Sceptics' impact on climate science

Amelia Sharman has published a rather interesting working paper about the impact of controversy in the climate debate. At its core is a survey of climate scientists and sceptics, asking what impact all that argy-bargy in recent years has had.

The main conclusion is that the impact has been both positive and negative, but focused more on the way the scientists communicate their findings than the way in which they conduct their research: "increased caution, followed by disruption, a greater focus on communication, defensiveness and a reluctance to publicly engage."

I sense that the two sides of the climate debate might view "increased caution" as falling on different sides of the positive/negative divide. I certainly view one of sceptics' chief impacts as being to force the Met Office to moderate the tide of wild claims that it used to issue about the climate, something that a PR officer there once acknowledged to me.

We also read of work being reexamined as a result of postings at Climate Audit, and of research being accelerated to address sceptic claims.

It's fascinating stuff, and if you can get through the jargon in the first and last sections it is very readable.

Puffed rice

Here's an interesting wrinkle in climate science that I hadn't thought about before. It came up in a thread at Ken Rice's place, underneath an article about carbon dioxide reductions.

The specific claim of interest was that "the amount of warming depends almost linearly on cumulative emissions". This is a claim that you hear quite often, with the corollary being that even if we halt carbon dioxide emissions, temperatures are going to remain high for centuries. However, it seems that the scientific veracity of the statement is not exactly set in stone, as Nic Lewis points out in the comments.

For the record, whilst this may be true for simulations by most current Earth system models, it is an entirely model dependent result. So please don’t present it as if a fact. If one builds a model with a low ECS, and moderate climate-cycle feedbacks, warming peaks immediately if emissions cease and declines quite rapidly thereafter. Which would happen in the real climate system is not as yet known, of course.

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Quote of the day, recycling edition

Religious rituals don’t need any practical justification for the believers who perform them voluntarily. But many recyclers want more than just the freedom to practice their religion. They want to make these rituals mandatory for everyone else, too, with stiff fines for sinners who don’t sort properly.

John Tierney revisits his legendary 1996 article about the insanity of most forms of recycling and concludes, that 20 years on, he remains completely correct.

I don't think he is mistaken.

Coffee, with a pinch of salt

Bloomberg has an article out claiming that coffee production is being hit by climate change:

Global Coffee Shortage Looms as Market Braces for Climate Change

Rising consumption, especially in emerging markets, means global production will have to rise by an extra 40 million to 50 million bags of coffee in the next decade, said Andrea Illy, the chairman and chief executive officer of Illycafe SpA, a roaster based in Trieste, Italy. That’s more than the entire crop of Brazil.

Throw in the looming threat of climate change, as well as low prices that are discouraging farmers from increasing output, and you’ve got a potential problem. It’s something producers, government officials and industry representatives are trying to tackle this week at the Global Coffee Forum in Milan.

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The carneyage of Mystic Mark

It is said that once people start laughing at you, you are completely finished. I think Mark Carney may have reached that point:

The scene is the governor’s office at the Bank of England. Mark Carney is talking to an aide.

Governor, about your forthcoming speech to the chambers of commerce.

Yes

It seems to be about alien life forms.

You’ve seen the news from Mars?

I have, but this speech is supposed to be about labour flexibility and the downside risks to productivity.

You don’t see the downside risks from extremophile bacteria in the briny water on Mars?

Not in the short to medium term, Governor.

Read the whole thing...

Church on Syria

The Welsh singer Charlotte Church is trying to reinvent herself as a political pundit, and is certainly doing rather well on the PR front. Last night she managed to get herself on Question Time. Unfortunately I don't think her appearance will have done much for her political aspirations, but she certainly did the whole "slightly flaky showbiz person" thing pretty well, in particular repeating the old canard about the Syrian crisis being something to do with climate change, accompanied by lots of frowning to show how serious she was.

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Congress to investigate Shukla

Via GWPF, we learn that the US Congress has decided to investigate the institution behind the RICO letter, which called for sceptical scientists to be prosecuted for racketeering. As everyone no doubt knows, some of the authors of the letter appear to have been lining their pockets with taxpayer dollars in a fairly brazen manner.

Science, Space, and Technology Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas) today sent a letter to Dr. Jagadish Shukla, a professor of climate dynamics at George Mason University who founded the Institute of Global Environment and Society (IGES). IGES is a non-profit organization that has received millions of dollars in federal grants from the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) and NASA.

Don't you just love it when scientivists overstep the mark?

Climate cool-aid

Via El Reg, we discover that a whole new source of climate coolants has been discovered.

A team of top-level atmospheric chemistry boffins from France and Germany say they have identified a new process by which vast amounts of volatile organic compounds (VOCs) are emitted into the atmosphere from the sea - a process which was unknown until now, meaning that existing climate models do not take account of it.

The coolant in which they are interested is isoprene, which was previously thought to be produced mainly by marine plankton. It now seems that it can be produced abiotically too, and in quantities that might even explain the model-observation divergence.

As with the last story, I'd suggest a measure of caution might be valuable.

A new fusion process

A collaboration between researchers in Sweden and Icelands claim to have developed a new nuclear fusion process. It's based on deuterium, and takes place in in small laser-initiated reactors. More importantly they say that they have already got it generating more power than it consumes.

The laser-induced nuclear fusion process in ultra-dense deuterium D(0) gives a heating power at least a factor of 2 larger than the laser power into the apparatus, thus clearly above break-even. This is found with 100-200 mJ laser pulse-energy into the apparatus. No heating is used in the system, to minimize problems with heat transfer and gas transport. This gives sub-optimal conditions, and the number of MeV particles (and thus their energy) created in the fusion process is a factor of 10 below previous more optimized conditions. Several factors lead to lower measured heat than the true value, and the results found are thus lower limits to the real performance. With the optimum source conditions used previously, a gain of 20 is likely also for longer periods.

