New Years Honours 2012

The New Year's honours list for 2012 has been published (H/T Martin Brumby). Congratulations are due to Bob Watson, the former head of the IPCC and the man who brought us the hole in the ozone layer. He is now Sir Bob.

Also honoured is Professor Professor Stuart Haszeldine of the University of Edinburgh, honoured with an OBE. Prof Haszeldine's claim to fame is that he brought us carbon capture and storage technology. Or perhaps not.

How DECC fiddled its figures

Tim Worstall has picked up on the DECC energy pathways report and notes something intriguing: although the costs of the individual elements of the energy mix in the new regime are acknowledged to be higher than at present, the overall cost is said to be lower! But Timmy has managed to work out how this particular piece of government mathematics works:

Click to read more ...

Poisoning the well

As Mosher and Fuller noted in The CRUTape Letters, in the first years of the twenty-first century relations between Phil Jones and Steve McIntyre were relatively collegial. However, something changed during 2003 and thereafter Jones adopted an approach of blocking all McIntyre's requests for data.

It's hard to tell exactly what prompted this change of heart - the two major events of 2003 were the Soon and Baliunas affair and publication of MM03. Since both of these were critiques directed at Mann, it's not obvious why they would affect Jones

Click to read more ...

Helm and shale

Dieter Helm has spoken out on the effects of shale gas and that "possible positive future" that David Mackay mentioned.

“Unfortuntely peak oil theory is a nonsense” – said Dieter Helm – “The problem is not too little oil, gas and coal but too much of them. Prices are going up - this is totally wrong.”

Chairman of Roadmap 2050 ad hoc Advisory Group supports the idea of using gas as the fastest and most solid bridge to the decarbonized future.

“You have to ask: is there a better way of attacking the issue? Is there a way of cutting increasing coal burn quickly? Yes, there is– it`s called gas.” he said.

It`s still carbon, but of less magnitude.”

Green costs you more

The Guardian is highlighting DECC's energy costs calculator, a system developed by its chief scientific adviser, Prof David Mackay. The outlook, it appears is bleak.

Every person in Britain will need to pay about £5,000 a year between now and 2050 on rebuilding and using the nation's entire energy system, according to government figures. But the cost of developing clean and sustainable electricity, heating and transport will be very similar to replacing today's ageing and polluting power stations, the analysis finds.

The calculator itself is here. I'm not sure I'm reading it correctly, but it looks to me as if you have to have carbon capture and storage if you want to have gas-fired energy generation. If that's correct then I think it's fair to say that the calculator is a waste of time.

Update on Dec 28, 2011 by Bishop Hill

The No Hot Air site, which I  believe is much better informed on these matters than I, has more on MacKay's handling of the shale gas question.

(H/T J Heath in the comments)

Somehow

Updated on Dec 27, 2011 by Bishop Hill

An amusing paper in which the great and good of the climate narrative sit around and mull over what they have achieved and what they would like to achieve. This appears to have been recorded at a series of panels in front of an invited audience a few months back. There are several panels, but the interesting one involves Mike Hulme, Roger Harrabin and Oliver Morton:

I was amused by some of Harrabin's contributions, in particular this one:

Click to read more ...

Buerk wants climate debate

BBC newsreader Michael Buerk has called for a meaningful debate into climate change, strongly criticising the BBC's treatment of dissenting views as heresy.

What gets up my nose is being infantilized by governments, by the BBC, by the Guardian that there is no argument, that all scientists who aren’t cranks and charlatans are agreed on all this, that the consequences are uniformly negative, the issues beyond doubt and the steps to be taken beyond dispute.

Barry Woods (to whom a tip of the hat is due) has further thoughts.

Hulme on climate modellers

Via Hans von Storch (who calls it `remarkable') comes this paper from Mike Hulme on how climate modellers have imposed a hegemony on academic thought about the climate.

