Steve McIntyre at the GWPF - Cartoon notes by Josh

Steve McIntyre on Climate Science, the IPCC and the answer to just about everything...

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GWPF and Jo Nova hacked

GWPF and Jo Nova have both apparently been hacked. I am endeavouring to get in touch with the GWPF guys.

Fossil fuel Mann

Michael Mann has tweeted that he is in fundamental agreement with Roger Pielke Jr on the subject of shale gas, with :

I'm pretty much in agrent w/ @RogerPielkeJr on signif of dramatic recnt drop in U.S. CO2 emissions.

I always thought Mann was against fossil fuels, but perhaps I'm mistaken. The sudden outbreak of climate detente has been prompted by their comments in this interview.

Michael Mann, director of the Earth System Science Center at Penn State University, said the shift away from coal is reason for "cautious optimism" about potential ways to deal with climate change. He said it demonstrates that "ultimately people follow their wallets" on global warming.

"There's a very clear lesson here. What it shows is that if you make a cleaner energy source cheaper, you will displace dirtier sources," said Roger Pielke Jr., a climate expert at the University of Colorado.

While Pielke is also quoted as saying that shale is only an interim fix, we should probably welcome this outbreak of realism.

Parsing the report on the draft Energy Bill

The House of Lords informal working group on the draft Energy Bill has reported. I have made some excerpts from their paper, together with my take on what is meant.

[1] We understand that the Government’s long term aim is that of a competitive market for electricity but we have serious doubts that it can be reached by the mechanisms proposed in the Draft Bill.

Translation: This is a shambles.

[2]...if these proposals are implemented, the process for awarding contracts to supply electricity will, for much of the time between now and the end of the decade, be largely at ministerial discretion.

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Young report on wind

The Young Report into wind power has been around for over a year, but a link was posted the other day and it's well worth flagging up to readers here. It was commissioned by environmental NGO the John Muir Trust and aimed to answer some key questions about the viability of wind power. Here are the main conclusions:

1. Average output from wind was 27.18% of metered capacity in 2009, 21.14% in 2010, and 24.08% between November 2008 and December 2010 inclusive.
2. There were 124 separate occasions from November 2008 till December 2010 when total generation from the windfarms metered by National Grid was less than 20MW. (Average capacity over the period was in excess of 1600MW).
3. The average frequency and duration of a low wind event of 20MW or less between November 2008 and December 2010 was once every 6.38 days for a period of 4.93 hours.
4. At each of the four highest peak demands of 2010 wind output was low being respectively 4.72%, 5.51%, 2.59% and 2.51% of capacity at peak demand.
5. The entire pumped storage hydro capacity in the UK can provide up to 2788MW for only 5 hours then it drops to 1060MW, and finally runs out of water after 22 hours.

Helmer wants answers

UKIP energy spokesman Roger Helmer is pressing the government for some answers on the vexed question of wind power. The GWPF report authored by Gordon Hughes is providing some very useful ammunition by the looks of it.

You will recall that we have corresponded on the economics of wind power, and I drew your attention to the report from Professor Gordon Hughes of Edinburgh University, “Why is Wind Power so expensive?” You will recall that Prof Hughes concluded that wind power, with the necessary conventional back-up, saved little or no CO2 emissions, and that the capital cost of wind plus back-up was around ten times that of equivalent gas capacity.

From your reply, I formed the impression that the civil servants who are advising you had not really taken the trouble to understand Prof Hughes’ work — perhaps because it was so challenging in the face of current policy assumptions.  Given the vast implications of Prof Hughes’ findings, I wonder if you could take a moment to see if we can find some common ground?

Wallis and the Today programme

At the suggestion of the Information Commissioner, UEA have unredacted part of the release they made last month of correspondence with the Outside Organisation. We now learn that Outside were involved in pressuring the BBC to change its story on the Climategate affair (click for full size).

This appears to relate to a correction that the Today programme issued in July 2010 - see here. I'm not sure what Roger Harrabin's involvement was.

Yeo must go

The Telegraph is reporting that Conservative backbenchers are increasingly unhappy with Tim Yeo's chairmanship of the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee. It seems that the vast flows of cash he receives from renewables companies are now seen as unacceptable. Yeo apparently issued a statement to the Mail:

Not only have my interests been correctly registered at all times but... they were listed in full on the ballot paper circulated to all MPs when I was elected chair of the committee in June 2010.

Furthermore, I’ve held the views I’ve expressed regularly on renewable energy consistently and strongly since 1993, as many publicly available documents over the last 19 years show.

That the Commons elected him despite his conflict of interest in 2010 does not seem to be a good reason for him to keep his position now. Yeo must go.

Trip report

As readers have probably gathered, I have been in London for the last couple of days. The main purpose of the trip was to visit the Spectator, for the Ridley Prize for Environmental Heresy of which I'm one of the judges. The Spectator offices overlook St James' Park, so there was a certain aura of grandeur about the whole place and editor Fraser Nelson is an excellent host. Some really good essays have been submitted, and there were some very interesting discussions over an eventual winner. We didn't actually manage to reach a final conclusion but have narrowed it down to four.

