Thursday
Oct112012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Climate South West
Oct 11, 2012 By Today's Moderator
I came across this organisation called Climate South West, which, by the address, is linked to the Environment Agency, and which provides information to people and groups in the SW of England on climate change. Their declared mission: To help the South West Region of England to adapt sustainably to the impacts of climate change.
The website includes a leaflet and Power Point slides
I had a quick look and saw that winters are apparently getting warmer and wetter, and the sea is rising, but I wondered if anyone with time to spare would like to analyse what has been written, and included in the slides, graphs, etc, and report back on its accuracy or otherwise. Any offers?
Reader Comments (33)
I notice one of their partners is Ecclesiastical Insurance...
I commented on a similar thing over at James Delingpole’s post on the Aldersgate group:
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100184355/why-i-wont-be-shopping-at-m-s-any-more/
My post read:
You know it's funny but the Aldersgate group is registered with an address of 45 Weymouth Street, London, W1G 8N, United Kingdom. By a weird wouldn't you believe it coincidence the The Environmental Industries Commission Limited share the same postal address and are also registered here.
“The Environmental Industries Commission is an important voice for the environmental industry, and provides expert policy advice to me and my Ministerial colleagues. EIC makes a valuable contribution to the Government’s programme to drive forward the Green Economy.” Caroline Spelman MP, Secretary of State for Defra – June 2011
Just how many Green originations use different organisation names to produce lobbying information, to me it looks like the Environmental Industries Commission and the Aldersgate group operate from the same office. Is there a conflict of interest? Makes me wonder how many Green groups are just parts of bigger Green organisations and just how independent from each other they truly are. I got called a conspiracy nut for pointing this out.
Every time some Public Body states they'll help me, I wish I had a shotgun in the house to reach for comfort
haven't got time to read your link just yet, as i'm watching the china open tennis and djokovic is about to play; however, my local council had this in the free, local murdoch newspaper yesterday, and it seems to be a devious attempt to get smart meters into people's homes, under the guise of helping low-income families:
7 Sept: Qld Shelter: Sector news: Logan City Council seeks energy efficiency partners
The Logan City Council's sustainability program is developing a proposal to receive funding through the Low Income Energy Efficiency Program (LIEEP) to engage with low-income families and implement a strategy to assist them to overcome barriers to energy efficiency in the home.
If successful, volunteers will have a new type of electricity meter installed in their home, which records data on electricity use on separate household electricity circuits making it easier to identify where their electricity use is greatest. This information will be complemented by sessions on how to use the meter to better identify potential energy savings, and provide residents with steps they can take to reduce their energy costs. Due to the need to install the meters in the homes low-income participants will need to own their own home, or rent from a willing community housing providers or private lessor...
http://www.qshelter.asn.au/simplenews/2012/sep/ebulletin-friday-september-7-2012-0
from minutes of the Logan Council, i've read that a company called Auzion has installed some multi-circuit energy meters in some of the Council's buildings, with more to come, as commercial production begins:
25 May 2012: Qld Govt: Dept of Environment & Heritage Protection
Transcript for Mark Leckenby (Auzion), Redland Sustainability Forum
The easiest way to explain how this work is it’s the next step up on say, the ClimateSmart, which is a meter that you put on the electricity board with a little LCD display. I’m sure most of you are familiar with that type of technology. Three years later with a lot of money going into it, we’ve ended up with a commercial system. We call it the Energy Maximiser, AuziMAX for short. It’s basically that little blue box there that sits on your power board monitoring across the circuit breakers...
The way it works is we’ve built dashboards in a multitude of technologies; web based and iPhone based. So, the information coming back from how your house is performing can be very simply monitored and looked at and even diagnosed down to the individual appliance level...
Pretty much on day one of that installation we discovered something that we didn’t know and that was that the air conditioners were running at night, it’s interesting. This sort of little information, unless you’re monitoring it you may not realise why your power bill is so high...
The system can also be used to control. We’re actually trialing this at the moment with Energex in Capalaba. The way it works is they’re using it in a peak demand fashion connected to a new type of interface. Anyone that’s in the appliance industry may be familiar with this new interface called Demand Rationalisation. Some new air conditioners are being fitted with this now.
It allows you to opt in to a new target control signal, whereby during the peak demand periods, say between four and eight o’clock, you can allow the energy retailer to manage your air conditioning systems. The way this works is you’re not supposed to feel any comfort change, but the signal will tell your air conditioner to wind down to 50 percent or maybe 25 percent of its duty cycle. So, the idea is not to make you uncomfortable. The whole thing should be unnoticed. Maybe on a very hot day you could feel something happening.
