Davey's reckless gamble

Dieter Helm has a (paywalled) article in the Times this morning, taking Ed Davey and his predecessors to task for their reckless assumption that energy prices would rise inexorably.

By about 2020 it was assumed that expensive technologies such as wind farms and solar panels would be competitive against what would by then be much more expensive fossil fuels. Add in a bit of energy efficiency, and ministers could confidently predict that household energy bills would be 8 per cent lower by 2020 than they would have without their policies.

Almost everything that could be wrong with this is in fact wrong, and it explains the mess that British energy policy has got itself into. There is no shortage of oil, gas or coal. We are not running out of any of them. There is enough to fry the planet many times over. There is no reason to assume that oil and gas prices will go on ever upwards, and it is at least possible that they will fall, joining the sharp fall in world coal prices. If so, renewables are unlikely to become cost-competitive by 2020. The subsidies will not then wither away. They would be permanent. Therefore, bills would be higher than they would have been as a result of government policies, not lower as Mr Davey claims.

Where the corruption and personal enrichment ends and mere incompetence begins is hard to ascertain, but we will all be paying the price very soon.

The eagle has crash landed

I few days back I was pressing Harry Huyton, the RSPB's climate change bod, about the society's weak opposition to wind farms. His position is that the RSPB opposes windfarms when inappropriately sited. I pointed out that windfarms tend to be in upland areas, where raptors - particularly prone to wind turbine collisions - tend to be found in large numbers.

It also occurred to me that the society has been trying to reintroduce sea eagles in the east of Scotland, an area in which windfarm development is frantic and so I thought I would try to work out just how much overlap there is between the two. The RSPB's sea eagle newsletter has a useful map of sightings and maps of windfarm developments are also easy to get one's hands on.

Here are the results. I've fairly crudely superimposed the two maps and shaded out the east-coast wind farms in black, leaving the large coloured dots that represent the sea eagle sightings (ignore the small dots - that's just more windfarms).

The size of the dots for the eagles represents the number sighted rather than a range, but given that sea eagles have a range of up to 70 km, it's clear that the RSPB is going to have to oppose all east-coast windfarm developments north of the Firth of Forth and South of Aberdeen.

I'll ask Harry if he'd like to comment.

A discrepancy

The Royal Meterological Society's evidence to the AR5 inquiry was apparently written by Emily Shuckburgh, incorporating comments from the society's Climate Science Communications Group, including Ed Hawkins, and the governing council. I was struck by their remarks about the reliability of climate models:

Does the AR5 address the reliability of climate models?

13. The Report devotes Chapter 9 to a comprehensive, balanced and realistic evaluation of climate models which is based on the published literature and draws extensively on the results of the Coupled Model Intercomparison Project Phase 5 (CMIP5). As stated in the report (Chapter 9, final draft) climate models are based on physical principles, and they reproduce many important aspects of observed climate. We agree with the report when it states that both these aspects contribute to a “confidence in the models’ suitability for their application in detection and attribution studies and for quantitative future predictions and projections”, and when it notes that “whereas weather and seasonal climate predictions can be regularly verified, climate projections spanning a century or more cannot. This is particularly the case as anthropogenic forcing is driving the climate system toward conditions not previously observed in the instrumental record, and it will always be a limitation.”

This seems an astonishing thing to say, given Ed Hawkins' now iconic graph showing the divergence of the temperature record from the projections, to the verge of falsification. It seems like one story for the climate debate and another for the policymakers.

I've tweeted Ed to see if he can shed any light on the discrepancy.

Tax-funded recessionmongers

The Tyndall Centre's Radical Emissions Reduction conference has garnered quite a lot of attention in recent days, and I'm pleased to say that slides and audio of the presentations are now available.

When watching these, it's important to remember that these lunatics are paid for out of your taxes. Such a thing is barely comprehensible in times of plenty, but when the public finances are in the appalling state they are, when people everywhere are struggling to pay their bills, when we are in danger of the lights going out, it seems almost criminal for the government to be paying for a bunch of unreconstructed teen revolutionaries to fly from all corners of the globe to talk about how to make things worse.

And I'm not being sarcastic here. These people want permanent recession.

What is David Willetts thinking of when he lets this situation continue? Does he think this is an acceptable use of taxpayers' money? Does he want the Conservative vote to migrate en masse to UKIP?

AR5 inquiry - written evidence

The House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee has published the written submissions of evidence to its inquiry into the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. There are many familiar names including Nic Lewis, Pielke Sr, Michael Kelly, plus lots of BH regulars.

