Books
Click images for more details
Bishop Hill Dec 13, 2013 Greens 
Detail from "The Mussel Gatherers" via antiqueprints.com. Click for link.
David Hone is Shell's very green climate change advisor, and his blog posts have been mentioned here in the past. Yesterday he posted a report on the Tyndall Centre's "Radical Emission Reduction" conference, an event that appears to have given him considerable pause for thought.
Bishop Hill Dec 13, 2013 Climate: Sceptics Climate: WG3 
Mike Kelly has a letter in the Times expressing concerns over the electricity supply and the role of the Committee on Climate Change.
Sir, If and when the UK next experiences large-scale rolling electricity brown-outs, last seen in the 1970s, the public inquisition on any consequential economic and social disruption must look first at the Climate Change Committee which has taken a single-issue look at the future, and has done much to bring such a situation about by persistently privileging concern for the environment above both the affordability and the security of supply of electricity since 2008 (report, Dec 11).
In the name of social cohesion and engineering sanity, the next decade must see a precise reversal of priorities, with no more coal plant closures until replacement base load capacity is in place.
Bishop Hill Dec 12, 2013 GWPF Royal Society 
Image via Albion Prints. Click for link.There has been some interesting correspondence in the Spectator regarding the meeting between GWPF and a group of FRSs nominated by Paul Nurse. This was sparked by Nigel Lawson's report on the events, which was discussed here the other day.
The FRSs seem to have been a bit upset by Lawson's take on the affair:
Sir: Lord Lawson has written in his diary (30 November) under the online summary headline ‘my secret showdown with the Royal Society on global warming’, but the reality is rather different. As he is aware, the purpose of the meeting on 19 November was not to put on a public performance, but to provide Lord Lawson with expert advice on climate science. The science summarised by the climate scientists was generally agreed to by all present.
Bishop Hill Dec 12, 2013 Climate: Sceptics 
I got an email today. It purported to come from dragonslayer John O'Sullivan, although a cursory look suggested that it was spam; the title was "hey" and the content consisted only of two links to websites, apparently something to do with architecture in France. I deleted the message.
A few hours later, however, David Holland got in touch to say that he'd also received a copy, and pointed out something odd about the message: the list of addresses was, apart from the two of us, as follows: Arthur B Robinson (of Oregon Petition fame), John Roscam of Australia's Institute of Public Affairs, BH regular Don Keiller and Peter Gill, who is also fairly well known in sceptic circles.
Are we being targeted?
Bishop Hill Dec 12, 2013 Deben 
David Rose tweeted last night that Lord Deben has resigned from his position at Veolia Water UK:
It seems from company records that @lorddeben of CCC has resigned as chairman of Veolia. Strange he hasn't announced it, to my knowledge.
Deben's position at the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) was clearly incompatible with working for a company making money from grid connections. What remains unclear is how we got to the situation where his position was deemed acceptable in the first place.
Bishop Hill Dec 11, 2013 Climate: Statistics 
This is the abstract of Professor Leonard Smith's lecture at the AGU meeting currently taking place on the other side of the pond. There are salutary lessons for climatologists. If anyone can point me to the video, that would be helpful.
Over the last 60 years, the availability of large-scale electronic computers has stimulated rapid and significant advances both in meteorology and in our understanding of the Earth System as a whole. The speed of these advances was due, in large part, to the sudden ability to explore nonlinear systems of equations. The computer allows the meteorologist to carry a physical argument to its conclusion; the time scales of weather phenomena then allow the refinement of physical theory, numerical approximation or both in light of new observations. Prior to this extension, as Charney noted, the practicing meteorologist could ignore the results of theory with good conscience. Today, neither the practicing meteorologist nor the practicing climatologist can do so, but to what extent, and in what contexts, should they place the insights of theory above quantitative simulation? And in what circumstances can one confidently estimate the probability of events in the world from model-based simulations?
Bishop Hill Dec 11, 2013 Yeo ;)
The news on Twitter is that Tim Yeo has sounded out support in his constituency and is confident enough to put the question of his standing for the party at the next election to a ballot.
