Tyndall Centre gives up on science

Professor Kevin Anderson of the Tyndall Centre, Britain's national centre for excellence in the study in climatology and its consequences doesn't seem to have got the memo about low climate sensitivity:

He recommended investment in public transport and renewable energy.

"The new president of the World Bank has said he expects to see people fighting for food and water everywhere.

"Hopefully we would be more organised and find a rationing system.

"We are not talking about many many generations away. We are talking about our own lifetimes and the lives of our children."

In the most likely scenarios, the Met Office climate change predictions for the Government forecast temperatures in the UK to increase from the 1961 to 1990 average of 10 to 17C in the summer to 15 to 22C by 2080.

Is this the result of one of those climate change communication strategy meetings? Louder! Longer! Pottier!

Take it away Kevin.

Update on Feb 6, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Richard Betts tweets that what Anderson says about Met Office forecasts is not true.

Ed Hawkins agrees.

+5C is just about seen in 2080 in most sensitive CMIP5 model & most extreme RCP emissions

Update on Feb 6, 2013 by Bishop Hill

No, this seems to be based on some confusion between global and UK projections. Global is 5 (allegedly), UK is more because land warms more than ocean.

Burning for you

The Scottish Bureaucracy has decided to spend £2.6 million on installing recharging points for electric (i.e. coal-powered) cars.

Reports on the number of electric cars in Scotland vary, with one estimate putting the number at 60.

Each charge takes an hour.

I'm sure readers are capable of doing their own mathematics. Even without crunching the numbers it is fairly plain that the SNP is burning your money for PR purposes. There is no scheme too idiotic for these people.

The relevant names are Transport Minister Keith Brown and Environment and Climate Change Minister Paul Wheelhouse.

Batting back at Beenstock

The Beenstock, Reingewertz, and Paldor paper that did the rounds before Christmas applied some whizzy statistical methods to the temperature and forcing trends and found that they were statistically independent of each other. There's a useful discussion of it here at David Stockwell's site. As Stockwell notes, this is not a debunking of AGW, but rather of the use of linear regression to "demonstrate" that something unusual is happening in the temperature records.

To that extent, Beenstock's paper should be entirely uncontroversial. I'm not sure that anyone really thinks linear regression is a suitable approach to apply to temperature records. Nevertheless there has been a rapid rebuttal posted to the journal in the shape of an article by two Oxford academics, D. F. Hendry and F. Pretis:

We demonstrate major flaws in the statistical analysis of Beenstock et al. (2012), discrediting their initial claims as to the different degrees of integrability of CO2 and temperature.

That WSJ column

When Matt Ridley wrote his column on climate sensitivity just before Christmas, he was given a very hard time by several web commentators. In rather hysterical vein, we had Joe Romm, of whom perhaps the least said the better. Needless to say, he was (ahem) rather critical of the Ridley column.

There was also Keith Kloor, who seemed to think that the article represented a bad case of confirmation bias:

Ridley [argues] that this “important debate” has now been given a revelatory jolt by the unpublished work of someone he describes as “a semiretired successful financier from Bath, England, with a strong mathematics and physics background.”

Click to read more ...

So you don't have to

Ben Pile glances at Lewandowsky's new "paper" so you don't have to.

Ultimately, ‘research’ of this kind will bring the academy down with it, because drawing attention to, and publishing Lewandowsky’s work means demonstrating to the world the fact that quite often, academic researchers are as petty-minded, ‘idologically-motivated’, and pig ignorant as the worst of online commentary.

More so, I would have thought. And all paid for by you, gentle reader.

Revkin does low climate sensitivity

Andy Revkin has taken a long hard look at the trend towards low climate sensitivity estimates and seems to conclude that things are just as the sceptics have said.

I can understand why some climate campaigners, writers and scientists don’t want to focus on any science hinting that there might be a bit more time to make this profound energy transition. (There’s also reluctance, I’m sure, because the recent work is trending toward the published low sensitivity findings from a decade ago from climate scientists best known for their relationships with libertarian groups.)

Nonetheless, the science is what the science is.

It's a must-read.

Update on Feb 4, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Anthony has further insights, gleaned from an email exchange Revkin had with Gavin Schmidt of NASA. Schmidt's view is this:

Andy, I think you may be slightly misrepresenting where the ‘consensus’ on this issue has been. While there have been occasional papers that have shown a large tail, and some arguments that this is stubborn – particular from constraints based on the modern tranisent changes – there has always been substantial evidence to rule these out. Even going back to the 2-11deg C range found in the initial cpdn results in 2005, many people said immediately that the high end was untenable (for instance).

