Dealing with DECC

Alex Henney sends me a 2012 article from the journal New Power, in which he and Fred Udo examine electricity grids in several countries around the world and assess how the use of wind turbines has affected the carbon intensity of the power generated. Suffice it to say that it's not quite what the environmentalists intended.

What is particularly interesting is that the article prompted a response from DECC, whose ability to misunderstand the arguments presented is something to behold, and the resulting correspondence is appended to the end of the file.

Henney and Udo

What the IPCC left out

Rupert Darwall has a smashing post in the National Review examining the IPCC's cherrypicking and its failure to report the benefits of global warming:

...the summary speaks of rapid price increases following climate extremes since the 2007 report. This negligence amounts to downright dishonesty, as the summary omits mention of one of the principal causes of the 2007–08 spike in food prices, which is highlighted in the main body of the report. It was not climate change that increased food costs, but climate policies in the form of increased use of food crops in biofuel production, exacerbated by higher oil prices and government embargoes on food exports.

Read the whole thing.

Avoiding agreement

So here it is - the Science and Technology Committee's report on climate science communication. In it we learn that the Mail and the Telegraph are bad people™ and that the BBC has been allowing other bad people on air.

So far, so predictable.

I was hugely amused by one bit of the report. I had told the committee that there wasn't any single trusted source for information about climate science and that you needed to check everything. And in particular I took issue with the reliance on peer review:

Peer review is completely overdone. I know this Committee has done its own inquiry into peer review, but there is a lot of empirical evidence out there that peer review does not do a lot for you. On the whole, it does not find fraud or error, so the only way of getting to the bottom of whether something is right is to verify it.

Click to read more ...

Preparing the ground

Ahead of tomorrow's publication of the Science and Technology Committee's report into the communication of climate science, certain sections of the chatterati are, shall we say, preparing the ground.

The Guardian notes SciTech chairman Andrew Miller bemoaning the appearance of dissenting voices in certain media outlets:

Andrew Miller MP, the committee's chair said: “All of the serious news outlets we spoke to were unanimous in accepting the scientific evidence that human activity is causing climate change. This came as a surprise to us because some papers regularly give a platform to lobby groups or indeed conspiracy theorists – many not even qualified scientists – who pooh-pooh the evidence and attack UK climate scientists."

Click to read more ...

The open society and its enemies

Lawrence Torcello, the academic who called for criminal negligence charges to be levelled at some climate sceptics, has been on the receiving end of some rude emails. One apparently invited him to "die you maggot".

Not nice.

On the other hand, he can hardly have expected those he wanted jailed to send him bouquets can he? Torcello's defence seems to be that he was not calling for sceptic scientists to be jailed but only those who fund them. Despite US law contradicting him, he seems to think that funding the causes one believes in doesn't amount to an exercise of free speech rights.

Click to read more ...

Worthington versus Tol

I was interested to see a Twitter exchange between Bryony Worthington and Richard Tol last night in which the noble baroness revealed a deep-seated wish for a public debate with Richard Tol.

Worthington: @RichardTol perhaps can have debate at more convenient time. Do you stand by your comments in FT about UK? or were they a kind of bad joke?

Tol: @bryworthington I'm happy to debate the impacts of climate change in the UK and elsewhere.

In intellectual terms this would be something of a David-versus-Goliath outing, but I'm sure it would score highly for entertainment.