Kelly on unbridled enthusiasm

Mike Kelly has a letter in Nature this week:

With more than US$1 trillion spent globally on research and development in 2007 (see go.nature.com/5wdd9p), sheer scale seems to be corrupting the scientific enterprise as individuals take ever more extreme measures to stand out.

For instance, parliamentary reviews of the 2009 'Climategate' scandal at the University of East Anglia in Norwich, UK, reported evidence of scientific misconduct (see go.nature.com/d6bdco). The allegations included questionable journal refereeing to promote a particular scientific line (see also Nature http://doi.org/ftb9hc; 2010). Instead, journals should be supported as places where unsettled science is refined by open debate. But, compared with 30 years ago, they do seem less willing to publish negative results or cautionary reviews that temper unbridled enthusiasm — perhaps because of ratings wars.

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You get what you pay for - Josh 230

 

Apparently Dana Nuccitelli works for the fossil fuel industry, see here and here, so I thought a cartoon of him at work would be helpful. If you want to get the slightly obscure but apposite references to Drillbit then Google is your friend ;-)

Cartoons by Josh

Your ship is sinking. Will spin help?

This is a hypothesis that the Met Office seems to be testing in the series of papers they have released today. There are three documents: 

• Paper 1: Observing changes in the climate system (PDF, 2 MB)
• Paper 2: Recent pause in global warming (PDF, 1 MB)
• Paper 3: Implications for projections (PDF, 664 kB)

Having focused on climate sensitivity in recent months, as far as this blog is concerned it's the third paper that is most of interest. As readers know, there is a surfeit of new observationally constrained papers that have found low climate sensitivity. Strangely, the Met Office authors only consider the Otto et al study, which had a relatively high ECS estimate - a function of the ocean temperature dataset used. As we know, if any other dataset had been used then they would have got an estimate in line with the other recent observational estimates.

Sure looks like spin to me.

Ben Pile on Nucc and the consensus

Ben Pile has a must-read guest post at the Making Science Public blog, covering l'affaire @afneil and the attempts to keep sceptical arguments off the airwaves. Here are a couple of quotes by way of a taster.

The emphasis on expertise is intended to permit only the expression of authorised opinion: not even the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change is allowed to speak. Because when he does, the public debate is revealed to be merely a battle of received wisdoms. Can we imagine this in any other discussion about public life? Should Andrew Neil be allowed to challenge ministers on unemployment figures or other economic metrics? After all, he’s just a journalist.

In spite of all the criticism levelled against him, then, Andrew Neil, in just one show, has done more to promote an active understanding of climate science and its controversies than has been done by the Carbon Brief blog, academics at the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism and elsewhere, Bad Science warriors, and a legion of Tweeters who claim to speak for science have done in their entire existences.

Keep digging

Dana Nuccitelli isn't giving up and has penned a response to Andrew Neil's comprehensive rebuttal. This one doesn't look any better than the last. I haven't time to look at everything in the article, but here are a couple of points that stood out.

On climate sensitivity and the lack of global warming

Nuccitelli opens up by saying that estimates of climate sensitivity are "slightly" lower than previously. This of course is grossly misleading. The IPCC's central estimate of effective climate sensitivity (ECS) in AR4 was over 3°C. The new estimates are all coming in below 2°C. By my reckoning that's a reduction of getting on for 50%, so hardly "slightly". The reduction in the shorter-term transient climate response (TCR) is smaller, but of course because of the low discount rates that environmentalists argue for, most of the social cost of carbon comes from the much (much!) longer term, so ECS will have more impact. In terms of whether we decarbonise, therefore, the recent results cause a significant change in the economics.

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Dana's vested interest

Anthony has the low down on Dana Nuccitelli's vested interest - it turns out that he works for a big company working in the environmental services area called Tetratech.

Given all the fuss the Guardian makes about the alleged funding of sceptics by big oil, it's hard to see that they can credibly retain Mr Nuccitelli's services.

Then again, if you take on a columnist with a penchant for reviewing books he hasn't read, it is possible that you consider such niceties as consistency a bit superfluous.

Science Media Centre spins the pause

The Science Media Centre is best known to readers here for its press release about the Oxburgh inquiry, in which they managed to quote only scientists implicated in wrongdoing over Climategate.

Today the centre has released a statement on the failure of global temperatures to rise in line with the models. It can be seen here.

It's spin of course, although perhaps not quite as blatant as we are used to from Fiona Fox et al. As one might expect there's a lot of emphasis on natural variability and not a lot on why the observations are on the cusp of falling out of the uncertainty bands. Lots of "our understanding is getting better" and not a lot of "nobody has a clue what's going on".

There's a complete misrepresentation of science's level of understanding of the reasons why this is happening:

It is becoming increasingly clear that absorption of heat in deep oceans is part of the explanation.

I think what they mean is that this is a somewhat implausible post-hoc rationalisation of the failure of the models to conform to reality; perhaps the copyeditor missed it.

As I said in Parliament, the inability of climate scientists to admit their ignorance is one of the reasons nobody trusts them. The Science Media Centre are just helping that process along in the wrong direction.

Update on Jul 22, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Lucia tweets out that the SMC's remarks about climate sensitivity make no sense:

"we are becoming more confident of mid-range figures." why not 'mid-range or lower?

Update on Jul 22, 2013 by Bishop Hill

David Shukman's take is here.

...the scientists say, pauses in warming were always to be expected. This is new - at least to me.

It is common sense that climate change would not happen in a neat, linear away but instead in fits and starts.

