A timely reminder

Also in the Telegraph, and on equally good form, is Christopher Booker, who issues a timely reminder about where the real green menace is:

All media eyes were last week focused on that infantile little ruckus over fracking in the Sussex village of Balcombe. But virtually unnoticed recently was a very odd and much more significant event in the fracking drama, which shed further disturbing light on the curious workings of that system of government which now rules our lives much more than most people realise. At a meeting of the EU’s Council of Ministers in the Lithuanian capital, Vilnius, a special “informal” lunch was given for 28 environment ministers, including our own Owen Paterson, to discuss what should be the EU’s policy on fracking.

One turbine per kettle?

The Telegraph is on top form today, looking at the detailed wind power data and finding some horrific results:

The Telegraph examined a snapshot of RWE’s own figures on Thursday afternoon last week. One wind farm Trysglwyn, which is in Anglesey in Wales, was producing a total of 6 kilowatts (KW) - just enough to boil two kettles each with 3KW of power.

The wind farm has 14 turbines and a theoretical capacity of 5.6 megawatts (MW). In other words, the wind farm was producing just 0.001 per cent of its maximum capacity.

And, even worse, some windfarms were withdrawing power from the grid:

According to RWE’s own data, three wind farms on Thursday afternoon appeared to be taking electricity from the National Grid rather than supplying it.

That the political establishment has imposed this kind of corruption on the country will not go unnoticed forever. It will haunt the big three political parties for generations.

Diary date: Meeting the climate change

Here's a diary date for readers in Manchester:

Title: Meeting the climate change: Is a low carbon energy future possible?
Date: 5 September  2012  2013 

Time: 6-8pm
Venue: Renold building, University of Manchester

Take part in a free public debate on the most challenging issue of the 21st Century.

Have you got questions about fracking, nuclear energy, carbon capture? Do you want get an insight into Government policy and the views of leading scientists in climate change? If so, put it to our panel.

Join this public debate on how we can meet the challenge of climate change - one of the major problems faced by the UK and the rest of the world. The complex technical, economic, social and political issues will be navigated by a panel of experts drawn from industry, local government and academia, including leading University of Manchester specialists: Professor Kevin Anderson from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change and Dr David North from the Sustainable Consumption Institute.

Some of the issues up for discussion will be the controversial fracking process and its potential contribution or threat to the carbon agenda; the favoured alternatives to fossil fuel energy e.g. renewable and nuclear energy; Government policy on transport; the viability of carbon capture and storage … and much more.

Register for free online

Pielke Sr and the decline of the AGU

The corruption and decay of the great scientific institutions is a theme that BH returns to from time to time. Many are now little more than vehicles for the political campaigns of their administrators, with Soviet-style elections ensuring they remain under the control of unrepresentative cliques.

The latest manifestation of this corruption is the American Geophysical Union. As Pielke Sr explains at WUWT, this once-great learned society is now so depraved that it feels no qualms at suppressing dissenting views in its journal, EOS. As Pielke puts it,

This AGU venue of publication has now become more of an advocate for particular perspectives than a venue to advance our knowledge of science issues. While in this case, it is dealing with climate science, the issue actually goes to the core of any controversy within any subject areas that are represented by the American Geophysical Union.

Greens back shale

This is a bit of a turnup for the books:

One [green] group in Surrey set up to encourage sustainable living has come out in favour of exploration and fracking, the process which may have to be used in future to extract the oil and gas.

Transition Dorking says it has surprised even itself.

But it looked at the evidence and came to the conclusion producing fuel locally may be less damaging to the environment than importing fossil fuels.

They should expect a visitation from the climate police, I would say.

Fracking far away - Josh 236

This is a bit of a long image so probably best not to take over the whole of the blog front page...

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Von Storch on the models again

In a post at Klimazwiebel, Von Storch and Zorita have expanded onf the views they put forward in the discusion paper I mentioned the other day.

We want here to set straight some misinterpretations that may have arisen in the blogosphere, e.g. Bishophill, and may also have been present in the review processes by Nature as well.

The main result is that climate models run under realistic scenarios (for the recent past) have some difficulty in simulating the observed trends of the last 15 years, and that are not able to simulate a continuing trend of the observed magnitude for a total of 20 years or more. This main result does not imply that the anthropogenic greenhouse gases have not been the most important cause for the warming observed during the second half of the 20th century. That greenhouse gases have been responsible for, at least, part or even most of the observed warming, is not only based on the results of climate simulations, but can be derived from basic physical principles, and thus it is not really debated. It is important to stress that there is to date no realistic alternative explanation for the warming observed in the last 50 years. The effect of greenhouse gases is not only in the trend in global mean near-surface temperature, but has been also identified in the spatial pattern of the observed warming and in other variables, such as stratospheric temperature, sea-level pressure and others.

Although von Storch and Zorita talk of misinterpretations, I'm not sure there is any great difference between what they say here and what I concluded last week. At the time I said that the models are falsified - they run too hot. A model that had a slower rate of warming would not be. So a claim that part of the observed warming is anthropogenic is still scientifically tenable. How big a part is manmade is, given the failure of the models, anyone's guess.