One hundred years ago, a popular theory contended that various aspects of climate determined the physiology and psychology of individuals, which in turn defined the behavior and culture of the societies that those individuals formed. As the ideological wars of the twentieth century re-shaped political and moral worlds, environmental determinism became discredited and marginalised within mainstream academic thought. Yet at the beginning of a new century with heightening anxieties about changes in climate, the idea that climate can determine the fate of people and society has re-emerged in the form of ‘climate reductionism’. This paper traces how climate has moved from playing a deterministic to a reductionist role in discourses about environment, society and the future. Climate determinism previously offered an explanation, and hence a justification, for the superiority of certain imperial races and cultures. The argument put forward here is that the new climate reductionism is driven by the hegemony exercised by the predictive natural sciences over contingent, imaginative and humanistic accounts of social life and visions of the future. It is a hegemony which lends disproportionate power in political and social discourse to model-based descriptions of putative future climates. Some possible reasons for this climate reductionism, as well as some of the limitations and dangers of this position for human relationships with the future, are suggested.

(The link in the paper is to a preprint - I hope somebody picked up the misspelling of Geoffrey/Jeffrey Sachs name in the meantime. Although perhaps I don't - it's always good to have people in Sachs position brought crashing down to Earth occasionally.)

Let the party commence

Things are about to kick off at the episcopal palace, and there's just a moment to wish all my readers a very merry Christmas.

Have fun!

A call for disinformation

The British Medical Journal has reentered the climate fray, with a leader bemoaning the alleged "false balance" in science journalism. Steve Jones' "report" on the BBC's impartiality (ho, ho) is discussed.

I wrote a response, which hasn't appeared as yet. (Perhaps it would be "false balance" to publish it?) I pointed out that one of the results of denying dissenting voices an airing was that it leaves those promoting the majority view in a position where they no longer have to be honest and can exaggerate and scaremonger without challenge.

Click to read more ...

2011 - A cartoon review

Need a ready made newsletter for Christmas? Cannot quite remember everything that happened in 2011? Here is a quick Josh roundup.

Click to read more ...

The sports implement that must not be mentioned

The sports implement that must not be mentioned is the title of an email (#0922) from Stefan Rahmstorf to Jonathan Overpeck and the IPCC 4AR paleoclimate chapter authors.

You can't say he hasn't got a sense of humour.

The text is less funny - it's a call for proxy reconstructions to be normalised on the twentieth century values. Otherwise they might diverge. And we can't have any divergence on show I guess.

BBC local news on Tallbloke

BBC East have published a story about the seizure of Tallbloke's computers.

Police who seized computers as part of the Climategate inquiry involving the University of East Anglia (UEA) have been accused of being "heavy-handed".

A Norfolk Police inquiry started after emails from the UEA's Climate Research Unit (CRU) were hacked in 2009.

Last week six police officers went to the Leeds home of a blogger and seized two computers.

Blogger Roger Tattersall said he was "shocked" by the incident. Police said the inquiry is continuing.

It's a longish piece, but frankly there's not a lot we didn't know before.

Update on Dec 21, 2011 by Bishop Hill

The video is here - from 11 mins

Back to the haystacks

Perhaps overwhelmed by all their recent activity, Norfolk Constabulary have handed over the investigation of the Climategate affair to another, as yet unnamed police force. Tallbloke has the story.

Update on Dec 21, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Tallbloke has issued a correction:

I’ve got my wires crossed on this it seems. Apparently the Norfolk Constabulary, along with the assistance of the Metropolitan Police and the National Domestic Extremism and Terrorism unit (Golly!) are to revue the evidence so far assembled in order to decide the future direction of the investigation

Justice Committee call for evidence

The House of Commons Justice Committee has now made a formal call for evidence into the operation of the Freedom of Information Act.

The Committee invites written evidence on the issues set out below (although respondents are welcome to address additional issues):

•  Does the Freedom of Information Act work effectively?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of the Freedom of Information Act? 
• Is the Freedom of Information Act operating in the way that it was intended to?

The deadline for submissions is Friday 3 February 2012.