First power cuts caused by renewables

Charlie Flindt sends this snippet from the Hampshire Chronicle:

More than a thousand homes across the Alresford area were left without power on Monday. Reports of power outages across Beauworth, Bramdean, Brockwood, Cheriton and West Meon, came in at approximately 10.30am, after a cable was struck by workmen near Alresford. Duncan MacDonald, a spokesman for Southern Electric, said the problems began at ariound 9.30am, when road workers hit a cable on Appledown Lane. They were working on laying cables for the solar  farm at Western Court Farm.

2020 Tories want central planning

The 2020 group of Conservative MPs has apparently submitted a paper to the Conservative manifesto project, which demands that the economy generate motherhood and apple pie in equal proportions:

The group’s first submission to the Tory manifesto process, published Monday, calls for a major drive to boost productivity by making better use of resources instead of relying on cutting labour costs. It says that Britain is lagging behind its rivals in areas such as recycling and “remanufacturing” so that materials or parts have a second or third life. It urges the Government to transfer responsibility for waste from the Environment to the Business department.

Laura Sandys, the Tory MP who wrote the report, “Sweating our Assets,” said such a push could result in a 12 per cent increase in annual profits for manufacturers; create more than 300,000 jobs in the “remanufacturing sector”; improve Britain’s balance of payments by £20 billion by 2020 and save £3 billion by reduced landfill costs and retaining the value of resources.

Whether efficiency gains are actually achieved from recycling depends, of course, on whether it is actually more efficient to recycle. We are already, for example, grinding up waste glass at vast expense, a process that everyone agrees is a waste of resources. My belief is that this comes about through a wicked combination of politicians wanting to be seen to do something, intellectually challenged greens thinking they are saving the planet, and bureaucrats trying to expand their empires.

Reading between the lines, the 2020 group's idea seems to be to have more of the same: to expand the reach of central planning in the economy, give further ground to the greens and to recruit more bureaucrats.

Mr Farage will be pleased.

Josh meets xkcd, well, kind of - Josh 255

I am sure many here are, like me, fans of the witty xkcd.com cartoons. So the recent Twittering of his cartoon on Global warming might have caused a few groans of dismay.

Click to read more ...

What to do with a hot model

One of the things I've noticed about climatologists is that once they get each generation of models out into the open they spend the following few years producing papers that analyse some aspect of the model output. This is no doubt an easy way of making an impact on the research evaluation exercises to which all academics are subjected. And if the papers are accompanied by bloodcurdling headlines about future disaster are no doubt good for promotion, salary increases and invitations to speak to the United Nations.

This paper (via Leo Hickman's Twitter feed) looks to be from the same drawer. Here's the abstract:

Trends of Arctic September sea ice area (SSIA) are investigated through analysis of Coupled Model Intercomparison Project phase 5 (CMIP5) data. The large range across models is reduced by weighting them according to how they match nine observed parameters. Calibration of this refined SSIA projection to observations of different 5 year averages suggests that nearly ice-free conditions, where ice area is less than 1 × 10⁶ km², will likely occur between 2039 and 2045, not accounting for internal variability. When adding internal variability, we demonstrate that ice-free conditions could occur as early as 2032. The 2013 rebound in ice extent has little effect on these projections. We also identify that our refined projection displays a change in the variability of SSIA, indicating a possible change in regime.

So far so bloodcurdling. However, it seems to me that the authors, and indeed the climatological community as a whole, have a problem. We know that the aerosol forcing figures in the CMIP5 models are far greater than the best observational evidence would suggest. This being the case the models will necessarily run too hot. This presumably makes the claim that the Arctic ice will be gone by 2032 just a weeny bit shaky.

Aren't they going to have to sort the aerosols out before they can start to make predictions?

Update on Feb 2, 2014 by Bishop Hill

And here's another!

The big EAsy

The attempts to link the flooding in the south of England to climate don't seemed to have gained much traction and attention is now turning to the performance of the Environment Agency, which is probably where it should have been all along.

The Sunday Telegraph says that agency chairman Lord Smith is under pressure, not least because he has no fewer than ten other jobs, while James Forsyth in the Mail on Sunday reckons that Owen Paterson is already looking around for a replacement. Even the organiser of the Glastonbury festival - an enthusiastic climate change campaigner - seems to think that the problem is more to do with the agency's refusal to dredge rivers than global warming.

The headless chickens

Prince Charles has been sounding off about us dissenters from the climate "consensus", describing us as being like "headless chickens". It's funny to be on the end of such criticism from a man who talks to his house plants, but nobody takes his views seriously anyway, so it's easy enough to shrug off.

I was invited onto the Stephen Nolan show last night to discuss the royal views, but mercifully the conversation was more about the nuts and bolts of the climate than any of the guff emerging from Clarence House. I was up against Paul Williams, a climatologist from Reading. I had taken a quick look at Dr Williams' web page before we went on air and he looked like a real scientist rather than one of the scientivists who normally get picked for these things. This impression was confirmed in the programme itself and, with the presenter letting us bounce things off each other, I think the we produced a pretty informative segment for the listeners.

The audio file is attached.

Stephen Nolan show