Jumping the climate shark

Yes folks, we may have reached peak climate drivel, with the news that we are being saved from impending climate disaster by the heroic actions of a hardy bunch of...sharks.

Turtle-eating sharks help slow global warming, scientist says

Sharks help to reduce global warming by eating sea turtles and other creatures that consume carbon-rich sea grasses, an Australian scientist said on Tuesday.

Sometimes there are no words adequate to describe the silliness of the climate change researcher.

Top trolling from the Sun

The Sun is to be commended for its splending trolling of the left-wing establishment.

Hidden advertising on the Today programme

The shale gas revolution is having its effect, and Shell has decided that drilling in the Arctic no longer makes economic sense. Radio 4's Today programme saw this as a valuable opportunity to give an environmentalist some airtime (audio below). Interestingly, the man chosen was Jeremy Leggett, best known as the author of a book about peak oil. I suppose we should recognise the BBC's chutzpah in choosing such a character to discuss the results of oversupply in the oil market.

Leggett was introduced as chairman of the "Carbon Tracker Initiative" and expounded at length about oil companies setting up renewables divisions. He also told us that it was not controversial to say that "droughts and floods and other horrors" are heading our way. More renewables are required.

With host James Naughtie listening on in docile fashion, the whole episode rather gave the impression that the people involved had something to sell. Certainly, Jeremy Leggett did, since as well as being involved in Carbon Tracker, he is also the director of a solar energy company.

The BBC forgot to mention that though.

Leggett Today

Follow the money

There is a big story breaking at Climate Audit right now about the authors of the letter demanding that climate sceptics be put on trial, and in particular the instigator, Jagadish Shukla.

In 2001, the earliest year thus far publicly available, in 2001, in addition to his university salary (not yet available, but presumably about $125,000), Shukla and his wife received a further $214,496  in compensation from IGES (Shukla -$128,796; Anne Shukla – $85,700).  Their combined compensation from IGES doubled over the next two years to approximately $400,000 (additional to Shukla’s university salary of say $130,000), for combined compensation of about $530,000 by 2004.

Shukla’s university salary increased dramatically over the decade reaching $250,866 by 2013 and $314,000 by 2014.  (In this latter year, Shukla was paid much more than Ed Wegman, a George Mason professor of similar seniority). Meanwhile, despite the apparent transition of IGES to George Mason, the income of the Shuklas from IGES continued to increase, reaching $547,000 by 2013.  Combined with Shukla’s university salary,  the total compensation of Shukla and his wife exceeded $800,000 in both 2013 and 2014.  In addition, as noted above, Shukla’s daughter continued to be employed by IGES in 2014; IGES also distributed $100,000 from its climate grant revenue to support an educational charity in India which Shukla had founded.

Windfarms' gannet problem

A new paper has apparently found that offshore windfarms pose a much greater threat to gannet populations than was previously thought. This is because when hunting they turn out to fly at a height that puts them in danger from turbine blades.

The RSPB are going to have an interesting time responding to these findings. They have previously said that they will only support windfarms that do not threaten bird populations. That's fine, but potentially problematic when you consider a map of gannet distribution in the UK.

There doesn't seem to be anywhere that you can put a windfarm offshore without it posing a threat to gannets.

Does this mean that the RSPB now has to oppose all offshore windfarms?

More laughs from the Cabot Institute

The famous..erm...Maldives dykes, keeping the sea at bayAccording to one of Stephan Lewandowsky's colleagues at the Cabot Institute, more than 80% of the Maldives lie below sea level.

Although ~30 to 100 cm of sea level rise may seem insignificant, it is worth considering what this means for other regions. For example, more than 80% of the Maldives lie one metre below sea level. In this region, sea level rise has the potential to impact up to 360,000 citizens and lead to widespread migration.

I would suggest that the author, Dr Gordon Inglis, has got a bit confused here, particularly as his source says something rather different.

Wadhams fails

Peter Wadhams is something of a favourite at BH, his researches into the paranormal, his physics-free sea-ice predictions and his concerns about assassination having provided readers with much entertainment over the years. The last of these claims led to an official complaint to the Press Regulator, but it seems that Prof Wadhams' complaint has been no more successful than his doom-laden predictions about the Arctic (£).

A Cambridge professor who claimed that assassins may have murdered three British scientists investigating the impact of global warming has had a complaint against The Times dismissed by the press regulator.

Prof Wadhams is an advisor to Pope Francis.

Great Evans above

Jo Nova carries a rather interesting piece today about some work done by her husband David Evans, who thinks he has uncovered a rather major flaw in the mathematics at the core of the basic model of the climate.

