SciTech committee looks at public attitudes

The House of Commons Science and Technology Committee has just launched a new inquiry:

In July 2011, the Foresight programme’s report into the International Dimensions of Climate Change stated:

Recent polling suggests that scepticism about climate change has increased, alongside diminished concern for its effects. In 2006, 81% of surveyed UK citizens were fairly or very concerns about climate change compared with 76% in 2009 in an identical tracking survey.

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Gloom and doom

Der Spiegel reports that this year looks set to be the gloomiest in Germany for decades and may even turn out to be the darkest on record (H/T Oliver Morton):

The days may be getting longer, but there's still not a hint of springtime sunshine in Germany. Weather data shows that this winter has been the gloomiest in 43 years. If the sun doesn't start shining soon, it will be the darkest winter on record.

This is a pity since Germany is, according to Wiki, "the world's top photovoltaics (PV) installer, with a solar PV capacity as of December 2012 of more than 32.3 gigawatts".

Don't expect this to change politicians' minds about anything though.

Greens and the rule of law

Yesterday, Ben Pile and I were having a somewhat fruitless exchange of views with Mark Johnston, who seems to be a Senior Advisor at the European Policy Centre, whatever that is. Johnston seemed to be of the view that the "No Dash for Gas" activists who had occupied EDF's West Burton gas plant were somehow justified because of global warming. He claimed that there is "a moral duty to act".

By coincidence, the US Ninth Circuit court has been considering just this argument in a case involving the Sea Shepherd, the ship that has taken it upon itself to harass and attack Japanese whaling vessels. Overturning the decision of a lower court, the judge ruled, in the following rather amusing terms, that the Sea Shepherd's actions constituted piracy:

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Greenpeace labouring night and day to make you colder and poorer

Via a correspondent, Greenpeace's latest mailing, about Tim Yeo's efforts to secure a decarbonisation target in the Energy Bill and put our fuel bills up even higher:

This is massive. So far, 267 MPs have shown support for clean electricity after more than 20,000 of us emailed them over the past 10 days. 326 is our target - a majority of Parliament. It's not going to be easy, but we can do this.

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Lord Deben is worried

Lord Deben is worried. Veolia UK Ltd, the company he chairs, stands ready to connect just as many windfarms to the grid as the country is willing to subsidise. But without clear national carbon reduction targets, the company is unlikely to make its mint.

In an entirely unrelated step, Deben has written to the Energy Secretary.

We note that the Government has acknowledged the benefit of a 2030 carbon-intensity target in your recent proposed amendment to the Energy Bill. However, the delay in setting this until 2016 at the earliest means that a high degree of uncertainty about sector development beyond 2020 remains. This will adversely impact on supply chain investment decisions and project development, therefore undermining implementation of the Bill and raising costs for consumers.

• Scenarios recently published by the Government in its gas generation strategy suggest the possibility of a significant fall-off in investment in low-carbon power generation after 2020...
• This could be particularly damaging for investment now in the offshore wind supply chain.

That would be a shame, wouldn't it?

Steps videos

A week or so back, prominent sci-policy wonks spoke at a symposium run by the University of Sussex's STEPS centre. Videos have now been posted here. They including Pielke Jr on the science-policy interface. Mike Hulme on the IPCC and Climategate, and Bob Watson on designing an assessment process.

Still still

There has been precious little wind over the last month. The graph below, redrawn from here, shows that most of the time output has been less than 2GW, roughly 5% of average daily demand.

And as we learned yesterday, widescale deployment of wind farms will produce power plants that are even less efficient.

Nurse left licking wounds

Nigel Lawson has responded to Paul Nurse's wild accusations of cherrypicking, accusing the Royal Society president of lying:

You claim that I “would choose two points and say ‘look, no warming’s taking place’, knowing that all the other points that you chose in the 20 years around it would not support his case”. That is a lie.

and continuing with a withering put-down

I hope that, on reflection, you will recognise that there should be a difference between the behaviour appropriate to a President of the Royal Society and acting as a shop steward for some kind of scientists’ closed shop.

Ouch.

Read the whole thing.

Update on Feb 27, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Interestingly, Nurse's comments about Lawson appear to have been added at the last minute. This version of his speech, which seems to have been prepared on the day of the lecture itself, does not seem to mention Lawson at all.

