Bishop Hill Donoughue's parting gift
Jul 31, 2013 This is a guest post by Doug Keenan.
The recent Bishop Hill post “Answers, non-answers” listed the replies to eight Parliamentary Questions, which had been tabled pursuant to suggestions in the Bishop Hill Discussion “Questions to suggest to Lord Donoughue”. Replies to a further six Questions are now available, as shown below. Lord Donoughue is very much grateful to those who suggested the Questions. He would be happy to consider suggestions for further Questions—although Questions can now not be tabled until after the summer recess.
As noted earlier, there are strict rules on the wording of Parliamentary Questions; the wordings below were obtained after discussions between Lord Donoughue and the officials at the Lords Table.
A) Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government by how many degrees they forecast global temperatures will be reduced, compared with a baseline case of what would happen without intervention, as a direct result of the emissions reductions mandated by the Climate Change Act 2008 by (1) 2050, and (2) 2100. [HL1483]
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Baroness Verma): The United Kingdom's 80% emissions reduction target for 2050 is derived from estimates of the UK's share of the global effort needed in order to keep the increase in global average temperature to below 2 Degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The UK does not have emissions reduction target set for 2100. The UK's emissions reductions alone would result in a small but crucial proportion of total global emissions reductions, as all countries need to contribute to achieving the 2 degree goal. It is vital that we show leadership and demonstrate that the shift to a low carbon model is achievable in order to influence other major emitters to take action.
B) Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government what is the mean residential time of anthropogenically emitted carbon dioxide in the simulated atmospheres of the general circulation models that are run by the Met Office.[HL1484]
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Baroness Verma): Carbon dioxide does not have a mean residence time in the atmosphere as there are a range of processes that exchange carbon dioxide between the atmosphere and other carbon reservoirs, operating on a wide range of time-scales. An indication of residence time can be seen from experiments using the Met Office Hadley Centre's Earth system model, HadGEM2-ES, in which for the current climate, the fraction of a pulse of carbon dioxide remaining in the modelled atmosphere after 20 and 100 years is 62% and 45% respectively1. This compares closely with other models used in the experiments in the paper referenced.
1 Joos et al. 2013, Carbon dioxide and climate impulse response functions for the computation of greenhouse gas metrics: a multi-model analysis. Atmos. Chem. Phys., 13, 2793-2825. doi:10.5194/acp-I 3-2793-2013.
C) Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government what is their estimate of the total cost by 2030 of the investments required to achieve their full plan for power and gas generation, including all renewables, connection, transmission, distribution, storage, systems and meters.[HL1485]
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Baroness Verma): The 2011 EMR White Paper calculated that up to £110 billion of investment in electricity generation and transmission was likely to be required by 2020 (75 billion could be needed in new electricity generation capacity, and Ofgem's 'Project Discovery' estimated that around an additional £35 billion of investment is needed for electricity transmission and distribution). These figures are in the process of being updated. Investment needs beyond this period are subject to a number of uncertainties and only therefore near term investment needs to 2020 are reported.
D) Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government what proportion of the carbon dioxide entering the atmosphere over the globe in the most recent year for which figures are available is anthropogenic.[HL1522]
Baroness Verma: Latest published assessments of anthropogenic carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions, collated by the Global Carbon Project, suggest that anthropogenic sources represent about 6% of total CO2 emissions into the atmosphere. However, although natural CO2 emissions are much larger than those from anthropogenic sources, the fluxes between natural CO2 sources and sinks are essentially in balance within the carbon cycle and the impact of anthropogenic emissions is such that they have been responsible for the increase in atmospheric CO2 concentration since pre-industrial times. This is the main driver of long-term global temperature rise.
1 Le Quéré et al, 2013. The global carbon budget 1959-2011. Earth Syst. Sci. Data, 5, 165-185. doi: 10.5194/essd-5-165-2013.
E) Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have conducted an assessment of the prime causes of the warming of the world during 1911–40; and if so, what conclusions they have drawn.[HL1791]
The Parliamentary Under-Secretary of State, Department of Energy and Climate Change (Baroness Verma): The Met Office has conducted studies into the warming of global mean temperatures during the 1911-1940 period1,2,3 as well as later periods, as have other scientific investigators4,5 These studies find evidence that a number of factors combined to cause the observed warming during the 1911-1940 period, including increases in greenhouse concentrations, a paucity of major volcanic eruptions, increasing solar output and natural variability within the climate system, such as changes in ocean circulation.
