Bishop Hill Bringing politicians to Booker
Mar 24, 2013 Energy: coal Energy: gas Energy: grid Energy: wind Christopher Booker is in fine form this morning, describing in horrific detail the steady progress of the UK's energy system towards disaster. Perhaps mercifully, he does not move on to consider what this will mean for the economy as a whole and for individuals.
[It] is all insane in so many ways that one scarcely knows where to begin, except to point out that, even if our rulers somehow managed to subsidise firms into spending £100 billion on all those wind farms they dream of, they will still need enough new gas-fired power stations to provide back-up for all the times when the wind isn’t blowing, at the very time when the carbon tax will soon make it uneconomical for anyone to build them.
Bishop Hill
Interestingly, a leader in the Telegraph calls for the government to repeal the Climate Change Act. One can't help but be reminded about Winston Churchill's quote about being able to trust Americans to do the right thing once they've tried all the other options.
Nice to hear, but ten years ago would have been better.
Bishop Hill
The Mail is headlining on the excess deaths from the current cold weather.
Freezing Britain's unusually harsh winter could have cost thousands of pensioners their lives.
This month is on track to be the coldest March for 50 years – and as the bitter Arctic conditions caused blackouts and traffic chaos yesterday, experts warned of an 'horrendous' death toll among the elderly.
About 2,000 extra deaths were registered in just the first two weeks of March compared with the average for the same period over the past five years.
Reader Comments (190)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/nov/20/coal-plants-world-resources-institute
According to the Guardian, 1,200 coal fired power stations are planned. Mostly as you would expect in China and India.
So we are going to close down the 17 we have, to save the planet? Get real. And follow the money.
Old Mike:
Yes, of course I may be wrong - if you read my paper on the potential for a 4 degree rise you'll see that I definitely do not over-state the certainty of this. I don't say global warming will reach 4 degrees by the end of the century, I say that it could and I give the reasons why we concluded this. I'm quite happy to change my mind on this if presented with convincing evidence.
Contrary to what some people seem to think, my career does not depend on "CAGW" or even AGW. My job is to assess the impacts of anthropogenic climate change and natural climate variability. When we are working for, say, a major oil company planning new offshore drilling, they are interested in the range of climatic conditions they may expect their rigs to have to cope with over the lifetime of the operation (several decades). They don't particularly care how this range of conditions comes about, they just want to know what they might be, so they can maintain resilience of their operations.
Don Keiller, Pharos, ZT:
I'm afraid Marcott et al is not a particularly high priority for me. I can see it's of huge interest to readers of this blog, since it's about palaeoclimate reconstructions and hockey-stick shapes, but there's much more to climate science than that. If my aim was to try to convince the public one way or another on whether climate change is an urgent issue or not, then I might be more motivated to read up on it as it clearly is quite pertinent to the public debate there. However, this is not my aim, so Marcott remains merely of academic interest to me. As I say above, I'm more interested in improving the ability to assess the impacts of climate change and variability over the next few years to decades, and an 11,000 year reconstruction does not seem to be especially helpful there.
Latimer Alder:
Thanks for the advice. I think you are right about the need to be clear. One thing I think I and my colleagues need to be clearer about is that the debate over fossil fuel use is not the raison d'etre for climate science - we try to understand and forecast climate for many other reasons (one of which being that it is just really interesting!) Unfortunately, the noise on the blogosphere is dominated by two opposing camps who do want to shout about whether we should keep using fossil fuels or not, and they both try to use arguments over climate science to support their side of the argument. I suppose that's inevitable, but there is more to climate science than merely informing decisions on energy policy.
RB: I'm afraid Marcott et al is not a particularly high priority for me.
And there lies the problem. Because the Met Office is quite happy to promote this paper on My Climate and Me as an important result.
Why is it important? Presumably because it supports CAGW.
Would the result still be important once you remove the uptick?
Because then the shape of the chart tells a very different story about recent warming.
And if it is important, why does it not matter to Richard Betts that the result may have been obtained by demonstrably invalid analysis?
