Food or fuel?

A survey of the Netmums website has found that a significant proportion of families are now having to choose between feeding the family and heating their homes.

Soaring energy bills are forcing one in four mothers to turn off their heating in the depths of winter in order to afford food for their children. Fuel poverty is resulting in thousands of families resorting to wearing extra clothes and using blankets in their homes.

Most of the political establishment will view this as a policy success, I imagine, since ever-rising prices is seen as an important objective of energy policy, which will cause people to insulate their homes and so save the planet.

Officially sanctioned conflict

Some weeks back, I noticed the odd dual role of Bernie Bulkin, chairman of DECC's Office for Renewable Energy Deployment, who doubles as an adviser to VantagePoint Capital Partners, a company that invests in the energy sector. Reader Terry Sanders has been following up on this story and writes to update us on what he has found.

After reading [your post] I looked into Bernie and discovered he was a director of Ludgate Investments which had a significant piece of its funds (7.9%) in a biomass company so I left a comment on his blog asking about it. My comment stayed in the "awaiting moderation" for 10 days which 1 thought was strange. I figured if they haven't let it through or declined it then they must be discussing it so I sent in a FOI request for all communication regarding the comment.

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On bias

In the UK, the forces that environmentalism is able to deploy in support of its cause are pretty overwhelming. The government, the universities, the civil service, the schools, 90% of the print media, all of the BBC, including the comedy and drama departments, the army, the navy, the airforce, most big businesses, parts of the judiciary etc etc. Whole government departments are given over to propaganda in favour of environmentalism.

In the light of this, I think I do an important service in highlighting bits of information that don't fit the narrative.

Keith Kloor, on the other hand, thinks I should be a bit more even-handed.

I'll bear his concerns in mind.

Society rejects action on climate

Public support for action on global warming has fallen in fairly spectacular fashion according to the British Social Attitudes Survey.

There has been dramatic decline over the past decade in the public's support for tackling climate change in Britain. Backing for higher green taxes and charges has waned and scepticism about the seriousness of the threat to the environment has increased.

Climategate is cited as a key factor in the fall in support. And rightly so - the Russell panel noted that CRU and IPCC had both been guilty of misleading policymakers over the "hide the decline" episode, and there has been no meaningful investigation into allegations of journal nobbling.

Upholders of the consensus may yell that none of this changes the science, and this is true. But Climategate shows us that the process by which governments have been persuaded that we have a problem is biased. That being the case, the public are right to want a halt to policy responses.

Update on Jan 5, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Whoops - that's an old one! From 2011. I'm closing comments on the thread accordingly.

England and Wales rainfall trends

In the wake of the "more rain and more intense rain" story, Doug Keenan sends this graph of England & Wales rainfall records for 1766-2012 (click for larger; data here).

Let's just say the trend towards more rainfall is not obvious. (As indeed is any trend towards less rainfall, which is said to be more likely by the UK Climate Impacts Programme).

[Updated to show England and Wales, rather than UK]

Update on Jan 7, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Doug writes:

The plot shows the total precipitation for England and Wales in 2012 as 1070 mm. That was the amount in the file for seasonal precipitation that the Met Office had on its web site when I downloaded the file on January 4^th (at 20:31). The amount, however, is incorrect. The Met Office has since changed the file to specify the amount as 1245 mm. The other data points in the plot seem to be correct. An amended plot is included in the e-mail that I sent to Julia Slingo on January 7^th. As shown and discussed there, the obvious problems remain.

On food and fearless advisers

Sir John Beddington was back in the news a couple of weeks ago, warning that food prices are going to get higher and higher:

During a radio discussion about food prices, he said much of world’s agriculture was dependent on stable weather patterns, which have undergone “major changes” in recent years.

This, he warned, meant that food supplies were “extremely fragile” and that reserves were subjected to extremes in conditions caused by climate change.

Ah, it's climate change. No mention of the insane policies on biofuels. If you haven't read it already, take a look at Matt Ridley's article about peak farmland, in which he reports new findings that suggest that the world's demand will soon be falling and, even more remarkably:

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Tummy tickling

The Telegraph claims to have a splash on Conservative ministers' attitudes to windfarms - in particular those of planning minister Nick Boles and DECC's John Hayes.

The Daily Telegraph has been told that Mr Boles warned Mr Hayes in the letter that people “bitterly resented” having onshore wind farm developments imposed on them by planners after an inquiry.

It is also the first evidence of a Tory ministerial alliance against Liberal Democrat attempts to introduce more onshore wind turbines.

The intervention will be a major boost for communities which are fighting the construction of turbines near their homes.