1 Stott P.A. et al., 2000, External Control of 20th Century Temperature by Natural and Anthropogenic Forcing, Science, 290, 2133-2137.
2 Stott P.A. et al. 2001, Attribution of twentieth century temperature change to natural and anthropogenic causes, Climate Dynamics 17, 1-21.
3 Tett S.F.B. et al., 2002, Estimation of natural and anthropogenic contributions to 20th Century temperature change, 107, 4306.
4 Hegerl, G. C., et al., 2007, Understanding and attributing climate change, in Climate Change 2007: The Physical Science Basis. Contribution of Working Group I to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, edited by S. Solomon, et al., pp. 663-745.
5 Min, S.-K., and Hense, A., 2006: A Bayesian assessment of climate change using multimodel ensembles. Part I: Global mean surface temperature. Journal of Climate, 19, 3237-3256.
F) Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Verma on 2 July (WA 202–3), whether the Met Office has yet set a date by which, in the event of no further increase in global temperatures, it would conclude that the global warming predicted via its general circulation models has been disproved.[HL1792]
Baroness Verma: My understanding is that no such date has been formally set by the Met Office.
Note: the first Question, HL1483, has previously been discussed in the post “More slipperiness from Baroness Verma”.
Update at 10.50am (from comment by Doug Keenan at 9.27am):
One other Parliamentary Question was also submitted by Lord Donoughue, but was rejected on procedural grounds. The Question was this:
"[Lord Donoughue] to ask Her Majesty’s Government if they still accept the opinion of their Government Chief Scientific Adviser, given in 2004, that by the end of this century the most habitable place on Earth will be the Antarctic, and if not what were the grounds for the change".
A reference for the statement by the GCSA (then David King) is here—see especially page 37.
Reader Comments (56)
Greg: That for me is the key one-liner. And the corollary is that we should be extremely grateful to Bernard Donoughue for kicking off this process and to Doug Keenan for his support, in the service of both truth and freedom. Innovation and tradition, Brit and Yank, combining at their best?
I agree with others who observe that the carbon cycle is not well understood and further investigation is required to ascertain its workings with more certainty.
I am one of those who does not understand the full SCIENTIFIC reasoning for discounting the chemical analyses of CO2 levels carried out in the 19th and early 20th century. In my view, before the results of those analyses can be dismissed, I consider that each of the experiments should be replicated today (same locations, same calendar day, same time of day, same equipment) and see what results we would achieve.
If CO2 was truly around the 280ppm level at the time when those experiments were conducted, one would expect if those experiments were replicated today to see results significantly higher than was achieved when the experiments were conducted back in the 19th and early 20th century.
It might be a little simoplistic to expect the outcome of the experiments replicated today to be some 400:280 greater than the results achieved when they were contemporaneously conducted, but if we do not now see a significantly higher resulting CO2 level, then this would lead me to consider that the old chemical analyses ought not to be dismissed out of hand, and perhaps CO2 levels were higher than we presently conclude and perhaps that CO2 levels are more variable than we presently give credit.
It surprises me that no climate scientist has thought to replicate those old experiments to see what results would be achieved today. Indeed, I would have expected any paper that suggests that those experiments are flawed and not representative of CO2 levels at the time, ought to have contained a replication of those experiments so as to produce proper corrobarative proof that it is right to dismiss those old experiments. But unfortunately, one cannot expect to see proper science conducted in the field of climate science..
I am slightly confused. The carbon cycle used by the IPCC seems to state that CO2 was in equilibrium until humans started to pump out excessive CO2. The UK government seems to suggest only 6% of CO2 is human. How do these two ideas hold together?
If we are only producing 6% of the total, surely 94% of the increase is not humans and therefore the CO2 cycle is not in equilibrium.
(I am never convinced of anything in nature being in equilibrium, everything works in cycles. It reminds me of Gordon Brown who thought he had got rid of boom and bust. That was not a great theory either!!)
"The UK's emissions reductions alone would result in a small but crucial proportion of total global emissions reductions"
But how small? That is what his lordship was asking, after all.
And, jamesp, how "crucial"? What does that even mean?
It means "We still need all the money."