If at first you don't succeed

The government is to relaunch its carbon mitigation "X-factor" competition - an attempt to get private investors to research carbon capture technologies.

For the second time in five years, £1bn will be offered for schemes to trap and bury carbon dioxide.

An earlier competition collapsed after all nine entrants pulled out, most citing cost as the main problem.

If government is going to pay for big, new technology breakthroughs then structuring the attempt as a competition is probably the least harmful way of doing it. I hold out little hope of success though.

(H/T Munroad)

The redundant rear-admiral

The UK Foreign Secretary William Hague has a guest post from Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti, who is "the UK Government’s Climate and Energy Security Envoy". 

Britain famously has more admirals than warships and one often wonders what all these highly paid people actually do all day, so it is good to have this clarification that the Ministry of Defence is setting up "jobs for the boys" schemes to keep redundant sailors up to their necks in our tax money.

Hague's decision to allow Morisetti a guest post on his facebook page rather seems to endorse the corruption too.

Morisetti's article is largely content-free, but he manages to demonstrate an almost complete ignorance of how business works, suggesting that supply chain disruption for businesses needs to be addressed by government policy.

That a redundant sailor doesn't understand that this is the kind of thing purchasing managers worry about on a day-to-day basis is understandable. That he should be paid a huge salary to advertise his ignorance is not.

Medics have too much time on their hands

The British Medical Journal returns once again to the theme of climate change, with the current edition of the august journal featuring an editorial and no less than seven articles on the subject. Here's the editorial.

Last week was Climate Week in the UK, featuring a host of awareness raising activities across the country. And next Wednesday, 28 March, is NHS Sustainability Day (http://doc2doc.bmj.com/forums/off-duty_general_nhs-sustainabilityday-of-action). So it seems a good moment to be publishing our Spotlight on climate change. The seven articles have been specially commissioned from among the speakers at last year’s high level conference on climate change, hosted by the BMJ in partnership with a consortium of other organisations (http://climatechange.bmj.com).

Click to read more ...

Planet under pressure

Lots of BH regulars are at the "Planet Under Pressure" conference in London today. There is a live video stream here if you can bear it.

Update on Mar 26, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Blimey, the talk from the eco-activist kids was so toe curling I had to switch it off. Interesting to see who is funding this particular bit of greenery:

• British Science Association
• Research Councils UK
• Sciencewise-ERC
• The Royal Society.

There's scope to reduce public spending there then.

More world government

This just in from Scientific American: an opinion piece about the kind of superstate that the environmental movement would like us to have in response to AGW:

To be effective, a new set of institutions would have to be imbued with heavy-handed, transnational enforcement powers. There would have to be consideration of some way of embracing head-in-the-cloud answers to social problems that are usually dismissed by policymakers as academic naivete. In principle, species-wide alteration in basic human behaviors would be a sine qua non, but that kind of pronouncement also profoundly strains credibility in the chaos of the political sphere. Some of the things that would need to be contemplated: How do we overcome our hard-wired tendency to “discount” the future: valuing what we have today more than what we might receive tomorrow? Would any institution be capable of instilling a permanent crisis mentality lasting decades, if not centuries? How do we create new institutions with enforcement powers way beyond the current mandate of the U.N.? Could we ensure against a malevolent dictator who might abuse the power of such organizations?

Quote of the day

"It is my sad duty to inform you of a four foot restriction on humanoid height."

[Extract from coversation of Joe Ordinary in Local Puborama]

"I hear the directors of Genetic Control have been buying all the properties that have recently been sold, taking risks oh so bold.
It's said now that people will be shorter in height,
they can fit twice as many in the same building site.
(they say it's alright),
Beginning with the tenants of the town of Harlow,
in the interest of humanity, they've been told they must go,
told they must go-go-go-go."

Get 'em out by Friday

Genesis, in their Peter Gabriel era, foresee Professor Liao's suggestion that the human race should engineer itself to be smaller. (H/T PMT in the comments)

Eco-eugenics

The latest piece of insanity to emerge from the global warming movement is a paper by S. Matthew Liao, a professor at New York University. His idea is that we should be engineering the human race to be less resource intensive:

In this paper, we consider a new kind of solution to climate change, what we call human engineering, which involves biomedical modifications of humans so that they can mitigate and/or adapt to climate change. We argue that human engineering is potentially less risky than geoengineering and that it could help behavioural and market solutions succeed in mitigating climate change. We also consider some possible ethical concerns regarding human engineering such as its safety, the implications of human engineering for our children and for the society, and we argue that these concerns can be addressed. Our upshot is that human engineering deserves further consideration in the debate about climate change.

There is a long interview with Liao in the Atlantic, in which he argues that his ideas are liberty-enhancing, since the alternative is a compulsory limit to family sizes.

Update on Mar 13, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Klimazwiebel picks up on the story here.

Nordhaus and the sixteen

Economist William Nordhaus takes a pop at the sixteen concerned scientists, in the latest skirmish kicked off by their Wall Street Journal editorial.

My response is primarily designed to correct their misleading description of my own research; but it also is directed more broadly at their attempt to discredit scientists and scientific research on climate change.¹ I have identified six key issues that are raised in the article, and I provide commentary about their substance and accuracy. They are:

• Is the planet in fact warming?
• Are human influences an important contributor to warming?
• Is carbon dioxide a pollutant?
• Are we seeing a regime of fear for skeptical climate scientists?
• Are the views of mainstream climate scientists driven primarily by the desire for financial gain?
• Is it true that more carbon dioxide and additional warming will be beneficial?

