is the other.
The UK has the best chance since North Sea oil of becoming self-sufficient (or close to it) in energy for the foreseeable future and at a price which it can dictate. To commit the country to expensive and unreliable supplies of gas is irresponsible.
This is great to see - well done Josh and Professor Colquhoun.
It was yesterday Bish. I know the feeling though. An hour is a long time in the climate blogosphere.
It's taken a while for the good professor to collect his thoughts, which I will read with care later. But I continue to think that this debate and the issue of Index on Censorship on open science that preceded it was an important milestone.
http://hitchensblog.mailonsunday.co.uk/
Staying Off topic as usual
Looking at the fuel bills story
i read that Chris Hitchens has finally passed away
Im really sad and its a great loss
Im pleased that Chris and Peter made up their differances and he died knowing that his family was all united at the end
Chris Hitchens was really at heart one us he was a humanist always forward looking optomistic loved the triump of the human spirit
(not a miserbalist control freaking climate alarmist)
But mainly he loved all things Ameican (ecept the Clintons)
He was this famous scruffy agnostic rather right centred carrassmatic interlectual a great writer and thinker
(unlike his his great sibling interlectual rival his brother Peter without the scruffy or the agnostic)
Peter and Chris were exactly like that other great brotherly partnership Niles and Frazer
Underneath all that interlectual pomposity there was some mad vibe going on between them
Imagine them smashing each other with sherry glasses over a discussion about Europe or something
look on Youtube where both Chrs and Peter appear on Question Time
Both brothers either end of the panel Dimbleby in the middle and silly Shirley Williasms trying to chip in
Chris was either pissed or stoned or both and Peter just starring daggers at him
Then at the very end with final always lighthearted trival question of the evening about bthe death of Bernard Manning they both cracked a slight knowing smile
An absolute TV classic
Shortly after that show is when they finally made up
Then Chris got his cancer Dioagnosis
Chrsi and Peter then appeared on various high brow panels discussing Iraq Fancail meltdown Europe
Globalisation Climate change etc etc
But with Chris and his on going cancer treatment the main topic was of course religon and atheism
Now Sadly but pehaps thankfully Chris has passed on
We need to thank Chris for every thing he has done to help the "humaan condition" and he can now finally rest in peace
I understand that there are currently more live scientists than dead ones. The rapid rise in scientists as a percentage of the employed population has escaped regulation of their product while that of other professions, however fast they are growing, has not. Does scientific output have to comply with national or international standards and are its practitioners exposed to professional liability claims if they practice incautiously? Not that I know of. Not much of science nowadays is of the apple > gravity type but the product of research and testing, so let us the consumer, have some measure of how well that has been undertaken.
Announcements of 'scientists say' type just don't come up to the mark and have spawned an industry of journalistic hangers-on. Remember 'burnt toast causes cancer'? Well, how burnt? Is there a threshold where blameless (so far) bread turns into a carcinogen? Do we need to follow the post-normal approach and ban bread, check toast against a colour chart or ignore it because the probability is death for only 0.0000001% of toast-eaters?
Come on science: put-up or shut-up!
Sorry everyone i been writting my tribute to Chris Hitchens for the last hour
I lost both my parents to cancer so its a bit pesonal
What im saying is its a crack in their armour and we have to attack it there
Panorama and Prince Philip they have been paniced into this report
Cmeron isnt backing the Euro the Lib Dems are on the way out
Hopefully Chris Hulme will jump first with his Mrs as the getaway driver
Ben Pile and the Bishop their main line of attack has always been challenge the Scientific data
For the interlectuals thats great they and me can understand the hockey stick graph and can understand why its flawed
But for the ordinary man or woman in the street like me who actually drives a white van when hes at work
Its not they dont understand but they havent got the time to try tounderstand it
Windfarms and solar panels bullshit
Nuclear power stations and shalegas
is the way forward
The bottom line for everone is pounds and pence
Look into this fuel story the same analytical way you looked into climage gate 1 and 2 prove they re either lying ,wrong or dont know what they are talking about
Then let Dellingpole ,Chris Booker Micheal Hannlon and the Clark Kents at the broadhseets and the tabloids run with it
PEOPLE WILL NOT VOTE FOR A POLITICIAN WHO WILL COST THEM EXTRA TAX
Dec 17, 2011 at 10:50 AM | Mike Jackson
In Thursday's Grauniad, David Kennedy, chief executive of the Committee on Climate Change, said:
one of the errors made by other analyses was to suggest that 30GW of wind turbines would be built by 2020 – the equivalent of around 30 nuclear power stations. The official objective of the government and the recommendation of the CCC is 12GW.
30 GW wind may have been equivalent to 30 GW of nuclear power stations in the 1970s, (Dungness B 1.1 GW) but today you would only need about 10 nuclear power stations, (10 x a Hinkley Point C @ 3.2 GW).
Why the absurd over-egging when the information to destroy his remarks is available in a couple of mouse clicks?
Can it really be that these people not have access to the internet?
How is it that Kennedy does not know that there is at least 15 GW of wind (5.8 in operation, 3.7 under construction and 5.7 consented) already committed?
Even with a PhD in economics, surely he knows that the subsidy farmers are on the point of exceeding the government's official objective and his own recommendation by 3 GW?
On the same day, Huhne published his vision for the future and his graphs show 20 GW of windmills in 2020.