The Conservatives, as we know, can do little or nothing about energy policy in the UK, since the coalition agreement awards this to the LibDems. This announcement therefore reeks of the blue half of the government reacting to the continuing rise of UKIP in the polls by trying to tickle the tummies of some disgruntled rural voters with a view to slowing the exodus of their voters to Farage's team.

Concerto for a rainy day

The Met Office and Channel Four combine in spectacular fashion to produce what may be one of the worst pieces of TV science for quite some time.

I love the bit where Tom Clarke says there are "clear signals of wetter weather emerging" and then we hear from a scientist about what his computer model predicts. And the bit where we hear that the globe has got warmer since 2000.

Extinction expert says windfarms hasten extinctions

Clive Hambler, a lecturer at Oxford University and the author of an important textbook on conservation, has written an important article at the Spectator on the effects on windfarms on wildlife.  It looks as if the "bird-blender" name is well-deserved:

My speciality is species extinction. When I was a child, my father used to tell me about all the animals he’d seen growing up in Kent — the grass snakes, the lime hawk moths — and what shocked me when we went looking for them was how few there were left. Species extinction is a serious issue: around the world we’re losing up to 40 a day. Yet environmentalists are urging us to adopt technologies that are hastening this process. Among the most destructive of these is wind power.

Pielke Jr on politicised science

Roger Pielke Jr has a must-read post on the politicisation of science, inspired by an editorial in Nature by Dan Sarewitz.

In a 2009 paper I documented that Science magazine published 40 editorials critical of the Bush Administration during its 2 terms, and only 1 such critique of the Clinton Administration's previous 2 terms (here in PDF). I have just updated this analysis through the first term of the Obama Administration, and found no editorials critical of the Obama Administration. Instead, there were editorials with the following titles:

• Presidents Who Value Science
• The Enlightenment Returns
• Helping the President

I think the UK is probably lagging behind the US here somewhat, although only to the extent that science's role as subcommittee of the Fabian Society is not publicly acknowledged to the same extent as it is over the pond.

Water, water everywhere

The Met Office is hot out of the blocks on the climate front this year, issuing the first "climate disaster" story of the year via the BBC's Roger Harrabin.

The frequency of extreme rainfall in the UK may be increasing, according to analysis by the Met Office.

Statistics show that days of particularly heavy rainfall have become more common since 1960.

The analysis is still preliminary, but the apparent trend mirrors increases in extreme rain seen in other parts of the world.

It comes as the Met Office prepares to reveal whether 2012 was the wettest year on record in the UK.

Given the apparently overwhelming drought risk in the South East of England - of similar magnitude to the Sahara apparently - we should probably be grateful for this rain. And while we're on the topic, let's not forget the Institute of Civil Engineers' report on water availability in the UK:

By the 2050s, summer river flows may reduce by 35% in the driest parts of England and by 15% for the wetter river basin regions in Scotland. This will put severe pressure on current abstractions of water.

This being the year of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report, I think we should expect a lot of this kind of thing in coming months.

Quality, quantity, both or neither

Climate Central reviews the extent of media coverage of global warming in 2012. As part of their article, they list the most prolific environmental journalists. Here they are:

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Parliament does statistical significance

Updated on Jan 2, 2013 by Bishop Hill

From Hansard:

Climate Change

Questions

Asked by Lord Donoughue

To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Verma on 30 October (WA 114-5) stating that global temperatures have risen less than 1 degree celsius since 1880, on what basis they assert that there has been a long-term upward trend in average global temperatures. [HL3048]

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Message to Clive

This is a message to Clive, who emailed my last night re setting up a user account at BH. I replied but got a bounce from your email. This is probably why your account is unverified.

Kahan't see the wood for the trees

Dan Kahan has a problem with Michael Mann's review of Nate Silver's book, The Signal and the Noise.

Frankly, I find the gap between Mann’s depiction and the reality of what Silver said disturbing. You’d get the impression from reading Mann’s review that Silver is a “Chicago School” “free market fundamentalist” who dogmatically attacks the assumptions and methods of climate forecasters.

I don't think this discrepancy is any kind of a surprise to readers here - it's the way the great Mann works. But it's certainly fun to watch Kahan grappling with the problem of what he calls a "great climate scientist" mispresenting the work of a sympathiser. You wonder if he has considered the possibility that Mann might misrepresent his critics too.

I mentioned The Hockey Stick Illusion in my comment, but I think the moderator at Kahan's site has not yet recovered from the New Year celebrations. No doubt it will appear in due course.

(As ever, please be nice if you decide to comment at sites I link to.)