Yup, desperate

A few days ago, I noted some rampant misrepresentation of Gordon Hughes GWPF report by the Chief Executive of RenewableUK, the self-help group for subsidy junkies. It now appears that responsibility for this onerous task has been passed down to the deputy CEO, Maf Smith. In an article in the Express, Mr Smith is quoted as follows:

We want to keep electricity bills as low as possible. So we have to stop importing massive amounts of expensive fossil fuels from abroad as we have no control over how much they cost. We know exactly how much wind costs: just 2p per household per day – that’s according to independent regulator Ofgem.

I'm speechless.

Cloudless days

Anthony reports an interesting new paper, which finds that cloud cover has decreased slightly over the last 40 years. It's not clear to me what impact this will have on AGW detection and attribution studies, but no doubt this will all come out in the wash.

More Deben

Updated on Aug 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Aug 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Aug 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Commenters on the Severn Barrage thread have been doing some very interesting work on Lord Deben's financial interests. Although the great man has apparently indicated that he will take unspecified steps to ensure that his financial interests do not impinge upon his work as chairman of the Climate Change Committee, the sheer scale of those interests starts to look, well, extraordinary.

First off, Terry S noted the various shareholdings of Corlan Hafren, the company that is to build the Severn Barrage.

Shareholdings of Corlan Hafren:

There are 8704 shares comprising of 8700 non-voting shares and 4 voting shares.

3400 + 1 John Richard Forbes Bazley
2200 + 1 Halcrow Group Limited

Click to read more ...

Madrid ’95: What went wrong?

This is a guest post by Bernie Lewin.

I have noticed around the blogs some patient and kindly folks attempting to summarise my overly verbose account of investigations into the background of the Chapter 8 controversy. I welcome these. And I welcome various interpretations. I am purposely inconclusive. However, I may have confused some folks as to what I am suggesting it was that went wrong in Madrid. Therefore, I thought it might be useful at this stage to explicitly clarify my current understanding of how the Scientific Assessment of the IPCC was first corrupted in its first positive human attribution claim.

Click to read more ...

Lord Deben and the Severn Barrage

Leo Hickman tweets that Lord Deben is a director of Corlan Hafren, the company that has just proposed building an enormous barrage across the River Severn.

Conflict of interest anyone?

Update on Aug 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Leo has added the further interesting snippet that DECC failed to mention this role when they announced Deben as the new chairman.

Update on Aug 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Leo has now spoken to Lord Deben, who apparently stood down from the company's board two months ago.

Abraham and Leveson

Leo Hickman pointed me to John Abraham's submission to the Leveson Inquiry and somewhat jokingly suggested I should be fact-checking it. Always seeking to oblige, I took a look. It's rather interesting.

The general theme is the wickedness of right-wing people in general and of right wing journalists in particular. Singled out for particular mention are David Rose, who writes at the Mail, and Christopher Booker.

Click to read more ...

Commons comedy gold

Although this blog has mostly concentrated on Lord Oxburgh's multiple conflicts of interest, press attention is currently focused on the similar problems of Tim Yeo, the chairman of the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee. Yeo's decision to lobby for legislative changes strangely coincided with the interests of Eco City Taxis, a company of which he is the chairman, and this unfortunate coincidence did not escape the notice of the UK's uber-Westminster watcher Guido Fawkes. The following day the Mail carried a major review of Yeo's green machinations, outlining the extraordinary sums of money he has earned in the process.

Today, David Rose has expanded the attack to Lord Deben, the new chairman of the "independent" Climate Change Committee. Deben is chairman of a consortium seeking to build windfarms in the North Sea and a lobbying company with a specialism in climate-related business.

The Department of Energy and Climate Change has put forward a hilarious defence of their proposal of Deben:

A CCC spokeswoman said that any  possible conflicts of interest would be considered by the DECC. A Department spokesman added: ‘Lord Deben has made a full declaration of his interests to the DECC and the Cabinet Office. The appointment is now subject to scrutiny by the Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee.’

So Tim Yeo, the conflicted committee chairman, will question Deben, the conflicted candidate on whether conflicts are acceptable. I imagine this could be a penetrating cross-examination. It promises to be Commons comedy gold.

The date for your diaries is 4 September 2012 at 3pm.

German industry counts cost of renewables

Der Spiegel is reporting that all those wind farms in Germany are having an unfortunate effect on the stability of the electricity grid and that manufacturing industry is counting the cost.

It was 3 a.m. on a Wednesday when the machines suddenly ground to a halt at Hydro Aluminium in Hamburg. The rolling mill's highly sensitive monitor stopped production so abruptly that the aluminum belts snagged. They hit the machines and destroyed a piece of the mill. The reason: The voltage off the electricity grid weakened for just a millisecond.

Workers had to free half-finished aluminum rolls from the machines, and several hours passed before they could be restarted. The damage to the machines cost some €10,000 ($12,300).

A problem that is no doubt coming to an employer near you soon.

Wind produces more CO2 than gas - the numbers

Ever since Gordon Hughes' report noted that wind power was more likely to produce more carbon dioxide emissions than gas, I have been looking for the figures behind the claim. In the comments, someone has now posted some details that seem to meet the bill. Although these are not Hughes' own numbers -they were submitted in evidence to Parliament by an engineer -  I assume they are similar.

