Spot the climate spiv

The Guardian discusses Bjorn Lomborg's work today in a podcast which can be found here. The panel chosen to take part consisted of Chris Hope, Mark Maslin and Adam Vaughan. And if that doesn't put you off, a couple of minutes listening to it will do the trick, or at least it did me.

Just before nodding off, I did take in Mark Maslin's claim that renewables only appear uncompetitive because fossil fuels are subsidised so heavily. (Why the Guardian thought to raise this topic with Maslin, a geographer, is beyond me). Given that the vast majority of subsidies of fossil fuels are applied outside the European Union, this is of course entirely irrelevant to policy decisions in the UK, and it is grossly misleading of Maslin to suggest otherwise.

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Notes from a conference, part II

More from Cameron Rose, who is attending a business and climate conference in Brussels.

The Big Fat Carbon Price (see the end of yesterday's post) was the subject for the first discussion, surprise, surprise. Tony Hayward was the man to watch. He is chairman of Glencore, a mining company, and CEO of an Anglo-Turkish company called Genel Energy. He was once BP CEO. Here are the key points I noted:

• 'Fossil fuels provide 82% of world energy but in 30 years the IEA expects it to be a percentage in the early 70s.' (Not much reduction there, then)
• 'The emissions trading scheme (ETS) has been a mess and we are now left with a dysfunctional energy market.' (Not afraid to speak plainly.)
• 'If the objective is to change behaviour it must be at the point of use. We need to eliminate subsidies.'
• 'The abatement of a tonne of CO2 from a coal power stations should be treated the same way as for other, new technologies.'
• 'China and India must complete their industrialisation.'

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Notes from a conference

This is a guest post by Cameron Rose.

Just thought I'd share my brief diary from the Business and Climate conference at the UNESCO building in Paris on 20th/21st May 2015.  It is in the lead up to COP21 in December and I'm a delegate this week.

Arrived late and missed the opening warm-up from Christine Figueres, the Executive Secretary of the UNFCCC. The businessman in the next seat told me there had been nothing new from her.

Wed 20th PM.  I was in time to catch the second half of the 'Energy' thematic session, where there were six CEO-level panelists plus the Norwegian Minister of European Economic affairs.  I learned the following (perhaps a True/False quiz would be appropriate):

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With apologies to Joel Pett

I found myself thinking about a well-known climate change cartoon by Joel Pett, and wondered if the wording didn't need to be changed slightly (original here). The words on the left come from the Climategate emails.

Pope Francis and Ben Tre

The Pope has apparently lent his approval to a petition by the Catholic Climate Movement, which wants to step up the  pace on global warming policy. The petition's wording is as follows:

Climate change affects everyone, but especially the poor and most vulnerable people. Impelled by our Catholic faith, we call on you to drastically cut carbon emissions to keep the global temperature rise below the dangerous threshold of 1.5°C, and to aid the world’s poorest in coping with climate change impacts.

No fossil fuels for African people then. To save the poorest we had to abandon the poorest. It's Bến Tre all over again.

The Vatican blinks

Anthony is reporting rumours that the Vatican just blinked on climate change.

Word has it, according to Vaticanist Sandro Magister, Pope Francis has decided to postpone the publication of his long-awaited encyclical on the environment. The reason, according to Magister, is that the Pope realized that the document in its current state had no chance of receiving the approval of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under the leadership of Cardinal Gerhard Müller.

Mind you, once one realises the horrors that climate change policy is dishing out in the developing world, the Pope should probably be shuddering, as well as blinking.

Humanitarianism versus environmentalism

Edinburgh University has decided that it will shun the trend among its fellows and refuse to divest its pension fund from the fossil fuelled part of the energy industry. Instead it will require companies in which it invests to report on their emissions.

Companies will be required to report on their emissions and benchmark them according to best performance in their sector.

In addition, the University will focus specifically on companies involved in the extraction of the highest carbon-emitting fossil fuels: coal and tar sands.

The University will withdraw from investment in these companies if: realistic alternative sources of energy are available and the companies involved are not investing in technologies that help address the effects of carbon emissions and climate change.

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Tamsin on climate sensitivity, lukewarmers and what we risk

As a pearl in the dunghill of the Guardian's climate change coverage, Tamsin Edward's wise article today is going to take quite a lot of beating. It attempts to sideline the namecallers, pointing to the areas of agreement and sensible disagreement in the climate debate, particularly over climate sensitivity, and ends on these very pertinent questions.

But whether we are in denial, lukewarm or concerned about global warming, the question really boils down to how we view uncertainty. If you agree with mainstream scientists, what would you be willing to do to reduce the predicted risks of substantial warming? And if you’re a lukewarmer, confident the Earth is not very sensitive, what would be at risk if you were wrong?

For a mainstream scientist, are you confident enough in your computer simulations to argue that they support the need for the shifting of resources away from dealing with the problems of today - clean water and energy for developing countries are obvious candidates - and towards the problems of the next century?

The weaselly ways of Lord Stern

Some delicious weasel words from Lord Stern over at the Guardian this morning. The great man purports to be explaining the state of the climate debate, and invites us all to believe that extreme weather is getting worse.

More frequent and severe extreme weather, rising sea levels and acidifying oceans are already posing threats to homes and businesses across the world...

But read that again. It's a sentence of striking ambiguity. Is he saying that extreme weather has become worse? That would be untrue, of course. But perhaps he is saying that there is the threat of increased extreme weather. The question that one would then have to ask is why, if the threat of extreme weather has gone up, hasn't the number or intensity of extreme weather events gone up too.

