Cowrin', timorous beasties

Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie, O, what a panic's in thy breastie.

Big, bad Pielke Jnr is in town next month and has invited the Grantham Institute to debate some current global warming issues with him.

Unfortunately, the academic staff are apparently unavailable.

All of them.

For the full ten days of Roger's visit.

You have to laugh...

For whom the bell Tols

Richard Tol has a strongly worded piece up at Klimazwiebel. His ire is directed at a statement by IPCC bigwig, Ottmar Edenhofer - this one:

I cannot understand, even if I try hard, the assertion that the IPCC would deliberately have omitted things, which would have been inconvenient, which would not have been consistent with the overall story.)

The response is forthright:

This assertion of the co-chair of Working Group III of the IPCC is at best peculiar if not outright false. In the following, I will back this statement in some detail, by demonstrating how specific conclusions from white publications, known to the IPCC lead authors, have been filtered out in support of a (false) claim of consensus in the Summary for Policymakers. At the time of his interview, Dr. Edenhofer was aware of these inconsistencies.

Ouch.

Pielke Jnr on the Climate Fix

RP Jnr's talk on climate policy is well worth a look, if nothing else for the perspective it gives on UK energy policy. One can't help but be mightily embarrassed by the 'solutions' put in place by our political leaders and mightily concerned that our energy policy is now being dictated by 'Howlin mad' Huhne.

Our disingenuous man in San José

From Nacion.com, a newspaper in Costa Rica:

Here is some good news for the citizens of San José: in the future you are going to find your city a little quieter and the air less polluted and cleaner. Why? Because the Swiss and British ambassadors have just bought electric cars to use for routine trips in the city.

...[the cars], being electric, don't generate emissions.

That last bit ain't true, electric cars merely displacing emissions from the exhaust to the power station.

Huhne out?

A report on the Spectator website suggests that David Laws has resigned as chief secretary to the Treasury.

His successor is understood to be a Lib Dem, probably Chris Huhne or Jeremy Browne. ...getting Huhne out of the environment office may prove a blessing.

Yes indeed.

Update on May 29, 2010 by Bishop Hill

BBC confirms that Laws has gone but says that his replacement will be Danny Alexander. We're stuck with Huhne.

David Mackay at Oxford

This is another guest post by DR. David Mackay is Professor of Physics at Oxford, a Fellow of the Royal Society and a member of the World Economic Forum Global Agenda Council on Climate Change.

Another talk from Oxford. This is my report of David MacKay’s talk on Sustainable Energy – without the Hot Air in the Department of Engineering Science on 13 May 2010.

Click to read more ...

Nature on the Hartwell paper

Last night I posted a comment on the Nature Climate feedback posting about the Hartwell report. I said that it was odd that they gave earnest consideration to the sources of funding for the Hartwell group but, in giving space to some critical comments by Bill Hare, of the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research, they failed even to mention that he is an advisor to Greenpeace.

My comment doesn't seem to have made it past the moderators yet. Perhaps it's their day off.

Climate panel in crisis

This is a translation of an article in the Norwegian newspaper Forskning. The original article was by Bjørnar Kjensli and the machine translation was tidied and corrected by readers Messenger and Geir Hasnes.


A German climate researcher says that people are beginning to lose faith in climate research, pointing to the IPPC as one of the main causes. Norwegian IPCC veterans disagree about what the organization should do about it.

Click to read more ...

Sidelining the 2500?

Re-reading Richard Tol's post at Die Klimazweibel (can anglophone readers call it The Climate Onion?), I was struck by this:

The models assessed by the IPCC all have that abatement costs grow and accelerate as targets become more stringent. Typically, doubling the rate of emission reduction would lead to a quadrupling of costs. The cost curve in SPM.6 (and SPM.4) bends the wrong way: Incremental costs fall as policy become stricter.

Click to read more ...

The rot spreads to WG3

The IPCC -gates have so far mainly been a feature of Working Group 2, which looks at the potential impacts of climate change. As Hans von Storch explains in the introduction to a posting by Richard Tol, this is not because the other areas of the IPCC report deserve a clean bill of health.

The WG3 report did not attract the same scrutiny. This could create the impression that WG3 wrote a sound report. That impression would be false. Just as WG2 appears to have systematically overstated the negative impacts of climate change, WG3 appears to have systematically understated the negative impacts of greenhouse gas emission reduction.

Tol's article is a must-read.

Timmy in the Express

Tim Worstall has a piece on the economics of climate change in the Daily Express, which is excellent and not just because he manages to squeeze in a reference to the Hockey Stick Illusion in passing.

Newsnight turns

BBC's flagship current affairs programme, Newsnight, had climate change as its headline news tonight, with an interesting piece about a largely unnamed group of scientists meeting in the UK to discuss what to do with climate science, an interview with Doug Keenan, and a television debate between Chris Field, head of IPCC WGII, and Roger Pielke Jnr.

Good stuff, but probably not viewable outside the UK.

Update on Feb 3, 2010 by Bishop Hill

Roger's take on the head to head with Field is here.

Stern report doctored

Roger Pielke Jnr has the news.

As I was preparing this post, I accessed the Stern Review Report on the archive site of the UK government to capture an image of Table 5.2. Much to my surprise I learned that since the publication of my paper, Table 5.2 has mysteriously changed!

Richard Tol on Stern

I'm very pleased to have had a comment by the eminent economist Richard Tol (even it is was to tell me that I was wrong about the Stern Report - the report was still flawed, but not for the reasons I had put forward).

Here's what he says:

Stern managed to focus the discussion about the Stern Review on the discount rate used. The issue is not that Stern argues for a particular discount rate. That is his right as a a citizen of a democratic country. The issue is that he used a single discount rate (without performing a sensitivity analysis) and that he used a discount rate that differs from the discount rate typically used by his own, democratically-elected government. And all without alerting the reader. Stern's use of the discount rate is a clear case of manipulation.

The sloppiness of the Stern Review is perhaps best illustrated with its assessment of an optimal climate policy. (By the way, the Stern Review concludes that the previously formulated long-term target of the UK government is exactly right.) Stern's "optimum" does not meet the first-order conditions. In the optimum, marginal costs should equal marginal benefits. Stern recommends that greenhouse gas concentrations be stabilized at 550 ppm CO2eq, but at that point his (faulty) estimates of marginal costs do not equal his (faulty) estimates of the marginal benefits.

When I pressed him over this, the paraphrased reply was that Newton and Leibnitz are so passe.

The subsequent discussion is very interesting too. In essence Stern is arguing that a philosopher king should tell us what is right, while Tol is making the libertarian case - that ordinary people should choose their own way. Global warming enthusiasts should be clear, both to themselves and to the public they seek to persuade, that this is their intention.

Which brings me back to my original point: Stern should be strongly criticised for not making this clear to his readers, and Ed Stourton, one of the most senior journalists at the BBC should hang his head in shame for precisely the same reason.

More food riots

There have been more riots triggered by food price rises driven by biofuels policy and crop failures due to the cold.

Haiti

Hédi Annabi told the 15 members of the U.N. Security Council that recent deadly riots in parts of Haiti over rising food prices also appear to have a political dimension, and could undermine the government as well as the public's confidence.

Egypt

Ahmed Ali Hammad, 15, died from gun shot wounds Tuesday morning in the Mahalla hospital, said a security official on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the press. The gritty industrial city has been the scene of two days of violent clashes between police and residents angered over rising food prices.

The Times fears that unrest will spread to the Far East.