We told you so - Josh 197

Cartoons by Josh

Update on Jan 28, 2013 by Josh

Richard Tol makes a very good point so I have changed the title from 'Predicting the past' to 'We told you so'.

Carbon austerity

The Royal Society's Phil Trans A is back on the global warming bandwagon, with a whole issue devoted to "materials efficiency" (Roger Harrabin's coverage is here).

The general theme seems to be that if we are going to meet our carbon emissions targets, we are going to need to recycle more and use less of everything.

Reducing requirements for production of new material would lead to reduced rates of extraction of natural resources, reduced energy demand, reductions in emissions and other environmental harms, and potentially has national political advantages through offering a reduced dependence on imports and increased self-reliance. However, the core motivation for examining material efficiency in this Discussion Meeting Issue arises from its potential as an emissions abatement strategy: materials production is both energy intensive and already largely energy efficient.

It reads like politics rather than science to me.

Nurse joins the EU referendum battle

Paul Nurse has weighed into the EU referendum fray with an article in the Guardian outlining why he thinks we should stay in.

There's a lot of spurious verbiage to get through, but at the end of the day he seems to be saying that because we get some science funding from the EU we should stay in (he makes a subsidiary point that being in aids collaboration). Having cut through the stream of words in this way, one can see that his argument is extraordinarily thin.

I assume Nurse is clever enough to understand that the concerns of the scientific community are only a minor side issue in the arguments over Europe. In reality, we have the considerable issues of taxation, self-determination, democracy and openness to the world to consider.

Money grubbing by scientists should not weigh too heavily on the views of politicians or of the voters in a referendum.

Bayesians on Bayes

Two statisticians - professors of Bayesian statistics - write in the New Yorker.

...the Bayesian approach is much less helpful when there is no consensus about what the prior probabilities should be.

That will be a bust for the climatologists then.

Biofuels bust

The New Times reports that a judge has decided that the US Environmental Protection Agency is a bad joke. The EPA's biofuels mandate has been officially ruled to be absurd, because of its requirement that fuel companies incorporate cellulosic ethanol in their products whether it was possible to buy such ethanol or not.

A federal appeals court threw out a federal rule on renewable fuels on Friday, saying that a quota set by the Environmental Protection Agency for incorporating liquids made from woody crops and wastes into car and truck fuels was based on wishful thinking rather than realistic estimates of what could be achieved.

Heads will not roll, however. This is the government we are talking about.

It's all in the adjustments (redux)

From time to time we have observed at BH that tweaks and corrections and errors in climatological time series always seem to lead to the conclusion "it's worse than we thought". Who can forget the great Bob Watson's remarks to this end in the aftermath of glaciergate?

Anthony Watts reports on the latest in this long line of upwardly mobile adjustments:

...the rate of sea level rise has been bumped up 0.43 mm/yr in the last few years. This sort of thing has been going on more or less regularly and it seems to go only one way.

Yup.

Unspeakable in pursuit of the iniquitous

The Mail on Sunday's splash last week about Lord Deben's misleading the House of Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee over the business of Veolia, a company he chairs, has elicited a response in the form of a letter from committee chairman Tim Yeo.

You may have seen the press coverage on Sunday 13 January (attached) relating to your interests in Veolia Water. At the Committee's request, I have written to Ed Davey to ask for an update on how DECC and the Cabinet Office have addressed the outstanding matters in relation to your interests, which we drew to their attention back in September. The Committee also asked me to write to you to give you an opportunity to comment.

The spectacle of the heavily conflicted Yeo assessing Deben to see if he too is heavily conflicted is almost too much for me.

(H/T Dung)

Lovelock recants

James Lovelock has written a letter of objection regarding a windfarm development in Devon (see link below for the whole thing). This bit strikes me as important.

I am an environmentalist and founder member ofthe Greens but I bow my head in shame at the thought that our original good intentions should have been so misunderstood and misapplied. We never intended a fundamentalist Green movement that rejected all energy sources other than renewable, nor did we expect the Greens to cast aside our priceless ecological heritage because of their failure to understand that the needs of the Earth are not separable from human needs. We need take care that the spinning windmills do not become like the statues on Easter Island, monuments of a failed civilisation.

As Phillip Bratby (to whom a big tip of the hat is due) puts it, there are strong shades of Patrick Moore's regrets over the monster he created in Greenpeace. One might add that another parallel would be Mark Lynas's regrets over his anti-GMO activism.

I've said it before, but the damage done by environmentalists to the environment is beyond estimation.