To me it looks as if the Met Office is now an accomplice after the fact in having promoted what many now believe to be an invalid analysis to support a previously held belief and being totally disinterested in drawing attention to the controversy that has erupted.
At the very least they should regard Steve McIntyre's analysis as being as newsworthy (if not more so) than the original paper.
So Richard Betts would you like to give us some insight as to what you have been advising your "Customers" over the last few years about what the Climate was going to do in the short to medium term?
Because I hope it is a damn sight better than that offered by the Met Office.
Thanks Richard
People use numbers to express their understanding of situations. In this it is your view that an increase of 4C this century is entirely possible.
However the observational data and the MO's latest decadal forecast both indicate a declining rate of warming ending up in 2017 at approx +1.3C per century.
As 1.3C is considerably lower than your "entirely possible", you must have a view on when you expect the present decline in the rate of warming to reverse? Also you must have a view on what will be the cause of the reversal? I would appreciate your comments.
TIA
As always thanks for your contributions
As an example of just how crap the Met Office is
Met Office 3-Month Outlook 20 December 2012: For January as a whole below-average UK-mean temperatures are somewhat more likely than above-average, although there is considerable uncertainty. Similarly, snow and ice may occur more often than they do in an average January.
For February and March the range of possible outcomes is also very broad, although above-average UK-mean temperatures become more likely.
Overall, the probability that the UK-mean temperature for January-February-March will fall into the coldest of our five categories is around 15% whilst the probability that it will fall into the warmest of our five categories is around 20% (the 1981-2010 probability for each of these categories is 20%).
matthu
The Met Office didn't "promote" Marcott on My Climate and Me, it just discussed it - as I say, it's of interest to the public debate.
My Climate and Me also discussed the recent Huntingford et al paper which showed that rainforests may be more resilient to climate change than we previously thought. This definitely doesn't "support CAGW".
Richard,
The Marcott et al. paper was presumably selected as one from many to report as news of an unprecedented result in the week of 12 March: "New Analysis Suggests the Earth is Warming at a Rate Unprecedented for 11,300 Years"
The blurb included the following:
The research suggests today’s temperatures are higher than those over last 1500 years.
What’s more important, is the speed at which global temperatures seem to be changing today. The rate of warming over the last 150 years appears to be much faster than any temperature changes over the last 11,300 years.
The Met office has drawn attention to this paper, describing it as being an important result. They should now draw attention to the controversy it has created and the fact that several scientists are saying that the analysis is not just contentious but badly flawed and also contradicts results of an earlier PhD thesis which relies on the same data.
In this case, the controversy this paper has created is more significant than the result, would you not agree?
Mar 25, 2013 at 11:07 AM | A C Osborn
Sure - our work on the UK electricity transmission and distribution network is one example.
Green Sand
The forecast for the next five years is not particularly relevant to the long-term trend, it's largely about natural variability with a small contribution from the long-term trend, as explained here.
the My Climate and Me piece is headlined:
NEW ANALYSIS SUGGESTS THE EARTH IS WARMING AT A RATE UNPRECEDENTED IN 11,300 YEARS.
Now then:
(a) the authors' press release did make this claim
(b) their report does not actually support the claim in the press release or the Met Office headline ((i) there is insufficient reoslution in the 11,500 to show whether there may or may not have been equivalent or greater periods of warming during that time and (ii) the hockey blade is acknowledged in the paper to be "not robust")
(c) the uptick is in any event a wholly artificial and manufactured device, contrived in order to secure exactly the type of headline published by the Met Office
(d) the Met Office, and Met Office scientists, by not condemning this disgraceful conduct thereby tactily endorse an "anything goes" approach to clilmate "research".
