The climate scare overturning circulation

Anthony is having lots of fun with the latest scare paper that is doing the rounds of the media, which tries to breathe life into the somewhat hackneyed "ocean currents are about to halt" scare.

Published by Nature and with a team including Mann and Rutherford, you know the paper's entertainment value is going to be high and the authors certainly don't let us down, declaring on the basis of a proxy study (!) that ocean currents in the Atlantic are slowing down and everything is worse than we thought. But as Anthony points out, this is a stark contrast with an earlier observational paper by Rossby et al that found no evidence of any slowing at all. In fact there's a bit of a mystery here:

Click to read more ...

Guardian mob attacks: reports were accurate

The BBC has interviewed an eyewitness to the Guardian mob attack on Nigel Farage and has confirmed the accuracy of the original reports:

There was lots of noise and kerfuffle. It was harassment, there was no reasoning with them.

Enough to frighten the living daylights out of a ten-year old I would have thought.

Longannet to close

The BBC reports that the Longannet power station is to close in 2016.

Scottish Power has announced plans to close its huge coal-fired power station at Longannet in Fife early next year.

The move comes after the energy firm failed to win a crucial contract from National Grid.

Scottish Power said it was "extremely disappointed" at National Grid's decision.

The Greens are celebrating.

Gina Hanrahan, from WWF Scotland, said National Grid's announcement was "another important step in Scotland's energy transition".

The correspondent who pointed the story out to me (to whom many thanks are due) adds this:

National Grid have given a £15million contract to maintain grid voltage to [the gas-fired station in] Peterhead, but that is for only 385MW of the station's potential 1.2GW. 

Longannet is 1.8GW (2.4 in theory but they don't like to crank it up nowadays).  So a net loss of 1.4GW capacity and a significant loss of grid inertia.  It's maybe not the best analogy, but National Grid are now sailing very close to the wind.

National Trust wants to clearcut North American forests

Dame Helen Ghosh, the former Whitehall bureaucrat who now runs the National Trust, was on the Today programme this morning explaining why climate change is the biggest threat to the Trust's work.

Pressed to explain herself, Dame Helen had almost nothing to justify her position, apart from a suggestion that the Trust likes to address the issues of the day. This came across to me as saying "we just jump on any passing bandwagon, it's good for business".

She did mumble something about declines in house sparrow and hedgehog populations. Unfortunately for this case, the fall in sparrow numbers appears to be due to changes in farming practices, to cats, and to pesticides, and in hedgehog numbers because of habitat loss. Dame Helen is therefore engaging in some pretty misleading scaremongering on the climate front.

When pressed on whether people should stop burning fossil fuels she again waffled, before saying that the Trust was going to be getting most of its energy from renewables. Interestingly, she didn't mention windfarms, no doubt because she might have been hammered on the "desecration of the uplands" front (although on the BBC she would presumably have been safe enough). Instead she spoke of hydro schemes and biomass boilers.

Given that wood pellets are being imported from North American forests that are clearcut for the purpose, this does seem quite a strange policy for the National Trust to adopt. Is this really what the National Trust wants to see happening?

Ringberg

Climate sensitivity experts from around the world are spending the next week at a castle in Germany. The Ringberg conference features a stellar cast of speakers who will look at the latest developments in the area.

For readers who are on Twitter, highlights of the discussions can be seen on the Ringberg15 hashtag. Some BH regulars will be interested in one of the first tweets, from Gavin Schmidt:

Knutti and Gregory giving lots of examples of how simple assumptions in forcing/feedback paradigm break down.

Farage mob leader is Guardian writer

The news that UKIP leader Nigel Farage and his family were attacked in a pub this afternoon would be interesting enough at the best of times, but for BH readers there are many other angles that attract attention besides the thuggery.

If early reports are to be believed, the mob was organised by a guy called Dan Glass, a former leader of the Student Union at the University of Sussex, but who was also involved with the green group Plane Stupid. They too had a dubious relationship with the concept of law and order.

He is also a "Guardian Youth Climate Leader" and an occasional Guardian columnist. One can't help but wonder why so many writers at the Graun seem to be mixed up with violence and thuggery these days.

Update on Mar 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

It turns out that Dan Glass was not the only Guardian columnist at the protest. Eva Jasiewicz, who has written for the Graun here, was there too.

Update on Mar 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Jeez, and another one! Pennie Quinton's Guardian corpus is here, her involvement in the mob here.

Greens suspend Viv

Vivienne Westwood has been suspended by the Green Party, say the Telegraph this morning. Not, it seems, because of her promotion of assaults of academics but because of her - rather hypocritical but considerably less blameworthy - tendency to tax avoidance.

O tempora! O mores!

Words and deeds

The Daily Caller is reporting that President Obama may just have bought himself a beachfront mansion in Hawaii. This is very nice for him, but a bit unfortunate since for several years the great man has been warning  that the USA is in imminent danger from sea-level rises.

