Shale Mili

David Miliband*, the Labour party's king in exile, has been given space in the Mail on Sunday (of all places) to take a look at the year ahead. He had some somewhat surprising things to say:

And if [the government] need inspiration they should look to the good news story of 2013: the recovery of our old ally, the U.S. It is a very lucky country.

Just when you think the price of oil is too high to sustain their standard of living, shale gas promises an energy boom. We’re not just talking cheaper prices; suddenly the U.S. is set to become the world’s largest energy exporter.

Strangely, he doesn't even mention the possibility of a similar shale boom in the UK, but reading between the lines this is surely what he means. I sense a big change in the offing.

This doesn't mean that the insanity of wind farms will stop of course. The big three political parties are wedded to the idea of expensive sops to green sentiment and will willingly squander billions to that end.

[sp. amended 8am, 31.12.12]

Jumping Jackson

US Environmental Protection Agency chief Lisa Jackson, who has been at the centre of a growing scandal over allegations that she used a pseudonymous email account to avoid public oversight, has resigned from her post.

The Mail makes explicit the link between her standing down and Chris Horner's ongoing litigation, which is expected to force the emails into the public over the next few weeks. The story in the Guardian is rather different:

Jackson's departure had been anticipated as part of the usual changeover for a second term. But the last four years were tumultuous.

The split is interesting. Saying that Jackson's jumping was "anticipated" is spin rather than straight reporting. Back in November, nobody was saying one way or the other (see for example here):

Sources close to the Obama campaign were split on whether Jackson will stay for another term. Practically speaking, getting a new EPA administrator confirmed in another Obama term would be a Herculean task. Bob Perciasepe, the agency’s deputy administrator and chief operating officer, is widely rumored to be a top choice to move up if Jackson leaves.

I can't find anything firm to suggest that opinion had hardened against her since. So, let's just say that Obama's decision was probably made a little easier by the decision that the secret email account had to see the light of day.

And a Merry Christmas from Josh too!

Click the image for a larger version

A traditional song to sing over the festive period, with words by Anthony Watts and Josh.

Merry Christmas and best wishes for the New Year!

Cartoons by Josh

Merry Christmas

Internet access has been erratic for the last couple of days, so I'm not sure if I will get a chance to post anything later on in the day.

That being the case, here's wishing all BH readers, and particularly those who help support the site in a myriad of different ways, a very happy Christmas.

ABC of bias

A couple of interesting bits and piece from Oz.

Tony Thomas looks at the ABC's claim to be not nearly so biased as the BBC, covering the CMEP story and my Propaganda Bureau pamphlet in some detail.

"We may be biased but we're not as bad as the bad boys in the Beeb" is a pretty weak claim, but I'm not sure even this is going to hold up well in the light of Jo Nova's revelation of how the ABC edited the interview they did of Jo and her husband.

What a sorry state of affairs.

Ridley response to Romm

This is a guest post by Matt Ridley.

Joe Romm of ThinkProgress described my Wall Street Journal op-ed as:

riddled with basic math and science errors

Yet he fails to find a single basic math or science error in my piece.

He says I :

can’t do simple math

and then fails to produce a single example of my failing to do simple math.

Click to read more ...

Questions and non-rebuttals

The antics of the upholders of the climate orthodoxy are becoming truly hilarious. In response to Nic Lewis's findings about the contradictions and failures of the draft IPCC report, we have now had no fewer than three "rebuttals" (Desmog, Media Matters, Think Progress) none of which link to the actual article. In fact none of them even mentions Lewis, preferring instead to concentrate on Matt Ridley's WSJ op-ed.

It does rather tell a story.

I think we can say that there is a consensus that the IPCC's models don't include their latest best estimates of aerosol forcings and that the empirical evidence suggests that that climate sensitivity is low.

There have been some scientific objections to Lewis's paper however and it's worth pointing these out.

BBD, commenting at Keith Kloor's blog, is querying the claim that the IPCC places little weight on LGM studies because of the huge uncertainties.

Lewis references this claim to AR4 WG1 Box 10.2, and I can't find anything like that in the referenced text.

And on Twitter, we have the observation that Aldrin et al also considered a scenario in which the cloud lifetime effect was considered and that this raised the sensitivity. The tweet says it raised it to 3.3, but this is the mean rather than the most-likely value, which is still around the 2 mark. The cloud lifetime effect is probably worthy of a blog post in its own right.

That said, these last two observations seem at least to be addressing Lewis's arguments and are worthy of follow-up.

Cheating at the IPCC

Donna Laframboise has a must-read article about the IPCC creating made-to-order journal articles:

IPCC officials know that the papers to be published in that issue of the PNAS have not been written yet. Their own document says the submission deadline isn’t until January 31, 2013.

So why is the IPCC giving its authors this kind of heads-up? Is it clairvoyant? Does it already know that these papers will be so ground-breaking the IPCC won’t be able to ignore them?

Perhaps. Or perhaps IPCC officials are telling authors where to look for material that fills inconvenient gaps in their narrative.

The view from the Whitehouse

David Whitehouse has a thoughtful piece on blogging, science and the like. It will be uncomfortable reading for those in the ivory tower:

The fact is that the internet is changing science and the debate about climate science is a good example of it. You can be a professor of anything these days but there will be someone out there in cyberspace who is smarter, better at statistics and computing, and has more time to focus on key problems. Someone who will ask for the raw data and mercilessly pick away at it, pointing out mistakes that before would have gone unnoticed. This might be uncomfortable for some, but it is undoubtedly good for science that cares nothing for personal feelings. The baloney detection kit is in ten thousand parts and is on the internet. Science needs to find a way to encompass this new reality.

