Gored awful

Al Gore appeared on Channel Four News tonight. Fair to say that it was one of the most feeble interviews I've ever seen Krishnan Guru Murthy give. Which is saying something. "In Britain you will see political leaders rolling back the green agenda...would you say they are making a terrible mistake?" Give me a break.

Japanese cool

NASA's Climate 365 website has a post declaring the marvellous agreement between the different temperature records. Here it is:

But, as Tom Nelson notes, that purple line - the Japanese record - sure seems to diverge from the others. What could it mean?

Update on Jan 31, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Anthony reckons he has pinned down the discrepancy.

It's pretty interesting.

The edge of the academy

Yesterday I had an interesting exchange of views with various members of staff at the University of Nottingham over the limits to academia. At what point does someone teeter on the brink between legitimate academic research and political activism?

I am uncomfortable with the idea of marketing as an academic specialism full stop. I seems to me to be hard to justify taxpayers having to cough up their hard earned cash so that academics can try to find ways of selling them things. Are we really happy with the man who sweeps the floor in the widget factory keeping middle-class boffins in this way?

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A new hockey team paper

There are lots of familiar names behind this new paper in JAMS - Rutherford, Mann, Wahl and Ammann. It seems that their infilling RegEm methodology has received some criticism. Apparently though, it "doesn't matter".

Smerdon et al., (2010) report two errors in the climate model grid data used in previous pseudoproxy-based climate reconstruction experiments that do not impact the main conclusions of those works (Mann et al., 2005; 2007a). The errors did not occur in subsequent works (Mann et al., 2009, Rutherford et al., 2010, and Schmidt et al., 2011) and therefore have no impact on the results presented therein. Results presented here for the CSM model using multiple pseudoproxy noise realizations show that the quantitative differences between the incorect and corrected results are within the expected variability of the noise realizations. It should also be made clear that the climate reconstruction method used in Smerdon et al. (2010) to illustrate the nature of the errors, RegEM-Ridge, is known to produce climate reconstructions with considerable variance loss and has been superseded by RegEM-TTLS in Mann et al. (2007) and subsequent works.

Mr Opportunity - Josh 198

Climat Depot reports on Al Gore's appearence on the David Letterman show. Al tells David 'There's a lot of opportunity in this crisis'. From Green tech to Oil funded Al Jazeera to Apple he has certainly done rather well.

Cartoons by Josh

Mistress of understatement

Prof Catherine Mitchell, who is professor of energy policy at Exeter, has written a critique of Dieter Helm's book (which I must get hold of soon).

I enjoyed the wonderful understatement on shale gas:

Helm’s final piece of the jigsaw, which he sees as the outcome of his solutions, is for gas to displace coal and to be the short to medium term transitional fuel until these ‘future’, including renewable energy, technologies kick in. This requires abundant global gas and although we know the recent shale gas finds have increased the global gas resource we still do not know what either its environmental or economic costs will be, particularly if large swathes of the globe move to gas. This policy therefore risks security and (increasing) price problems; including greater numbers of fuel poverty.

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Climate tummy tickling

The Labour party has called for all new gas-fired power stations to be fitted with carbon capture and storage (CCS) after 2020. As the Independent reports, this will double the price of the electricity they produce.

Labour has put itself on a fresh collision course with the Government over its dash-for-gas policy, proposing that after 2020 all new gas-fired power plants be forced to install technology to reduce their carbon emissions that will double the cost of the electricity they produce.

Oh yes, and carbon capture and storage has not actually been made to work in the UK yet - they think maybe they'd like to get a demonstrator up and running in a few years' time.

I think it's fair to say this announcement represents a case of tickling the tummies of some swing voters rather than a serious policy proposal.

Newsdrive

This is my interview today on Newsdrive, the BBC Radio Scotland afternoon show, discussing energy and climate. I am preceded by Patrick Harvie of the Green Party.

Newsdrive excerpt

Less daft

The Scottish Conservatives have announced their new energy policy, which seems, on the face of it, to be not quite as foolish as what has gone before.

Wind farms should be substantially cut and fossil fuels such as shale gas should be exploited, according to a review of Scottish Conservative energy policy.

The shake-up calls for councils to be given the power to halt all wind farm applications for a year and suggests homeowners should be compensated for loss value because of turbines.

