WWF spivs are spinning

It hasn't taken long, but the story put out by WWF over the weekend about windfarms meeting nearly all domestic demand during December is being torn to shreds.

Euan Mearns gives the claims a good going over here:

Their press release is biased, vague and ambiguous, and journalists may be forgiven for reaching the wrong conclusions and miss reporting it. It would appear this is the intention.

And David Mackay, the former chief scientist at DECC, is having a go on Twitter too.

.@LangBanks "Home" is a misleading unit - total power cons'm'n in all forms is about 24x greater than "all homes" http://t.co/6rcs7UnGKU

— David MacKay FRS (@davidjcmackay) January 5, 2015

Update on Jan 5, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Anoneumouse sends us the new logo for WWF.

Delta farce

I awoke this morning to find notification of a tweet from Jan Pascal van Ypersele, the vice chairman of the IPCC. He had tweeted the image of a new graph from the Japanese Met Office suggesting something of a leap in global temperatures in 2014. I had pointed out that the long-term trend marked on the graph was, at just 0.7°C, hardly the stuff of nightmares.

At this point, our exchange was interrupted from a environmentalist who pointed to the current wildfires in South Australia and one to problems in the delta of Bangladesh. His point was somewhat obscure in relation to what van Ypersele and I had been discussing, so I ignored these contributions, but it seems that the great man felt that the Bangladesh point was worth a wider audience and he retweeted to his followers:

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Why do good intentions in the public sector lead to evil?

The tactic of demonising dissenters from the global warming orthodoxy has a long and dishonourable history now, and I'm sure that readers scarcely need me to recount the instances of bad behaviour that have made it to the public record. I was struck by the parallels between these stories and the experiences of Professor Joseph Meirion Thomas, a cancer surgeon who had the temerity to write a series of articles questioning certain aspects of the way health services are run in the UK.

The resultant Twitter storm would have looked entirely familiar to BH readers, with GPs and nurses all over the country flinging vulgar abuse at the good professor. This probably all falls under the heading of "free speech" (although also under the heading of "bad manners"), but as ever with these things there were less reputable ideas floating around, with one GP trying to organise a complaint to the General Medical Council and, in a painful echo of Andrew Dessler's contemptible behaviour during the Bengtsson affair, a GP from Fulham asked if the professor was "unwell". A letter describing Meirion Thomas as "vile" and "evil" was circulated to doctors in the area where the professor worked.

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Sinks and sources

Over the years I haven't really devoted much time to the carbon cycle, but I wonder if some of the attention of the climate debate will be switching to this area with the advent of the Orbiting Carbon Observatory, a satellite deployed last year to measure carbon dioxide concentrations across pretty much the whole planet.

The first maps were presented at AGU last month and the data is now publicly available:

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An also-ran in the climate prediction stakes

Back in 2013 I wrote a report for GWPF about the official UKCP09 climate projections and Nic Lewis's discovery that the underlying model was incapable of simulating a climate that was matched the real one as regards certain key features of the climate system. The final predictions in UKCP09 were based on a perturbed physics ensemble: a weighted average of a series of climate model runs, each with different key parameters tweaked, with the weighting in the final reckoning determined by how well the virtual climate produced matched the real one. As Lewis revealed, since the climate model output couldn't match the real one, we were effectively being asked to believe that a weighted average of unrealistic virtual climates would nevertheless produce realistic predictions.

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