(e) Richard Bett's Nelsonic "I see no ships" attitude is sadly typical of those wedded to the alarmist paradigm
I really wasn't going to get into this. I was just enjoying the comments and learning something them from more qualified posters. But, Richard Betts, I took a look at your paper (has it been Peer-reviewed?) and was taken by a para in the section 4:
Apart from the fact that your 'could' is all based on the 'precautionary principle, which is hard to gainsay, your paper is models all the way down and then relies on Magic in the end! (It was just too good to leave alone....sorry).
Hang on Richard Betts: You're not saying - sorry, predicting - 4 Deg by the end of the century at all. In your paper, you say it will likely occur in the 2060s - less than 50 years from now.
That's one hell of an acceleration!
Richard Betts, I think you should have left it with a general statement, the link you gave shows this in the summary
There is evidence that the conditions that cause flooding faults may increase in the future, but a reduction cannot be ruled out. Due to the uncertainty associated with future wind projections, there is no clear signal associated with the future frequency of wind and gale faults, however snow, sleet and blizzard faults are projected to decrease due to a reduction in the number of snow days.
Absolutely brilliant, especially the part about a reduction in the number of snow days, or did you mean in 2060?
I bet those involved with the Electricity Network are really impressed with that, I am wondering if they can sue
Ah, Richard has less urgency now than before. I wonder what has passed?
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Climatic Change
December 2012, Volume 115, Issue 3-4, pp 821-835
Assessing the potential impact of climate change on the UK’s electricity network
"We investigate how weather affects the UK’s electricity network, by examining past data of weather-related faults on the transmission and distribution networks. By formalising the current relationship between weather-related faults and weather, we use climate projections from a regional climate model (RCM) to quantitatively assess how the frequency of these faults may change in the future......however snow, sleet and blizzard faults are projected to decrease due to a reduction in the number of snow days."
Richard there is a word to describe this: "Schadenfreude"
Buying the Met. Office diktat used, like IBM, to be the best way not to get sacked.
Now that the herd is starting to move, this career choice in not necessarily the safest.
I suspect that at lot of people in the MO are also looking at their support for the warm mongers.
I think it may be time for Richard to "stop digging", the hole is getting ever deeper.
Thanks Richard
"The forecast for the next five years is not particularly relevant to the long-term trend"
My point is not about a 5 year forecast, it is about the long term trend. The 30 yr rate of warming has been in decline since Dec 2003, the MO's 5 year forecast states that it will continue in decline until at least he end of 2017. By then it will have been in decline for 14 years and the numbers in the 30 year trend will then be 10 years warming 1987 to 1997 and 20 years 1998 to 2017 of flat or declining temps.
When and how is the 30 yr (long term) trend going to double and achieve a rate of +2C never mind +4C?
It is simply a matter of mathematics rather than AGW. Unless of course you can point to the event that is going to reverse the trend. The change in direction at the end of 2003 is well defined.
As said above to get the +4C "That's one hell of an acceleration" and therefore surely it must stick out on some of the ensemble runs like a "Hockey Stick" making it obvious when it is going to happen and why?
Would appreciate your comments
TIA
As always thanks for your contributions
I apologize for harping on the apparently uninteresting issue of the extra 2,000 deaths. Do other readers consider this number fallacious? Is that newspaper unreliable? What am I missing?
We present results starting in the 2020s, and show a range of reductions in snow, sleet and blizzard faults, ranging from a small decrease to a large decrease (averaged over the decade for the 2020s -this does not mean that all individual years will show a decrease). The range arises partly from natural variability and partly from uncertainties in the long-term trend. It's important not to simply interpolate this back to the present-day as natural variability is more important in the near term.
Richard Betts wrote 'The forecast for the next five years is not particularly relevant to the long-term trend, it's largely about natural variability with a small contribution from the long-term trend, as explained here.'
The World's climate exhibits sudden jumps in temperature. in the past 150 years they have mostly been upwards. We are now facing a sudden downward jump because we are in the cold ENSO AND the Sun's magnetic field and EUV emission is low.
As for the general upward trend. that is most likely going to be the worst bet in History because CO2-AGW is probably minimal and could be slightly negative, and Milankovitch is causing substantial reduction of 65 °N insolation. The hot oceans will hopefully camouflage this for the next 15 years.
