Shale "a game changer": official

Interfax Natural Gas Daily says that a report prepared for DECC in the wake of the British Geological Survey estimate of shale gas resources in the UK will find that it and similar resources around Europe prove exploitable then gas prices could fall by 28%.

Following the release of a study by the British Geological Survey that shows there could be 40 trillion cubic metres of shale gas resources in England alone, the impact of these reserves on the UK’s gas prices has been a hot topic.

If the UK and continental Europe combine to produce around 100 billion cubic metres per year of unconventional reserves between 2020 and 2030, Navigant expects “a combination of local gas and readily available LNG puts sufficient pressure on oil price-indexed gas supplies that gas prices fall towards the long-run marginal cost, getting to 50 pence per therm [p/th] by 2030”.

Under this ‘low price scenario’, Navigant believes continued cost efficiencies could even “move prices downwards to somewhere between 35 p/th and 50 p/th”. The fall would mean prices have the potential to halve from 2012’s average trade price of 69 p/th, making the UK’s shale resources an undoubted ‘game-changer’.

David Kennedy of the Committee on Climate Change has of course declared that shale is not a game changer. But given his remarks on climate sensitivity I know who I am going to believe.

Did the IPCC just blink?

The wave of new evidence of low climate sensitivity, the existence of which is denied by the CCC's David Kennedy and downplayed by Julia Slingo, has presented the IPCC with a dilemma. They could try to bluff it out, an approach that could be terminal given the widespread reporting of the new science in the media. Alternatively they could 'fess up. This too could be extremely damaging, but perhaps might not be the end of them.

Being good bureaucrats they have gone for the option that is most likely to lead to their survival. At least that is what I surmise from a posting at the Economist, which has managed to get its hands on a table from the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. According to the article, a draft of the WG3 report reveals that

at CO₂ concentrations of between 425 parts per million and 485 ppm, temperatures in 2100 would be 1.3-1.7°C above their pre-industrial levels. That seems lower than the IPCC’s previous assessment, made in 2007. Then, it thought concentrations of 445-490 ppm were likely to result in a rise in temperature of 2.0-2.4°C.

Now of course, it's draft and its WG3, not WG1, so we have to be cautious. But there is at least a possibility that they are going turn down the alarm somewhat.

Chalk up another for low climate sensitivity

Nicola Scafetta has a new paper in Energy and Environment, which finds a figure for climate sensitivity of 1.35, some what lower than even the torrent of EBM papers over the last year or two.

Global surface temperature records (e.g. HadCRUT4) since 1850 are characterized by climatic oscillations synchronous with specific solar, planetary and lunar harmonics superimposed on a background warming modulation. The latter is related to a long millennial solar oscillation and to changes in the chemical composition of the atmosphere (e.g. aerosol and greenhouse gases). How- ever, current general circulation climate models, e.g. the CMIP5 GCMs, to be used in the AR5 IPCC Report in 2013, fail to reconstruct the observed climatic oscillations. As an alternate, an empirical model is proposed that uses: (1) a specific set of decadal, multidecadal, secular and millennial astronomic harmonics to simulate the observed climatic oscillations; (2) a 0.45 attenuation of the GCM ensemble mean simulations to model the anthropogenic and volcano forcing effects. The proposed empirical model outperforms the GCMs by better hind-casting the observed 1850-2012 climatic patterns. It is found that: (1) about 50-60% of the warming observed since 1850 and since 1970 was induced by natural oscillations likely resulting from harmonic astronomical forcings that are not yet included in the GCMs; (2) a 2000-2040 approximately steady projected temperature; (3) a 2000-2100 projected warming ranging between 0.3°C and 1.6°C , which is significantly lower than the IPCC GCM ensemble mean projected warming of 1.1°C to 4.1°C; (4) an equilibrium climate sensitivity to CO₂ doubling centered in 1.35°C and varying between 0.9°C and 2.0°C .

