Another one bites the dust

Following close on the resignations of key officials at DECC, the Prime Minister's climate change adviser Ben Moxham has decided to call it a day too.

Ben Moxham, senior policy adviser on energy and the environment at Number 10, has become the latest in a line of key energy experts to leave government.

Moxham is understood to have become frustrated that climate change has slid down the government's agenda.

Update on May 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The Telegraph's Emily Gosden reports that Moxham's replacement is to be Tara Singh, a PR person who used to work at Centrica and before that was a Conservative special adviser.

Update on May 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Joss Garman of Greenpeace tweets:

Guardian political chief @patrickwintour is reporting leading climate sceptic Peter Lilley is David Cameron's new energy adviser. #gp

Update on May 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Wintour's tweet is:

Shake up of no 10 climate change team. Peter Lilley, one of 5 Tory MPs to oppose climate change act, now overseeing energy, but not cc.

Update on May 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Press Association says Lilley has foreign affairs and not energy, according to Josh Garman.

Update on May 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Apparently Tara Singh is currently a spin doctor for Renewables UK.

Quote of the day

[In 2008] Scientists from the Met Office's Hadley Centre responded to Lord Lawson's contention that there has been no global warming since 2000, saying this was due to the La Niña cooling event of early 2007.

From the Wikipedia page on Nigel Lawson's An Appeal to Reason.

Another devastating indictment of energy policy

The FT's Nick Butler has added to the chorus of condemnation of government energy policy. His article is almost as good as the Liberum Capital briefing last week, and suggests that the whole policy is close to collapse:

The problems facing the Government’s plan to reform the UK’s electricity market go well beyond the departure of two of the limited number of civil servants who actually understand the proposals. The reality is that the Government is losing its appetite for a scheme which is liable to disintegrate under the weight of its own complexity...

The real problem is that the plans freeze the system in aspic at a time when the market and new technology are producing dramatic changes. The prices (we are not allowed to call them subsidies) represent corporate welfare on a very big scale – a transfer of wealth from consumers to suppliers which means that those who win the lobbying battle will be celebrating for decades to come.

With the roll-call of ministers responsible for DECC including Ed Miliband, Chris Huhne and Ed Davey, that the policy should by turns be corrupt, incompetent, and risible is hardly surprising. Its collapse cannot come a moment too soon. Nevertheless, it's hard to see the coalition (or indeed HM Opposition) being able to pull a more coherent alternative out of the bag: they have painted themselves into a corner with their green rhetoric.

Read the whole thing.

No let-up for the Met Office

Doug Keenan writes:

A new session of parliament began yesterday, and already parliamentary questions about the statistical analyses of Chief Scientist Slingo have been tabled in both houses.

In the House of Lords:

Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answers by Baroness Verma on 14 January (WA 110), 5 February (WA 31–2), 21 March (WA 170–1), and by Lord Newby on 23 April (WA 359), whether they will give their numerical assessment of the probability in relation to global temperatures of a linear trend with first-order autoregressive noise, as used by the Met Office, compared with a driftless third-order autoregressive integrated model and ensure that that numerical assessment is published in the Official Report; and if not, why not. [HL62]

(Background posts include “Questions to ministers” and “Advisers advise politicians to look in the peer-reviewed literature”.)

In the House of Commons:

Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton): To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills, with reference to the Answer of 15 April 2013, Official Report, column 261W, on climate change, what statistical models were used in any analyses done to calculate significances. [153909]

(Background posts include “Not answering the question” and “More from the Beddington FOI”.)

Peter Lilley on shale

Peter Lilley has written an excellent summary of the shale gas debate for the Spectator - the text seems to be outside the Spectator paywall, so it's doubly good.