Green Sand
There's doesn't need to be a particular event, just an ongoing rise in GHG concentrations causing hte general warming trend, and the sign of natural variability flipping back to being a neutral or warming effect on top of the long-term trend, rather than opposing it as in the last decade or so.
Ed Hawkins produced a nice animation illustrating how short-term trends are not particularly informative for the long-term trend.
Richard, if you have no results showing an increase, and only those with decreases, then you're overconfident in attribution of the long term trend, the recovery from the Little Ice Age.
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Rhoda's model shows, for all those oil drillers who want to know what the climate is going to do, that nothing much will happen, and nothing will happen that hasn't happened before.
Now, how much should I be charging for this advice, and who do I know who is daft enough to pay up?
Naive enquiry number 256: What does a climate model have to do to get chucked out of the ensemble? How unjustified may its results be before it is deemed 'unskillful'?
Oh, and Richard, surely it's someone else's turn in the barrel now, you have flown the required number of missions, time for a rest off ops for a while?
Additionally, and even more importantly, Richard, if you are even partially correct about the attribution of warming to GHGs, where would we be without that warming? You have an ugly dilemma gaping like a widening ice crevass facing you.
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Thanks Richard
"There's doesn't need to be a particular event, just an ongoing rise in GHG concentrations causing hte general warming trend, and the sign of natural variability flipping back to being a neutral or warming effect on top of the long-term trend, rather than opposing it as in the last decade or so."
" the sign of natural variability flipping back to being a neutral or warming effect". Is an "event", Dec 2003 was clearly defined.
When do you expect the "flipping back" to take place? It must be in your model? You obviously, if you give any credence to the latest decadal forecast, do not expect it before 2017. So when do you expect it?
To be clear in your own mind that +4C is "entirely possible" by 2060 you must surely have a time frame laid out. By 2017 we will be 30% of the way there with a rate of warming of about 25% of the magnitude you deem "entirely possible" to be achieved. So you must be expecting a rate of warming far in excess of +4C for the period 2017 to 2060. That is one hell of a change, it must stick out in the model runs like a sore thumb?
Would appreciate your comments
TIA
As always thanks for your contributions
Edit: thanks for the link to Ed's animation. I note just by eyeballing that is shows approx +1.4C in 70 years 1990 to 2060, +2C/century?
Richard what I find amazing is that for the past 15-17 years, "natural factors" have managed to cancel out, with exquisite precision, the increase in global temperature purported to result from increased CO2 in the atmosphere.
In fact these "natural factors" have managed to increase their effect, year by year, to exactly match the increased radiative effect of this CO2.
As a mathematician, or even a betting man, what do you think the odds of this are?
P.S. needless to say, before this stagnation in global temperatures came along to slap the modellers in the face, not one of their much venerated models managed to capture this scenario. However with some more tweaking of the variable "fudge-factors" the latest models have, miraculously, managed to "hindcast" this hiatus.
Give me strength!
Mar 25, 2013 at 1:33 PM | Don Keiller, not only can't they get 5 year forecasts right due to Natural Variability, they can't even get 3 month forecasts right.
But they are happy to predict 20, 50, 100 years in to the future, in other words there will be no "Natural Variability" beyond 5 years.
They just do not live in the real world.
Richard Betts says '...If my aim was to try to convince the public one way or another on whether climate change...'
ZT says '...you would be making podcasts, posting on web sites during work hours, and adroitly avoiding papers which don't support your cause so that you can dance around questions'
(i.e. political (not scientific) behavior)
Green Sand -
" thanks for the link to Ed's animation. I note just by eyeballing that is shows approx +1.4C in 70 years 1990 to 2060, +2C/century?"
If you view the long version of the animation, the curves extend to 2100 where there is about a +2.5 K rise over the century. However, Dr Hawkins notes "Both simulations are using CSIRO Mk3.6, using the RCP6.0 scenario." Stott et al. notes that "CSIRO-based analysis ... gives much higher rates of possible warming" than other models, as is shown in figures 2 and 3 of that paper.
