Would you want to let this man near your pension?

Mark Wilson, the boss of insurance giant Aviva has been getting in on the climate alarm act, with a speech to a city audience in which he outlined his shock at the horrors ahead and explained what Aviva intends to do about it. The bare bones of the plan can be seen here, and is headed by this summary of Mr Wilson's thinking.

If we do not take urgent action to limit global temperature increases to within 2°C the impacts upon the economy, society, and our business will be nothing short of devastating.

To which the only plausible response is "drivel". I don't think there is a single reputable scientist who would support Mr Wilson's view. The IPCC doesn't think this. Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office doesn't either. The academic literature is clear that the target is a political convenience. Even Ottmar Edenhofer, who came up with the idea of a target has confirmed that view. "Two degrees brings chaos" is mainly the preserve of the wilder fringes of the green movement.

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D is for diesel

In my Twitter feed yesterday came something entirely without precedent: a tweet from Lord Deben. This was something of a shock, as the noble lord has hitherto made it a matter of policy never to address me directly, leaving his followers in the slightly strange position of trying to work out who it is that he is insulting.

I assume that this was an error on his part.

He was responding to a tweet from someone who asked rather alarmingly:

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A private communiqué

The hijacking of learned institutions by political activists is something of a theme at BH, and today's news brings further depressing evidence that the situation has not changed. It seems that the managers of a group of UK learned societies have decided to try to influence the political agenda ahead of the Paris conference, issuing a joint call to arms (another one!), no doubt without consulting a single one of their members.

The communiqué opens with a decidedly shonky statement about the scientific evidence:

The scientific evidence is now overwhelming that the climate is warming and that human activity is largely responsible for this change through emissions of greenhouse gases.

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Casual smears at RTCC

A year or so ago I caught the people at the Responding to Climate Change website fabricating a story. They had claimed that an island in the Solomons was being evacuated due to climate change but a little research showed that it was due to a tsunami. RTCC had simply tried to appropriate the story for "the cause".

Today I find that RTCC editor Ed King has done a drive-by smear on Matt Ridley, alleging that he is the owner of a coal mine. The insinuation is fairly clear - that Ridley argues against decarbonisation in order to protect this business interest. Of course as readers here know, all subsurface energy assets in the UK are the property of the state so it it is not even possible for Ridley to own the coal under his land. Moreover the mines there are operated by H.J. Banks Ltd: Ridley is therefore neither owner nor operator. In fact he only receives a wayleave from Banks for access to the site.

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Quote of the day, unimpressed edition

Pope Francis should certainly be commended for his desire to deal with poverty in the developing world, but it is hard to see how he hopes to do so without economic growth and fossil fuels, both of which he thinks are unnecessary evils.

The Bishop of Chester is unimpressed with the papal encyclical

Oil brings development to Africa

The Economist describes how a major oil find in Northern Kenya has brought the possibility of development to an area that was once far from the benefits of civilisation. With oil prices low, it's all on hold for the moment, but even so, benefits have started to flow:

If and when it happens, Turkana will get its first paved roads, power stations and water treatment plants. Yet the knock-on effects of the oil boom are already evident and reach well beyond infrastructure. Drillers have found not just oil but reportedly also several large underground aquifers that could supply the bone-dry region with water for decades. Pastoralists might in future be able to grow crops. A man with a jerry-rigged distillery in a thatched hut near Tullow’s camp says: “We thought oil would bring us jobs and it’s done that—at least for some. But it’s so much more, both good and bad.”

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Integrity and scholarship at the LSE

Bob Ward and the Grantham Institute are jumping up and down this morning about a new paper the Institute has published. It's fair to say the conclusions of author Fergus Green, as reported in the Grantham Institute press release are striking:

Countries will benefit economically from almost all of the actions needed to limit global warming to no more than 2°C above pre-industrial levels, according to a paper published today (PDF) (13 July 2015) by the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and ESRC Centre for Climate Change Economics and Policy at London School of Economics and Political Science.

The paper suggests that individual countries have large incentives to make ambitious reductions in greenhouse gas emissions and to agree to strong collective action at the United Nations climate change conference in Paris in December.

Remarkable stuff, I'm sure you will agree, overturning much of what we thought we knew about the economics of global warming mitigation. It's even more surprising when you learn that Mr Green is not an economist at all, but a post-graduate student who was until recently a lawyer at a firm in Australia.

