Sahel greening confirmed

Another paper has confirmed that the Sahel is greening. A team from South Dakota State University led by Armel Kaptué have looked again and confirmed earlier reports:

The predominance of increasing rain-use efficiency in our data supports earlier reports of a “greening” trend across the Sahel. However, there are strong regional differences in the extent and direction of change, and in the apparent role of changing woody and herbaceous components in driving those temporal trends.

That's (yet another) one in the eye for Desmog's (alleged) debunking.

Turnbull's not for turning?

It's all go on the political front. While attention here has been focused on Jeremy Corbyn, in Australia, staunch sceptic Tony Abbott has been ousted by the considerably more eco-emollient Malcolm Turnbull, news that has been greeted with considerably satistifaction by our green friends.

Unfortunately, Turnbull has now gone and spoiled it all:

.@turnbullmalcolm says no intentions to change #climate policy. "It's very well designed".

— ABC Environment (@ABCenvironment) September 14, 2015

Autocorrelation in the Sahel

Sahelian forest in Mali, courtesy Wikimedia

This is a guest post by Doug Keenan.

In August, the journal Nature Climate Change published a piece by a researcher at the Earth Institute of Columbia University. The researcher, Alessandra Giannini, is an expert on precipitation in the Sahel, and her piece was on that topic.

Giannini’s piece notes that Sahel precipitation has been slightly increasing during the past few decades, but then warns as follows.

… a gap in research: a complete understanding of the influence of [greenhouse gases], direct and indirect, on the climate of the Sahel. This is needed more urgently…. While precipitation may have recovered in the seasonal total amount, it has done so through more intense, but less frequent precipitation events. This state of affairs requires more attention be paid to the climate of the Sahel, to ensure that negotiations around adaptation, such as those taking place in the run-up to the Conference of the Parties of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change that will be held in Paris at the end of this year, are based on the best science available….

Click to read more ...

Lucas to DECC?

Guido has just tweeted a rumour that Corbyn is to appoint Green Party MP Caroline Lucas to the DECC portfolio. If true, that should go down like a lead balloon with ambitious Labour party backbenchers.

I assume it's not true though.

Update on Sep 14, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Indeed, it was a bit unlikely wasn't it? The dear leader has filled the DECC shadow role with Lisa Nandy, an MP with little or no previous interest in the subjects of energy or climate.

Red, but not green?

The somewhat bizarre decision of the Labour party to elevate Jeremy Corbyn to the position of supreme leader (or is it "beloved" leader?) has prompted me to take a look at his positions on climate and energy. It's fair to say although he's a keen cyclist and doesn't own a car, green issues seem not to be at the forefront of his thinking. Indeed his major policy position in this area - the renationalisation of the power companies - seems unrelated to any concerns about the environment.

You get a similar impression by looking at his website, where there is not exactly a plethora of climate-related material, and there is not even a category for energy.

Still, he's a politician, so his own views on issues may not actually be a good guide to what he decides to put on the Labour party menu for the next election - that of course will be dictated by what he thinks will go down well with target groups of voters.

Update on Sep 14, 2015 by Bishop Hill

The ECIU has this quote.

"We can overcome the challenge of climate change and build a sustainable future – but not if we leave power in the hands of corporations only interested in short-term profit. We need democratic government acting in the long-term interests of people, not husky-hugging photo opportunities."

I'm not sure this changes my impression very much.

Countryfile does shale gas

The BBC's Countryfile programme is not normally somewhere you look for balanced coverage of environmental issues, so it was interesting to see a piece (from 6 mins) on the prospects for unconventional gas development in England that was not exactly balanced, but still a far cry from the corporation's early coverage of the subject.

So we heard it was "controversial", but only once, and fracking fluid was described as "a mixture of water and chemicals", which struck me as rather misleading. You could still have come away from the report thinking that fracking was a new or "untried" technology. But we did get to see what a completed well pad looked like and the focus was more on greenhouse gases than the wilder claims of the environmental movement.

I suppose this must count as progress.

More than media

This interview with Hans Rosling is rather wonderful in the way that the great man batters away until realisation dawns on the interviewer that the bubble he inhabits reflects only a small part of reality.

Green rump

With mainstream greens all coming out in favour of fracking (Robin Harper signed up yesterday, adding his name to a list that now includes Stern, Deben and Worthington), it looks at though only a green rump - the true oddballs of the movement - want to continue the fight.

Dame Vivienne Westwood's anti fracking tank rides to David Cameron's house in #Witney. #HeartNews pic.twitter.com/oRRn50ibBg

— Thames Valley News (@HeartThamesNews) September 11, 2015

(You would have thought that a top person in the creative industries could have thought up their own publicity stunt rather than pinching Guido's idea.)

Death spiral stops

The Arctic death spiral seems to have been postponed for another year. Based on the Danish graphs below, it looks as if the summer minimum may have been reached, although it is not beyond the realm of possibility that we get another downtick.