Update on Feb 27, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The transcript as broadcast is here.

Big wind just got smaller

A new paper by Amanda Adams and David Keith reports that once deployed on a large scale wind farms may generate even less power than previously thought.

Estimates of the global wind power resource over land range from 56 to 400 TW. Most estimates have implicitly assumed that extraction of wind energy does not alter large-scale winds enough to significantly limit wind power production. Estimates that ignore the effect of wind turbine drag on local winds have assumed that wind power production of 2–4 W/m² can be sustained over large areas. New results from a mesoscale model suggest that wind power production is limited to about 1 W/m² at wind farm scales larger than about 100 km².

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The price of life: the IPCC's first and forgotten controversy

This is a guest post by Bernie Lewin.

Mostly on the blogs we give our attention to the corruption of climate science by the politics of climate change. However, beyond the physics of climate and its physical impact, recently there has been a small revival of interest in the economic damages climate change is expected to cause, and how the costings of these damages is weighed against the costings of various mitigation efforts.

Such cost/benefit analysis should be the ultimate instruction to policy action, yet it introduces whole new layers of uncertainty that render such assessments even less tolerable to sceptics. This analysis is no more tolerable, or tolerated, even where the results present sober and moderate, even when they all but call off the alarm. This hit home hard with the recent treatment of work by a reader and commenter on this site: Richard Tol might be one of the most vocal and scathing expert critics of the Stern Review, but he still had to weather the onslaught against his own sobering damage assessment when it was posted on WUWT.

Tol’s willingness to engage across the borders of this fractious debate is admirable, and some BH readers may know of his previous work with Bjørn Lomborg on the Copenhagen Consensus. But many readers may not know that Tol’s very academic career was baptised in an earlier fiery controversy. While still a PhD candidate in his early 20s, Tol was swept up in the first public controversy ever to hit the IPCC.

The tale of this ‘price of life controversy’, like the tale of Tol’s career, is not easily reduced to a simple yarn of black and white, sceptic/alarmist, good and evil. Its significance presents in more subtle ways, and sometime in direct contradiction to the motives of the various actors. Thus, this story takes a bit of work to get into. However, it may reward those readers curious about the early history of the IPCC during the time when it was still engaging with the gathering political forces but not yet overwhelmed by them. The following is a short summary, while more detail can be found here.

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The Smart Money - Josh 206

I wonder who will benefit the most from Smart Meters?

Cartoons by Josh

Regrets, apologies but all too late

Douglas Carswell is an influential and forward-thinking Conservative MP for whom I have a high regard. There is however, one enormous and ugly blot in his copybook - his support for the Climate Change Act.

Now, however, with the newspapers full of the prospect of further energy price rises and power cuts to boot, Carswell has issued an apology.

My biggest regret as an MP is that I failed to oppose the 2008 Climate Change Act. It was a mistake. I am sorry...

The Climate Change Act is giving us a low carbon economy the way that pre-industrial Britain had a low carbon economy.

I suppose we should welcome this move, but it does look as though it might be a bit late.

(H/T Fay)

The green, the crooked and the incompetent

Updated on Feb 25, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Leo Hickman tweeted a link to this fascinating set of minutes from the September meeting of the DECC Science Advisory Group (SAG). SAG features several familiar names, including John Shepherd, David Mackay, Stuart Haszeldine and David Warrilow.

The whole document is worth a look, and it's only seven pages long. We learn much of what is worrying DECC's scientific advisers, for example the horrific (but presumably distant) prospect of low energy prices:

John Shepherd pointed out that whilst energy efficiency policies are required, they risk being ineffective while energy prices are low. Other SAG members observed that incentives such as a substantial price on carbon were needed to promote innovation and reducing carbon intensity, and it was vital to avoid carbon lock-in.

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Energy, just like old times - Josh 205

It's an all-out media war against the Green Energy Lobby says The GWPF

Excellent, carry on!

Cartoons by Josh

(and spelling corrected, thank you!)

Booker on when the lights go out

Normal BH service will be resumed tomorrow. In the meantime Booker has a good, if thoroughly depressing, look at the UK's energy crisis.

Has anyone in the government said they think the lights will in fact stay on? Or should we accept their sullen silence as an admission that we are in trouble?