Bishop Hill Dec 11, 2013 Climate: MetOffice
Updated on Dec 12, 2013 by
Bishop Hill
Readers may remember Nic Lewis's paper demonstrating a major flaw in the UKCP09 climate predictions. In brief summary, the predictions are a weighted average of a series of virtual climates produced by the HadCM3 climate model, the weight each one gets being determined by how well it matches the observations. Nic discovered that the HadCM3 model was incapable of producing virtual climates that match the real-world climate as regards two key parameters - the climate sensitivity and the aerosol forcing. This obviously meant that the average produced is meaningless.
Nic's paper had a response from Julia Slingo which acknowledged that HadCM3 could not produce low-sensitivity/low aerosol forcing climates, explaining that this was an emergent property of the model. Nic noted that she was therefore implicitly accepting his core argument and I mentioned this in a blog post about the related UK Climate Change Risk Assessment.
Shortly afterwards I had an email from a press officer at the Met Office:
Bishop Hill 
This morning the green movement is making an enormous and apparently coordinated attempt to force the government to switch the lights out.
First up, Lord Deben et al have published a report saying that we must stick to the path of insanity, regardless of the consequences:
Bishop Hill Dec 11, 2013 Energy: gas 
The Lords took a couple more evidence sessions on shale gas yesterday, parts of which were well worth watching. The first session, featuring an environmental consultant, somebody from the Institute of Directors and a pair from "Residents’ Action on Fylde Fracking", was mostly worth missing although I was intrigued by one of the anti-frackers. Tina Rothery turns out to have been an organiser for the Occupy the London Stock Exchange protests and revealed during the course of the hearings that she had spent most of the summer in Balcombe. This made me wonder to what extent she is actually a Lancashire resident, whether Fylde against Fracking is genuinely a movement of local residents or whether it is just a part of the green anti-capitalist movement.
Bishop Hill Dec 10, 2013 Climate: Parliament
Updated on Dec 10, 2013 by
Bishop Hill
Ed Davey was up in front of the Energy and Climate Change Committee today, to discuss the aftermath of the Warsaw climate summit. It was mainly dull stuff, but there was a moment of hilarity (around 11:44) when Davey appeared to accept that since the advent of the Climate Change Act the UK's total carbon footprint had gone up, and almost in the next breath said that he didn't view this as meaning the approach taken by the government was wrong.
Bishop Hill Dec 10, 2013 Climate: MWP 
From time to time I have noted the pronouncements issued by the Royal Society, and observed that those at the helm have used and abused the society's good name in order to advance their own political agendas: the fellows are rarely if ever consulted about the policy positions that are taken in their name.
Today the Geological Society has issued an addendum to its position paper on climate science, which appears to have been put together in exactly the same way.
Bishop Hill Dec 10, 2013 DECC Energy: wind 
David Mackay has left a comment on the earlier thread, saying that in fact he maintains that Gordon Hughes' estimates of windfarm deterioration are incorrect.
Christopher Booker did not check his facts: Booker asserts that "David MacKay ... could not dispute [Hughes's] findings", but this is poppycock. You can find a technical report I wrote, pointing out a significant flaw in Hughes's analysis here or here. Another paper is about to come out in a peer-reviewed journal, by Iain Staffell and Richard Green, which does the analysis properly, combining wind data with weather data. There is a decline in wind farm output, but it is much smaller than Hughes asserted.
As Guido would say: "Developing".
Bishop Hill Dec 10, 2013 Climate: IPCC Diary dates 
On 5 February next year, the Royal Meteorological Society is having a meeting in London to discuss the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report.
Lead Authors of the report will present key new findings of the AR5, and the associated evidence base, also highlighting outstanding research challenges. The target audience is the UK climate science community and other interested scientists. The meeting is being organised by the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, the Met Office, the Royal Meteorological Society and the Environmental Physics Group of the Institute of Physics.
Details here.
Bishop Hill Dec 10, 2013 Energy: solar Energy: wind Foreign 
An article in the Financial Post in Canada looks at China's much-vaunted renewables industry and shows that it is nearing collapse:
Sinovel – one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers – went from earning hundreds of millions of dollars in profits in 2010 when the renewable energy industry was booming to millions in losses that grow by the day. Revenues are now just a fifth of what they were in 2010. The company has closed its overseas offices and recently laid off thousands of employees.
And it seems that the solar industry is doing just as badly. In China, just as in Europe, renewable energy was only able to survive if it was regularly hosed down with public funds. As soon as the taps were switched off, the industry was in trouble.