From the establishment side of the debate there are submissions from the Met Office, the Grantham Institute, the Royal Society, the Royal Meteorological Society and DECC. These are what you might call "brazen", a shameless chorus of claims that the science is "even more certain than before". The models can fail completely, study after study can show that climate sensitivity is lower than previously thought, the long-predicted increase in extreme weather can fail to materialise and yet scientists are are more confident than ever that they are right.

The things you have to do to get ahead in the civil service eh?

Update on Dec 18, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Judith Curry describes Nic Lewis's evidence as a "tour de force".

Why energy prices are rising

Manic Beancounter has been digging into the official figures for energy prices and costs to see if claims of profiteering by suppliers and generators hold water. In short, they don't.

What is most important is why unit costs have risen. Labour are correct when they say it is not due to the wholesale price of energy. As already demonstrated, they are incorrect to say it is due to rising profits. The real reason is “other costs”. These rose from 32% to 40% of revenue in just four years. That is from £14.1bn to £17.7bn in just four years or a 25% increase. On declining volumes this is more significant for consumers.

Other costs includes things like windfarm grid connections and green levies. Read the whole thing.

The foolishness of the overqualified

Jonathan Rowson has a golden collection of academic qualifications, having got himself a first class honours in PPE, spent a year at Harvard and got a PhD from Bristol. Oh yes, and he's a chess grandmaster.

I'm not sure he isn't a bit slow on the uptake though.

The Climate Change Collaboration, an alliance of Sainsbury family charities have just paid Rowson to produce a sceptic-bashing report under the banner of the Royal Society of Arts. Seeing another formerly distinguished academy dancing to the green tune is fascinating, particularly when the financial reward for doing so is so obvious, but when you see the tone of the report it is more interesting still. This is in essence an extended exercise in name-calling, with "denier" and its variants appearing hundreds of times. What we have then is green charities paying an education charity to spew venom at people who disagree with them

Click to read more ...

Business speaks up?

There are signs that some members of the business community may finally have decided to speak up about energy policy.  Yesterday, the head of oil refiner Ineos criticised the absurd Hinckley Point deal struck by the coalition government:

"Forget it," Mr Ratcliffe said in an interview with the BBC's business editor Robert Peston. "Nobody in manufacturing is going to go near [that price]."

Mr Ratcliffe said: "The UK probably has the most expensive energy in the world.

"It is more expensive than Germany, it is more expensive than France, it is much, much, more expensive than America. It is not competitive at all, on the energy front, I am afraid."

Click to read more ...

The Reddit ban

Grist, a website for environmentalists, reports that the science forum of Reddit has "banned climate deniers", as the article so delicately puts it. The headline writers wonder if other media outlets shouldn't follow suit. Having read the article though, there is rather less to this than meets the eye, and it doesn't actually seem that there is a blanket ban at all:

The answer was found in the form of proactive moderation. About a year ago, we moderators became increasingly stringent with deniers. When a potentially controversial submission was posted, a warning would be issued stating the rules for comments (most importantly that your comment isn’t a conspiracy theory) and advising that further violations of the rules could result in the commenter being banned from the forum.

Click to read more ...

Spoof truth - Josh 252

There is a very funny post at WUWT here about an odd Facebook page called 'I Heart Climate Scientists'. The page seems to be doing its very best to reduce climate science credibility to zero using voodoo science and scary environmentialism.

Clearly they are not taking this whole thing seriously. Excellent, keep it up, guys.

Cartoons by Josh

Oxburgh's undisclosed interest

The House of Lords Commissioner for Standards has issued his report on the conduct of Lord Oxburgh, the latter having been the subject of a complaint from BH regular Don Keiller. Although several allegations were made, the commissioner decided that only one was part of his remit, namely Oxburgh's failure to disclose the fact that he was an advisor to a renewable energy investment fund called the Real Energy Asset Company. Here are the findings:

I am satisfied that Lord Oxburgh's role as an adviser to the RAEF would be thought by a reasonable member of the public to be a relevant interest for the purposes of the Code of Conduct. The responsibilities of the advisory board quoted above make membership of it akin to the offices and bodies required to be registered under category 10 of the Guide to the Code of Conduct (paragraph 79). Accordingly, I am of the view that he should have registered his membership of the advisory board in the Register of Lords' Interests and that he breached the Code of Conduct by not doing so.