Lovelock letter

New study finds low climate sensitivity

Via Leo Hickman, more evidence that aerosols have a small impact and that climate sensivity is low.

When the researchers at CICERO and the Norwegian Computing Center applied their model and statistics to analyse temperature readings from the air and ocean for the period ending in 2000, they found that climate sensitivity to a doubling of atmospheric CO2 concentration will most likely be 3.7°C, which is somewhat higher than the IPCC prognosis.

But the researchers were surprised when they entered temperatures and other data from the decade 2000-2010 into the model; climate sensitivity was greatly reduced to a "mere" 1.9°C.

Click to read more ...

Uniform priors and the IPCC

Last week, I posted about a comment Nic Lewis had written at RealClimate. In that comment, Lewis had spent some time discussing a study by Aldrin et al, and noted that its findings were distorted by the use of a uniform (or "flat" prior). Although Gavin Schmidt did not respond directly to this point, one commenter pushed the question of the validity of the uniform prior approach a little further.

Graeme:

I thought James Annan had demonstrated that using a uniform prior was bad practise. That would tend to spread the tails of the distribution such that the mean is higher than the other measures of central tendency. So is it justified in this paper?

This elicited a response from a statistician called Steve Jewson (a glance at whose website suggests he is just the man you'd want to give you advice in this area):

Click to read more ...

Independent Koch up

The Independent has wheeled out the tired old "sceptics funded by big oil" story. Bob Ward is predictably impressed.

And they have both made complete fools of themselves.

The story is this:

• the Koch brothers control The Knowledge and Progress Fund
• The Knowledge and Progress Fund gave money to The Donors Trust
• The Donors Trust gave money to the American Enterprise Institute.

However, if you look at the AEI's climate change pages, you will see that their involvement in the area is thin to say the least.

And the first article on the page is entitled "Weather Change: Temperatures are Increasing and Humans are Playing a Role".

The article was written by Steve Connor, the Independent's science bod.

Science ain't what it used to be.

Eyefall

Isn't it interesting that when the UK energy industry was privatised, leading to sustained falls in costs to consumers, Private Eye felt able to print this cover lampooning the idea.

Now that governments are encouraging lunatic renewables schemes and really are making energy more expensive, Ian Hislop maintains a determined silence.

Funny that.

The low-down on aerosols

Updated on Jan 26, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The leak of the draft of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report before Christmas has had perhaps rather less of an impact than might have been expected, but the rock that Alec Rawls' chucked in the IPCC's pond was a large one and not all of the ripples have reached the shore yet. Here's a slightly unexpected one.

One of the immediate responses to the leak came from New Scientist, a bastion of climatological rectitude and stern upholder of the IPCC consensus. The article, by Michael Marshall and Fred Pearce, discussed what the IPCC report "really said", much of it being a lengthy attempt to rebut Rawls' case that the IPCC was acknowledging a much greater role for solar activity. However, the close of the article shifted to other aspects of the report:

Click to read more ...

Silly Sally psychoanalyst

Lots of people are emailing me about the BBC's Thinking Allowed programme (see here from 16 mins) in which a pschoanalyst called Sally Weintrobe waffles uncontrollably about "climate denial". There's some amusing background about Weintrobe here - she seems to be a rather touchy character and litigious to boot. It appears, however, that she doesn't actually think we're mad, although what she does think is a little obscure. As one reader who emailed me said of Weintrobe and her fellow interviewees on Thinking Allowed:

To be honest they're so painfully clever that I, as a mere Cambridge Uni Natural Sciences graduate, couldn't understand most of what they were saying.

No doubt this show was part of the BBC's ongoing commitment to "due impartiality" in the climate debate.

Update on Jan 30, 2013 by Bishop Hill

A transcript has been posted here.

Ofgem and the family bill

Bob Ward is trumpeting the latest propaganda sheet from Ofgem, which details the costs of environmental legislation on energy prices. The impact, he claims, is only around 10% of the average household bill.

Here's Ofgem's leaflet, and here are the relevant paragraphs:

Energy Company Obligation (ECO): A new domestic energy efficiency programme designed to create a legal obligation on certain energy suppliers to improve the energy efficiency of domestic households. ECO is estimated to cost a typical consumer £27 per fuel each year.

The Renewables Obligation: A Government support mechanism for promoting large scale renewable electricity projects in the UK. Ofgem’s estimate is that the cost of this scheme this year is £21 out of your electricity bill (there is no impact on your gas bill for this programme). The cost of this scheme is expected to increase in April 2013.

Click to read more ...