Indeed, the consensus statements in the IPCC reports have remained within the 1.5 – 4.5 range first set by Charney in 1979. James’ work has helped improve the quantifications of the paleo constraints (particular for the LGM), but these have been supported by work from Lorius et al (1991), Kohler et al (2010), etc. and therefore are not particularly radical.

By not reflecting that, you are implying that the wishful thinking of people like Ridley and Lindzen for a climate sensitivity of around 1 deg C is tenable. It is not, and James’ statement was simply alluding to that. For reference, James stated that his favored number was around 2.5 deg C, Jim Hansen in a recent letter to the WSJ quote 2.5-3.5 (based on the recent Palaeosens paper), and for what it’s worth the CMIP5 GISS models have sensitivities of 2.4 to 2.7 deg C. None of this is out of the mainstream.

Lindzen has of course argued for sensitivity around 1deg;C, but Ridley was arguing for 1.6 in his WSJ essay. The idea that figures like this are "untenable" seems to me to be extraordinary given that our only fully empirical estimate and a series of other studies give precisely this figure.

To Schmidt's comment, Revkin adds this:

In policy circles, including popular calculations of emissions trajectories necessary to avoid a high chance of exceeding 2 degrees C. of warming, the hot tail has not been trimmed (unless I’m missing something?).

To me, that says the climate science community — including the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change science working group — has not adequately conveyed the reality you state here.

And Richard Betts agrees:

You’re right – see, for example, the Stern Review, Table 1.1 right-hand column, citing Meinshausen (2006) to give a wide range of warming for different stabilisation levels, and compare that with the other 2 columns (TAR range and Hadley Centre model range) – the Meinshausen range was then used later in the review to inform the economic impacts modelling (Box 8.1, page 220)

So Stern used a fat-tail distribution not the TAR distribution.

Update on Feb 4, 2013 by Bishop Hill

I'm struggling to reconcile Richard Betts' observations with the remarks on climate sensitivity by Chris Hope on the PAGE2002 model (the basis of the Stern Review) as reported in my post on Climate Sensitivity and the Stern Report.

The mean value is unchanged from the default PAGE2002 mean value of 3°C, but the range at the upper end is greater. In PAGE2002, the climate sensitivity was input as a triangular probability distribution, with a minimum value of 1.5°C and a maximum of 5°C.

I'm going to ask Richard and Chris to clarify. Please don't jump to conclusions in the meantime.

Update on Feb 4, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Gavin tweets:

@Revkin somewhat overstates impacts of changes in CS. It is not too small to be negligible, nor so large to be a nightmare

Dellers on Huhne

Really good piece by James Delingpole on the Huhne case:

I feel about Huhne as I feel about all politicians: I really don't give a damn how many rent boys they sleep with or whether they're heavily into heroin or oranges or how serially unfaithful they are or how often they break the speed limit. Not even whether or not they beat their dogs.

What I do care about, very much, is the immense damage their ill-judged, ill-considered policies are doing to this country. Sometimes – especially in the field of environmentalism, for some reason – their incompetence borders on the criminal. Sometimes – naming no names, but I think we know exactly who we mean – their corruption and sleaze goes beyond it.

There are some very bad dangerous people in politics right now. But it's their policies I want them nailed on, not their personalities.

Huhne cartuhne - Josh 200

Chris Huhe pleads guilty and the BBC chief political correspondent Norman Smith says: "We can safely say that his political career is over."

Cartoons by Josh

Huhne pleads guilty

From the BBC

Chris Huhne admits perverting the course of justice

Former cabinet minister Chris Huhne has pleaded guilty to perverting the course of justice over claims his ex-wife Vicky Pryce took speeding points for him a decade ago.

Zickfeld folly - Josh 199

James Annan writes on his blog here

"Interestingly, one of them stated quite openly in a meeting I attended a few years ago that he deliberately lied in these sort of elicitation exercises (i.e. exaggerating the probability of high sensitivity) in order to help motivate political action."

Great, nice to know. However I am not sure if regular readers here are surprised. 