Checkout this article in "the Telegraph" from 2011.
"Era of constant electricity at home is ending, says power chief."
probeinternational.org/library/wp-content/uploads/2011/.../Doc3.pdf
We are "progressing" to this "goal" rather sooner than predicted.
@HaroldW
Thanks Harold I have some reading to do!
".....The CSIRO model was an outlier in the attributable trends estimated for the 1861–2010 period with the other 5 model results considered being much more consistent .......
..... While further work is needed to investigate why the CSIRO model gives much higher attributable near-surface warming due to greenhouse gases than all other models investigated so far, the general degree of agreement between observationally constrained warming ranges estimated from individual model results and from the multi-model average support using the latter as our best estimate of likely future warming rates......."
Richard Betts, the Met Office's Outreach Officer for Sceptics (amongst his other responsibilities), has been offered gratuitous career development advice on this thread, some of it along the lines "get out and get a proper job before the whole global warming scare falls apart".
I think the givers of such advice underestimate Mr/Dr/Professor Betts, who is not dumb by any means (notwithstanding his faith in the value of general circulation models).
I would surmise that he already has his own post S.H.T.F. career plan and I'd doubt that it involves teaching physics in a comprehensive school.
To me the issue is not whether RB might be wrong, nor whether he admits he might be wrong - such an admission is already implicit in the description of the alarming scenarios as only 'possible'.
For me the issue is this: given that the alarming scenarios are only 'possible', a good scientist should surely try to give equal space to the equally possible non-alarming scenarios. And I am talking about temperatures, not rainforests.
Trouble is the Met Office is all about "telling a story" rather than trying to achieve accurate forecasts as this illimunating Climategate mail explains -
“I can’t overstate the HUGE amount of political interest in the project as a message that the Government can give on climate change to help them tell their story. They want the story to be a very strong one and don’t want to be made to look foolish.”
http://foia2011.org/index.php?id=2445
Marion,
It appears to be Post Normal Science
"With PNS we are characterising the changes in science which will be necessary in this new century for our civilisation to become sustainable, and thereby worthy of survival."
http://www.eoearth.org/article/Post-Normal_Science
I think it may be described as using the trappings of science to illustrate a political narrative.
Looking at data from Reuters-Herren on the UK National Balance Point gas price (NBP) versus Platt's LNG daily for Japan Korea Marker (JKM), UK gas prices have topped Japan Korea prices for the first time in at least 2 years. Remember the Pacific Basin high prices are a result of closing down Japanese nuclear plants post Fukushima, with the resultant increase in demand for LNG gas imports. All that was required in the case of the UK was some snow in March.
What I find amazing is that for the past 15-17 years, "natural factors" have managed to cancel out, with exquisite precision, the increase in global temperature purported to result from increased CO2 in the atmosphere. In fact these "natural factors" have managed to increase their effect, year by year, to exactly match the increased radiative effect of this CO2.
What do you think the odds of this are (assuming independence and no-autocorrelation- which is what climate psientists do in their reconstructions)?
A not unreasonable assumption is to say that the probability that for any one year that the chances of "natural factors" exactly matching the radiative effects of increased CO2 is 50%, then the binomial outcome culmulative probability = (0.5)^15 = 0.00003, or 1 chance in 33,333
If we are really generous and say the probability is 70% then (0.70)^15 = 0.0047, or 1 in 212.
Assuming statistical independence of things in the same system is generally a dodgy assumption as even minute traces of correlation can completely change the probabilities of the possible outcomes.
However, I have noticed that the Met Office uses the following logic:
1. Global warming must have been caused by CO2 because we can't think what else could have caused it and that proves it was CO2.
They now have to add on:
2. Having conclusively proved that CO2 causes global warming, the absence of apparent warming for 15+ years requires a different explanation from "CO2 has very little to do with global warming" and we are working on it.