Muller again

Pielke Jnr has a partial transcript of Richard Muller's radio interview yesterday.

CONAN: Do you find that, though, there is a lot of ideology in this business?

Prof. MULLER: Well, I think what's happened is that many scientists have gotten so concerned about global warming, correctly concerned I mean they look at it and they draw a conclusion, and then they're worried that the public has not been concerned, and so they become advocates. And at that point, it's unfortunate, I feel that they're not trusting the public. They're not presenting the science to the public. They're presenting only that aspect to the science that will convince the public. That's not the way science works. And because they don't trust the public, in the end the public doesn't trust them. And the saddest thing from this, I think, is a loss of credibility of scientists because so many of them have become advocates.

CONAN: And that's, you would say, would be at the heart of the so-called Climategate story, where emails from some scientists seemed to be working to prevent the work of other scientists from appearing in peer-reviewed journals.

Prof. MULLER: That really shook me up when I learned about that. I think that Climategate is a very unfortunate thing that happened, that the scientists who were involved in that, from what I've read, didn't trust the public, didn't even trust the scientific public. They were not showing the discordant data. That's something that - as a scientist I was trained you always have to show the negative data, the data that disagrees with you, and then make the case that your case is stronger. And they were hiding the data, and a whole discussion of suppressing publications, I thought, was really unfortunate. It was not at a high point for science.

And I really get even more upset when some other people say, oh, science is just a human activity. This is the way it happens. You have to recognize, these are people. No, no, no, no. These are not scientific standards. You don't hide the data. You don't play with the peer review system.

It's good to see Muller banging on about "hide the decline": the scientific establishment and prominent science commentators have, for the most part, maintained a deafening silence on the subject - something that does them no credit.

If you have climbed to the very top of the scientific tree you get responsibility as well as power. That responsibility includes the duty to stand up and speak out when scientists misbehave, particularly where public policy is involved. Fence-sitting, diplomatic silences and vague allusions to "problems" are not sustainable approaches for these people to take. Eventually the truth will get out and then the public will ask "Who knew?" and "Why weren't we told?". Many reputations will then be on the line. Muller's will not be one of them.

Beddington's meeting with Pachauri

H/T to David Holland for this little snippet. In February 2010, Ed Miliband - then the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change, now leader of the opposition - wrote to Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the IPCC on the subject of Climategate. The letter is not desperately interesting, being mainly suggestions for what Pachauri might do about the shambles of the IPCC, but I was interested that its writing was prompted by a meeting between John Beddington and the IPCC chairman.

The meeting doesn't seem suspicious to me - for the head of the IPCC to meet the chief scientific officer of one of his major funders is surely quite natural in the wake of a scandal. What is interesting is that I had asked to see all Beddington's Climategate related correspondence and papers, and there is no hint of such a meeting in what was disclosed. I find it hard to believe that UEA was not discussed at this meeting.

More FOI required.

Cornell shale study debunked

This looks like a fairly thorough riposte to the Cornell shale gas study. I don't think "debunking" is too strong a word for it. The article lists five things you need to know about the Cornell study. Here's a sample:

Thing #1: The study’s conclusions rely almost entirely on the application of a Global Warming Potential (GWP) factor that’s 45 percent higher for natural gas than the one cited by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007.

Thing #2: Even the study’s authors admit their data is “lousy.”...

Thing #4: The authors’ estimates on pipeline leakage are based on data and assumptions that are completely irrelevant to the Marcellus Shale...

I always had it in my mind that Cornell was a good university. But it's going to be hard to maintain that idea in the face of stuff like this.

Quality data

The New York Times seems to want to head up the fightback against shale gas, publishing a rather uncritical article about a forthcoming paper about whether gas really is better than coal.

Cornell University researchers say that natural gas pried from shale formations is dirtier than coal in the short term, rather than cleaner, and "comparable" in the long term. That finding -- fiercely disputed by the gas industry -- undermines the widely stated belief that gas is twice as "clean" as coal in terms of greenhouse gas emissions. The gas industry has promoted that concept as a way for electric utilities to prepare for climate change regulations by switching from coal-fired plants to gas.

There is a link to the preprint of the paper, which finds that the root of shale gas's problems in leakage of methane during the production process. I particularly liked their description of where they got their methane leakage figures from:

Between 0.6% and 3.2% of the life-time production of gas from wells is emitted as methane during the flow-back period (Table 1)... However, we note that the data used in Table 1 are not well documented, with many values based on PowerPoint slides from EPA-sponsored workshops.

The source of the Table 1 figures for quantity of methane emitted at the Haynesville site - the highest in the table -  is a paper by Eckhardt et al (2009). Oddly, this paper doesn't appear in the list of references. Can anyone identify likely candidates?

Update on Apr 12, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Thanks to a reader for pointing me to this. The company discussed produce oil well data and have an Eckhardt on their books.

Solar looters get more loot

Having fleeced taxpayers once by offering crazy feed in tariffs to solar power companies, DECC is now going to fleece them once again by offering compensation now the subsidies have been somewhat reined in. Huhne really is stark raving mad isn't he?