The other purpose of the trip was to meet Steve McIntyre. By a stroke of good fortune he was arriving on Tuesday morning so I was able to extend my trip so we could meet. It was strange to finally meet the guy I had written a book about so long ago - we missed each other when Steve was over in 2010 because I was on holiday at the time. There was a lot to talk about though - we covered pretty much all of the IPCC reports, both Climategates, work, blogging and family. Intense, but great fun. I had suggested to Steve that a couple of hours would be enough as he was just getting off a trans-Atlantic flight. In the event we talked for well over four hours and it was only my own flight back to Edinburgh that forced us to go our separate ways.

GWPF web presence down

A couple of readers have emailed to say that GWPF's website is down. I emailed Benny Peiser and he says that there are technical issues of some kind. The site will remain down for a couple of days. I gather that email is also affected, so anyone wishing to contact them should telephone instead.

I'll post a report on my trip south tomorrow.

I'm off

I'm off to London this morning. There will be some inevitable hanging around during the day, so I may be able to check in from time to time (but then again, maybe not).

On Tuesday I will be hooking up with Steve M for a few hours before heading home. Normal service may therefore not be resumed until Wednesday.

Ten Billion

The Guardian's science editor, Robin McKie, has been to the theatre. He went to see Ten Billion, a one-man show by computer scientist Stephen Emmott. This is slightly odd. The Guardian is losing tens of millions of pounds every year and yet this is their second review of the show. I wonder why they would be plugging it so much?

The answer, of course, is that it's a show about man's impact on the planet - it is in essence a lecture by a somewhat millenarian academic with no particular expertise in the area.

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Wind: a zero-sum industry

Christopher Booker has a devastating critique of the government's energy policy today. The numbers speak for themselves.

At one point last week, Britain’s 3,500 turbines were contributing 12 megawatts (MW) to the 38,000MW of electricity we were using. (The Neta website, which carries official electricity statistics, registered this as “0.0 per cent”).

It is 10 years since I first pointed out here how crazy it is to centre our energy policy on wind. It was pure wishful thinking then and is even more obviously so now, when the Government in its latest energy statement talks of providing, on average, 12,300MW of power from “renewables” by 2020.

Everything about this is delusional.

The VP candidate and Climategate

Mitt Romney's running mate for the 2012 presidential election is to be Representative Paul Ryan of Wisconsin, a youthful figure from the right of the Republican party. There is a profile of Ryan here.

Perhaps more interestingly he turns out to be very sceptical on the climate front and rather well informed on Climategate. As he said in an interview in 2009:

At issue ...are published e-mail exchanges from the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit (CRU). These e-mails from leading climatologists make clear efforts to use statistical tricks to distort their findings and intentionally mislead the public on the issue of climate change.

The CRU e-mail scandal reveals a perversion of the scientific method, where data were manipulated to support a predetermined conclusion. The e-mail scandal has not only forced the resignation of a number of discredited scientists, but it also marks a major step back on the need to preserve the integrity of the scientific community. While interests on both sides of the issue will debate the relevance of the manipulated or otherwise omitted data, these revelations undermine confidence in the scientific data driving the climate change debates.

While I think there was only one scientist who actually stood down, the rest is on the button. Of course, people like Chris Mooney are jumping up and down saying that Ryan has it wrong, but given that the CRU bods were found to have been misleading in their trick to hide the decline, this just makes him look disingenuous.

Moore realist

Greenpeace founder turned eco-realist Patrick Moore is interviewed at the Washington Times. I want to scream every time I hear some idiot journalist discussing the climate wars as if they are a dispute over whether carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. I think Moore may share my frustration.

What most people don't realize, partly because the media never explains it, is that there is no dispute over whether CO2 is a greenhouse gas, and all else being equal would result in a warming of the climate. The fundamental dispute is about water in the atmosphere, either in the form of water vapour (a gas) or clouds (water in liquid form). It is generally accepted that a warmer climate will result in more water evaporating from the land and sea and therefore resulting in a higher level of water in the atmosphere, partly because the warmer the air is the more water it can hold. All of the models used by the IPCC assume that this increase in water vapour will result in a positive feedback in the order of 3-4 times the increase in temperature that would be caused by the increase in CO2 alone.

Many scientists do not agree with this, or do not agree that we know enough about the impact of increased water to predict the outcome. Some scientists believe increased water will have a negative feedback instead, due to increased cloud cover. It all depends on how much, and a t what altitudes, latitudes and times of day that water is in the form of a gas (vapour) or a liquid (clouds). So if  a certain increase in CO2 would theoretically cause a 1.0C increase in temperature, then if water caused a 3-4 times positive feedback the temperature would actually increase by 3-4C. This is why the warming predicted by the models is so large. Whereas if there was a negative feedback of 0.5 times then the temperature would only rise 0.5C.