***But, that’s an exciting thing. Energex have seen this device as a potential way forward to help manage peak demand...
We are trying to integrate our reporting into ecoBiz. I was just talking to a gentleman before about that and hopefully the ecoBiz project will continue under the new leadership and we can integrate that...
http://www.ehp.qld.gov.au/ecobiz/network/previous-forums/transcripts/2012-04-sustainability/mark-leckenby.html
But that's an exciting thing?
I must admit I haven't had time to look into this fully, however I did find this by Googling Jodie Davis (the Project Officer).
http://content.yudu.com/Library/A1t7w3/TheWrappernewsletter/resources/3.htm
Seems she was based in Lincolnshire in April 2010 on the Climate Adaption project. Do you think that there are two Jodie Davis's?
Meanwhile, how abouth this for chutzpah?
http://www.ctvnews.ca/sci-tech/increase-in-antarctic-ice-may-be-sign-of-climate-change-1.990453
Apparently, the record high ice in the Antarctic is due to .... Warming!
I can't remember whcih Electricity distribution company he was working for but one man was saying that the beauty of the smart meters is that they will be able to cut you off if you are using too much electricity - Winston Smith anyone?
As someone living in the south-west, I'll see what I can do. I may have been to one of their meetings at the Environment Agency in Exeter a couple of years ago. I can say that in the six years we've lived here, the winters have got colder (some very cold spells and lots of snow), but they are wet anyway. Anecdotal evidence from farmers who have lived here all their lives says nothing is different. We just get lots of weather. I don't believe the harbours have noticed any sea level rise.
The 9 scariest words in the english language...
Ronald Reagan
This crew are making a big thing out of floods and Storm Damage.
The Hockey Stick Graph spikes at 1900 onwards
But a quick read through the local archives they were still getting severe floods from 1800 onwards
http://dro.dur.ac.uk/1072/
Check this paragraph from the PDF
"associated with a small decrease in temperature and a negative NAO indexes between
the 1940s and 1970s. However, it is noted that the slightly high flood frequency in the
1980s seem to coincide with the rise in temperature and the positive NAO indexes.
But the low number of floods in the 1990s does not fit with the climate trend."
Does not fit with any trend.
That expression"Since records began" Another expression "Before records began"
On second thoughts, as all this propaganda on climate change is based on the nonsensical UK Climate Projections 2009, it is a complete waste of time. I had a long spat with the chief executive of Devon County Council about "winter resilience". I was fed up of being snowed in for weeks on end whilst DCC were preparing for warmer wetter winters. They did change their minds very slightly and now there is a scheme for local parishes to make it easy for parishioners to buy bags of road salt. Other than that, unless you live in Exeter or use the M5 or major trunk roads, you're on your own.
sorry to be boring, but just want to clarify i'm watching the shanghai masters, not the china open. too much tennis. as i'm here, BBC had a lengthy piece on the following on wld sce radio, but i haven't found it online. listeners' responses which were read out were quite negative. possibly the listeners were either unemployed, working short weeks already, or wondering why they couldn't just garden on the weekend:
10 Oct: UK Evening Standard: Four-day week could "solve every headline problem"
The New Economics Foundation say workers should garden on their day off.
Gardening and growing food are good for physical and mental health, improve the environment and boost wildlife in towns and cities and even help make urban communities more resilient against food prices spikes and climate change.
But to harness the growing interest in gardening and "growing your own", more time and space for growing plants and vegetables in cities are needed, a leaflet by Andrew Simms, of the New Economics Foundation, and co-author Mollie Conisbee said.
So, all private and public employers should offer new recruits, and possibly existing staff, the option of a four-day week, either with the same amount of hours compressed into four days or a shorter working week with less pay...
The authors point to other places in the world where a shorter week has delivered benefits, such as Utah in the US where the working week for state employees was compressed into four days, saving the state millions of dollars...
Mr Simms is outlining the scheme at the Horticultural Trades Association Garden Futures conference in London.
http://www.standard.co.uk/business/business-news/fourday-week-could-solve-every-headline-problem-8204678.html
3 Sept: Guardian: Andrew Simms New Economics Foundation: 52 months and counting
We can learn resilience from the natural world - but only up to a point
Life on Earth can adapt to all sorts of conditions but we are living outside its cycle of normal variation
At a much greater scale, with global warming, we now risk triggering a sequence of system-shifting events. Think of this more as an "aeon fire" than a century fire, in which we default to an unpredictable new, more hostile climate, very different to that in which human civilisation evolved. It will take millennia to shift back to a more convivial world, if indeed such a reversal ever occurs...
