Library manoeuvres

Updated on Dec 14, 2015 by Bishop Hill

The opposition have called a debate on the Cumbria floods tomorrow, and so the House of Commons Library has issued a briefing paper to MPs. There's lot to amuse. For example, I read with interest that:

...there is a general understanding that climate change is likely to be linked to increased winter rain in the UK.

I think it's fair to say that this is complete drivel. As Richard Betts has quite rightly noted, predictions of UK climate are incredibly difficult because of our geographical position. Most commentators also agree that GCMs are useless when it comes to rainfall. So predictions about UK rainfall are almost impossible to take seriously. The "increased winter rain" story is of course derived from the UKCP09 climate projections, which are so wrong they put even Lord Deben in the shade. The idea that there is a "general understanding" of anything based on this farce of a computer simulation is preposterous.

Click to read more ...

A little gem

The BBC's Inside Science strand had a brief section on the floods in Cumbria, with Nick Reynard of the Centre for Ecology and Hydrology interviewed on the subject.

During the interview he mentioned the startling fact that the average record length for river flow in the UK is 36 years.

Remember that next time you hear about the 100-year flood.

More problems for the climate models

As I noted in my Spectator piece yesterday, the Met Office is really, really desperate to attribute floods and rainfall to global warming, particularly at this time of year when they can usually rely on taking advantage of a bit of human misery.

Unfortunately, some toad at the Lawrence Livermore laboratories in the US has rather gone and pooped the party by publishing a paper that shows that climate models are overestimating growth in rainfall (report here).

Lawrence Livermore researchers and collaborators have found that most climate models overestimate the increase in global precipitation due to climate change.

Specifically, the team looked at 25 models and found they underestimate the increase in absorption of sunlight by water vapor as the atmosphere becomes moister, and therefore overestimate increases in global precipitation.

The team found global precipitation increase per degree of global warming at the end of the 21st century may be about 40 percent smaller than what the models, on average, currently predict.

They are not the first to notice how bad climate models are, but it's good to be reminded of these things, particularly when there's rain - and the odd chief scientist - in the air.

Me on the floods

I have a post up at the Spectator blog about the Cumbria floods.

Read it here.

The amazing Sarah Montague

Quite astonishingly bad journalism from Sarah Montague on the Today programme this morning, inviting the president of Kiribati to hold forth about how his country was about to disappear beneath the waves. Not even a hint of a challenge to anything he said, and certainly not a mention of the fact that Kiribati is growing.

The BBC's tsunami of disinformation shows no signs of abating.

Audio below.

Kiribas

Update on Dec 10, 2015 by Bishop Hill

We should not forget Montague's earlier triumphs on the journalistic integrity front.

On the floods in Cumbria

The floods in Cumbria are obviously attracting a lot of attention this morning. A couple of things are exercising my mind.

Firstly, as readers are pointing out, the claim that 340mm of rain fell in 24 hours seems suspect. Nobody seems quite sure where it came from. I have seen it suggested that this was the amount that fell over two days and in Unthreaded, Mike Post wonders if it is actually the November rainfall total.

Secondly, how do we know what the 100-year flood is in any given river basin? The process looks less than straightforward and involves a wealth of assumptions.

The first assumption is often but not always valid and should be tested on a case by case basis. The second assumption is often valid if the extreme events are observed under similar climate conditions. For example, if the extreme events on record all come from late summer thunder storms (as is the case in the southwest U.S.), or from snow pack melting (as is the case in north-central U.S.), then this assumption should be valid. If, however, there are some extreme events taken from thunder storms, others from snow pack melting, and others from hurricanes, then this assumption is most likely not valid. The third assumption is only a problem when trying to forecast a low, but maximum flow event (for example, an event smaller than a 2-year flood). Since this is not typically a goal in extreme analysis, or in civil engineering design, then the situation rarely presents itself. The final assumption about stationarity is difficult to test from data for a single site because of the large uncertainties in even the longest flood records^[3] (see next section). More broadly, substantial evidence of climate change strongly suggests that the probability distribution is also changing^[7] and that managing flood risks in the future will become even more difficult.^[8] The simplest implication of this is that not all of the historical data are, or can be, considered valid as input into the extreme event analysis.

Lots to dig into.

Update on Dec 7, 2015 by Bishop Hill

On Twitter, Derek Sorensen tracks it down to Honister.

The Times does climate

Respected professor, or international laughing stock?The Times has a trio of articles on climate this morning, from Mark Lynas, from Matt Ridley, and from science editor Tom Whipple. Matt Ridley is doing the good news on global warming, Lynas is doing the "right wing people must do as I say" thing. But it was Whipple's piece that caught my eye. This was because he opened by shooting himself smack bang in the middle of his foot. As a way of getting attention this is hard to beat.

He achieved this feat of public relations when he described a Royal Society meeting and

...a talk by a respected professor who expected the summer collapse of Arctic ice before 2020. The problem, for those listening, was that this same professor had previously given different dates — 2012, 2013, 2015 and 2016.

Yes folks, he means Peter Wadhams, who I think it's fair to say is not actually much respected at all - he is actually seen by both sides of the climate debate as a bit of a noodle. Whipple does seem to have cottoned on to the fact that Wadhams was wildly wrong, but he seems to be under the impression that he will be right in the near future. I'm not sure how convincing this is.

Click to read more ...