We will only know for sure how much is there, and can be economically extracted, by drilling. So you might assume governments would be forcing the pace. Far from it. In 2011, the government imposed an 18-month moratorium. Since that ended, Cuadrilla — the only company which has drilled in the UK — has suffered further delays because of bizarre environmental obstacles. Department of Energy and Climate Change ministers have consistently talked down the industry’s prospects. When the British Geological Survey recently dramatically revised up their estimates of Britain’s shale potential, the department’s chiefs allegedly told them to redo the figures — further delaying the publication of their findings until the summer. There is still no date for the next licensing round to open up more acreage for drilling.

Rather amusingly the article has prompted the usual response from Bob Ward. Ever the master of the fallacy of the trivial objection, Ward notes Lilley's error in naming the great Lancastrian shale formation as the Bowman (rather than the Bowland) and declares, on that basis, that the article is "strewn with errors".

This attempt to decry an attempt to kickstart shale gas exploration is very odd because just a few weeks back, Ward was co-author on a Grantham Institute report that called for UK shale's potential to be explored. Ward seems to have been demanding exactly the same thing he now condemns Lilley for wanting.

This makes the Grantham Institute look very, very silly.

It's voting, Jim, but not as we know it - Josh 220

An interesting way of voting - see here and here.

Cartoons by Josh

Orlowski at the IT

Andrew Orlowski has reported on David Holland's most recent visit to the Information Tribunal, this time in an attempt to get details of the IPCC's zero-order draft from the Met Office. Interestingly, DECC appear to have refused to allow their representative on the IPCC to appear:

I actually felt a bit of human sympathy for Stott; you can bet he would have rather been somewhere else, and it transpires that Holland didn't actually want him there at all. Holland had wanted to cross-examine the head of the UK delegation to the IPCC, a Department of Environment and Climate Change official called David Warrilow, head of climate science and international evidence.

The procedural questions under the spotlight are Warrilow's bailiwick, not Stott's, but Holland was refused his man. Stott, we learned, had been pressganged into appearing by the Met Office's lawyers. Stott also had to defend his and allied organisations' refusal to disclose material on a basis - as we shall see - that's highly questionable. No intelligent person should have to waste his own time, or anyone else's time, defending the indefensible.

Culture and Media Committee on 28gate

From 12:50.30

Between the lines of the energy market

Professor Jonathan Stern has written a letter to the Guardian about the possibility of the lights going out. Apparently it's not going to happen, a view that tallies with the view from the markets I reported last week. While I'm not entirely convinced that price spikes will be enough to prevent blackouts, I think it's fair to say that forcing people to switch the lights off through pricing and having their lights switched off for them when the grid can't deliver amounts to the same thing anyway, so it's probably not worth arguing about.

There is, however, plenty in Stern's letter that raises eyebrows:

It's quite correct that a great deal of old coal and nuclear capacity will be retired over the next few years. For the rest of this decade, that will be replaced by as much renewables as can be built (mostly wind) and gas. Most of the gas-fired power generation which is needed has already been built; around 4GW is currently not in operation because it is unprofitable and most of the rest is running at far lower load factors than in previous years. If "the lights threaten to go out", existing gas-fired generation will run at higher load factors and more can quickly be built.

I wasn't aware that any gas fired power stations were not in operation because it was unprofitable to run them, although I know this is happening in Germany. I guess this is the double whammy of low coal prices and subsidised wind power. Presumably the plan is that once the coal fired stations are shut down then gas will pick up again. The idea that we have built all the gas-fired capacity we need strikes me as highly suspect, given that wind power needs 1:1 backup for when conditions are still.

Stern's thoughts on shales are little more than wishful thinking though:

Towards the end of the decade, the UK may produce some shale gas if drilling and fracking prove to be environmentally acceptable; the volumes will not be great and are unlikely to be "cheap" in comparison to imports.

Given the likely size of the resource and the thickness of the shales, it is most likely that the volumes will be large, if the country chooses to exploit them.

Bitter for some - Josh 219

Hooray, at long last! A politician with a really great cartoonable face. I'm sure I can hear the appreciative sharpening of pencils across the UK. I will certainly be trying to do him justice ;-)

Well done, Nigel, and all the best with the politics too.