I'm not, however, convinced that the only plausible explanation for the warming of the last 50 years is greenhouse gases. As I mentioned the other day, the IPCC looks set to conclude that there was a Medieval Warm Period. Last time I heard Rob Wilson discuss the matter, he said that the climate models couldn't even get the MWP in the right historical position, let alone explain its apparently large magnitude.

So once again I find myself returning to the point I make so often. The unknown unknowns are a big problem. Scientists would do themselves a favour if they recognised it.

[Comments will be tightly edited for relevance and tone]

Discoloured water in Balcombe

Updated on Aug 23, 2013 by Bishop Hill

There's a lot of Twitter noise this morning about Balcombe residents experiencing discoloured water. Many tweets are pointing to a video by "local resident Carl Lee".

It's probably not worth watching the whole thing; you will get the gist fairly quickly. Mr Lee turns out to be fairly active in the anti-fracking campaign, so you can imagine what it's like.

Click to read more ...

Judith Curry on NPR

Judith Curry was interviewed by NPR recently, and the results are here - a print article and an audio interview.

I walk to work, I drive a Prius, I'm a fanatic about turning lights off and keeping air conditioning high and heating low, so I try to personally minimize my own carbon footprint. But in terms of telling other people what to do, I don't have any big answers.

Her humility and integrity are a stark contrast to the bluster and demands for behaviour change that spew from her critics.

Judith's own thoughts on the interview are here.

More evidence that green jobs are illusory

Pat Swords writes to tell me of an official report that has been published in Germany this week, featuring findings of research commissioned by the German Ministry of Environment (BMU) and the Federal Environment Agency(UBA). The report confirms that the Green economy is a dud, and produces few, if any jobs (source):

A recent contribution to the IZA-Standpunkte series cautions against overly optimistic expectations with regard to job creation through Germany's renewable energy turnaround. To date, there is no reliable scientific evidence on whether additional jobs can be expected from the transition to a green economy. Both a precise definition of "green jobs" and access to the relevant micro data would be essential for a sound judgment. Moreover, it remains unclear to what extent the green economic transition might also threaten "non-green" jobs. IZA expert Nico Pestel, who authored the study, says that "research on 'green jobs' is still at a very preliminary stage. However, the existing evidence suggests that much of the euphoria expressed by green energy proponents is overblown. I don't think Germany will see a 'green job miracle' any time soon."

Click to read more ...

A feature, not a bug

Eyebrows have been raised over Chris Huhne's landing a job with a US bioenergy business, reportedly worth £100,000 for two days a week, shortly after being released from prison for perverting the course of justice. Priyanka Shrestha, writing at Energy Live News, wonders if maybe crime does pay.

She's right of course. We at Bishop Hill have noticed that there is a curious tendency among those involved with energy policy to move on to extraordinarily lucrative jobs in the energy industry. And it's not just the politicians, it's the civil servants too. PJ O'Rourke has observed that when politicians decide what gets bought and sold, the first thing bought and sold is the politicians. Deals for the purchase of civil servants are not far behind though.

So make no mistake. Corruption is a feature of "government energy policy", not a bug.

A Fracking Time - Josh 235

There is so much to cartoon about Fracking at the moment that it is hard to keep up. I chose how long it takes to Frack a well, and I think water has to be next. And many thanks to James Verdon for all the information and checking. I am learning a lot!

Cartoons by Josh

Oodles of noodles

There's a wonderful article at Kernel Magazine in which Jeremy Wilson meets the fracking protestors:

Have you protested before on energy issues?
Prajna: “Well, no. But I’ve designed a few energy things. I’ve designed an internal combustion engine that only has two moving parts, which is far too efficient to produce, otherwise oil companies would kill me. I’ve had some top engineers working on it. My great uncle designed a perpetual motion machine. But he was busy looking for something that would insulate between magnets in order to produce it. Well actually I’ve had a look at the design since. I looked into buoyancy. I did all the maths on buoyancy.

Balcombe evictions

Apparently one of the Balcombe sites is in the process of being cleared by police after suggestions of criminal behaviour.

Police have tweeted:

Our officers have just entered a camp set up in a Christmas tree plantation/woodland close to the Cuadrilla site in Balcombe.

The protestors are apparently squealing that it's an illegal eviction. This sudden concern for the law seems a little bit unlikely to me.

The protestors are filming their own agents provocateurs at work here.

Protestors arrested on earlier days all seem to be getting unconditional bail. Not even a demand that they steer clear of the Cuadrilla site.

More as I get it.

Miranda and Climategate

The Guardian has got itself into a bit of a pickle over the Miranda affair, with editor Alan Rusbridger trying to justify his newspaper's possession of the leaked Snowden intelligence material on public interest grounds. He does seem to have resiled from this position, however: in an article yesterday he explained how he was persuaded to destroy some PCs containing the illicit material. Evan Davis and Malcolm Rifkind discussed these issues on the Today programme this morning, and a transcript appears at the Guardian:

MR: I think Mr Rusbridger, in the article he wrote yesterday about the destruction of his hard disk, is on relatively weak ground. He clearly did not dispute that he had no legal right to possess the files or the documents that were being discussed.

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