But I've never heard leading researchers mention the possibility before.

Neil responds to Nucc

Andrew Neil has written a comprehensive response to all the critics who got so upset with him doing his job properly. I did explain to him on Twitter that the rules of the climate game are that one should only have interviewees who espouse alarmist views and that they should only be asked softball questions.

Strangely, Neil seems to differ:

Many of the criticisms of the Davey interview seem to misunderstand the purpose of a Sunday Politics interview.

This was neatly summed up in a Guardian blog by Dana Nuccitelli, who works for a multi-billion dollar US environmental business (Tetra Tech) and writes prodigiously about global warming and related matters from a very distinct perspective.

He finished by saying: "[Andrew] Neil focussed only on the bits of evidence that seemed to support his position".

This is partly right. We did come at Mr Davey with a particular set of evidence, which was well-sourced from mainstream climate science. But it was nothing to do with advocating a "position".

More slipperiness from Baroness Verma

From Hansard:

Lord Donoughue: To ask Her Majesty’s Government by how many degrees they forecast global temperatures will be reduced, compared with a baseline case of what would happen without intervention, as a direct result of the emissions reductions mandated by the Climate Change Act 2008 by (1) 2050, and (2) 2100.

Baroness Verma: The United Kingdom's 80% emissions reduction target for 2050 is derived from estimates of the UK's share of the global effort needed in order to keep the increase in global average temperature to below 2 Degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. The UK does not have emissions reduction target set for 2100. The UK's emissions reductions alone would result in a small but crucial proportion of total global emissions reductions, as all countries need to contribute to achieving the 2 degree goal. It is vital that we show leadership and demonstrate that the shift to a low carbon model is achievable in order to influence other major emitters to take action.

The beauty of asking a question to which the answer is a number is that this kind of evasion is patently obvious. No doubt the question will be put again in due course.

Low-sensitivity model outperforms

Steve McIntyre has a must-read post about a low-sensitivity climate model which, when loaded up with actual greenhouse gas levels, completely outperforms the Met Office's HADGEM2.

The warmist's MO

Andrew Neil has been getting a hard time on Twitter, with Nuccitelli et al shouting that he is misrepresenting things but as usual presenting very little actual evidence to support his case.

There was another delicious example of this kind of thing overnight. Readers will of course remember the Economist's minor scoope about what WGIII were going to say about climate sensitivity. The article was heavily caveated as to the draft nature of the IPCC table concerned:

There are several caveats. The table comes from a draft version of the report, and could thus change. It was put together by the IPCC working group on mitigating climate change, rather than the group looking at physical sciences. It derives from a relatively simple model of the climate, rather than the big complex ones usually used by the IPCC. And the literature to back it up has not yet been published.

Click to read more ...

Energy impact

I'm grateful to reader Mark for the image here (click for full size). It shows an area near Barenburg, Saxony in which there are both wind turbines and gas wells. Mark explains the importance:

I think it rather illustrates the point we have been making the last few years. There are 11 gas wells in the photo, but they are extremely difficult to spot due to their small size relative to the wind turbines (they can be located by the things that look like mobile phone masts).  In fact the gas is from sandstone, rather than shale rock, but I understand that they were hydrofractured in the 1970s to improve recovery (like the Wytch Farm wells in Poole Harbour).

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Energy prices rises caused by government

RWE Energy have issued a major report looking at energy price rises in the UK. El Reg has done the analysis for us.

Care to guess how much "gas prices" have surged over the last six years, as the average household bill has climbed by roughly thirty per cent?

They are up by just ten per cent. That's strange.

And it gets stranger. RWE npower's analysts believe that the relatively small rises in commodity/production prices we've seen will probably go away again by 2020, so that their costs in this regard will return to the same level as they were in 2007. This will be due to gas fracking, more efficient powerplants and other factors.

In the year 2020, then, "gas prices" will have gone up by zero per cent since 2007. What will have happened to bills? Will they have gone down again to reflect this, in npower's view?

Certainly not. By that point, the company forecasts that our energy bills will have climbed even more. They will be up no less than fifty-six per cent on 2007 levels, on top of no increase at all in "gas prices".

Read the whole thing.

100% of poll respondents don't believe Mr Davey and the CCC

Peter Atherton of investment bank Liberum Capital reports the result of a light hearted survey of investors.

...we decided to carry out a pop quiz asking investors to vote on which of the propositions below seemed the more credible:

• A. Liberum Capital / RWE: £150bn of investment to 2020 = circa 30% increase in power bills (or 19% dual fuel according to RWE); or
• B. UK Government / Committee on Climate Change: £150bn of investment to 2020 = 11% reduction in dual fuel energy bills.

The results are in..................

We had 55 separate responses. The headline result was follows:

• A: 100%
• B: 0%

Although not a serious survey, as Atherton goes on to explain, it is possible to draw some conclusions.

...what this poll does show is that the government is failing to convince a key constituent (the equity market) that its affordability projections are plausible. Nor given RWE’s intervention (and feedback on our research we received from the other leading utilities) does it appear that the major utilities find government assertions convincing either. This represents a dramatic failure by the government on what is the central issue on energy policy in the UK. So even if the government’s projections are actually correct, their failure to convince anyone outside Whitehall of the fact creates a major credibility problem.

Quote of the day

For [Caroline Lucas] to suggest that [shale] it will be extractable only in the States is really to express the belief that God is an American.

Peter Lilley, speaking at the Westminster Hall debate on shale. The transcript is here, and is well worth a read, particularly for Lilley's contributions.