Bishop Hill Their lordships bestir themselves
Dec 9, 2014 Climate: Parliament The House of Lords Science and Technology Committee were taking evidence on the subject of the resilience of the electricity grid, hearing from Kevin Anderson among others.
Some of the exchanges seemed rather significant to me.
At around 10:44 Anderson suggested that future temperature rises could increase demand for airconditioning, producing a doubling of the load on the grid. Demand from electric cars could produce a similar increase and demand for heat would produce the same increase again.
This was all heard in respectful silence by their lordships, but then at 11:00 Matt Ridley asked a simple question that seemed to launch something of a rebellion by the committee, who did the absolutely unthinkable and started challenging the good professor. Who didn't seem to like it.
I can't remember such a hostile reception for a green in Parliament before.
Reader Comments (82)
Payin' these prediction 'experts,' who have never heard of Philip Tetlock's study on experts' poor
prediction - record, from Malthus, Ehrlich et AL, and who never have to act under the old Hammurabi Code
of responsibility to the public for their costly 'expert' mistakes, hmph... There's a big difference between
'knowing what' and 'knowing how,' the latter involves feedback and personal responsibility, like builders of
dams and bridges and aircraft pilots and surgeons and dentists. Whereas Professor Anderson and those
U.N. bureaucrats ... beth the serf.
Extraordinary. No opening formal definition of terms I could identify. The sobriquet 'climate change' used as a synonym for 'weather'. Unsure why Matt Ridley didn't hammer the nonsense of a 4C temp rise by 2050 and the obvious, that this was based on IPCC models that have relentlessly proved their unerring accuracy....http://www.energyadvocate.com/gc1.jpg
Dear me.Wee Kev didn't do his homework, did he?
Here are a few of his basic errors
1. Did not research his audience ('I don't know your background'). Should have. Its the House of Lords. Could have. You can look them up.
2. Did not have a firm grasp on his figures....went into 'bullshit baffles brains' spiel when Ridley asked a pretty simple question
3. Patronised the audience (reference to astrology).
4. Appealed to authority, not data
etc
A performance that only highlighted the superficiality and fragility of his 'case'.
The comparison with the design guys easy mastery of his subject and admissions of ignorance is quite marked.
Way back when in sales training, the worst mark was 'Unsatisfactory, Did Harm'. Anderson would have scored UDH- on my book.
Bring on the Tumbrils, thats wot I sez. Grrrr...
Dec 9, 2014 at 10:08 PM | Unregistered Commentergareth
We have one Guillotine left in the Paris musée. I have been dying to get it out.
Shame about using silverlight for the video. Might as well have published it in Betamax as far as I am concerned...
It will probably be a requirement that all these new aircon units be placed as close as possible to temperature measuring instruments so that temperature records fall more in line with the models.
I previously contributed analysis underpinning the UK’s Climate Change Act and the development of national carbon budgets.
So, Anderson admits his guilt. Now that he has confessed the verdict should be a formality. All that needs to be decided is the sentence.
We've spent several weeks every year in Indonesia during their slightly cooler rainy season, when the temperature can still be around 30-35 degrees C and it is really humid. We don't have the air-con on at all during the day, using a ceiling fan if necessary while sitting down in the afternoon and having doors and windows wide open. The air-con is used at night only, in closed bedrooms,so reckoning that it would be used most during the day in the UK is probably inaccurate anyway.
"Kevin Anderson seems to be ignorant of climate science." Dec 9, 2014 at 6:32 PM | CharmingQuark
Perhaps that's because he isn't a climate scientist. He starts from the view point that Global Warming as per IPCC is a given and then proceeds to play computer games around it. There is no research, there is no new science, the approach is: "given this, what will happen if that".
He is a Marine Engineer, and I understand is shortly to release a Christmas cover version of "Trains and Boats and Planes", with Rajendra Pachauri and Richard Branson. (Burt Baccharach, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tmSyWzbxazk)
Anderson's bio at Manchester Tyndall:
"Research Director of Tyndall-Manchester's Energy and Climate Change programme and manager of the Tyndall Centre's energy pathways to global decarbonisation programme. Kevin is based in the Department of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering at the University of Manchester and is an honorary lecturer in Environmental Management at the Manchester Business School.
Managing and understanding the linkages between the disparate projects demands a genuinely interdisciplinary approach, synthesising, for example, highly technical electrical power systems research with conceptually demanding interpretations of equity and carbon emissions scenarios for the UK's energy system."
I love that last sentence. "Conceptually demanding?" This isn't science, this is just sociological claptrap. He was the originator of the idea of personal carbon credit cards, fill up your car swipe your card, credits used. Don't drive so much? Sell your allowance to someone who does.