In June 2008 (GoneGreen) National Grid were anticipating 30 GW of connected windmills by 2020/21 - 19 GW off-shore and 11 GW on-shore.
How is it that he does not know that the Infrastructure Planning Commission (another gang of luvvies) have more than 25 GW (and counting) of windmills on their books awaiting rubber stamping?
There is also another 10 GW of windmills jumping through hoops at county and local authority planning level.
Altogether, that is a potential of 50 GW of windmills connected as of today, never mind how many more GWs of windmills are brewing in the brains of the subsidy farmers.
Words fail me.
Shame David Colquhoun feels the need to carry on with the "denier" tag. He and his friends Ben Goldacre and Simon Singh really should spend the time to get their clearly very capable heads around some of the facts of the climate debate. Now that people like Josh and Richard Drake seem to have got into a dialogue with Prof Colquhoun, perhaps they could supply a gentle nudge in that direction.
So Colquhoun speaks of the corruption in the medical publishing field and yet, everything is alright in climate science?
Colquhoun's position is classical amongst those in academia - they will reflexively support their fellow scientists when the issue is put before them, say, by the Guardian. If they look any closer they would naturally say what any skeptic has been saying for years.
A Christmas Pantomime...Ding Dong Merrily on High...
http://fenbeagleblog.wordpress.com/2011/12/17/211/
Nice one Fenbeagle!
Nice one fen!
Pete H
I would trust Colquhoun's medical notes more if he hadn't used Sarah Myhill as a target. Her Fitness to Practice hearing was recently cancelled by the GMC with no case to answer. One of the complaints against her was her alleged prenatal treatment of a patient called Rosemary, who turned out to be her pregnant pet pig. None of the complainants in her case was a patient - she being the only doctor many of them had had any effective treatment from.
Brownedoff
"another 10 GW of windmills"
I assume those aren't real GW - shouldn't the duty cycle or usable power or whatever they really generate in practice be the measure of capacity? Stating what they can do when the wind if both in the right direction and the right strength, and is steady enough to allow back-up generation to be turned off, seems misleadingly optimistic...
James P
It is government policy to have targets in installed capcity, not how little electricity they produce. They claim they do this because it is easy to keep track of meeting targets if they are simple. The fact that this is totally the wrong thing to do doesn't matter (I have had a letter from a govmint minister to this effect). It shows you what a mess we are in when a succession of ministers cannot understand what is going on and what a disaster is looming.
In plain terms, as far as the govmint renewable energy targets are concerned, 1MW of solar panels with a capacity factor of 5% is the same as a 1MW wind turbine with a capacity factor of 25% is the same as a 1MW energy from waste plant with a capacity factor of 80%.
Sheer lunacy, but that's what you get with looneys in charge of securing our future electricity supplies. In the old days (he said nostalgically), these things were determined by engineers.
Sigh
Nice analysis by Colquhoun of the academic press merry-go-round. So, universities and research institutes provide journal publishers with material for free (or even pay the journal in some cases), then universities provide them with free reviewers, then if something gets published they have to pay for access to the journal? Not only that, they have to buy bundles like those useless pay TV packages where you have to pay for 43 channels of stuff you will never watch to get the 2 or 3 that you do?
As a business model, it makes Somalian pirates look like philanthropists.
I wouldn't mind, except that a huge amount of the free material, free reviewing and subscription purchases are done courtesy of the ever generous taxpayer. I note that in addition to institutional subscription purchases, those made by individuals are almost always tax deductible.
Our generosity to these companies seems to know no bounds.
Re David Kennedy of the CCC and fuel bills, I have a transcript of last week's interview on Radio 4's Today programme here.
He's singing from exactly the same hymn sheet as Chris Huhne.
Colquhoun's nasty little throwaway about "the unspeakable Delingpole" tends to detract from his (C's) credibility. He should be above that sort of spitefulness, particularly as everything else he wrote in that blog entry indicates that he's well aware that on the important procedural issues the sceptics, including Delingpole in particular, have been spot on in their criticism of the corrupt practices revealed by the Climategate disclosures.
He sounds like one trying to have his cake and eat it and choking on it.
He comments in the thread below his blog, to the effect that climate debate is off limits, deniers=ranters.
Little does he realise that climate sceptics are precisely the scientifically-literate vigilantes championing traditional honesty in that science. He has a long road to Damascus ahead, and Delingpole the journalist is already there, sipping his gin and tonic. .
[Snip - Off topic]
It's true that I loved Josh's cartoons. So much so that I didn't at first realise that this was a climate deniers blog.
It would be a waste of time to go into details, but I fear you have got it all wrong, so please don't imagine I'm on yout side, any more than I'm on the side of quacks.
I was intrigued by Pete H's comment about MMR. When I thought that this blog had a serious interest in science, I'd have presumed that he'd concluded that the kids had got MMR, Now I'm beginning to wonder.
David Colquhoun
Thanks for your input. Could I ask you please not to refer to people here as "deniers". This will be taken as gratuitously offensive and will simply lead to others responding in kind. There are those on your side of the global warming debate (Oreskes is an example) who eschew this kind of namecalling. On this site I try to encourage people to engage in constructive discussion "across the divide". This is not very easy, but we now have a number of regulars whose views are pretty much mainstream. I would be grateful if you would try to engage in that spirit.
I don't think anyone here imagines you are on our side of the climate debate - I certainly don't, any more than I think George Monbiot is. However, if we all agree that scientific data should be freely available, then that is a step forward.