UN body: IPCC talking out of hat

The United Nations Food and Agriculture Organisation has made an announcement on extreme weather this morning, which is sure to attract a lot of attention:

Drought, floods and other extremes of weather have become more frequent and severe in the past 30 years and pose a rising threat to food security in developing countries, the United Nations food agency said on Thursday...It said they were occurring almost twice as often as in the 1980s, hampering efforts to eradicate hunger and poverty.

This is a pretty major leap for the FAO, because it directly contradicts the IPCC, which says there is low confidence in there being any global change in droughts and hurricanes and makes only the mildest statements about extreme rainfall (it is silent on floods). The alleged doubling in extreme weather events is nowhere to be found in the IPCC report.

It's rather remarkable to see one arm of the United Nations effectively saying that another one is talking out of its collective hat, particularly just before the Paris Summit begins.

The perils of being a mouthpiece

One of the problems with being a PR guy for an environmentally minded billionaire is that you sometimes find yourself having to utter complete drivel in public fora. There has been a lovely example of this in recent weeks, when, in a letter to the FT, Lord Stern claimed that 7 million deaths each year were caused by pollution derived from fossil fuels. This was disputed by Matt Ridley, who pointed out in another letter that most of these deaths were actually caused by burning wood and dung.

According to the World Health Organisation, the majority of these estimated deaths (4.3m) are from indoor air pollution, and the vast majority of them are caused by cooking and heating with wood and dung.

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Syria drought claims are demonstrably false

Roger Andrews, writing at Euan Mearns' site, has just demolished the claim that the Syrian uprising was something to do with climate change. Firstly with an analysis of rainfall changes in the country:

The average [change in rainfall] for all seven stations was 7% below the pre-2006 average, decreasing to 4% when only the five “cropland” stations (Lattakia, Aleppo, Kamishi, Hama and Damascus) are considered...

When the Palmer Drought Severity Index is analysed, it's the same story. These:

lend no support to the claims that Syria suffered severe and widespread drought after 2006.

There is also some very interesting analysis of what may have been behind the Syrian uprising (our old friend the government).

This is devastating. Read the whole thing.

Guardian goes full ecobonkers

Yesterday, the IUCN, the body set up to worry about endangered species, issued the latest estimates on polar bear numbers. As Susan Crockford reports, the polar bear population seems to be at a record high, although the IUCN will not be drawn on the current trend and they seem to have been persuaded to leave the bears' status as "vulnerable".

Meanwhile, over in cloud cuckoo land, the Guardian is going the full ecobonkers on the report, with a gory headline about climate change being polar bears' 'single biggest threat'. Three subpopulations, they tell us, are in decline already. Strangely they seem to have neglected to mention the overall increase, and also the fact that two of these allegedly declining subpopulations were determined to be so more than ten years ago.

Weather extremes don't harm insurance companies

With "Mystic" Mark Carney telling anyone who crosses his palm with silver (or, indeed, anyone who crosses his path) that the insurance industry is going to be sunk by climate change, it's interesting to see what the empirical evidence has to say on the subject. By happy coincidence, Ross McKitrick has just published a paper on just this subject. Here's what he says about it on his website.

Bin Hu and I have just published a study looking at how climate variations, in particular indicators of extreme weather, have historically affected the share prices of major insurance firms. The insurance industry has raised the concern that climate change poses a financial risk due to higher payouts for weather-related disasters. However, if extreme weather is increasing, presumably that means they have an opportunity to sell more insurance products as well, which may increase profitability. In our paper we examined historical data on a portfolio of insurance firms and estimate a three-factor model augmented with climate indicators. Short-run deviations in measures of climate extremes are associated with increased profitability for insurance firms. Overall we find that past climatic variations have not had a negative effect on the profitability of the insurance industry.

Coffee, with a pinch of salt

Bloomberg has an article out claiming that coffee production is being hit by climate change:

Global Coffee Shortage Looms as Market Braces for Climate Change

Rising consumption, especially in emerging markets, means global production will have to rise by an extra 40 million to 50 million bags of coffee in the next decade, said Andrea Illy, the chairman and chief executive officer of Illycafe SpA, a roaster based in Trieste, Italy. That’s more than the entire crop of Brazil.

Throw in the looming threat of climate change, as well as low prices that are discouraging farmers from increasing output, and you’ve got a potential problem. It’s something producers, government officials and industry representatives are trying to tackle this week at the Global Coffee Forum in Milan.

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The carneyage of Mystic Mark

It is said that once people start laughing at you, you are completely finished. I think Mark Carney may have reached that point:

The scene is the governor’s office at the Bank of England. Mark Carney is talking to an aide.

Governor, about your forthcoming speech to the chambers of commerce.

Yes

It seems to be about alien life forms.

You’ve seen the news from Mars?

I have, but this speech is supposed to be about labour flexibility and the downside risks to productivity.

You don’t see the downside risks from extremophile bacteria in the briny water on Mars?

Not in the short to medium term, Governor.

Read the whole thing...

Church on Syria

The Welsh singer Charlotte Church is trying to reinvent herself as a political pundit, and is certainly doing rather well on the PR front. Last night she managed to get herself on Question Time. Unfortunately I don't think her appearance will have done much for her political aspirations, but she certainly did the whole "slightly flaky showbiz person" thing pretty well, in particular repeating the old canard about the Syrian crisis being something to do with climate change, accompanied by lots of frowning to show how serious she was.

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