In his 2015 State of the Union speech, Obama said “we’ll continue to see rising oceans, longer, hotter heat waves, dangerous droughts and floods.”

In 2013, Obama said that “seas will slowly keep rising and storms will get more severe, based on the science” — one of the reasons why he’s imposing regulations on carbon dioxide emissions from coal plants.

It's like Al Gore all over again. The words says one thing and the deeds say something else entirely.

Greens incite violence against academics

James Verdon points us to what appears to be a clear case of anti-fracking activists inciting assault against academics whose results are inconvenient to Gaia's cause.

As James notes, since throwing things at people (even water) is potentially assault it's hard not to construe this as incitement.

Talk Fracking is funded by Vivienne Westwood and Lush Pharmaceuticals.

The IPCC versus Stevens

I've updated Nic Lewis's graph of his new climate sensitivity estimates by adding the IPCC's likely range of 1.5°C–4.5°C as a grey box. Something of a contrast here I would say.

The situation for TCR is only marginally better.

Update on Mar 20, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In the comments at CA, Shub and Nic Lewis point to another important implication of the Stevens paper:

SHUB: Do low estimates for aerosol cooling imply the 1940-1978 drop in global temperatures were not due to coal plant emissions from post-war industrialization?

LEWIS: Yes, they strongly suggest that the main reason for global temperature going down rather than up from 1940 to the mid-1970s despite quite strong greenhouse gas forcing (+0.7 W/m2 for long-lived GHG, +0.85 W/m2 including ozone) lay elsewhere. Internal variability (here the AMO) seems the obvious cause. On Steven’s best estimates, aerosol forcing became a bit under -0.3 W/m2 more negative during this period. Sulphate emissions from coal plants etc. grew rapidly and reached their peak level in the mid/late 1970s.

Climate sensitivity takes another tumble

Over at Climate Audit, Nic Lewis reports on the publication of a very important paper in Journal of Climate.

Bjorn Stevens has created a new estimate of the cooling effects of pollution ("aerosols") on the climate. Readers will no doubt recall that to the extent that aerosol cooling is small the warming effect of carbon dioxide must also be small so that the two cancel out to match the observed temperature record. Only if aerosol cooling is large can the effect of carbon dioxide be large.

Stevens' results suggest that the aerosol effect is even lower than the IPCC's best estimates in AR5, which were themselves much lower than the numbers that were coming out of the climate models. He also suggests that the number is less uncertain than previously thought. This is therefore pretty important stuff. 

Click to read more ...

Hague's chosen fruitloop

While he was in post as Special Adviser on Climate Change at the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, John Ashton kept a relatively low profile. For someone of such (how to put this politely?) eccentric views, this was probably a wise move, and helpful to his boss, William Hague.

However, Ashton has now moved on, and is positively flaunting his intellectual weirdness. Just take a look at the diatribe he launched at the head of Shell recently:

Click to read more ...

Lord Deben and the bureaucratic mindset

Experts (it says here) at the University of Leeds have declared that the UK is not really cutting its carbon emissions; it is merely exporting them to China.

The analysis shows that CO2 emissions produced within the UK fell 194 million tonnes in 2012 compared with 1990.

But the cuts were outweighed by a rise of 280m tonnes created abroad during the manufacture of goods imported to Britain.

So it seems that these experts have discovered what Nigel Lawson has been saying for nearly ten years (H/T Paul Matthews). As he put it in An Appeal to Reason (2008):

Click to read more ...

Walport: energy security is paramount

Launching the Institute of Chemical Engineers' new energy centre this morning, Sir Mark Walport has apparently said that:

...security of energy supply is paramount.

It was just a year ago that I noted that Walport had described the climate/energy policy as needing to be viewed through multiple lenses - of energy security, climate change, pricing and fuel poverty, and so on. Security was the first of these, but I wonder if we are now seeing a further subtle shift.

Waiting for a Guardian outcry

So, in the wake of Pielke Jr's comment yesterday, we know that Kerry Emanuel has been citing a paper without disclosing that he had been involved in its preparation. We know that the paper was commissioned and paid for by green billionaire Tom Steyer. The question that now springs to mind is whether Emanuel has disclosed this activist cash in his academic work; in the wake of the recent rumpus over Willie Soon's papers, readers will recall that environmentalists are very keen that such disclosures are made.

Emanuel has disclosed in one of his papers that his own business, WindRiskTech, is involved in the same line of work:

Conflict of interest statement: The technique used here to estimate the level of tropical cyclone activity in CMIP5-generation climate models is also used by a firm, WindRiskTech LLC, in which the author has a financial interest. That firm applies the technique to estimate tropical cyclone risk for various clients.

However, the argument made about Willie Soon's COI disclosures was that all of his papers should disclose his funding from an oil company, whether directly connected or not. So in this case I feel certain that environmental activists will be loudly condemning Emanuel's failure to disclose Emanuel's income stream from a green billionaire.

No? Why ever not?