The climate models, it turns out, have 95% certainty but are based on partial derivatives of dependent variables with 0% certitude, and that’s a No No. Let me explain: effectively climate models model a hypothetical world where all things freeze in a constant state while one factor doubles. But in the real world, many variables are changing simultaneously and the rules are  different.

Partial differentials of dependent variables is a wildcard — it may produce an OK estimate sometimes, but other times it produces nonsense, and ominously, there is effectively no way to test. If the climate models predicted the climate, we’d know they got away with it. They didn’t, but we can’t say if they failed because of a partial derivative. It could have been something else. We just know it’s bad practice.

This sounds plausible to me. What do readers here think?

Quote of the day, goofy edition

This moment requires we the people to rethink democracy as a global mechanism for enacting policy for and by the planet.

Environmentalist Daphne Muller goes all Che Guevara

Fiddle me this - Josh 346

Volkswagen has been found cheating on US emissions tests. But with the Green Blob fiddling everything from Renewables to Global Temperatures, it's no wonder they thought this was ok. Some like Stephen Glover blame green zealots directly.

Cartoons by Josh

The fading dream of CCS

The pretence that carbon capture and storage can ever be a viable technology is looking increasingly hard to maintain, with the news that Drax will pull out of the White Rose CCS project in Yorkshire once the current phase is complete.

It's amusing to recall Ambrose Evans-Pritchard in the Telegraph just three weeks ago, telling us that the UK had "hit the jackpot" on the CCS front:

Britain is poised to take the lead in Europe, approving two CCS projects later this year with a £1bn grant. One will be a retro-fit on SSE's gas-fired plant at Peterhead in Scotland. The CO2 will be sent through the Golden Eye pipeline to storage sites in deep rock formations below the North Sea.

The other will be Drax's White Rose plant in Yorkshire, a purpose-built 448 MW "oxyfuel" plant for coal. With biomass, it promises negative carbon emissions.

Oh dear.

Malaria maths

Bjorn Lomborg's article in the New York post riffs on his traditional theme of prioritising spending on areas where the greatest benefits can be gained. It's not rocket science of course, although perhaps on the tricky side for your typical environmentalist.

As ever, Lomborg is fully accepting of mainstream climate science, as well as some of the wilder claims that are made about the impacts. Take malaria, for example. Lomborg accepts claims that malaria will be a bigger problem in a warming world, but does not accept that this is an argument for spending money on climate mitigation:

Click to read more ...

Kelly on Stern

Mike Kelly has a long piece in Standpoint magazine looking at Lord Stern's magnum opus and some of the big questions of the climate debate:

Those building the biblical Tower of Babel, intending to reach heaven, did not know where heaven was and hence when the project would be finished, or at what cost. Those setting out to solve the climate change problem now are in the same position. If we were to spend 10 or even 100 trillion dollars mitigating carbon dioxide emissions, what would happen to the climate? If we can’t evaluate whether reversing climate change would be value for money, why should we bother, when we can clearly identify many and better investments for such huge resources? The forthcoming Paris meeting on climate change will be setting out to build a modern Tower of Babel.

Well worth a read.

Environmentalism may not be perfect!

The Today programme picked up the current ecomodernism meme, with a segment in which Owen Paterson faced off against Greenpeace's Doug Parr on the subject of technology.

I can't recall a previous occasion on which someone has been permitted to take a potshot at environmentalists, so it will have been a surprise for the average Radio 4 listener, who has previously been led to believe that greenery is beyond reproach.

A three-minute segment on a news programme is just a gesture of course; we await (with no great sense of expectation) a three-part critique of environmentalism analogous to critiques the BBC has commissioned on, say, climate sceptics and libertarianism.

But nevertheless, credit where credit is due.

Audio below.

Paterson Ecomodernism

Joe Biden, ambulance chaser

Despite the fact that the Sahel has experienced relatively benign weather conditions for many years now and despite the fact that there has been a striking and well-documented greening of the region, attempts to link the wars and strife that still bedevil the region to the climate are still being made.

And the people spinning these yarns are often those who should know better. Last weekend US vice-president Joe Biden claimed that the Darfur conflict, which started more than ten years ago, is "all about" climate.

You think there’s a migration problem in Syria? Watch what happens when hundreds of millions of people in the south, south Asia are displaced trying to find new territory to live. Look what’s happened with Darfur. Darfur is all about climate change. It’s about arable land being evaporating, figuratively and literally, and warring over land.”

Unfortunately for Mr Biden's hypothesis, this review of Sahelian climate by UEA's Nick Brooks takes a different view:

• 20th century changes in climate probably not unusual...
• Darfur conflict from 2003 at time of climatic improvement
• Earlier droughts may have helped set stage, but no climate change “trigger”

I think we can conclude that Mr Biden is engaging in a bit of ambulance chasing. How low the office of VPOTUS has fallen!