Inevitably with nuclear fusion, a degree of caution is always advisable. Nevertheless, it's an interesting paper, which can be seen here.

Hybrids and the cost of virtue signalling

Readers will be much amused by the recent report from consultancy firm Element Energy (see bottom of post). Prepared for Lord Deben's Committee on Climate Change, it describes the gap between real-world performance of motor vehicles and what happens in the test laboratory - a topical subject, I'm sure you will agree.

The report's main theme is that manufacturers are gaming the rules of the test procedures to make their cars appear to perform better than they will do in real life. The performance gap could be as much as 50% in a few years' time although it is expected to shrink when new performance standards come into play.

What caught my eye was the discussion of hybrids. The official tests assume that hybrids are driven in electric mode for two thirds of their mileage. The reports authors' reckon that it is rather less and suggest that, as a result, the overall carbon emissions could be as much as 50% higher than suggested by the test results.

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A bloody truth or a big bloody truth

George Monbiot is sounding off about the guys at the Breakthrough Institute today - it seems they are insufficiently green for the great man's liking and so they are to receive a tongue lashing.

2/3: One of #ecomodernism's authors has been spreading a great blood libel against the green movement. http://t.co/nwdrg7qO58 @mark_lynas

— GeorgeMonbiot (@GeorgeMonbiot) September 30, 2015

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No significant trends in rainfall extremes

In January 2013, in the wake of some heavy rainfall, the Met Office published a non-peer-reviewed briefing paper that found that extreme rainfall might have increased. This was reported by Roger Harrabin here, with readers informed that "Professor Julia Slingo, chief scientist at the Met Office, said the preliminary analysis needed further research but was potentially significant."

Today, the International Journal of Climatology has published just what Prof Slingo was a looking for. However, the paper concerned has a more mixed message than I think she might have wanted:

The England and Wales precipitation (EWP) dataset is a homogeneous time series of daily accumulations from 1931 to 2014, composed from rain gauge observations spanning the region. The daily regional-average precipitation statistics are shown to be well described by a Weibull distribution, which is used to define extremes in terms of percentiles. Computed trends in annual and seasonal precipitation are sensitive to the period chosen, due to large variability on interannual and decadal timescales. Atmospheric circulation patterns associated with seasonal precipitation variability are identified. These patterns project onto known leading modes of variability, all of which involve displacements of the jet stream and storm-track over the eastern Atlantic. The intensity of daily precipitation for each calendar season is investigated by partitioning all observations into eight intensity categories contributing equally to the total precipitation in the dataset. Contrary to previous results based on shorter periods, no significant trends of the most intense categories are found between 1931 and 2014. The regional-average precipitation is found to share statistical properties common to the majority of individual stations across England and Wales used in previous studies. Statistics of the EWP data are examined for multi-day accumulations up to 10 days, which are more relevant for river flooding. Four recent years (2000, 2007, 2008 and 2012) have a greater number of extreme events in the 3- and 5-day accumulations than any previous year in the record. It is the duration of precipitation events in these years that is remarkable, rather than the magnitude of the daily accumulations.

I haven't read the paper, and so I wonder what other multi-day accumulations they tested and whether they assessed the possibility that these results might have happened by chance. I'm not sure I'm alarmed by any of this.

CCS projects may be uninsurable

While looking to see what the insurance industry made of Mark Carney's speech (they seem to have ignored it so far) I chanced upon an article in Insurance Times about CCS.

Insurers will be reluctant to cover projects that capture carbon emissions and store them permanently underground, or they may charge “large risk premiums”, according to Royal Dutch Shell.

“Insurance will be able to address only part of the financial risk exposure,” Shell said in a report on its planned Peterhouse Carbon Capture & Storage (CCS) project that the company posted on the Department of Energy & Climate Change website.

“As the risk can currently neither be defined nor quantified, no insurance solutions are available,” Shell said.

(They mean Peterhead rather than Peterhouse I think). Another nail in the coffin, I would say.

The otherworldliness of Mark Carney

The Governor of the Bank of England, Mark Carney, has once again been trying to use his position to bully the insurance industry into supporting the green movement. His speech last night at Lloyds of London was fascinating - a blend of pseudoscience, green activism and big state interventionism the likes of which one rarely finds outside DECC and Defra. 

As far as I can see, Carney's big idea was that more should be done "to develop consistent, comparable, reliable and clear disclosure around the carbon intensity of different assets". 

[A] framework for firms to publish information about their climate change footprint, and how they manage their risks and prepare (or not) for a 2 degree world, could encourage a virtuous circle of analyst demand and greater use by investors in their decision making.  It would also improve policymaker understanding of the sources of CO2 and corporate preparedness.

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RICO letter disappears

Steve Milloy notes that the letter by Shukla et al calling for sceptics to be had up on racketeering charges has suddenly disappeared from the website where it was hosted.

Run away.... Letter asking Obama for RICO investigation of skeptics removed from http://t.co/aV9olE1BMp website. pic.twitter.com/0u8zvEf0Ki

— Steve Milloy (@JunkScience) September 29, 2015

You can imagine the horror on the signatories' faces when they realised that some very determined people were about to take a close interest in their financial arrangements and those of their colleagues at IGES.

I'm not sure taking the letter down is going to help much though.