Cartoons by Josh

Pierrehumbert and unrealistic expectations

David Appell has written a rather strange article, purportedly about climate sensitivity, but actually about individual components of the climate system. It's only at the end that the climate sensitivity question is addressed:

“There’s really nothing in [the recent temperature record] that changes our estimates of climate sensitivity.” Calculation of that all-important number from the 20th century record is not possible, because the aerosol forcing is not well known, nor are the data for ocean warming up to the task.

“Any estimate of sensitivity requires all of the record and not just the last 20 years of it,” Pierrehumbert says. “The smaller the piece of it you take, the less certainty you have in your result.”

Nonetheless, he agrees that earlier warming may have been deceiving.

“I think it’s true that some rather sloppy discussion of the rapid warming from the 20th century has given people unrealistic expectations about the future course of warming.”

This is rather odd, because the IPCC publishes estimates of aerosol forcing. They may be uncertain, but they are hardly unknown. It's also rather odd that flat temperatures don't, in Pierrehumbert's opinion, change estimates of climate sensitivity. I'm sure someone (Ed Hawkins perhaps, or was it James Annan?) said that flat temperatures could do nothing except reduce the value.

Moreover, I also recall that Forster and Gregory reported that aerosol forcing affected the uncertainty of their estimate of climate sensitivity but not the value. I think I am also right in saying that their method is unaffected by ocean heat uptake uncertainty.

That said, the unrealistic expectations of the future engendered by sloppy discussion of 20th century warming need to be more widely recognised, so it's good to see the case being made by an RC insider.

Wrapped in cotton wool

Defra has invited comments on its plan to cut back spending on WRAP, the quango charged with spending money on dreaming up burdensome recycling schemes.

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) has called on stakeholders and partners to submit their views regarding future funding for the Waste & Resources Action Programme’s (WRAP) activities.

Defra has stated that in order for the government to ‘succeed in reducing the current budget deficit,’ its review of funding for WRAP is ‘necessary as a contribution to wider savings’.

It is hoped the review will ‘identify whether the WRAP delivery model continues to be the most appropriate way to deliver policy interventions in support of waste reduction and resource efficiency… and to secure best value for public money’.

Interestingly, spending already seems to have been cut back, although it's slightly unclear by how much because WRAP is only part funded by Defra, the rest coming from the devolved administrations.

A quick look at the accounts suggests there is plenty of flab still to be dealt with. Over £300k is handed out to the two executive directors (plus pension), and there are a dozen non-execs taking home another £200k between them.

More on the Holland EIR decision

UK Human Rights Blog has examined the Information Tribunal's decision to allow the Russell panel to withhold its emails. The eyebrows of the author, David Hart QC, appear to have been raised:

It is a little odd that a public authority can commission an inquiry of this sort, pay for it, and use its results, in this case, broadly to clear its name, and then not be able to produce documents which, had the inquiry been internal, it would have been required to produce to the requester.

The silence of the Manns

Judith Curry is highlighting a report by Emil Røyrvik of Norwegian outfit SINTEF, which looks at the climate wars in a not unbalanced fashion. Yours truly gets a mention:

[There are] allegations, not entirely unfounded (see section “Climategate” below), of for example seeking to “hide” the Mediaeval Warm Period (as well as the Little Ice Age) supposedly in an attempt to exaggerate and overstate the significance, unprecedentedness and man-made character of the current warming period. And when Mann in his book “The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars” does not mention with a single word the comprehensive account and critique of the “hockey stick” made by Montford (2010) it just adds fuel to the fire.

I'm glad someone has picked up Mann's silence on Hockey Stick Illusion. It does cast Mann's protestations in an unfavourable light.

A well cooked survey - Josh 218

Lots of blogs helping John Cook out here, especially Lucia and Brandon over at The Blackboard where Brandon has just discovered that the survey of 12,000 papers, is, in fact, not a survey of 12,000 papers but a selection of papers based on John's own idea of which should be chosen. Wow.

Cartoonsbyjosh