Two years later

Engineers and industry agree that although challenges abound in utility-scale solar in the sunniest places on Earth, we have the technology to go big in the desert

The vast and glittering Ivanpah solar facility in California will soon start sending electrons to the grid, likely by the end of the summer. When all three of its units are operating by the end of the year, its 392-megawatt output will make it the largest concentrating solar power plant in the world, providing enough energy to power 140,000 homes. And it is pretty much smack in the middle of nowhere.

Scientific American, 1 July 2013

[Ivanpah] isn’t producing the electricity it is contractually required to deliver to PG&E Corp., which says the solar plant may be forced to shut down if it doesn’t receive a break Thursday from state regulators.

Marketwatch, yesterday

H/T Anthony

The man the Royal Society honoured not once but twice

There is a man that the Royal Society has chosen to honour not once but twice: first with a Wolfson Merit Award, and second with his own volume of their flagship journal. This post is about that man.

The man the Royal Society honoured not once but twice wrote a paper claiming that global warming sceptics believed that the moon landings were a hoax. This was despite the fact that his survey data had been collected at stridently anti-sceptic blogs. Worse,  his data showed precisely the opposite of what he claimed (and leaving aside that only ten of his 1145 respondents believed in the moon hoax anyway). Yes really - the man the Royal Society honoured not once but twice wrote a paper the title of which was completely, utterly and obviously refuted by his own data. This is a man who lied about the participants in his survey, the people who had given their time for scientific research.

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Remember when Nature was a science journal?

Climate change: Climate justice more vital than democracy

Title of new paper published in Nature

I can still remember the days when Nature magazine was about science.

Update on Oct 15, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Great minds...

Orac takes on @NatureNews for their propagation of quackery. Remeber when @Nature used to be a science magazine http://t.co/Vaq642LcCb

— David Colquhoun (@david_colquhoun) October 15, 2015

He gets all his best stuff from me. ;-)

In which Nature Climate validates my predictive models

In order for a predictive model to be useful it needs to be validated in some way. Here are two predictive models that I suggest might be useful in interpreting scientific papers.

• If the paper is published in a Nature journal it's probably nonsense. Particularly if it's in (a) Nature itself or (b) Nature Climate Change
• If it calls RCP8.5 "business as usual" it is political drivel.

With these predictions in mind, readers may be interested in this new paper from Nature Climate Change:

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of some climatic extremes^{1, 2}. These may have drastic impacts on biodiversity^{3, 4}, particularly if meteorological thresholds are crossed, leading to population collapses. Should this occur repeatedly, populations may be unable to recover, resulting in local extinctions. Comprehensive time series data on butterflies in Great Britain provide a rare opportunity to quantify population responses to both past severe drought and the interaction with habitat area and fragmentation. Here, we combine this knowledge with future projections from multiple climate models, for different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), and for simultaneous modelled responses to different landscape characteristics. Under RCP8.5, which is associated with ‘business as usual’ emissions, widespread drought-sensitive butterfly population extinctions could occur as early as 2050. However, by managing landscapes and particularly reducing habitat fragmentation, the probability of persistence until mid-century improves from around zero to between 6 and 42% (95% confidence interval). Achieving persistence with a greater than 50% chance and right through to 2100 is possible only under both low climate change (RCP2.6) and semi-natural habitat restoration. Our data show that, for these drought-sensitive butterflies, persistence is achieved more effectively by restoring semi-natural landscapes to reduce fragmentation, rather than simply focusing on increasing habitat area, but this will only be successful in combination with substantial emission reductions.

My predictive models appears to be working splendidly.

Quote of the day, Boyd edition

I see too many studies...assigning causation to climate change when the evidence for this is quite poor...I think this is bad for climate science in general and authors and journal editors need to try to avoid the temptation of headline-grabbing when it is not justified by the evidence.

This comes from Professor Ian Boyd, the chief scientist at Defra, whose blog can be found here. It doesn't seem to be updated often, and the quote is from an old post. But fun nevertheless.

Science is often flawed

That is the message of this long piece at Vox.com

Recently, the conversation about science's wrongness has gone mainstream. You can read, in publications like Vox, the New York Times or the Economist, about how the research process is far from perfect — from flaws in peer review to the fact that many published results simply can't be replicated. The crisis has gotten so bad that the editor of The Lancet medical journal Richard Horton recently lamented, "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."

That science can fail, however, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's a human construct, after all. And if we simply accepted that science often works imperfectly, we'd be better off. We'd stop considering science a collection of immutable facts. We'd stop assuming every single study has definitive answers that should be trumpeted in over-the-top headlines. Instead, we'd start to appreciate science for what it is: a long and grinding process carried out by fallible humans, involving false starts, dead ends, and, along the way, incorrect and unimportant studies that only grope at the truth, slowly and incrementally.

I'm not sure that this is meant to apply to climate science though.

Science's pollution problem

Science Direct covers what looks like a very interesting paper by Arthur Caplan, which looks at science's "pollution problem", namely the ability of junk science to get published.

The pollution of science and medicine by plagiarism, fraud, and predatory publishing is corroding the reliability of research," writes Dr. Caplan. "Yet neither the leadership nor those who rely on the truth of science and medicine are sounding the alarm loudly or moving to fix the problem with appropriate energy.