As for the suggestion that a marginal decrease in alkalinity in the oceans is "already posing a threat to homes and businesses", you have to wonder what threat precisely he is thinking of?

Green policy - complicity in genocide?

Matt Ridley has republished his Times column from yesterday at his blog. It picks up many of the themes that have been the focus of BH in recent days, particularly the curious moral corner into which the greens have worked themselves:

Without abundant fuel and power, prosperity is impossible: workers cannot amplify their productivity, doctors cannot preserve vaccines, students cannot learn after dark, goods cannot get to market. Nearly 700 million Africans rely mainly on wood or dung to cook and heat with, and 600 million have no access to electric light. Britain with 60 million people has nearly as much electricity-generating capacity as the whole of sub-Saharan Africa, minus South Africa, with 800 million.

His post also contains the valuable information that Britain has, like the USA, banned investment in fossil fuel power stations in developing countries.

Matt is an admirably polite writer, even in the face of gross provocation from environmentalists. Tom Fuller, who has also been discussing these matters, is much blunter about what it all means:

[T]o be agonizingly clear, there is a case to be made for saying the aggregate effect of Green policy in the developing world is perilously close to being complicit in genocide.

That's about the size of it.

On encyclicals

This is a guest post by Cumbrian Lad.

Climate change and the coming encyclical

Today we see another set of meetings in Rome. One is that of the Pontifical Academy of Science, and the other the Heartland Institute. Both organisations are hoping to influence the widely heralded encyclical from Pope Francis that will include references to climate change. Given that the text of the encyclical has already been finalised, and is currently being translated, there may not be much that either party can do to affect its content. The headlines they are making will be building up expectations on both sides, and it's worth having a closer look at the background to an encyclical. 

What is an encyclical?

Simply put, it is a circular letter written by the Pope to the Church which forms a part of the Ordinary Magisterium or teaching of the Church. It is not a formal statement of the type that is regarded as infallible doctrine, as it usually deals with moral guidance and the application of existing doctrine to current matters. In the past encyclicals have dealt with such subjects as war and social issues of all types.

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The morality of the green academic

A few days ago, I mentioned Professor Corey Bradshaw, the University of Adelaide academic who was being extremely vocal in his attempts to get Bjorn Lomborg defunded and ostracised.

I was blocked by Professor Bradshaw soon after my post appeared, but I gather that he is still hard at work demonstrating his willingness to sacrifice other people's careers to his own political imperatives:

Last week I was asked to exam a @uwanews PhD thesis. After the #LomborgDebacle wp.me/phhT4-4rC, I refuse. Apologies to the student.

What a lot of collateral damage the environmentalist academic can tolerate!

Update on Apr 27, 2015 by Bishop Hill

While we're on the subject of greens, how about Vivienne Westwood's comments about David Cameron's dead son?

Or what about the guy who thinks that Bjorn's Lomborg's call for spending on clean water for Africans is "warped" and "blinkered"?

The climatologist's privilege

The BBC has infamously decided that climatologists should not be challenged on air. They are, in the corporation's considered view Science Personified; the very voice of truth. As if to emphasise the point, the Today programme this morning invited Sir Brian Hoskins on air to talk about climate change. Ostensibly this was to allow him to air his grievance that the election debate has largely eschewed consideration of the subject, but also gave him plenty of time to discuss his views on climate policy and what he sees as the need to prioritise climate over wealth creation. And all without a word of challenge from anyone.

The climatologist's privilege is creeping ever wider by the looks of it.

Audio below.

Hoskins, Today 22 April 2015

Update on Apr 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In Unthreaded, reader Harry Passfield notes that James Lovelock was invited onto Today last weekend to make the same point as Hoskins about the lack of climate change on the election agenda.

Climatologists and moral choices

Yesterday's posts seemed to generate quite a lot of heat, with several commenters reading rather more into them than they should. The object was not to blame climatologists for the actions that their climate models are used to justify, but to ask them what they thought about those actions. I had hoped that we might get some condemnation of the attempts to prevent Africans getting access to fossil fuels, but there was nothing along these lines.

As an aside, I should point out that it is my understanding that these attempts span more than just coal - it's the whole range of fossil fuels that politicians are now seeking to sideline, as this paper makes clear.

...under US Senate Bill S.329 (2013) the Overseas Private Investment Corporation – a federal agency responsible for backstopping U.S. companies which invest in developing countries – is essentially prohibited from investing in energy projects that involve fossil fuels...

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BBC joins Guardian divestment campaign

With Alan Rusbridger's divestment campaign being relentlessly hammered in the Guardian, it's no surprise to see Roger Harrabin answering the call to arms with an article at the BBC on the same subject. It's quite funny in parts:

Are we approaching the twilight of the fossil fuel era? A few years ago that question would have seemed absurd. But a combination of forces is squeezing carbon assets like never before.

The oil price remains stubbornly low.

And of course we can't burn the fossil fuels, blah blah.

The oil price is of course low because of a surge in production. I'm struggling to see oversupply of a commodity as the herald of its downfall. Readers should also rest assured that the consequences of divestment for the Third World are not addressed. For the BBC and the Guardian and their fellow travellers it is morally wrong to consider such unpleasantness.

Update on Apr 16, 2015 by Bishop Hill

I've adjusted one of the pics from the BBC piece slightly.