Bishop Hill Climate video nasty
Jun 13, 2011 Climate: MetOffice Climate: Models Climate: WG2 Climate: WG3 Economics These videos of a conference run by the Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences popped up on one of my Google alerts. The conference was at the end of last year, so I'm not quite sure why it's only appearing now.
First up is a presentation by Tim Palmer, an Oxford climate modeller, who is particularly interesting on the large biases in climate models and the "misleading" way these are dealt with in "some reports".
After that there is a panel discussion featuring Palmer, Alan Thorpe the head of NERC (his name may be familiar to some readers because of his early involvement in the Climategate inquiries), Vicky Pope the head of climate at the Met Office, and a UEA guy called Tim Lenton. The scientists were all quite well behaved, I thought.
The tone changes with the second panel discussion, which is veritable video nasty featuring a group of technocrats. The panel features Ralph Cicerone, the head of the US National Academy of Sciences, who is best known for his role in rewriting the job specification for the inquiry into the Hockey Stick, Sir John Beddington (no introduction required), Adair Turner, the chairman of the UK's Climate Change Committee, and a banker who was largely forgettable.
You will love the moment where Turner, a former partner at McKinsey, peer of the realm, chairman of this that and the other, with a home in the poshest part of London, says that there are some aspects of our current lifestyles that he would like to do something about (or words to that effect). Lots of discussion of "changing behaviour" ensues.
The whole thing has something of the otherwordly air of the Chinese National People's Congress, with economics to match. These are seriously scary people.
Reader Comments (37)
(the video nastly link - which I admit was the first one I tried to open - seems to require me to be "logged in" to Squarespace)
Thanks. Fixed now.
Lord Turner, chair of the "independent" Climate Change Committee and chair of the Financial Services Authority, which single-handedly was responsible for overseeing the banking collapse. Why does the Coalition Government not sack Turner and strip him of his peership?
Here is a better link:
http://www.newton.ac.uk/ofb/ofb006/seminars/index.html
the video nasty is the third item
Bishop,
The link to the "video nasty" goes to a Squarespace login page and probably isn't what you intended.
Lord Adair Turner.
Oh dear. He said, all we can do is to look at all the climate models and projections and take an average and work with that.
As the financial crisis , and his big part in it, showed, and now this, he doesn't understand probability, or even science.
As Tim palmer describes it in the first video, climate models only show AGW when you introduce an assumed forcing that is hypothetical and hasn't been proven.
The fact that reality continues to diverge from the models surely shows the forcing assumption to br invalid!
Or am I just missing something?
Gwyn Prinz talking some sense with his question, but I couldn't bring myself to watch the whole thing- too depressing.
Beddington: I'm the chief scientist, not a political commentator!!!
And that was written 60 years ago. Plus ca change; plus c'est la meme chose
You're right, Bishop. Scary people!
Lord Adair Turner's approach is typical of a non-scientists approach - the argument from authorities - these days we call it the Simon Singh approach,
A little hard on Adair Turner blaming the total incompetence of the FSA on him - the banking tsunami didn't break on his watch.
He was appointed FSA Chairman in September 2008. One of his previous banks, he was a non-executive Director at Standard Chartered Bank; performed creditably in the crisis.
He had, however, long been a member of the great and the good, so it seems that his economic expertise was perhaps as shaky as his knowledge of Climate "Science".
He has also backed a Tobin tax - at least it doesn't attempt to hide that its a tax.
O/T I am trying to do some arithmetic on energy costs.
If the cost of a wind farm is 3x that of a fossil plant per MWh, and the wind farm only operates at about a sixth of nominal capacity, it's 18 times as expensive as fossil. Moreover, you still need most of the fossil for when there's no wind.
If your target is a third of power coming from renewables, and if renewables means wind, does that mean your domestic energy bill goes up by a factor of six (because a third of it comes from a source 18 times as costly)?
J4R, no, the ratios quoted are those for the initial capital, and do not carry through to the operating costs per unit.
Regards, Tony.
Mike Jackson (not THE Michael Jackson by any chance?) at 9:31 am:
From "Foundation", Book 1, first published in 1951, written between 1942 and 1950 according to Wikipedia:
Excellent first question in the second video. The guy from the National Oceonograhy Centre says that short range weather models are evaluated by "Skill Scores" which show they ARE better than guesswork or extrapolation (interesting, would like to see more on this). He asks if the Climate Models have an equivalent.
The rather uneasy answers focussed on hindcasting performance with handwaving on future predictions (which is surely what this is all about). So it seems the correct answer to the original question is No then! It's 23 years since Hansen's original scenarios were put forward and it should be imperative that these and other climate predictions ARE subject to ongoing methodical evaluation.
