Green vision

This morning I chanced upon some interesting documents that set out the vision for the UK of Friends of the Earth. The docs are FoE's contribution to the 2050 Calculator site set up by DECC's former chief scientist David Mackay a few years ago. The site allows users to set down how they think the UK's energy mix should be achieved in the future.

In the graph below (click for larger), we can see that FoE believe that we are going to reduce demand by 30% or so, which strikes me as optimistic. More interestingly they seem to have recognised that we are going to need standby gas powered generation right through to 2050. However, in their wisdom, they seem to think that three quarters of this gas should be imported rather than produced locally. Their stance on oil is similar. Given their stance on unconventional gas this is probably the only choice, but the conclusion must be that FoE believe that when calculating the trade off between environmental posturing and carbon emissions, it is environmental posturing that should win out.

So much for caring about the planet.

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Who's behind the RICO push?

Shub Niggurath has been taking a look at a report by the Climate Accountability Institute, a small California non-profit, with links to the renewable energy industry, and which features Michael Mann among its advisers. The Institute seems to have been coordinating efforts to bring racketeering charges against climate dissenters in the USA.

The report in question describes a 2012 conference at which the strategy was agreed and Shub's report makes for fascinating reading. The list of those who took part is interesting. Some were entirely expected - Naomi Oreskes and James Hoggan for example - but it was slightly more surprising to see Myles Allen there.

South Australia today, UK tomorrow?

The authorities in South Australia have been pretty right on in terms of their devotion to the green cause, and the state has been in the forefront of efforts to increase renewables' share of electricity generation. That being the case, the state is something of a leading indicator for us here in the UK. Over the weekend there were strong hints that the chickens are coming home to roost.

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Enforcing the dogma

Over the weekend, news emerged that the decision by French weatherman Philippe Verdier to come out as a sceptic has resulted in swift retribution.

The Head of Weather France 2, away from the antenna to its challenges to the consequences of global warming, aired Saturday night, a video claiming he was fired by the public channel.

Last year, Roy Spencer was widely criticised for referring to global warming Nazis. But as the list of those who have lost their jobs for questioning the orthodoxy grows, you have to ask yourself, was Spencer wrong?

In related news another weatherman has announced that he is not a sceptic any longer.

Greg Fishel was once a Limbaugh-loving climate skeptic. Now he’s fighting global warming.

You can see why that might be an attractive option.

Food fight in Dodge City - Josh 350

Click image for larger version

With Last Chance Saloons in mind it is worth pausing to consider the amazing '97% consensus' (TM Climate Science) around the The Pause. It's been in the news this week with the Karl et al paper, the 'no-you-cant-have-our-emails' story, and the Meehl paper with comment by David Whitehouse. Cheers again, guys!

Cartoons by Josh

Battery hype

UK readers might recall the episode of Top Gear, when Jeremy Clarkson drove from London to Edinburgh on a single tank of fuel. Today there are claims floating round that electric cars will soon be able to achieve the same feat.

A breakthrough in electrochemistry at Cambridge university could lead the way to rechargeable super-batteries that pack five times more energy into a given space than today’s best batteries, greatly extending the range of electric vehicles and potentially transforming the economics of electricity storage.

This sounds like great stuff, although if you read further, Clare Grey, the researcher whose breakthrough this is, says that there are a lot of caveats:

We haven’t solved all the problems inherent to this chemistry.

...at least another decade of work is likely to be required to turn it into a commercial battery

She also claims that the battery can be recharged 2000 times, which, if it can also take a car the 400 miles from London to Edinburgh on a single charge, would give it a theoretical lifetime range of 800,000 miles.

I'm not sure I'm going to hold my breath here.

The last chance saloons

https://www.flickr.com/photos/spendadaytouring/3627047294Ahead of the Paris climate conference, Climate Change Predictions is having a lovely time reviewing all the previous "last chances" we have faced.

Just how many last chance saloons are there in Climateville?

Just what is DFiD spending money on?

On a whim, I downloaded the monthly expenditure details from the Department for International Development for August 2015, the most recent figures available.

Of interest are payments to:

• ClientEarth £246,171 Aid programme
• Climate Policy Initiative £32,500 Project delivery
• WWF £371,860 Aid programme, Asia, Caribbean and Overseas Territories
• World Resources Institute £867,847 Aid programme grants,Policy division
• Solar Aid £239,875
• Environmental Investigation Agency £69,416 Aid programme grants, policy division

I don't know about you but you could get the impression that a great deal of what DFiD reports as overseas aid spending is actually bungs to environmentalists.