Lord Oxburgh has been candid and cooperative throughout my investigation. I am satisfied that the relationship between him and the RAEF was imprecise. Lord Oxburgh was surprised to learn that his association with the RAEF had been publicised on the organisation's website. Lord Oxburgh took prompt action to disassociate himself from the RAEF (see appendix E) and has demonstrated a clear desire to uphold the standards of the House and to avoid any embarrassment. Thus, I was content to agree remedial action with him. Lord Oxburgh has "put the record straight" by ending his connection with the RAEF and has written to the chairman of the Sub-Committee on Lords' Conduct (appendix F) apologising unreservedly for not being more careful and for giving rise to the complaint. I suggest that no further action need be taken.

Defining reality

Science writer Jon Turney has been looking at computer simulations and their role in the decision-making process, considering in particular climate models and economic models. There's a much of interest, like this for example:

Of course, uncertainties remain, and can be hard to reduce, but Reto Knutti, from the Institute for Atmospheric and Climate Science in Zurich, says that does not mean the models are not telling us anything: ‘For some variable and scales, model projections are remarkably robust and unlikely to be entirely wrong.’ There aren’t any models, for example, that indicate that increasing levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases will lead to a sudden fall in temperature. And the size of the increase they do project does not vary over that wide a range, either.

Hmm. Climate models are unlikely to be wrong because they give similar results to each other? Aren't they mean to be tested against - you know - reality? And when you do this, doesn't it show that the models are running too hot?

Click to read more ...

Top climate official likely to be jailed

You have to laugh - one of the US Environmental Protection Agency's top officials, and the man at the head of its climate change work, spent much of his time at home enjoying himself. He told staff at the agency that he was working for the CIA.

This story was apparently accepted without demur by top brass at the agency:

Beyond Beale’s individual fate, his case raises larger questions about how he was able to get away with his admitted fraud for so long, according to federal and congressional investigators. Two new reports by the EPA inspector general’s office conclude that top officials at the agency “enabled” Beale by failing to verify any of his phony cover stories about CIA work, and failing to check on hundreds of thousands of dollars paid him in undeserved bonuses and travel expenses -- including first-class trips to London where he stayed at five-star hotels and racked up thousands in bills for limos and taxis.

Read the whole thing.

The unscrupulous led by the incompetent. You can see how we have ended up in the fix we are in.

The great eco-cesspit

The big climate and energy story this morning is David Rose's splash on the eco-policy cesspit - the mob of greedy politicians, greedy lobbyists, greedy civil servants and greedy greens who are all enriching themselves at public expense.

Four of nine-person Climate Change Committee, official watchdog that dictates green energy policy, are, or were until recently, being paid by firms that benefit from committee decisions.

A new breed of lucrative green investment funds, which were set up to expand windfarm energy, are in practice a means of taking green levies paid by hard-pressed consumers and handing them to City investors and financiers.

£3.8 billion of taxpayers’ money funds the new Green Investment Bank, set up by the Department of Business and Skills. One of its biggest deals involved energy giant SSE selling windfarms to one of the new green funds, Greencoat Wind. The Green Investment Bank’s chairman, Lord Smith of Kelvin, is also chairman of SSE. The bank says it ‘provided expertise’ to enable BIS to take a £50 million stake in Greencoat, which helped fund the SSE sale.

The same bank’s chief executive, Shaun Kingsbury, is one of the UK’s highest-paid public sector employees. His £325,000 salary is more than twice the Prime Minister’s.

Firms lobbying for renewables can virtually guarantee access to key Government policy-makers, because they are staffed by former very senior officials – a striking example of Whitehall’s ‘revolving door’.

Standards in public life. Don't make me laugh.

Hoskins' heat haze

The Guardian has obtained some more details of the meeting between Royal Society fellows and representatives of the GWPF, apparently from Brian Hoskins:

Professor Sir Brian Hoskins, of Imperial College London, said: "There was not any major disagreement on the science we presented, which is an interesting thing."

In particular, Hoskins debunked the so-called warming "pause", describing how excess heat has continued to be trapped by greenhouse gases for the past 15 years, showing that global warming is continuing.

He said air temperature alone is a very limited view of climate change, given that 93% of all trapped heat enters the oceans.

"I can't remember any challenge of that in the meeting," he said.

It would be interesting to examine Hoskins' earlier public pronouncements on anthropogenic global warming to see how often he discusses changes to ocean heat content rather than the "limited view" represented by surface temperatures.

Perhaps readers would like to take a look.