Whilst Tim Plamer's 1st video was interesting I thought it suffered from a similar problem. Lots of stuff about reducing the Theoretical uncertainty but nothing on quantifying the Actual uncertainty, i.e. verifying the models against actual results. These are clever guys but to my mind they need to get out more.
Most of the rest of the talk centred on the need for more computing power but with a very poor business case. We've been rubbish up until now but give us more cash and we'll be much better...promise!. They need to be called on their past performance.
Particularly in the current economic climate we need to get back to the core purpose, short term weather prediction for business etc. I'd also keep the real life data collection arm to build up reliable trustworthy records but scrap funding for the rest of the Climate Gravy Train.
There is an interesting paper (2008) on Skills scores here:
http://www.esrl.noaa.gov/psd/people/robert.pincus/Papers/Reprints/GCM-Cloud-Metrics.pdf
First conclusion:
J4R, no, the ratios quoted are those for the initial capital, and do not carry through to the operating costs per unit.
Regards, Tony.
What re the Operating Cost ratios then?
Thanks
Sandy
@ Sandy / Tony
Well yes, this is what I was trying to figure out. Presumably the capital costs get amortised somehow in either event. Domestic power supply is a regulated industry in which returns are limited by statute, the payoff being it's low risk, but they're allowed a return on capital, which includes the capital cost of their generating kit.
So surely we are all paying for the depreciation of existing power stations and will have to do so for the new ones also?
It's hard to find good numbers on this. But AIUI the true cost of wind is about 18x that of fossil. So you start from Plan A in which 100 units of power cost you £100. Then you move to Plan B where 20 of those must come from wind costing £360. The other 80 still come from fossil but it now costs at least what it used to and perhaps more. Say £120, because of all the feed-in tariffs, carbon taxes, and running on standby in case it's not windy enough.
Well, how is your energy bill not going to be £440, or maybe £480, where it used to be £100?
These are made-up numbers, except the disparity between wind and fossil cost, but does anyone have the real ones?
And, pertinently, when will people notice this and revolt? Possibly never, because we have tolerated paying 5x more for petrol than Americans for ever, but at some stage the piper has to be paid.
The link to Palmer's presentation pdf is not working.
[BH adds: Google the PDF name. THere's another copy out there]
Incidentally, when we hear of a fossil power station costing X, does anyone know if it is customary for the X to include the discounted year 0 cost of the fuel?
If not, then the initial setup of a wind plant may be less disadvantageous than is usually thought. Instead of paying a bit up front and more as you go along, you pay a lot up front and less as you go along - although presumably wind consumes a fair bit of power at all times.
Sandy, that's a good question. Unfortunately, it does not have a simple answer, since it involves cost accounting. That, in its turn, involves decisions as to the allocation of initial capital costs (via imputed depreciation), and lots of other "intangibles". For example, if a given wind farm requires that somewhere a fossil fuel plant is x% larger than it would otherwise be (for standby purposes), does one allocate x% of its capital costs to the wind farm? Has the wind farm properly costed the transmission lines? The more I have looked at this area, the less I seem to be comfortable with any simple, single figures of costs for comparison purposes. How about the imputation of the costs of spoilt amenity in scenic areas?
Strong claims about wind-generated power bother me. Is the evidence in yet? I just don't know.
Tony.
Anthony Ratliffe
You mention transmission lines. AFAIK the cost of integration is not factored into most (all?) comparative estimates of unit cost (kWh) for wind vs fossil/nuclear. And grid extensions are expensive things.
In the final session Beddington (like all the other panel members ) failed to deal squarely with the question about the inconsequential nature of the UK 's efforts to move away from a carbon based economy if the rest of the world showed no great enthusiasm for following our lead. His line of defence was to say little about setting a moral example (I sense he doubts the efficacy of such chivalry) but to dwell on ways by which we could, as a fallback, adapt to changes and how we might help tackle other environmental issues such as food security and population growth. Given that he is part of the inner ring of government I wonder whether we are seeing further signs of HMG preparing a line of retreat . If so where does this leave Adair Turner and his bold plans to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by 80%? A general whose battalions are slipping away night by night?
Jun 13, 2011 at 2:21 PM | Anthony Ratliffe
The cost of the connections to the grid from wind powered generators and the cost of providing standy plant for those wind powered generators is bourne entirely by the consumer of electricity. Consequently the nitty gritty of accounting for these items is redundant. Nobody, but particularly the government, gives a rat's ass.
Here is how it comes about:
The ONLY reason wind powered generation exists at all is because landowners find that these devices create a very large annual income.