Silly? In a former penal colony, "Norfolk Island to trial world's first personal carbon trading scheme"
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/australiaandthepacific/australia/8092210/Norfolk-Island-to-trial-worlds-first-personal-carbon-trading-scheme.html
"Norfolk Island, a former British penal colony in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, is to become the first place in the world to trial a personal carbon trading program.
Anderson's collaborator on many papers is Alice Bows. She is not a climate scientist either, but a climate modeller and PR specialist.
Her bio from Manchester Tyndall:
"Alice trained initially as an astrophysicist at the University of Leeds, and made a transition into climate change research by taking a PhD in climate modelling at Imperial College in London. After completing her PhD in 1999 she left academia to work in science communication, firstly as a press officer at the Institute of Physics and then in charge of media relations at a London medical school."
Again, she is taking IPCC as a given, and building scenarios around it. This is not research, this is not science, this is not discovery. She has been working with a 3 year research grant of £257,000 on the development and socio-economic analysis of low-carbon pathways for aviation in the North West region.
More sociological nonsense dressed up as science.
I'm always amazed when people like Prof. Anderson say "we know we're putting more energy into the system" when it's clear that this is a modelling conclusion, not a fact. It would only take a small change in cloud behaviour (i.e. albedo) to eliminate this supposed excess (i.e. 4 Hiroshima atom bombs per second!).
It's also a pity that someone didn't mention Dr Judith Curry when he talked about consulting climate 'experts' over "astrologists" for an understanding of climate change science.
Never worry, the National Grid has it all under control, as John Brignell at Numberwatch has discovered, do have a look, it's priceless:
http://www.numberwatch.co.uk/2014%20November.htm#Grid
Anderson was an engineer – even worse, a Marine Engineer? And he is associated with Civil Engineers? Oh, dear – we are doomed!
I have known quite a number of engineers, and, while pretty much all mad as hatters, a more grounded bunch of realists would be difficult to find. Well, perhaps this is why he moved from doing to teaching. It is just a shame that this should somehow give him greater credibility amongst the ignorati.
Others have commented on Anderson's barking air-conditioning figures. (14,500 units a year for the average household!). On heat pumps the figure is the same. So in his world, every house would be heated by a heat pump, and each one would consume 14.5 MWh per annum, implying a household heat load of ~45 MWh per annum (CoP=3) - in a warming world. Oh, and none of the heat pumps would be arranged for cooling. Nope, can't see anything wrong with those figures at all prof Anderson. Just one minor niggle on presentation: when you're talking about energy it's really smart (geddit!) to speak of TWh and not TW - but I'm sure you know that. I'm relieved to see that the education of our future engineers is in such safe hands.
And no sooner do we get rid of the university prof of energy-whatever, than we get another one from Exeter.
Seems to me that, as a general approach to dealing with issue X, consulting experts on X is reasonable. (It would surely be unreasonable to studiously avoid experts.) It's just that things get rather complicated when there is deep disagreement on who the experts on X are and, possibly, over the nature of X itself.
ZT - thanks for the YouTube link. That worked for me - the original didn't.
Bish - please can you add the YouTube option as an update to the post?
http://www.parliamentlive.tv/Main/Player.aspx?meetingId=16748&player=windowsmedia
is the link for those who cant use silverlight.
No he wasn't.
What are the assumptions behind that?
I think that Kevin may have been trained at the SkS school of "how to talk to a sceptic".
A really good example of how to impress with your depth of understanding and how to bring people round to your point of view.
28:16
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=hJ0JyGMA-ak#t=1689
Pulling out the co2 graph when asked what would cause the sudden jump in temperatures from now to 2050 compared to the last 35 years was a laugh out loud moment for me.
Next question should have been "do you have a graph that shows that alongside global temperature since for the last 35 years? If not can you make a guess about the correlation?"
"Now I will ask my last question again: What makes you think there will be a sudden jump in the next 35 years that hasn't been recorded in the last 35 years."
I bet I could have got him to say "hiding in the deep ocean" ;)
So - Anderson is a 'climate expert' is he..?
God help us...
Will the moderates of the Establishment be calling BS on the 3-4C increase by 2050 as they did when Wadhams? had his jumping the shark moment.
"This is not supported by mainstream scientists" would sound rather good.
In the absence of such clarification we'd better all get some air-conditioning installed pronto.
Ahem.....if this is suuppsedly the warmest year on record by 0.01 degrees and we are using less energy because of it then warming obviously puts overall less stress on the grid. End of argument.
What a shower!
Of course, Anderson doesn't take showers...
Meanwhile I read that the "weather bomb" © Met Office has caused a major power outage in the Western Isles affecting 17,500 consumers. Perhaps we need to know more: all the power company is admitting to is that it has been caused by lightning strikes. So - were all the windmills shut down because it was too strong a wind? Were the windmills the offending structures struck by bolts that knocked out the volts? Grid resilience and all that...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-scotland-30402293
This "if you've got an illness you go to an expert" analogy needs carrying on to its logical conclusion.