My letter in the BMJ

I have a letter published on the BMJ's website in response to their call for action on climate change.

Climate change editorial was callous

Andrew W Montford, Author: The Hockey Stick Illusion

Sir

The timing of your call for action on climate change (Editorial, 19 October 2011) could hardly have been worse. Rather than dwelling on the theoretical dangers of climate change, you would perhaps have done better to note the BBC's report the same day that 2700 people die each year in the UK because of conditions linked to fuel poverty. For you to call for "governments to enact legislative and regulatory change to stop the building of new unabated coal-fired power stations" - actions that would undoubtedly increase the death toll still further -- therefore seems needlessly insensitive. For you to do so on the same day that the main pilot carbon capture and storage plant was scrapped, thus ending any realistic near-term hope of 'abated' coal-fired power stations, might been seen as somewhat callous.

Yours faithfully

Andrew Montford
Author: The Hockey Stick Illusion

For whom the blog Tols

Readers will remember the post a couple of days ago about Sir Andy Haines' citation of a new paper by Ackerman and Stanton about the costs of carbon. The paper was much criticised in the comments. This is Frank Ackerman's response. Please could readers try to engage with the arguments rather than piling on.

Is it true that there’s no such thing as bad publicity? If so, we’re in luck. The paper that Elizabeth A. Stanton and I wrote on the social cost of carbon has been discussed by the author of the Bishop Hill blog, and in comments on that blog and on Twitter by Richard Tol.

Bishop Hill cites us as estimating that the social cost of carbon – the monetary value of the present and future damage caused by emitting one ton of carbon dioxide – could be $1,000 or more. Tol calls this estimate “complete nonsense,” and Bishop Hill refers to the increase from the U.S. government’s $21 estimate to $1,000 and higher as “fairly jawdropping.”

Click to read more ...

Climate Change Committee 3

A week ago I traced one of the scientific claims underlying the the Climate Change Committee's policy recommendations back to source. This was the claim that there would be 5-8% increase in dry areas in Africa.

The source was a paper by Fischer et al 2005, although the dry-areas claim could actually be traced back further.

However, I'm grateful to a reader for pointing out some interesting things about Fischer et al 2005. While it is clearly the soure of the IPCC's doom-laden claim, in fact the paper is rather optimistic about the effects of climate change on agriculture. Here is what it has to say about sub-Saharan Africa:

Click to read more ...

Goreballs

Myles Allen has an interesting piece up in the Guardian, putting Al Gore right on what climate models really tell us (theoretically) about extreme weather.

The claim that we are "painting more dots on the dice", causing weather events that simply could not have occurred in the absence of human influence on climate, is just plain wrong. Given the paucity of reliable records and bias in climate models, it is quite impossible to say whether an observed event could have happened in a hypothetical pristine climate. Our research focuses on quantifying how risks have changed, which is a much easier proposition, although addressing all the uncertainties still makes working out these "relative risks" a painstaking affair.

He also has some interesting things to say about policy:

Enthusiasm for doing anything about climate change seems to have given way to resignation that we will simply have to adapt. For the foreseeable future, this overwhelmingly means dealing with harmful weather events that have been made more likely by human influence on climate. What we can't say right now is which these events are, and therefore who is being harmed and how much.

If mitigation efforts have indeed stopped, that's good. There are still the subsidies we give to renewables, of course, but I think most people would agree that these are meaningless gestures rather than mitigation.

More Climate Change Committee

Remember this? These were some of the impacts expected for various degrees of global warming as described in the Climate Change Committee's report.

Click for full sizeThe source for this table is IPCC WG2 - it's a direct lift from one report to the other. The IPCC report then provides citations for each impact described.

Click to read more ...

Intelligence Squared debate

This looks like it will be fun. I don't think I'll make it unfortunately:

If a windmill is about to blight your cherished view of the green English countryside, you might start to wonder why on earth the Department for Energy and Climate Change thinks it is a good idea to subsidise the monsters at vast cost to the British taxpayer. Why not retune some boilers in Guangdong instead? Or encourage the booming cities of China to power themselves with gas, not coal? There’s a whole raft of practical, carbon-saving steps which can be more cheaply achieved in the growing, bustling emerging world. After all, a ton of carbon saved in China is as good in global terms as a ton saved in the UK. So why ever spoil our green and pleasant land?

Hang on, though. Wasn’t the “green new deal” all about creating jobs in a new sort of economy? Making Britain a leader in an industry of the future? Not to mention making us just a little less dependent for our energy on geopolitically unstable regions of the world. Make China the focus of all our policy effort, and it will be China that reaps the knock-on benefits. Why would we realistically agree to that?

So who is right? Join us on October 20th 2011 at the Royal Society to find out.

The speakers include George Monbiot.

How policy is made

Having heard Lord Turner the other day I wondered what sort of policy recommendations somebody with his approach to facts might come up with and so I decided to take a look at some of the outputs of the Climate Change Committee, on which he sits alongside such luminaries as Sir Brian Hoskins and Lord May.

This is the report I've been reading, and in particular I've looked at the bit where they try to determine what the global target for temperature stabilisation should be.

As far as I can tell the process is this:

Click to read more ...