[A]s wind rarely produces more than 25% of its faceplate capacity it needs 75% backup - which due to the necessity of fast response times needs OCGT generation (CCGT can respond quickly but the heat-exchanger systems upon which their increased efficiency relies, cannot - so CCGT behaves like OCGT under these circumstances). CCGT produces 0.4 tonnes of CO2 per MWh, OCGT produces 0.6 tonnes. Thus 0.6 tonnes x 75% = 0.45 tonnes. Conclusion: Wind + OCGT backup produces more 0.05 tonnes of CO2 per MWh than continuous CCGT.

Now, where does the alternative view - the one proclaimed by Grantham Institute man Robert Gross - come from?

Update on Aug 19, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Tim Worstall has picked up on this post. There is an interesting exchange in the comments.

McIntyre in London

Andrew Orlowski has published a report on Steve McIntyre's recent talk at GWPF. It's good, strong and clear stuff:

The entire rationale of policy in US and Europe has been to ignore what's happening in China and India and hope that petty acts of virtuous behaviour in both countries will cure the problem," he said. "Even if you install windmills you're not going to change the trend of overall CO2 emissions."

Things can only get better

Matt Ridley has a long, long article in Wired on the subject of apocalyptic visions of the future:

Over the five decades since the success of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring in 1962 and the four decades since the success of the Club of Rome’s The Limits to Growth in 1972, prophecies of doom on a colossal scale have become routine. Indeed, we seem to crave ever-more-frightening predictions—we are now, in writer Gary Alexander’s word, apocaholic. The past half century has brought us warnings of population explosions, global famines, plagues, water wars, oil exhaustion, mineral shortages, falling sperm counts, thinning ozone, acidifying rain, nuclear winters, Y2K bugs, mad cow epidemics, killer bees, sex-change fish, cell-phone-induced brain-cancer epidemics, and climate catastrophes.

So far all of these specters have turned out to be exaggerated. True, we have encountered obstacles, public-health emergencies, and even mass tragedies. But the promised Armageddons—the thresholds that cannot be uncrossed, the tipping points that cannot be untipped, the existential threats to Life as We Know It—have consistently failed to materialize. To see the full depth of our apocaholism, and to understand why we keep getting it so wrong, we need to consult the past 50 years of history.

The Bishop, the Sky and the Leveson Inquiry

The Leveson Inquiry has just published a submission from me and Tony Newbery of the Harmless Sky blog.

The submission was prompted by Fiona Fox's evidence to the inquiry, which told a tale of wicked journalists distorting the results of noble scientists. Tony was aware, however, that the origin of the distortion was not in fact in the media but in a press release prepared by the scientists themselves, with assistance from Fox's own Science Media Centre. We have attempted to fill in some of these details for the inquiry.

The submission also covers the BBC's handling of climate science and controversies over Climategate.

Update on Aug 17, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Leo Hickman has pointed out a minor error. In para 22, we say that he didn't give us credit for our efforts in disclosing the fact that Outside Organisation were paid £113k by UEA. The original FOI came from Graham Stringer, but the story was broken by me. Leo did link to the copy of the Stringer response letter at BH, but we missed this because the link was only part of a text string (see the letters PDF in this post). Hope this clarifies.

RenewableUK get desperate

Gordon Hughes' GWPF report on the costs of wind power contains the following claim:

Meeting the UK Government’s target for renewable generation in 2020 will require total wind capacity of 36 GW backed up by 13 GW of open cycle gas plants plus large complementary investments in transmission capacity – the Wind Scenario. The same electricity demand could be met from 21.5 GW of combined cycle gas plants with a capital cost of £13 billion – the Gas Scenario. Allowing for the shorter life of wind turbines, the comparative investment outlays would be about £120 billion for the Wind Scenario and a mere £13 for the Gas Scenario.

This seems clear to me. The capital cost - see the words there in the middle? -of wind energy is much higher than that of gas.

Now look at how BusinessGreen reports Hughes' work (the article is written by Maria McCaffery, the chief executive of RenewableUK (formerly the British Wind Energy Association):

Among the more absurd assertions put forward in this paper is the contention that wind energy is 10 times more expensive than gas, but his comparison is flawed. He fails to include the cost of gas itself and only includes the cost of building a gas-fired power station and the infrastructure to go with it. As most right minded people know, a gas-fired power station without any gas does not generate any electricity. Perhaps his calculations exclude the cost of gas because the costs of this fossil fuel are so difficult to predict and very volatile. The comparison is certainly not like-for-like and is very misleading.

I think we have established something about the integrity of Renewables UK.

Yeo in more trouble

Guido Fawkes is reporting that Tim Yeo is in more trouble over using his political influence to lobby for his own private financial interests.

Yeo lobbied the London mayor to introduce a law forcing drivers to replace their taxis, while all the while he was the chairman of the company which would sell them the new cabs. And now he’s been caught red handed…

Cameron needs to move fast in dealing with the festering sores of Tim Yeo and Lord Deben. If he doesn't strike quickly and remove them from their posts he will be seen to be lending his tacit support to malfeasance.

End of the CMEP road

My long struggle to find out who attended the BBC's seminar on climate change has come to an end (if you are not familiar with the story, buy the Conspiracy in Green pamphlet - see sidebar). Readers here will recall that the seminar appears to have been attended by a bunch of NGO people, who decided that there was a consensus on climate change that meant that sceptics could be sidelined in the corporation's output. The BBC Trust then falsely reported that the decision had been made by leading scientists.

Click to read more ...