That income can be even larger if the landowner also owns the devices.
The ONLY reason that people own these devices is because the devices create a very large annual income.
The income for these owners/landowners is extracted from the wallets of people who consume electricity in their homes or businesses.
Electricity supply companies are obliged by law to have a certain proportion of the MWh which they sell to consumers sourced from "renewables", say wind powered generators.
This proportion is monitored by government by the simple method of the goverment printing bits of paper worth 1MWh and handing them over, free of charge, to the owners of wind powered generators, against meter readings. These owners can then sell these bits of paper to supply companies who are desperate to get hold of the bits of paper because, if at the end of the financial year, they do not have enough bits of paper to equal the obligated proportion, then government levies a hefty fine.
If power supply companies can not be bothered to own wind powered generators, then they have to buy bits of paper (denominated in 1 MWh/ bit of paper) from owners of wind powered generatators until they have enough of these bits of paper totalling the value in MWh of the obligated proportion of their total MWh delivered to consumers.
If they can be bothered then their own wind powered generators make a contribution to the obligated proportion, but even if they do this they cannot (at the current level of penetration) generally create enough "renewable" to satisfy the obligated proportion. so they also have to buy bits of paper worth 1 MWh each from owners of wind powered generators.
Apparently the competition to purchase these bits of paper costs the supply companies a lot of money which is then passed on to the consumer.
The supply companies are also obligated to buy MWh from the owners of wind powered generators and this is very expensive because the government has set the price of these MWhs at a high level to encourage people to build wind powered generators in the first place. This cost is also passed along to the consumer.
Right, now go to the top line of this piece and start again, and then again and then again ......
National Grid has an obligation to distribute power at a certain voltage and frequency (both within very tight tolerances) and also balance supply and demand.
National Grid also has an obligation to connect wind powered generators to the grid system and also, in order to fulfil the balancing obligation, hope that owners of gas fired power stations build rather a lot of inefficient Open Cycle Gas Turbine generators to cover for the intermittency problem of wind powered generators.
The cost of connecting these wind powered generators to the grid is bourne by National Grid from the income they derive from charging "dirty" generators and the supply companies for their use of the overhead cables forming the grid system. These costs are, obviously, passed along to the consumers by the supply companies.
As to the provision of OCGT plant, National Grid have no control of this at all. They are hoping that the "dirty" generators will perceive an opportunity to make a load of cash because the provision of this type of generator is not attractive (low efficiency - high running costs) and therefore the "dirty" generators need to see premium payments from National Grid over the horizon for this facility.
However, the "dirty" generators are in a bit of a fix: what if the penny drops in government over the coming years and they abolish the generous feed in tariffs and ROCs and then construction of wind powered generators stops dead, i.e. the growing intermittency problem vanishes, therefore no need for OCGTs! What to do? What to do?
This problem is huge for National Grid because, if wind eventually penetrates to 19 GW offshore and 11 GW onshore, National Grid will need to have access to about 24 GW of OCGT on standby to cover the intermittency problem. That is at least 12 power stations on standby across the UK.
Thus the cost of the connections to the grid from wind powered generators and the cost of providing standy plant for those wind powered generators is bourne entirely by the consumer of electricity.
Unfortunately, no-one is responsible for ensuring that the standby plant will be ready and waiting when wind penetrates to 30 GW. Or even before that nightmare target materialises.
Chin up!
Brownedoff
Good summary.
Let's hope our committed energy fantasist from the West Country sees it.
Thanks Brownedoff for an excellent overview. It is so depressing.
For those who can't be bothered to wade thru the entire video nasty, the particularly loathsome and hypocritical Adair Turner comments are at the 66:00 mark
Just one of many many factual errors:
At 71:00 Cicerone says he's been driving a Prius for 5 years and has never been in for a service (doubtful unless he never drives it) "so switching to a 100% electricity driven car does not even require any behavioural changes".
Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't the Prius a 100% fossil fuel powered car? Just with regerenrative brakes, a battery and electric motor which which gives it marginally better mpg at a huge economic and enviromental cost in exotic rare-earths metals and batteries.
Most people viewing this blog know Ralph Cicerone as the head of the US National Academy of Sciences. However, his tenure as Chancellor of the University of California, Irvine, was equally unimpressive.
I call them the Green Bank Authority:
http://oi54.tinypic.com/es5gev.jpg
OMG the president of the Nat. Acad. of Sci. is a hard core climatologist (yet his undergraduate work was in electrical engineering). No wonder the NAS is whitewashing climate criticism! Looking at him, I do not see the bright creative eyes of nearly every top scientist I've ever met doing a Ph.D. at Columbia in chemistry and then a three year postdoc at Harvard (with lots of time in the clean rooms of MIT). He really does look like a banker! He actually suggests that the public doesn't understand that climate models are mathematical computer software programs but in fact are child's toys. That's creepy and authoritarian at the same time. Then he yaps on and on about policy issues.