Next month is the halfway point in our countdown to when the odds shift against us in the likelihood of staying on the right side of the climate threshold. To celebrate optimism and "doing what I can", we will mark it by publishing some of the best ideas for change that were submitted through this column to the Guardian, and examples of specially commissioned articles from people who lead their own fields and are changing their own lives. A special event jointly organised by onehundredmonths.org, the New Economics Foundation, 5x15 and the Guardian will also be held at the Royal Festival Hall on 1 October.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/sep/03/100-months-resilience-natural-world
(can't find anything on how it went at the RFH)
Macmillan: Andrew Simms: Ecological Debt
Global Warming & the Wealth of Nations
Guardian: 'Essential reading.' Head of the IPCC: 'A new phrase has entered the language.'
Andrew Simms is policy director of nef (new economics foundation), the award winning independent British think-and-do tank. He went to the London School of Economics, led campaigns for several major aid and development agencies and was one of the original organisers of the Jubilee 2000 debt campaign. He is a regular commentator in the national press and broadcast media, and is on the board of Greenpeace UK and The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) Europe. Over several years he has written groundbreaking reports on issues ranging from debt, trade, aid, and big business, to biotechnology, and climate change.
http://us.macmillan.com/ecologicaldebt/AndrewSimms
Sourcewatch: Andrew Simms
Affiliations
Director, 10:10
Associate Editor (2009), Resurgence
Member, Green New Deal Group
http://www.sourcewatch.org/index.php/Andrew_Simms
Had a quick look but nothing mentioned that is out of the ordinary. I am Cornish and climate/weather there is variable to say the least. It was warm and dry during the war so long hot summers but this changed and we had cool wet summers in the 50's/60's. Flooding? the SW is no stranger to flash flooding as a look at the history of Boscastle will illustrate. Most woodland is scrub oak in deeply incised valleys, high erosion rates, with the trees covered in moss and wet area species of ferns growing beneath. Lots of bog land on the moors with their high rainfall. I do not expect that this generally wet/dry cycle to change.
@Ian E
'Apparently, the record high ice in the Antarctic is due to .... Warming!'
According to Vicky Pope from the Met Office, the last two unusually cold and snowy winters in S. England were also down to Global Warming.
Snippets overheard in the crowd at the annual Met Office vs CRU football match at Exeter..
'It's hot, it's, it's cold, it's what we all foretold...global warming, global warming
It's cool, it's warm, it's going down a storm...global warming, global warming
Be it shine or be it rain, we're just gonna sing again
Global Warming, Global Warming!'
'Come on Phillip, come on son...come on Phillip... delete another one!'
'We hate MacSteve, we hate him. We hate MacSteve we want to do him in'
'No one likes us, No one likes us
No one likes us, We don't care
We are CRU
Super CRU
We are CRU from East Anglier'
'What do we want?
Pal review
When do we want it?
Now now now'
The result was a 2-0 win to the Met Office. (CRU og Jones (2)). However after adjustment and homgenisation at UEA the scorebook now shows a thumping 5-1 victory to the visitors.
Met Office 1 (Forecaster) CRU 5 (Jones 3, Briffa 1, HR Me 1)
Referee: R Oxburgh.
Match Commentary . The ref played a blinder (Beddington)
I'm in the South West. I've just emailed them ... I'll keep you posted. I should note that not once have I had a response from any such institutions when I have queried what they have to say.
Your web page says
"Climate change is happening now in the South West and we are already vulnerable to extreme weather. We need to plan for both current and future vulnerability."
Please point me to where the effects of "climate change" on the South West are documented on your website; references to papers detailing this would also be appreciated. Indeed, any such statement about "climate change" on the website must also have the relevant links to papers which confirm your statements. How else can you be taken seriously by an educated public?
You will be aware, I am sure, that even the IPCC are loath to link "extreme weather" and "climate change" (whatever that might be). You will also be aware, again I am sure, that the prestigious journal Nature also refuses to link "extreme weather" and "climate change". Here also is a link to the highly respected climate scientist, John Christy, from the University of Alabama's in Huntsville (UAH)also highly respected atmospheric sciences faculty, and his presentation to Congress regarding the widespread and fallacious linking of "extreme weather" and "climate change".
Given this, the quote from the website I note above is extremely misleading - can you therefore back it up, with references to paper noting the effects of climate change on extreme weather in the South West?
Kind regards
Jeremy Poynton
It's a funny small world. My daughter has been encouraging us all to move to Devon and get a smallholding. Imagine my surprise when she showed me the brochure for Coombe Mill. Owned by none other than James Lovelock of Gaia Hypothesis fame.
He was interviewed in the Guardian on 15th June 2012, They report that three years ago, he received a heating bill for the winter totalling £6,000. He has had enough of the cold and damp, and is wintering in St.Louis, Missouri.
