More Met Office gongs

Thanks to Greensand for alerting us to a new set of awards for Met Office staff, including our very own Richard Betts:

The new Science Fellows and their areas of expertise are:

• Mike Bell: Ocean Processes
• Richard Betts: Climate Impacts
• Dave Matthews: Computational Science and Modelling Infrastructure
• David Jackson: Space Weather and Stratospheric Dynamics

Julia Slingo, Chief Scientist, said 'I am delighted to make these appointments, which exemplify the excellence of our science, modelling and prediction activities across weather and climate. Along with the Deputy Directors and Strategic Heads, our Science Fellows play a critical role in the senior leadership of our Science Programme, and this leadership helps us to maintain our global standing in weather and climate science and services'.

Falsifiability in my lifetime

An article on the Nature website looks at the failure of global temperatures to rise in line with the climate models and finds a possible explanation in the Pacific Decadal Oscillation. I notice what may be the start of a new meme emerging:

...none of the climate simulations carried out for the IPCC produced this particular hiatus at this particular time. That has led sceptics — and some scientists — to the controversial conclusion that the models might be overestimating the effect of greenhouse gases, and that future warming might not be as strong as is feared. Others say that this conclusion goes against the long-term temperature trends, as well as palaeoclimate data that are used to extend the temperature record far into the past. And many researchers caution against evaluating models on the basis of a relatively short-term blip in the climate. “If you are interested in global climate change, your main focus ought to be on timescales of 50 to 100 years,” says Susan Solomon, a climate scientist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

Click to read more ...

Barroso then and now

The EU seems to have seen the writing on the wall and is starting to beat a retreat from its previous environmentalist-friendly policies:

If European Commission President Jose Manuel Barroso has his way, the European Union would do away with its green energy mandate and replace it with a voluntary system in which EU member states set their own renewable energy targets as they see fit.

German newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung on Wednesday reported that Barroso is pushing for an end to EU renewable energy mandates when the current legally binding target expires in 2020.

How times change. Here is Senor Barroso just a couple of years ago:

José Manuel Barroso, the commission president, expressed confidence that renewables would move from an alternative form of energy to the mainstream over the next decade. “I believe renewable energy is neither a luxury nor a distraction,” Mr Barroso said.

The green nexus

Here's an interesting story from the other side of the pond:

Internal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) emails show extensive collaboration between top agency officials and leading environmentalist groups, including overt efforts to coordinate messaging and pressure the fossil fuel industry.

The emails, obtained by the Energy and Environment Legal Institute (EELI) through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit, could fuel an ongoing controversy over EPA policies that critics say are biased against traditional sources of energy.

I've little doubt that similar things go on in the UK.

Identifiable decline

Readers will no doubt recall the study by Gordon Hughes, which suggested that wind farms are wearing out much more quickly than previously thought. This was the subject of a bit of to and fro at BH the other day, when Prof David Mackay, the chief scientist at DECC, appeared in the comments to dispute the findings. There were some further developments at around the same time, which I have been meaning to post since before Christmas.

At around the same time he appeared in the comments at BH, Prof Mackay published a more detailed rebuttal of Hughes at his own blog, which he said showed that Hughes' results were spurious. Hughes' model has parameters for the age-related performance of the wind farm, one for the windiness of the place in which it is located, and another to relate its performance to other windfarms. Mackay's case is that Hughes' model is non-identifiable, which means that the fit to the data is arbitrary: Hughes could, according to Mackay, explain the data say with a fast decline in performance and an increase or windiness, but could also do it with a slow decline in performance and a decrease in windiness. This point was disputed by Hughes.

Click to read more ...

Shale fail

Also in Parliament yesterday, we had David Cameron's appearance before the Commons Liaison Committee, a body composed of the chairmen of all the select committees. Being mostly party placemen, the views expressed were pretty conventional, and indeed one could have mistaken it for a convention of greens. Tim Yeo questioned Cameron on climate matters at 17:01, but this was just two greens comparing notes on the climate consensus. Later on (17:33) David TC Davies expressed a desire to discuss climate issues a bit further but said that he might get into trouble if he did so.

The interesting bit came when shale was raised (17:33). This was mostly in a rather superficial way, except for the bit where Cameron explained that he felt we had the correct regulatory regime in place:

Click to read more ...

The Wright stuff

The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee had another in its long running series of hearings on shale gas today. The first witness, it is fair to say, will have been an eye opener. Chris Wright is the boss of an American shale gas company, someone who has actually done fracking, made it work and made it pay - in other words someone who could, rather than discussing hypothetical opportunities and hypothetical problems, explain the realities on the ground. He exudes all-American get up and go and is therefore a rather different kettle of fish to most of the world-weary Brits who appear to before the committee. Some of the peers seemed to eye him rather suspiciously at first, as if he might suddenly leap up and achieve something tangible without asking first, but they seemed to warm to him as the hearing went on and there were some moments of communal good humour and bonhomie.

