Climate Neutral

The UN climate people have got their tentacles everywhere.

 Bonn, 20 October 2015 - The Brazilian Embassy in London hosted a special event today to mark the launch of Climate Neutral Now, the UN-led initiative for increased voluntary climate action, which took place during New York Climate Week in September.

The London event discussed how individuals, companies and governments can contribute to a climate-neutral future by measuring their carbon footprints, reducing emissions where possible, and offsetting the rest with UN-certified emission reductions (CERs), while at the same time investing in sustainable development projects in developing countries. Keynote speakers included representatives from the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the Brazilian government and the private sector.

Participants at the event heard inspiring examples, such as the successful experiences of the Brazilian government in using CERs to offset carbon emissions from major events. A short film commissioned by the UN climate change secretariat on offsetting the 2014 World Cup’s carbon footprint was also screened. See below.

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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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Greenpeace warns of ice age dangers

Greenpeace are fond of telling us that the planet is going to fry because of our evil addiction to fossil fuels. How then to explain their submission to the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, which maintains a register of issues and potential problems with the nation's nuclear waste repositories?

The long-term effects of glaciation on repository safety could be very serious, potentially involving a large release of radionuclides due to glacial flushing from a damaged repository zone. Future glaciations could cause faulting of the rock, rupture of containers and penetration of surface and/or saline waters to the repository depth.

Surely some mistake?

Diary dates, hold on a minute edition

The Geological Society is holding an event in the autumn which looks as though it is going to ask some slightly awkward questions about this whole global warming malarkey:

Environmental conditions at the Earth's surface have been continuously suitable for life for more than three billion years.  Temperatures, for example, have only varied by few tens of centigrade despite large changes in solar luminosity and atmospheric composition.  Since the Archean, the planet has not once been rendered sterile.  However, the reasons for this long-term life-friendliness remain contentious.  How has Earth’s climate avoided the runaway warming shown on Venus or the runaway cooling of Mars?  Has Earth’s relative stability resulted from geochemical feedback (e.g. through silicate weathering), the stabilizing influence of a complex biosphere (i.e. the Gaia hypothesis), good luck (e.g. purely fortuitous cancellation of solar warming by decreased greenhouse gas concentrations) or is long-term life-friendliness simply the consequence of life’s extraordinary adaptability (allowing it to survive even Snowball Earth events)?  

This conference will bring together proponents of these various views in an attempt to forge a consensus on how to move the debate forward.  This debate will be informed by data relating to the latest understanding of silicate weathering, Neoproterozoic ice ages, and the environmental history of Earth.

This meeting would be suitable for anyone interested in the long-term habitability of the Earth, its long-term climate history, geo-biochemical cycles, the highly controversial Gaia hypothesis or the likelihood of habitable worlds beyond the solar system.

There's a programme here. More details here.

A question for David Spiegelhalter

Updated on Mar 26, 2015 by Bishop Hill

I have a lot of time for David Spiegelhalter, the Cambridge University statistician who has become something of a go-to guy for the media on matters statistical. You certainly warm towards him when he sticks his head above the parapet to throttle a media health scare at source, as he did yesterday, responding to an article in the Telegraph that claimed that three alcoholic drinks a day could cause liver cancer.

There's no doubt that excessive drinking is bad for you and those around you. But does this justify exaggerated and misleading claims? They got their publicity, but perhaps the WCRF should value its scientific credibility a bit more.

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The Institute of Physics is corrupt

Richard Tol has posted up a review of the strange affair of the "97% consensus", as the second anniversary of Cook's infamous paper draws near. An edited version has apparently been published in the Australian.

The sample was padded with irrelevant papers. An article about TV coverage on global warming was taken as evidence for global warming. In fact, about three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsements had nothing to say about the subject matter.

Requests for the data were met with evasion and foot-dragging, a clear breach of the publisher’s policy on validation and reproduction, yet defended by an editorial board member of the journal as “exemplary scientific conduct”.

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Climate Change by Numbers

Updated on Mar 3, 2015 by Bishop Hill

I almost gave up on Climate Change by Numbers last night. By ten o'clock I was flagging fast and not really getting a lot from it which is a pity because it could have been brilliant.

The presentation was really well done. I thought the decision to have three different presenters paid off in spades and the producers did well to come up with three such engaging people - Norman Fenton, Hannah Fry and David Spiegelhalter - to front the show. I liked the style of having them completely separate and avoiding the cheesy infills that TV people seem to like so much. The decision to get just a little bit closer to the maths was a good one and the radical step of showing equations on screen seemed like a bit of a breakthrough.

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By the numbers open thread

This is an open thread for anyone who wants to discuss Climate Change by the Numbers. I'll set some thoughts down in the morning.

Readers may also be interested in the post-match thoughts of one of the presenters, Norman Fenton.

The BBC on climate, circa 2007

While trawling through my archives last night I came across a dead link, which I was fortunately able to resurrect through the Internet Archive. Well worth a look.

Building up to Paris

No sooner do we learn of the BBC's Climate by Numbers, than climate change makes another appearance on the airwaves, this time Philomena Cunk's short slot in the Charlie Brooker show. Climate scientists on Twitter seem to like it. See what you think (from 25 mins).

I wonder if this is the start of the BBC's big push for Paris.

Time to lose the labels

Hot on the heels of their paper on labels in the climate debate, Candace Howarth and Amelia Sharman have a piece up at the Conversation:

We need new ways of framing and talking about climate change. We need to remember that science “does not provide us with convenient yes/no answers” and being sceptical is part of the scientific process.

Removing these antagonistic labels from the debate could encourage all those engaged in this area to think of it less as a polarised debate and move towards a more nuanced and constructive discussion about specific issues of disagreement.

The current academic focus on categorising labels about climate change diverts attention away from much-needed research on underlying rationales. Scientists can play an important role in informing and legitimising new policies, therefore it is vital that climate researchers pay attention to their choices of language.

Well worth a read.

New Atlantis, same old problems

Well you can't fault the green movement's persistence. With the National Theatre's Greenland having being a spectacular flop and last year's 2071 having apparently failed to set the pulse racing too, the London luvvies are having yet another attempt to bring the public on board.

The new show is called The New Atlantis and, being green, gets lots of free publicity courtesy of the BBC.

At the futuristic venue, The Crystal, on the Thames in East London, the cast of New Atlantis is rehearsing for the new production, named after a fictitious intergovernmental organisation managing water supply in the capital.

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Thought for the day

Saying that humans cause climate change is like saying alcohol causes babies. Sure, you might get some more, but it rather misses the point.

Duarté on Verheggen et al.

Jose Duarté has had a comment published on Bart Verheggen's survey of climate scientists. I discussed this at BH last summer.

It's fair to say that Jose is not terribly impressed and his comment makes very amusing reading. Describing the process taken by Verheggen et al to arrive at the list of authors they survey (who very often turn out not to be climate scientists at all), he notes that those remaining after the whittling down process includes a paper entitled:

Urban bicyclists spatial analysis of adult and youth traffic hazard intensity

and another entitled

Attitudes of Scottish city inhabitants to ceteacean conservation.

Jose says that "The paper should be withdrawn and the correct figures reported when available".

Ouch. Read the comment here.

Update on Jan 15, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Verheggen et al have a response to Duarte here.

Persuading the public

One of the climate-related memes that has tended to induce yawns in yours truly over the years concerns the so-called "deficit model" of climate communication. This is the idea that on the subject of climate the public are at best ill-informed and at worst pig ignorant and that they need better information about climate change in order to bring them round to the idea that we need to tear down the economy and build the new socialist future together.

Or something like that.

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