Cartoons by Josh

Wind farms gone in 25 years

This is the unmistakeable conclusion of remarks from Richard Dixon, the head of Friends of the Earth Scotland in an interview on BBC Radio Scotland yesterday. The debate concerned Loch Fitty, not far from where I live, which is to be drained, the coal bed beneath mined. Discussion turned to the ongoing effects on the landscape, with a view put forward that a temporary opencast mine replaced with a relandscaped loch was infinitely preferable to a landscape permanently scarred with wind turbines.

Of course wind turbines do not have to be there permanently. Most of them will be there for 25 years. But if we decide to remove them then they are removed.

This strikes me as rather misleading.

The whole discussion is quite fun. Link below.

GMS 2 Feb 2013

Climate Audit is down

Lots of people have been getting in touch about Climate Audit. Anthony reports that it was a simple matter of the domain not having been renewed, a situation that will soon be remedied.

In the comments to that thread we learn that Steve is in New Zealand due to a family medical emergency.

The thoughts and best wishes of everyone here at BH go out to the McIntyres.

All that is Goldenberg does not glitter

Suzanne Goldenberg enjoys (if that's the right word) a certain reputation among BH readers and her latest offering will do nothing but enhance (if that's the right word) her position in our estimation.

America's carbon dioxide emissions last year fell to their lowest levels since 1994, according to a new report.

Carbon dioxide emissions fell by 13% in the past five years, because of new energy-saving technologies and a doubling in the take-up of renewable energy, the report compiled by Bloomberg New Energy Finance (BNEF) for the Business Council for Sustainable Energy (BCSE) said.

The reduction in climate pollution – even as Congress failed to act on climate change – brings America more than halfway towards Barack Obama's target of cutting emissions by 17% from 2005 levels over the next decade, the Bloomberg analysts said.

The Bloomberg report is here.  It actually says little about emissions, but as far as I can see it says nothing like what Ms Goldenberg suggests it does on the subject of renewables. try this for example:

The reductions in coal generation, ascendancy of gas, influx of renewables, expansion of CHP and other distributed power forms, adoption of demand-side efficiency technologies, rise of dispatchable demand response, and deployment of advanced vehicles are all contributing to the decline in carbon emissions from the energy sector (including transport), which peaked in 2007 at 6.02Gt and have dropped by an estimated 13% since.

And as the report also makes clear, the big change in the energy mix has been the rise of gas:

Total US installed capacity of natural gas (442GW) plus renewables (187GW) is now at 629GW (58% of the total power generating mix) – up from 605GW (56%) in 2011 and 548GW (54%) in 2007. Between 2008 and 2012, the US nearly doubled its renewables capacity from 44GW to 86GW (excluding hydropower, which itself is the single largest source of renewable power, at 101GW as of 2012).

Deben's reply to Yeo

Lord Deben has replied to Tim Yeo's polite inquiry about the nature of Veolia, a company chaired by Deben and which appears to represent a conflict of interest.

The position with the water company has not changed materially since I wrote to the committee before my confirmation. Veolia Water UK is overwhelmingly a supplier of services to the water industry. One of its subsidiaries continues to run an infrastructure services business which carries out utility connections of all kinds, including connections to renewable and non-renewable energy sources. It will complete grid connections, whatever the nature of the energy source, and is energy source neutral.

As I have previously highlighted, the whole business represents a very small proportion of Veolia Water UK's turnover. Indeed, its connections to renewables represented less than 1% of Veolia Water UK's turnover in the most recent financial period.

Hmm. As the Mail on Sunday pointed out the other day, Deben had previously suggested that he would be whiter than white on this issue:

If [Veolia] had ‘even a remote connection’ with the environment or climate change, he promised, he would step down.

He seems to have resiled from his position of purity in double quick time.

The other thing to point out is that Deben will be at the heart of decisions that could very quickly turn that 1% figure into something considerably larger. Indeed Veolia have admitted that new wind connections are likely to be a new source of income for the infrastructure business. Deben himself has noted the closer and closer links of Veolia Water to the other parts of the Veolia empire, which include Dalkia, a renewables company.

Deben is either Veolia's man or he is the public's man. He can't be both.

Bad choice of victim

Times Higher Ed has a not-unsympathetic profile of David Holland.

What drives a man to spend his retirement trying to refute the scientific consensus that human activity is warming the planet?

"I'm a very bad loser. They chose the wrong guy to screw," explained David Holland, a climate sceptic who has taken the University of East Anglia to an information tribunal in the Climategate saga's most recent twist.