We've seen many "experts" already and they have all told us we'd be dead by now for many different reasons and in many different ways. Why would we go to another so-called "expert"?
Re: "weather bomb" - catchy name, seems to be about one or two a week in winter:
//
Over the year, 45 cyclones on average in the Northern Hemisphere and 26 develop explosively in the Southern Hemisphere, mostly in the respective hemisphere winter time.
http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bomb_(meteorology)
//
Can you explain how Matt Ridley gets to ask questions in Parliament?
Could we see him on CSPAN questioning Cameron?
MikeN, "Matt Ridley" is Matthew White Ridley, 5th Viscount Ridley. He is a member of the House of Lords.
Here is what Anderson said in the 2009 BBC Radio programme "Getting to Four Degrees".
“I mean there are some things in science, you know, gravity will remain roughly the same, there will be lots of things in science that remain the same. And therefore we can say quite a lot about the physical makeup of the world. And if you know there’s 9 million billion people in there about how they may respond.”
With his vague appreciation of the laws of physics, and no idea about the world's population, is the job title "Professor" today synonymous with "Bloke Down The Pub"? He is a Director of Greenstone Carbon Management Ltd., or was in 2009.
Silverlight and Real Player are two applications I have no interest in ever loading again on any of my computers. Whichever of the posters above that provided the youtube link:
▶ Kevin Anderson, Matt Ridley, and others 2014-12-09 - YouTube
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hJ0JyGMA-ak&feature=youtu.be&t=21m2s
should be thanked and possibly cursed at the same time. These sessions are always so frustrating to go through!
Regarding the Ridley+ other lords exchange being discussed from what I gather the position is that we can take the recommendations of the "experts" that have yet to get anything right or we can listen to the people that point out the actual facts of the matter and present the observed data.
It is a debating tactic for advocates to present their hypothetical premise one moment and the speak of all the disastrous predictions with "will happen" without prefacing each statement with the stipulation "if suddenly we gained understanding of the climate and to our surprise there materializes a link between our radical theories and reality".
How these people go on and on as if dramatic climate change and increasing severity of events has occurred in the face off all evidence to the contrary is beyond belief. They do not seem to live in the same world that the population lives and breathes.
"He was the originator of the idea of personal carbon credit cards...
No he wasn't."
Dec 10, 2014 at 11:34 AM | RichieRich
Oh, Yes He Was!
Was it you then? Are you really Richie Starkey?
http://www.tyndall.ac.uk/sites/default/files/t3_22.pdf
"Domestic Tradable Quotas: A policy instrument for reducing greenhouse gas emissions from energy use"
Richard Starkey, Tyndall Centre, School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, University of Manchester,
Dr Kevin Anderson, Tyndall Centre, School of Mechanical, Aerospace and Civil Engineering, University of Manchester
2004, http://www.theguardian.com/society/2004/apr/29/environment.comment
"Here's how our scheme works. First, the government sets an annual carbon budget - the maximum quantity of emissions permitted from energy use - which reduces year on year until the 2050 target is reached.
Each year's budget is broken down into carbon units (say 1 unit = 1 kg of CO2). Households are responsible for about 40% of energy emissions, so this proportion of units is allocated equally and without charge to every citizen over 18. The remaining units are auctioned to organisations.
Then, when citizens or organisations purchase fuel or electricity they surrender corresponding units from their carbon card.
Now comes the clever bit. Each card links to a national database allowing individuals to trade their carbon units. Say, for example, you need to drive to work, but have no carbon units left. No problem, the garage simply goes into the national market and buys the number of units needed. The cost is added to your bill.
To be effective, the scheme would need to be technically and administratively feasible and acceptable to the public. Clearly it requires a central database to hold the carbon accounts and record transactions. Computer experts say such a database is not a problem using current technology, and neither is linking our 11,000 garages to it in real-time.
There is one obvious sticking point: the government would need a list of individuals entitled to carbon units. In other words, it would need a population register: but one would be created for the proposed ID card scheme. In fact, the ID card could act as the carbon card.
Finally, the scheme scores well for efficiency. According to economists, its market approach is the most cost-effective route to reduce emissions.
Richard Starkey and Kevin Anderson are scientists at the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research, Umist"
If it wasn't him and his colleague, who did they steal it off? Certainly not Ed Miliband two years later, http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2006/dec/11/uk.greenpolitics
"Every citizen would be issued with a carbon "credit card" - to be swiped every time they bought petrol, paid an energy utility bill or booked an airline ticket - under a nationwide carbon rationing scheme that could come into operation within five years, according to a feasibility study commissioned by the environment secretary, David Miliband, and published today.
In an interview with the Guardian Mr Miliband said the idea of individual carbon allowances had "a simplicity and beauty that would reward carbon thrift"."
Classic. I love it