Does Oliver Morton have postmodern sideburns or just a shadow from his glasses? Oh no, please don't tell me he's the wolfman.
Yup: http://oi52.tinypic.com/ru1b82.jpg
I found Tim Palmer's earlier presentation (http://www.newton.ac.uk/programmes/CLP/seminars/082310001.html) pretty useful
Abstract:
A rather prevelant picture of the development of climate models throughout the 20th Century, is for the idealised, simplified, and hence mathematically tractable models of climate to be the focus of mathematicians, leaving to engineers, the "brute force" approach of developing ab initio Earth System Models. I think we should leave this paradigm in the 20th Century, where it belongs: for one thing, the threat of climate change is too important and the problems of predicting climate reliably too great. For the 21st Century, I propose that mathematicians need to engage on innovative methods to represent the unresolved and poorly resolved scales in ab initio models, based on nonlinear stochastic-dynamic methods. The reasons are (at least) threefold. Firstly, climate model biases are still substantial, and may well be systemically related to the use of deterministic bulk-formula closure - this is an area where a much better basic understanding is needed. Secondly, deterministically formulated climate models are incapable of predicting the uncertainty in their predictions; and yet this is a crucially important prognostic variable for societal applications. Stochastic-dynamic closures can in principle provide this. Finally, the need to maintain worldwide a pool of quasi-independent deterministic models purely in order to have an ad hoc multi-model estimate of uncertainty, does not make efficient use of the limited human and computer resources available worldwide for climate model developement. The development of skilful stochastic-dynamic closures will undermine the need for such inefficient use of human resources. As such, a very grand challenge for the science of climate prediction is presented in the form of a plea for the engagement of mathematicians in the development of a prototype Probabilistic Earth-System Model. It is hoped that this Newton Institute Programme will be seen as pivotal for such development.
Putting aside the talking up his book towards the end that seems pretty sensible stuff to me. Worth a listen.
The climate models looking less good -
"The Chaos theoretic argument that undermines Climate Change modelling
Guest submission by Dr. Andy Edwards
This is not intended to be a scientific paper, but a discussion of the disruptive light Chaos Theory can cast on climate change, for non-specialist readers. This will have a focus on the critical assumptions that global warming supporters have made that involve chaos, and their shortcomings. While much of the global warming case in temperature records and other areas has been chipped away, they can and do, still point to their computer models as proof of their assertions. This has been hard to fight, as the warmists can choose their own ground, and move it as they see fit. This discussion looks at the constraints on those models, and shows that from first principles in both chaos theory and the theory of modelling they cannot place reliance on these models."
More at http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/06/13/the-chaos-theoretic-argument-that-undermines-climate-change-modelling/#more-41556
Paul Boyce asked:
Mike Jackson (not THE Michael Jackson by any chance?)
My heart also fluttered when I first saw the name, but sadly, he can't possibly be the (late) Michael Jackson who wrote The World Guide to Beer.
International readers might be interested to know that here in the USA, I believe there was another (also late) gentleman of the same name who achieved some minor notoriety.
thanks for the link Bish
to be fair i thought it was not that bad (uncertainly everywhere but don't tell J.Public) & to be expected in this forum.
you did all watch to the end (start 91:47) where the organizer (Rowan Douglas CO of Global Anal..something) gives his spin on how to make £$ to the audience (he just happened to be be in Munich talking to Munich-re recently + he loves/believes the models).
Asimov's Foundation figure the diplomat Lord Dorwin gets some mentions above. Asimov portrays him as superficially a fop. In fact he proves to be a very clever politician. After days of reassuring-sounding discussion, it emerges that Dorwin had not said a single thing. Take out the contradictions, ambiguities and waffle, and nothing was left.
This institute is named after Newton. Ironic. He is lampooned today for supposedly believing that the end of the world could be calculated from biblical sources - he is accordingly treated as a nut. He actually attacked such attempts by hotheads who thought the end was coming any day. Newton said the event was not tightly predictable but would be centuries off. It's the CAGW alarmists who are the heirs of the hotheads.
I found it amazing that the Chief Scientist Advisor of the UK Government, Sir John Beddington, would regard it as "unfortunate" that there was low probability of 5 consecutive crop failures with soaring grain prices or 6 or 7 major floods in Pakistan. At 31:30 of second panel discussion.