He also says "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 is right: what's worse, snow starts here at the end of October as the weak solar magnetic field presages the start of 40 years of the new Little Ice Age. When will our Establishment accept there can be no CO2-AGW and the 'consensus' is fraud morphing into a new fascist totalitarianism as the Greens revert to their political roots.
Jeremy Poynton
On the website home page, the picture of Plymouth Hoe looks faked. As a resident of the South West, perhaps you can tell us if this is so.
Pat (8.55AM above) reports that Logan Council is helping low-paid people in Scotland by installing a system to manage their air conditioning units. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but there’s something about this that sounds not quite right ...
Phillip Bratby,
I can complement your anecdotes with one from the North-West: Grange-over-Sands. Located under the Lake District on the Northern edge of Morecambe Bay, Grange is another of those Westerly locations in the British Isles that have very mild "micro-climates" sporting palm trees by the coast.
Or at least it did until a couple of years ago. In September a local gardener and storekeeper on the edge of the Bay told me that many or most of them have died in the last two years or so. I was visiting relatives in Grange who confirmed that their Daughter also owned several palms that had died recently.
Global-warming is killing palm trees? Who knows. I expect we'll hear more about this at some point from the usual BBC suspects. Then, in the distant future, we'll learn that the first explanations were of the usual blame-it-on-carbon-dioxide-somehow-by-hook-or-by-crook variety. [Copied off the back of a packet of breakfast-cereal and hastily embroidered to avoid copyright restrictions.]
So Andrew Simms is 'on the board of ... The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) Europe'. Is that TERI as in Dr R K Pachauri, Director General? Says it all, really.
It appears to be a sub quango of the Environment Agency, the head, Julie Stannett appears to have only published once and that as a co-author:
"Estimation of river flow time series to support water resources management: the CERF model 2008"
In it she is listed as being a member of the Environment Agency
@Oct 11, 2012 at 2:06 PM | HuhneToTheSlammer
I don't know Plymouth or the Hoe at all, so can't comment. I'm in Frome, so the other end, so to speak, of the South West.
Sustainability is currently being "embedded" in every thing that is done across every dept of government. Oliver Letwin is responsible for making it happen.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201213/cmselect/cmenvaud/c327-i/c32701.htm
Link courtesy of Diogenes
@Oct 11, 2012 at 2:06 PM | HuhneToTheSlammer
No, it is Plymouth Hoe (although not the usual bit you see in pictures) probably taken at peak spring tide in September
@Oct 11, 2012 at 2:06 PM | Unregistered CommenterHuhneToTheSlammer
Agreed, it's not all unusual for a peak spring tide to coincide with offshore winds to drive high water ashore. The same is true all along the south coast. The doom-mongers love these events, but fail to report that the same has been happening for thousands of years, and the south-west land mass is still descending into the sea as part of the rebound from the last ice-age.
@ geoffchambers 2:11 PM
The householders are probably new-builds, off the Natural Gas grid, so were 'sold' air-to-air heat-pumps - with the promise of very high COP (Coefficient of Performance).
They'd be undersized, needing on-peak top-up.
But are reversible - hence "air conditioner" (sic) [actually simply heating/cooling, not filtration / humidification.]
Ah... the Environment Agency (SW) hosing public funds, ducking direct accountability. subsidizing political advocacy and displaying towering incompetence... yet again.
Don't expect to get any sense out of them - we've just had them (EA) ask for £35,000 to fulfill a FoIA request that comprises around 50% of a similar £1000 FoIA request we asked for last time - that they connived to evade and lie about for 18 months. It resulted in a full fee refund plus a wet lettuce thrashing by the Information Commissioner for extended naughtiness.
Why is this being allowed ? Is there no effective supervision and oversight of these people? They can't even discharge their normally statutory duties properly - let alone save the planet....
We'll be posting some fresh steaming stuff over at our place shortly about all this - but for the mildly curious a primer can be found here
Now what are the odds of the Project Manager of this organisation assessing the science and the evidence then declaring "Panic over, no identifiable effects. I am closing the office and making myself redundant so as to save the squeezed taxpayer a useful sum of cash."?
Not good I would imagine.
geoffchambers -
apologies for the confusion. this Logan Council is in South-East Queensland, Australia.
Oct 11, 2012 at 9:58 PM | Argusfreak
erm.... infinitely improbable - in that they'd never actually finish the assessment before the budget expired.
Well, so far, no reply to my email, indeed, no acknowledgement at all. Is there an Ombudsman for Useless Quangos?
@ pat-Oct 11, 2012 at 10:44 AM
thanks for hard work on digging out links/etc, much appreciated (been meaning to say this for a while:-)
good info on good old Guardian fav Simms (AKA - were all as good as dead, trust me i know)