Climate change just happens

I've always shuddered rather when people say things like "70% of the observed temperature change is due to manmade carbon dioxide emissions". Christofides and Koutsoiyannis clearly feel the same way as shown in their presentation to the EGU a few days ago.

...we should be careful when we talk about causes, and that trends and shifts do not necessarily imply non-stationarity or a change in forcings: they can just happen.

The implications for all those claims of "we can only reproduce climate history with carbon dioxide in our forcing mix" seem rather profound.

Light blogging

It's half term at the moment and I've headed for the beach. Blogging will therefore be light.

Terence Kealey on post-normal science

Another brilliant talk from the EIKE conference, this time from Terence Kealey, vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham. Kealey's message is essentially "never mind the idealised version of science put forward by Popper, let's look at how it works in practice".

Praising post-publication peer review

Richard Smith, former editor of the British Medical Journal and regular critic of the pre-publication peer review process, writes on the subject of post-publication peer review.

But more important than...formal types of peer review is the informal, the thousands of comments, decisions, and actions from the many that lead to a sorting of studies. I may hear a study presented or read a paper and be impressed. Others in the audience or other readers might also be impressed. We talk to friends about it. We email colleagues. We put it on listserves. Some of the recipients are impressed and start their own cascade. Others are less impressed and see problems. Perhaps a statistician attracted by the clamour reads the clinical article and sees important flaws that she shares with colleagues. Somebody might incorporate the study into a lecture, a review, or a grant application. And so a study might attract increasing attention and assume a prominent place, or it might fade as its receives more attention and more problems are noticed.

Many studies, in contrast, attract no attention—usually, but not always, rightly.

More on the windy flops

There is a very amusing article on the BBC website about the John Muir Trust report on windfarms, which you read about here yesterday. The report, you may remember, noted that...

During each of the four highest peak demands of 2010, wind output reached just 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity, according to the analysis.

...to which Jenny Hogan of the quango Scottish Renewables has retorted:

no form of electricity [works] at 100% capacity, 100% of the time.

Hilarious.

Epic shale

The shale gas boom just keeps getting bigger and bigger, having now reached what Nick Grealy calls a Wow! moment (H/T GWPF).

And surprise, surprise: China! Largest shale reserves in the world, surpassing even the US by far. I've said it before, and I'll say it again. The only way I have been wrong about shale is by underestimating it's impact. But the Chinese figures change everything. World LNG? Toast! Which can't help Australia too much even with 395. Which leads to the other southern hemisphere wonders, although since this site mentioned them both in Q3 2009, it's only the massive scale of the resource that surprises, not the locations:

South Africa  485!

Argentina 774!  Repeat that.  That is not a mistake.  That is technicially recoverable.  That is astounding.

For some, however, this kind of good news just can't go unchallenged and I sense that there is a concerted effort to hype up the idea that there might be some important environmental concerns. Take this article in Time magazine for example, or this forthcoming conference.

Meanwhile, Zeke, writing at Lucia's blog, looks at an old chart of hydrocarbon deposits and the proportion used to date - it's hard to get the two figures on the same chart because mankind has used so little. Zeke wonders what it would look like now we have discovered all this shale gas.

Climate heroes

Eli Kintisch interviews Richard Muller, whose BEST project has been causing something of a stir in recent days. Muller certainly knows how to get attention...

I realized that Watts was doing something that was of importance. The issues he raised needed to be addressed. It made me seriously wonder whether the reported global warming may be biased by poor station quality. Watts is a hero for what he's done. So is [prominent skeptic blogger] Steve McIntyre.

ABC in Australia is also looking at BEST and Anthony W.

It's the ocean, stupid!

Jeff Id gave up blogging a few months back, but fortunately for us he just can't resist the urge to return from time to time. According to RP Snr, what he has said today is pretty important:

If you were to transfer enough ocean energy directly to the atmosphere to create 4 degrees of atmospheric warming, how much would that change the average temperature of the Earth’s water?

Would you believe –  0.001 Degrees C of ocean temp change?  The left side pancake wouldn’t look any different in Fig 1!   Hell, it wouldn’t change if we were in another oceanic current inspired ice age — think about that.

Windy flops

The John Muir Trust is that rare beast, an environmental organisation that is more sane than bonkers. One of their big bugbears is their fellow greens' enthusiasm for windfarms, a position they seem to take a certain amount of relish in tearing to pieces in their recent report on the subject.

The nature of wind output has been obscured by reliance on “average output” figures. Analysis of hard data from National Grid shows that wind behaves in a quite different manner from that suggested by study of average output derived from the Renewable Obligation Certificates (ROCs) record, or from wind speed records which in themselves are averaged. It is clear from this analysis that wind cannot be relied upon to provide any significant level of generation at any defined time in the future. There is an urgent need to re-evaluate the implications of reliance on wind for any significant proportion of our energy requirement.

Delingpole's take on the story is here. Apparently BBC Scotland covered it too.

Cloud of obscurity

Richard Black reports that scientists have got themselves into a bit of a pickle over whether one of their ideas for geoengineering the earth is a good one or not. The proposal being considered is to spray clouds with seawater, which scientists hope will reflect more sunlight back into space cooling our overheated planet.

Well, some scientists anyway. Some think it will actually warm the planet.

Oh dear.