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Keeping the heat out

An article in the Mail tells the story of the number of people - apparently large - who are choosing to decamp rather than continue to live in their ecohouses.

When Emma Taylor was offered a two-bedroom apartment in an award-winning block of flats, she couldn’t wait to move in.

Newly built, she was informed the building had been constructed to such high eco-standards that it would cost just £1 a week to heat. Unfortunately, as she’s discovered to her extreme discomfort, keeping warm is the least of her problems.

Because unlike most Britons, 23-year-old Emma has come to dread the summer months. Her ground-floor flat in Coventry is so well insulated that when the sun shines the temperature inside rockets — regularly over 25C, a point at which experts say health can suffer.

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White wrong

President Obama's energy adviser [Stephen Chu] has suggested all the world's roofs should be painted white as part of efforts to slow global warming.

Telegraph, 27 May 2009

By using white roofing materials, [architects] could earn a point for helping a city like Philly stay cooler and therefore lower air-conditioning demand and natural-resource consumption for electricity generation. But the fact that they would spend more on heating costs was not always factored into the equation.

Philly.com, 29 June 2015

Green Deal: a waste of precious resources

I've always had my suspicions about the way that energy efficiency is presented as an easy way of reducing carbon emissions. For a start there's the Jevons paradox: the observation that efficiency gains tend to lead consumers towards enhanced performance. In other words, as houses become more efficient we tend to keep them much warmer. Being someone who lives in a cool (or even cold house) and wears jumpers all the time, I find modern houses stiflingly hot, but most people are much happier to wear shorts and t-shirts indoors.

But even leaving this kind of thing aside, whenever I have done the sums on my own house I've always come to the conclusion that investment in energy efficiency is not going to provide a good return. It's therefore interesting to see that my back-of-a-fag-packet calculations seem valid across the board. A new, and by the looks of it carefully controlled study of homes in the USA has found that the much touted gains from energy efficiency measures are actually relatively small and certainly less than the cost of installation

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Laudato Si – a cry for the poor

This guest post by Joe Ronan is about the papal encyclical Laudato Si.

Why is Pope Francis writing about climate change? Because he cares for the poor, and wants us all to look at how we use the resources of the world. His objective is to ask each of us to look at how we use the resources available to us, and how to be good stewards of creation. Whether we consider ourselves as owners or tenants of this planet we are asked to use it's bounty to the good of all, and to avoid laying it waste to the detriment of our brothers and sisters.

He looks at a number of ways in which the poor more than most suffer from environmental damage that man has control over. The first thing he mentions (paragraph 20) is something well aired on these blogs: atmospheric pollutants affecting the poor, using as an example the breathing high levels of smoke from fuels used in heating and cooking. He talks of pollution caused by transport and industry, soil, fertilizers and insecticides. Then he mentions dangerous wastes and residues and the despoiling of landscapes. Again, his concern is primarily for the people these affect, and secondarily for the ecosystem (though he stresses our responsibility for that too).

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The encyclical leaked

A copy of the encyclical has been leaked to the Italian press. A copy can be seen here, for those who speak Italian. Maurizio advises that his impression is very much that this is going to be seen as a damp squib. He points in particular to this paragraph (translated mostly by Mr Google):

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They blather to deceive

Levelized cost comparisons are a misleading metric for comparing intermittent and dispatchable generating technologies...

Paul Joskow, MIT

The standard way of comparing the cost of different types of electricity is to look at the levelised cost of electricity (LCOE) per MWh.

From "Annex: How competitive is renewable energy" from the Global Apollo Programme, a new scheme from Lord Stern, Lord Rees, David King, Adair Turner and others.

Faking it

The news that a group of European oil majors wants to open negotiations with governments about the creation of a global carbon tax has all the hallmarks of a public relations campaign.

In a sign of the rising pressure on fossil fuel companies ahead of a UN meeting in Paris to seal an international climate deal, the chief executives of groups including Royal Dutch Shell and Britain’s BP have sought direct talks with governments on creating a global carbon pricing system.

“We owe it to future generations to seek realistic, workable solutions to the challenge of providing more energy while tackling climate change,” the executives say in a letter to the FT revealing their plan.

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Encycled

The papal encyclical on the environment looks to be imminent. According to this page it should be with us in a couple of weeks' time.

I can hardly wait.