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Weak sink sunk

In the years after the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report a small group of scientists claimed to have demonstrated that carbon sinks were weakening, so that a progressively smaller proportion of carbon dioxide emissions would be mopped up and locked away. Alarm, it would seem, was required. Josep Canadell and Michael Raupach, both of CSIRO, together with Corinne le Quere of UEA, published these claims in a series of papers from 2007-9 and their ideas have led to a great deal of worry among climatologists and licking of lips among environmentalists.

However, since then other scientists have challenged these views. Emanuel Gloor at Leeds published a paper that found that that the earlier claims were assigning to carbon sink weakening changes that should have been explained by other factors, like land-use change.

One of the carbon sinks that was claimed to be weakening was the Southern Ocean, but last night, Science published another paper (£) that finds that this was wrong too:

Several studies have suggested that the carbon sink in the Southern Ocean—the ocean’s strongest region for the uptake of anthropogenic CO₂ —has weakened in recent decades. We demonstrated, on the basis of multidecadal analyses of surface ocean CO₂ observations, that this weakening trend stopped around 2002, and by 2012, the Southern Ocean had regained its expected strength based on the growth of atmospheric CO₂. All three Southern Ocean sectors have contributed to this reinvigoration of the carbon sink, yet differences in the processes between sectors exist, related to a tendency toward a zonally more asymmetric atmospheric circulation. The large decadal variations in the Southern Ocean carbon sink suggest a rather dynamic ocean carbon cycle that varies more in time than previously recognized.

Weirdness

Bryony was glad she had someone to protect her from Bob's furyBack in July Secretary of State Amber Rudd told the Energy and climate change commitee that shale gas was effectively a low-carbon source of energy, a remark that had a harsh response from the usual suspects, including Simon Bullock of Friends of the Earth and BH favourite Bob Ward.

#ECC @AmberRuddhr shale gas "is low carbon source" - this is nonsense! Most of world's gas is unburnable for climate goals.

— Simon Bullock (@simonbullock) July 21, 2015

Bob Ward described Rudd's remarks as "bizarre".

Bizarre. Energy SoS @AmberRuddhr tells @CommonsECC that shale gas is a low-carbon source of energy. Only compared with coal!

— Bob Ward (@ret_ward) July 21, 2015

Today, of course, Bryony Worthington has said almost exactly the same thing.

What do people think about @bryworthington calling shale gas "low carbon"? For today's @guardianeco Eco Audit.

— Karl Mathiesen (@KarlMathiesen) September 10, 2015

We await comment from the Grantham Institute.

Update on Sep 11, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In the Graun, Bob Ward says that Worthington's stance is “perfectly sensible”.

Will removing cost make things cheaper?

The Today programme decided that it would invite two anti-capitalist greens on to discuss shale gas. I suppose we should at least be grateful that they picked two greens who had some minor disagreement, with Bryony Worthington wanting a domestic shale gas industry to develop and Friends of the Earth boss Craig Bennett adopting a zero-tolerance approach to any future development (audio posted below). Roger Harrabin's website report on the item also has a quote from Matt Ridley.

Worthington's view is that it's a waste to compress gas in Qatar, ship it thousands of miles and then decompress it again in the UK.

The important thing is to minimize the carbon emissions from gas. That means if we can get our own fracked gas, it's better to use that than importing gas that's been compressed at great energy cost somewhere else.

No doubt we should rest assured that removing this "great energy cost" from the equation will have no impact on gas prices in the UK.

Worthington Bennett fracking

Diary dates, "debate" edition

The British Academy (chairman, Lord Stern) has organised an event looking at energy and environment. It's described as a "debate", but looking at the speakers I think it's fair to say that all the participants are on the same side.

Tuesday 22 September 2015, 6.30-8.00pm
The Royal Society, 6-9 Carlton House Terrace, London, SW1Y 5AG 

Chaired by Nik Gowing, broadcaster 

What are the challenges of meeting future demands for energy for our rapidly growing urban population? How can the growing global demands for energy be reconciled with the need to protect the planet from the impacts of climate change? What role do energy companies and international organisations have to play in meeting our needs to enable growth, whilst balancing this with the long-term sustainability of our activities? 

Speakers: 

Juliet Davenport, CEO, Good Energy
Professor David Newbery FBA, Director, Energy Policy Research Group, University of Cambridge
Dr Camilla Toulmin, International Institute for Environment and Development

Details here.

Wrong-speed dating

Last year I posted a series of articles about statistical issues surrounding radiocarbon dating, a subject that is important in its own right but also directly impinges on the climate debate because of the way in which it informs our knowledge of past climates and the carbon cycle.

However, it looks as though a new paper in Earth and Planetary Science Letters is going to extend the debate still further, arguing that radiocarbon dating falls down badly in samples that are over 30,000 years old. According to an article in the South China Morning Post,

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Minor drying in Iran causes farmers to flee Syria

The origin of the claim that the Syrian refugee crisis is partly caused by climate is a paper by Kelley et al in PNAS. This has picked up quite a lot of media attention, yesterday's Independent  article being just the latest.

Kelley et al is a bit odd though. Consider at what they found. In the top panel of the following figure, they claim to have found a significant drying trend. They are using a significance level of P <0.05. (Questions, questions: why do they calculate trends since 1931 when they have data going back to 1900?)

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