They are also advocating construction of new nuclear power stations. However, belying their reputation as a party of small government and free markets they still intend to pump money into renewables.

Could do better.

Revkin on the publication process

Updated on Jan 29, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Here is Andy Revkin on the BEST results, 29 Jul 2012

BEST corroboration of temps is great (Rohde genius).

And here is Andy Revkin on the Skeie et al (low) climate sensitivity results:

Troubling details on @forskningsradet promoting unreviewed study of limited warming from 2x CO2.

I queried this with him and he has kindly sent this response:

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Von Storch's new book

Pierre Gosselin has translated some extracts from Hans von Storch's new book, written with Werner Krauß. It looks really interesting. Take this, for example:

Was the climate apocalypse really at our doorstep as we could read in the media? Or were they exaggerating in their depiction of the results coming from climate science? [...]

The climate scientist [von Storch] had the suspicion that climate science was dragging around a ‘cultural rucksack’ that was influencing the interpretation of the data. The cultural scientist [Krauss], with regards to the appearances by some climate scientists in the media and the roles they were readily assigned, was reminded of weather-wizards and shamans of foreign cultures.”

I wonder if anyone is going to publish it in English?

The lukewarmer's ten tests

Matt Ridley has a new paper out at GWPF.

I have written about climate change and energy policy for more than 25 years. I have come to the conclusion that current energy and climate policy is probably more dangerous, both economically and ecologically, than climate change itself. This is not the same as arguing that climate has not changed or that mankind is not partly responsible. That the climate has changed because of man-made carbon dioxide I fully accept. What I do not accept is that the change is or will be damaging, or that current policy would prevent it. For the benefit of supporters of climate change policy who feel frustrated by the reluctance of people like me to accept their assurances, here is what they would need to do to change my mind.

Read the whole thing.

More on that Norwegian CS study

There has been a bit of a mystery over the Norwegian climate sensitivity study that found evidence of low climate sensitivity. In particular, a number of commentators have noted that there doesn't appear to be a peer reviewed paper as yet.

It appears from the Twittersphere that the press release was issued by the Norwegian Funding body, based on an internal report on the project from the scientists concerned, and without the approval of the scientists.

While we wait for a paper (and the data and code), there is this magazine article about the study (from page 8). The lead researcher appears to be Ragnhild Bieltvedt Skeie. Here are the key conclusions:

The RF time series...have been used in a Bayesian approach to constrain the climate sensitivity in a recent PhD thesis from the Institute of Geoscience, University of Oslo (Skeie, 2012) in collaboration with the Norwegian Computing Center. The probability density function for the climate sensitivity in this study is tighter and with a lower posterior mean value (1.9°C) compared to previous studies using the instrumental record to estimate the climate sensitivity (Hegerl et al., 2007). Also, values of the climate sensitivity larger than 4.5˚C are excluded. The observed ocean heat content over the recent decade is found to be important for the better constrained climate sensitivity in this study, however the historical ocean heat content data series have large uncertainties. In addition to improved data for the storage of heat in the ocean, improved knowledge of how aerosols affect the clouds and how this effect has altered the energy balance over the last century is crucial in future work for constraining the climate sensitivity.

It's cold in India.

This is from Jug Saraiya in The Times of India. Yes, yes, it's weather not climate. But funny all the same.

Why are we sleeping in the refrigerator?·I asked Bunny. We're not sleeping in the refrigerator; we're sleeping in our bedroom, as we normally do, she replied. This conversation took place during the recent cold wave that swept north India, and many other parts of the world. In Haryana, where we live, the temperature went down to 0.6 C, making not just the bedroom but all the rooms of the house feel like the inside of a fridge. The freezer compartment of the fridge.' Teeth chattering in Morse code i marvelled at this unique phenomenon of global warming. How had this global warming - which was melting the Arctic ice cap and giving polar bears heatstroke - all of a sudden become a global colding? What next? Would they schedule the skiing and ice-skating events of the forthcoming Winter Olympics in the Thar desert in mid-July?

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Huhne trial to proceed?

Guido Fawkes is reporting that Huhne's trial will proceed. However, a correspondent suggests that it is possible his report is premature.

[Second sentence added later]

Update on Jan 28, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Given the sensitivities here, I am switching comments off.

Update on Jan 28, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Sky now has the story too.