The green blob and its double standards

I'm grateful to Ben Pile and Barry Woods for these observations about the latest edition of Nature Climate Change, a special with a focus on climate change and the media.

Barry noted that it featured articles by Leo Hickman, now of Carbon Brief, and Richard Black, now of the Energy and Climate Change Information Unit. By strange coincidence, both of these organisations are funded by the European Climate Foundation (ECF), a conduit for funding sent by green billionaires.

Ben then pointed out that the author of another article - James Painter of the Reuters School of Journalism - was not only the son in law of Crispin Tickell but also the beneficiary of considerable funding from the self-same ECF. Another coincidence, no doubt, but one that meant that no fewer than three of the five articles in the special feature were written by ECF-funded authors.

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The Institute of Physics is corrupt

Richard Tol has posted up a review of the strange affair of the "97% consensus", as the second anniversary of Cook's infamous paper draws near. An edited version has apparently been published in the Australian.

The sample was padded with irrelevant papers. An article about TV coverage on global warming was taken as evidence for global warming. In fact, about three-quarters of the papers counted as endorsements had nothing to say about the subject matter.

Requests for the data were met with evasion and foot-dragging, a clear breach of the publisher’s policy on validation and reproduction, yet defended by an editorial board member of the journal as “exemplary scientific conduct”.

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The climate scare overturning circulation

Anthony is having lots of fun with the latest scare paper that is doing the rounds of the media, which tries to breathe life into the somewhat hackneyed "ocean currents are about to halt" scare.

Published by Nature and with a team including Mann and Rutherford, you know the paper's entertainment value is going to be high and the authors certainly don't let us down, declaring on the basis of a proxy study (!) that ocean currents in the Atlantic are slowing down and everything is worse than we thought. But as Anthony points out, this is a stark contrast with an earlier observational paper by Rossby et al that found no evidence of any slowing at all. In fact there's a bit of a mystery here:

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Open advocacy

Gavin Schmidt's article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists contains some interesting ideas about scientists and advocacy, his big talking point being that he thinks that scientists who want to take on advocacy positions should be open about it.

Responsible advocates are up-front about what is being advocated for and how the intersection of values and science led to that position. On the other hand, it is irresponsible to proclaim that there are no values involved, or to misrepresent what values are involved. Responsible advocacy must acknowledge that the same scientific conclusions may not lead everyone to the same policies (because values may differ). Assuming that one’s own personal values are universal, or that disagreement on policy can be solved by recourse to facts alone, is a common mistake. Deliberate irresponsibility, by advocates who purposefully obscure their values and who often resort to “science-y” sounding arguments to avoid addressing the real reasons for any disagreement, should be avoided by anyone wishing to remain a credible voice in science.

Of course, as we have seen in recent weeks, there are already some scientists who have attempted a degree of openness about their advocacy - I'm thinking particularly of Mark Maslin telling his readers that the object of his book was to convince everyone that "a more equal society" was the way forward.

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The pursuit of Ramsey

Readers will no doubt recall a very interesting thread concerning Doug Keenan's pursuit of Christopher Ramsey, an Oxford researcher whose work on radiocarbon dating has led to considerable controversy in the archaeology world, as his methods lead to much ancient history potentially having to be rewritten.

Keenan had accused Ramsey of fraud and had issued a formal complaint to the University of Oxford. However, during the discussions on the BH thread discussing the case, it turned out that at least one of the allegations was wrong.

But this has not been the end of the affair. Doug has rewritten the complaint, bringing in a new allegation that he had held back previously and has put the whole thing to the University. A detailed account of what has happened can be seen at Doug's website, but suffice it to say that a fairly thick coat of whitewash has been applied by the powers that be.

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Anonymity in the ivory tower

Times Higher Education has an interesting article that touches on several subjects much beloved of the BH community, including post-publication peer review and anonymous commenters.

Moriarty concedes that having to reveal their identities even to a moderator could put off vulnerable early career researchers, and he suspects that PubPeer’s popularity – in contrast to some previous experiments in post-publication review – is down to the possibility of anonymity. But he suggests that finding a way to make comments citeable – and, hence, count towards scientific prestige – might warm up some cold young feet.

The BMJ's supersleuth

You have to laugh. Having been on the receiving end of some mild GWPF criticism for its eccentric decision to devote a large chunk of one of its issues to global warming, the British Medical Journal has retaliated. Ooh er!

The august journal has wheeled out its investigations editor, one Deborah Cohen, who has doggedly unearthed the truth behind the wicked people who have dared to challenge it. And being a highly skilled investigations editor, she has been able to get to all those hidden facts that normal people would just have missed.

Actually, she seems to have stuck "GWPF" into Google and has found her way to DeSmog.

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The OAS and replicability

The news that there is a new learned society for atmospheric scientists is very exciting and I'm sure that everyone at BH wishes those behind the move every success.

The focus is inevitably going to be on the Open Atmospheric Society "throwing down the gauntlet to the AMS and AGU" angle, but I'm also struck by the "throwing down the gauntlet to scholarly publishers" angle, summed up in this important position statement by the OAS regarding its journal:

[There is a] unique and important requirement placed up-front for any paper submitted; it must be replicable, with all data, software, formulas, and methods submitted with the paper. Without those elements, the paper will be rejected.

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