Update on Oct 29, 2015 by Bishop Hill

WWF seem to have been getting as much as £3-4m per year in the past. The figure above suggests that this has not changed much. Given what we know about WWF removing people from their homes to make way for wildlife (1, 2), you have to say that this is a pretty odd definition of "development".

Buying research

There is a rather interesting article in Times Higher Education today. It considers the question of whether academics are getting a reputation as being for sale. Actually I'm not sure why this is considered a question, as evidence that a significant proportion of academics will write a paper to show pretty much anything is hardly lacking. Who can forget the round robin from WWF to climate scientists trying to find someone to write a paper linking a heatwave in France to climate change? Or the Sarah Muckherjee's claim that most climate research was funded by big green.

The LSE's relationship with its funders has been the source of constant entertainment here at BH, with Colonel Gaddaffi and Jeremy Grantham apparently getting good value for money, so it's fun to see the article uncover that these are not the only parts of the LSE where money seems to be talking. The now notorious "charity" Kids Company seems to have been an active funder of "research" there:

In interviews, the charity’s chief executive, Camila Batmanghelidjh, cited a 2013 report from researchers at the London School of Economics as evidence that the organisation was well managed. However, neither she nor the report itself pointed out that the study had been funded by a £40,000 grant from Kids Company.

Read the whole thing.

Cheers, Gavin! - Josh 349

Here's an odd thing.

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Making poverty permanent

The World Bank thinks we can end poverty by making energy more expensive.

Behind the CCC's numbers

Updated on Oct 28, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In my absence last week, I missed the latest from the Committee on Climate Change, a document entitled "Power sector scenarios for the fifth carbon budget". This was widely reported as showing that renewables would be competitive with natural gas by 2020.

A reader has sent me some interesting observations which I thought were worth sharing.

Take this for example:

In a central scenario for gas prices and with a value attached to carbon that is consistent with meeting the UK’s 2050 target, the full cost of new gas generation would be £85/MWh for new plants coming on line in 2020 and £95/MWh for 2025. That assumes a gas price that increases from 46p/therm in 2015 to 66p/therm by 2025;

In fact, in a footnote, they note that the central scenario was in fact for a price of 72p/therm, but that they decided to reduce it by 6p "given sustained low gas prices".

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Meehl bashes Karl

The US CLIVAR project publishes a newsletter/cum journal, a recent issue of which was dedicated to the hiatus in global warming. Featuring papers from a variety of well-known climatologists, I was interested to see the headline article, from Gerald Meehl, which seems to take a fairly hefty pot-shot at the data tweaking approach adopted by many climatologists.

There have been recent claims that the early-2000s hiatus...was an artifact of problematic sea surface temperature (SST) data (Karl et al. 2015), lack of Arctic data (Cowtan and Way 2014), or both. Such claims indicate that when corrections are made to SST data, by taking into account various measurement methods that introduce biases in the data, then “there was no ‘hiatus’ in temperature rise...[and] a presumed pause in the rise of Earth’s average global surface temperature might never have happened” (Wendel 2015). Often there are issues with observed data that need adjusting - in this case such claims of “no hiatus” are artifacts of questionable interpretation of decadal timescale variability and externally forced response - not problems with the data. Thus, the hiatus is symptomatic of the much broader and very compelling problem of decadal timescale variability of the climate system.

Whether Meehl is any more correct than Karl is anyone's guess though.

When the Tyndall Centre loved big oil

Kevin Anderson, the deputy director of the Tyndall Centre, wondered a couple of days ago whether oil-company funding was "worse than tobacco funding".

Report concludes top UK uny's receive major Oil funding&influence https://t.co/6XYamaxoBE @OfficialUoM Worse/better than tobacco funding?

— Kevin Anderson (@KevinClimate) October 24, 2015

How different to the founders of the Tyndall Centre, who were extremely keen on oil companies, discussing a strategic partnership with Shell that would include the provision of funding, placements of students with the company.

What happened in the intervening years I wonder, to change the minds of the Tyndall Centre people so far?

Wake me up when it's over

The news on Twitter this morning is that a small group of greens have tied themselves to machinery at the Banks Mining opencast site in Matt Ridley's back garden.

Yawn.

Update on Oct 26, 2015 by Bishop Hill

It's over. Nine arrests.

See you in the morning.