I was struck by the fact that several of their lordships didn't seem to have grasped that the impact of shale wells is essentially a squad of drilling rigs moving around the country, leaving behind them lots of wellheads of trivial visual impact. So it was good that Wright was able to correct their misconceptions and they will have got a lot from his appearance, for example his thoughts on the idea that population density might be a barrier to shale gas development in the UK:

Click to read more ...

The BBC's covert funding of greenery

The Telegraph is apparently reporting (£) that the BBC has decided that the deficit in its pension scheme - some £740 million - should be made up by the corporation rather than by asking scheme members to make extra contributions.

It's a common meme on sceptic blogs that the BBC's output is influenced by its pension scheme's many investments in green businesses. I don't subscribe to this view myself since the scheme is defined benefit and therefore there would be no particular advantage to BBC journalists hyping greenery. Nevertheless, this new development means that the scheme will in effect have handed over all those hundreds of millions of pounds to green businesses at the expense of the licence fee payer. The political interests of the scheme managers are receiving an illicit subsidy.

Diary dates: sceptic edition

Some interesting lectures upcoming at the University of Nottingham. I hope they stream these or otherwise make them more publicly available:

Thursday, February 6th: 1-2pm, Law & Social Sciences (West Wing), A100
Amelia Sharman (London School of Economics and Political Science) 
“Mapping the climate sceptical blogosphere”
Amelia highlights three key climate sceptic blogs’ focus on the scientific aspects of the climate change debate, their status as alternative sites of expertise, how they contribute to the contestation and delegitimisation of expert knowledge and how they engage members of the public previously unengaged by the mainstream knowledge process.

Click to read more ...

Having a laugh

Readers may remember my post about ecoactivists discussing the firing of a flare at a police helicopter. The conversation on the Indymedia website is still ongoing, but it looks to me as if there is a bit of spoofing going on now.

If you recall, I noted the thread at the point at which Rachel Thompson, the group's spokesman, asked everyone on the thread to stop dicussing the firing of the flare. Since that time we've had a notice from an administrator saying that "Rachel" was a troll pretending to be Rachel Thompson and now the following:

Click to read more ...

CCC - the write-up

Ed Davey has just issued the triennial report into the performance of the Committee on Climate Change.

"Conflict of interest" might be expected to be an important issue in the report. However in terms of the conducts of the current members we learn only that the committee has been compliant with the "specified conduct and behaviour requirements". One can only assume that avoidance of conflicts of interest has not actually been specified. That said among the recommendations are the suggestion that the committee's register of interests, previously only available on request, be published on their website.

Click to read more ...

Greens prevented environmental testing

From the introduction to the Environment Agency's report on water at the Balcombe drilling site:

Many people have expressed concerns that the Cuadrilla drilling site near Balcombe West Sussex will cause the water quality to deteriorate. Before drilling took place, both Cuadrilla and the Environment Agency tested the borehole water and surface waters (streams) around the site.

We reported the findings in August 2013 in our Pre-drilling report. We wanted to repeat the water quality sampling during the test-drilling to see if there were any changes. However, we weren't able to do this as access became difficult during the protestors' occupation of the area in August. We did, however, collect a sample from the borehole at this time and subsequently took samples from the Lower Stumble area when it became safe for our staff to do so.

Greens not only damage the environment, but they prevent others from protecting it.

Cue popcorn

The Guardian is really turning into the most extraordinary publication. In its desperation to stay afloat financially it has ditched professional journalists left, right and centre (or at least left, leftish and very left), replacing them with a mixture of hippies and ecoactivists. The results are inevitable.

This morning we find that the paper has published what looks as if it's going to be a spectacular own goal, with Dana Nuccitelli fabricating what he says is a Richard Lindzen prediction, misrepresenting another one by Hansen and generally making the whole publication look like something out of the darkest recesses of the internet. It's astonishing stuff.

Steve Goddard is on the case here, here, here, and here. Monckton's take is at WUWT.

Pull up a seat and enjoy the fun.

Walport and Ridley

Mark Walport has a letter in the Times, taking issue with an article that Matt Ridley wrote a few days before. Matt's article was about cherrypicking in science, and mentioned Briffa's Yamal series.

Sir,

Matt Ridley falls into his own trap in his Opinion column (Jan 6), though the title “Roll up: cherry pick your research results here” is apposite, because that is exactly what Ridley does with respect to the research evidence for global warming.

Click to read more ...

Travelling Tina

Readers may remember my interest in Tina Rothery, the anti-fracking activist who suggested to the House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee that she was a local resident protesting against the Lancashire shale developments. This was surprise since she had also spent the summer in Balcombe protesting developments there as well as having been involved in the Occupy movement in London.

Today, she turned up again on the Radio 5 phone-in, described as an anti-fracking activist from Gainsborough, Lincolnshire. The show also featured James Verdon of the Frack Doctor blog, and a very balanced contribution from Roger Harrabin.