Not waving but drowning

The Climate Science Rapid Rebuttal Unit has finally issued its response to the Climate Sensitivity is Low articles - or at least to Matt Ridley's Op-Ed. Nic Lewis's article barely gets a mention. 

At first glance, they are struggling to keep their heads above water.

[Updated to direct link to main site rather than mobile version]

Update on Dec 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

From Nic Lewis's article:

Table 8.7 shows that the best estimate for total aerosol RF (RF_ari+aci) has fallen from −1.2 W/m² to −0.7 W/m² since AR4, largely due to a reduction in RF_aci, the uncertainty band for which has also been hugely reduced. It gives a higher figure, −0.9 W/m², for AF_ari+aci. However, −0.9 W/m² is not what the observations indicate: it is a composite of observational, GCM-simulation/aerosol model derived, and inverse estimates.

From the Media Matters article.

With regard to aerosols: Abraham told Media Matters: "it is very clear [they] have a cooling impact," adding, "I don't know of any reputable scientist that would dispute that." Boston University's Robert Kaufmann, lead author of a 2011 sulfur emissions study, agreed:

I know of no evidence that would suggest that the temperature effect of sulfur emissions are small.  This conclusion is totally at odds with my peer reviewed publication in the area, which indicate that sulfur emissions have a significant effect on temperature.

Update on Dec 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

It's now up on Think Progress. No mention of Lewis.

Stranger and stranger.

Diary date

Roger Pielke Jr is in London at the start of February and will be participating in an event at the Institute of Physics:

What counts as good evidence for policy?

Policymakers often talk up the importance of evidence-based policy, with increasing calls for randomised controlled trials (RCTs) as the best way of testing whether particular interventions work. But finding and applying evidence in policy is anything but straightforard. Evidence alone rarely wins complex political arguments. Often this merely shifts the locus of debate to what counts as evidence. 

Join us as we explore the politics of evidence across various policy domains, including climate change, innovation, public health, biodiversity, education and more. Our panel of experts will offer introductory perspectives, followed by what promises to be a lively debate.

It's free to attend. Tickets here.

Wind-worn

While we were all reading about climate sensitivity yesterday, the Renewable Energy Foundation published a devastating report by Gordon Hughes on depreciation of wind turbines.

The results show that after allowing for variations in wind speed and site characteristics the average load factor of wind farms declines substantially as they get older, probably due to wear and tear. By 10 years of age the contribution of an average UK wind farm to meeting electricity demand has declined by a third.

This decline in performance means that it is rarely economic to operate wind farms for more than 12 to 15 years. After this period they must be replaced with new machines, a finding that has profound consequences for investors and government alike.

The report is here.

If the lifetime of a wind turbine is 15 years rather than 25, that presumably means that the electricity it generates is going to be much, much more expensive. Douglas Carswell MP called the government's energy bill a disaster. He wasn't joking was he?

Reactions to low climate sensitivity

Apart from the Judith Curry piece, which I linked to yesterday, there have been a few others interested in what Lewis has to say.

Tim Worstall covered the story twice - once at his own blog, where the comments thread was quickly overwhelmed by the rantings and ravings of a well-known green, and once at Forbes.

Meanwhile, at Reason magazine, Ronald Bailey gave the story another airing.

My impression is that people are still trying to work out what to say. I think we will hear more in the coming days.

Update on Dec 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

James Annan, a specialist in climate sensitivity, says this:

I think a lot of what Nic Lewis says seems reasonable, though I also suspect that some of his choices will have served to underestimate sensitivity somewhat. Don't forget, "the ipcc" does no research to estimate sensitivity, they only summarise the literature which generally lags the latest evidence.

Why doesn't the AR5 SOD's climate sensitivity range reflect its new aerosol estimates?

Updated on Dec 19, 2012 by Bishop Hill

This is a guest post by Nic Lewis. Please note that comments will be tightly moderated for tone and relevance.

There has been much discussion on climate blogs of the leaked IPCC AR5 Working Group 1 Second Order Draft (SOD). Now that the SOD is freely available, I can refer to the contents of the leaked documents without breaching confidentiality restrictions.

I consider the most significant – but largely overlooked – revelation to be the substantial reduction since AR4 in estimates of aerosol forcing and uncertainty therein. This reduction has major implications for equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS). ECS can be estimated using a heat balance approach – comparing the change in global temperature between two periods with the corresponding change in forcing, net of the change in global radiative imbalance. That imbalance is very largely represented by ocean heat uptake (OHU).

Click to read more ...

Cox and Ince on the scientific method

Pop-sci heroes Brian Cox and Robin Ince have an editorial in the New Statesman. It's about the scientific method and discusses its application to - among other things - climate:

Let us take the politically controversial issue of climate change as an example. Climate scientists make measurements of observable properties of our planet, such as sea surface temperatures and the area of Arctic sea ice. Over many years, these measurements have formed a large data set. The only grounds for arguing with the data would be specific technical issues with the measurements themselves. One could assert that the satellites measuring sea temperatures were not calibrated correctly, or that there was a methodological error in the measurement of the area of the sea ice. Such criticisms are relatively rare. A more common criticism is of the interpretation of the data using computer models.

All models are, by nature, an approximation to reality. But they are the best we can do, given our current understanding and the power of our computers. The important words here are “the best we can do”. There is no other way of predicting the probability of weather in the future. The only legitimate criticisms would be of specific issues with specific models, or of specific inferences drawn from them. It would certainly be wrong to assert that the ensemble of climate models from various research groups around the world encompassed all possible uncertainties about the future, but it is not logical to attack climate science as a whole, because to do so is to attack scientific method.

The timing of this article, coinciding as it does with Nic Lewis's observations about observational estimates of climate sensitivity, couldn't be better. Climatology needs to explain why the scientific method gets reversed in this area.

(I'm on the warpath about ranty comments. Please be nice and on topic)