Misson possible?

Just days after getting planning permission to drill 12 monitoring boreholes at its prospective shale pad in Misson, Nottinghamshire, IGas have started installing equipment.

Work begins at Misson site, Notts https://t.co/rSFppNFuIM #fracking @FrackFreeNotts pic.twitter.com/3kjxjeNpun

— NoFrackingBarnsley (@NoFrackBarnsley) January 28, 2016

Separate planning applications would be required to drill a well and again to frack it, so it's fair to say that there is a long road ahead.

A haszelnut in every bite

As I think I've mentioned before, I now  assume that most gongs are handed out to people, not for public service, but for "going the extra mile" in the furtherance of a cause dear to ministers' hearts. I was reminded of this when I read James Verdon's devastating take down of an article by our old friend Stuart Haszeldine OBE, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh.

I first came across the good professor when I appeared at a Spectator debate on windfarms, and he spent a section of his talk bad-mouthing The Hockey Stick Illusion, before admitting that he hadn't actually read it. I'm therefore always on the lookout for his latest utterances. Earlier this week, he and colleagues from his group at Edinburgh wrote an article for the Energy and Carbon blog about waste water disposal in the oil and gas industry, with a particular focus shale gas fields. Unconventional oil and gas is not obviously where their expertise lies, and so one might have expected a few errors to have crept in to their text, but as James Verdon points out in his response, the level of incorrectness is...a bit of a worry.

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A not-so-cunning plan

Just as the coalbed methane industry in Scotland looked as though it was going to become viable the SNP administration in Holyrood moved with considerable speed to kill it off. Shale gas looks as though it has gone the same way. 

Now, these same bright sparks have decided that the way forward is to set up some "schemes" for the offshore oil and gas industry, while calling on Westminster to deliver taxcuts. None of this will help an industry in which production costs are too high for the current marketplace. 

So to summarise, the SNP's strategy is to throw tidbits to the parts of the Scottish oil and gas industry that are not cost competitive and to close the bits that might just be able to spin a profit.

I have to say, I'm slightly unconvinced that this is going to work.

Hunky dory

The Institute of Mechanical Engineers has a report out today which looks at the UK's energy situation. It seems that we have a bit of a crisis ahead.

The loss of coal by 2025, along with growth in demand and the closure of the majority of our nuclear power stations will therefore be significant, leaving a potential supply gap of 40%–55%, depending on wind levels.

To bridge this gap, the Institute sees no option but new gas=fired power stations and UK shale gas. As they explain though, there are some slight problems with this strategy. If there is no increase in demand then we are only (only!) going to need 30 new CCGT power stations. Unfortunately we don't enough skilled people to build them. And demand actually looks set to go up. And the greens are going to prevent UK shale going ahead. 

Apart from that it's all hunky dory.

Crooked briefs

Yesterday a magistrate handed down a guilty verdict to the loons from the Plane Stupid group who went airside at Heathrow airport last year and disrupted operations for several hours. A jail sentence is, apparently, "almost inevitable". Many of the perps seem to have form for this sort of thing. Kara Moses, for example, has previous form relating to fracking and Didcot power station; Sheila Menon was involved at Balcombe.

Perhaps the most interesting one though is Melanie Strickland, who turns out to be a solicitor and author for the Law Society Gazette. 

Can't she be struck off for this kind of thing?

How is this not fraud?

I'm not a great one for shouting fraud, but I can't see that there is any other conclusion that one can draw.

Somebody on Kickstarter is trying to raise funds for a film about Kiribati, the coral atoll that all BH readers know is not getting smaller. 

Yet the promoters of this film are saying this (click for larger):

That to me looks distinctly like a false statement being used to raise money. A fraud, in other words.

Recollections of Bob Carter

This is a guest post by Professor David Henderson.

I became involved with climate change issues, entirely by accident, at the end of 2002. A year or so after this event, as my acquaintance with the subject broadened, I became aware of Bob Carter’s writings, and I was impressed. I marked him down as an author to be followed.

It was not until 2006 that we met, through an initiative on my part. At the end of 2005 the Stern Review was published. I felt that it deserved a comprehensive critique, and so far as the economic aspects were concerned a team of potential authors was already to hand. Well before the Review appeared, Sir Nicholas Stern (as he then was) had given a public lecture the text of which was published (together with an annex on climate science). I put together a team of nine economists, and we published in the journal World Economics (June 2006} a short critical article entitled ‘Climate Change: The Stern Review “Oxonia Papers”’.  Alongside our piece there also appeared a reply by Stern.

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A "substantial" error in GISS Model E

Over the weekend Nic Lewis posted a brief update to his latest posting on the Marvel et al paper. In it, he described something he had unearthed in a paper by Chandler et al. I've reproduced it here.

I have just discovered (from Chandler et al 2013) that there was an error in the ocean model in the version of GISS-E2-R used to run the CMIP5 simulations. The single forcing simulations were part of the CMIP5 design, although it is possible that some or all of them were run after the correction was implemented.

Chandler et al write:

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Probable cause - Josh 358

Where does one start with a topic like "The Hottest Year Evah"? Probably with a climate expert - happily we have one right here

Cartoons by Josh

The daft and the non-daft climate model runs

Nic Lewis has published another fascinating article about the Marvel et al paper over at Climate Audit. I was particularly taken by the discussion of the GCM runs that lay behind Marvel et al's assessment of the effect of land-use changes.

In essence, the authors did five runs of the model, with only land-use forcing changes. This tends to produce a cooling, and four of the runs gave similar results, with their average looking like this:

But one looked entirely different; like this:

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What's up with El Reg?

A few days back The Conversation published a moderately dull article about paleoclimate, written by a couple of postdocs at Bristol. Its title kind of gave the game away up front:

The last time Earth was this hot hippos lived in Britain (that’s 130,000 years ago)

This introduced a temperature reconstruction that had been bodged together by an author at Wikimedia. It all seemed fairly pitiful to me, and hardly worth the bother, although I wondered for a time about whether I could get an easy laugh by noting that the authors had cited approvingly Michael Mann's 2008 carcrash paper:

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Paris and the risk of green judges

@Robin Hutton under CC licence. Click for link.Paris has been and gone and attention has mostly moved on to the latest eccentric claim about what the climate is going to do to us next (intoxicated fish anyone?). But a few outlets are still asking questions. Yesterday Carbon Brief explained that the timetable for ratification is almost impossibly vague:

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Real-world efficacies

BH readers have long been aware that low estimates of climate sensitivity based on observations are little affected by the pause and will therefore be little affected by this year's El Nino either. The discussion in this area will continue to focus on subjects like efficacies and aerosols. Marvel and colleagues are apparently formulating a response to Nic Lewis's critique, which is sure to be interesting. While we're waiting, I have been passed a preprint of a forthcoming Piers Forster paper in Annual Review of Earth and Planetary Sciences, which makes some interesting observations on the efficacy debate.

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Hot, apparently

© Copyright ronnie leask under CC licence. Click for link.So the stove is on, and outside the snow is starting to melt a little. It looks as though a thaw will set in by this evening.

Meanwhile Twitter and the newswaves are awash with tales of warmest years, although I have to say most of it has passed me by. I did pick up this interesting exchange on Josh's feed though.

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Xing's bendy hockey stick

You wait for ages for a hockey stick to turn up and suddenly two turn up at once. Hot on the heels of the Wilson et al temperature reconstruction comes Xing et al, a new effort from a Chinese team. In their figure, shown below, it's the blue line we're interested in. In truth it's a pretty bendy hockey stick.

A few thoughts and observations based on a skim of the paper:

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