There is a preprint here. No doubt there will be the usual barrage of comments arguing that it should be ignored because it's in Energy and Environment. Let us see what a critique based on logic turns up.

David Kennedy on climate sensitivity

While on the train on the way down to London on Tuesday, I found myself reading David Kennedy's evidence to the Environmental Audit Committee inquiry into Carbon Budgets. Kennedy, readers are no doubt aware, is the chief executive of Deben's Committee on Climate Change.

Kennedy's remarks on climate sensitivity are, well, extraordinary:

If it was true that climate sensitivity estimates are now half what they were two years ago, that would raise a question. Is it still appropriate to be on this path, or should we take our foot off the pedal? On that specific issue I can tell you there is not any new evidence that makes us think differently about climate sensitivity. Some people would have you think that is the case, but if you look at the science, there is not a fundamental shift on that important issue of climate sensitivity, and I would not expect the IPCC, when it reports in October, to say the range for climate sensitivity has shifted significantly. Let’s see what they say. I would not expect them to say it has shifted. That is one of the things that will feed into our review, so we will be looking at the IPCC report before we do a report on the science and the international context in November, but the other thing is the call for evidence asks the specific question: is anything different, particularly on climate sensitivity as well as some of the other key things?

"..not any new evidence that makes us think differently about climate sensitivity"? Now that is a brazen statement if ever I saw one.

Bishop in the commons

Well that went OK, I thought. The questions were fair and touched on many of the issues that are of concern to those of us in the sceptic community.Those readers who have been suggesting sceptic talking points that I could work in to my answers may be pleased therefore, although I had decided that I would concentrate on trying to answer their questions as best I could.

It would have been helpful to have had Sarah Newton's question, which revealed something of the committee's objectives, at the start of the hearing rather than at the end. It seems that the government is looking to find a way to persuade everyone that the science of global warming is solid so that we accept the IPCC report without question. I can't see that happening. If you want to convince someone a report is solid, you really need it to actually be solid in the first place. There's a long way to go before that happens.

I think I'm right in saying that this is the first time a sceptic has been heard in the SciTech committee since GWPF were invited to the Climategate hearings. I hope they learned something from it. Judging from the look on some of their faces when I was talking about sea ice, what I said was certainly new to them.

[Updated - I'd misidentified Sarah Newton as Sarah Wollaston]

Update on Jul 25, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The transcript is here.

And they're off

I will shortly be heading off for the big smoke for the SciTech hearing tomorrow - not looking forward to the London heat but I'm sure the hearing itself will be interesting.

This seems like an opportune moment to do a tip drive. The donate button is over there on the right.

Hosing down beancounters

DECC ministers have revealed the extent to which they are squeezing expenditure. In a written ministerial answer, Greg Barker has outlined the sums lavished on the big four accountancy firms.

Blue, PWC; Yellow, Ernst & Young; Red, KPMG; Purple, Deloitte

Improving peer review

Discover Magazine considers a new proposal for eliminating some of the bias from the peer review process.

...scientific manuscripts should be submitted for peer review with the results and discussion omitted. The reviewers would judge the submission on the strength of the methods and the introduction alone. If they recommended publication, the authors would then send them the full paper.

The reviewers would then have a chance to change their mind and reject it, or ask for further experiments to be carried out, but the ‘bar’ for this to happen would be high.

This is quite a neat idea, potentially removing much of the bias in the peer review process. Other problems would, however, remain. For example, You can imagine a paper that began "we updated all the major tree ring temperature proxies in North America and northern Europe" being rejected out of hand - there are some questions that people just don't want answered.

Ed Davey on Sunday Politics

Ed Davey was given a pretty thorough interrogation by Andrew Neil on the Sunday Politics today. Well worth a look, and probably due-a-line by line examination as well.

Update on Jul 15, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Alex Cull has prepared a transcript of the interview, which is available here.

The greening of the Sahel

Geoffrey Lean has a an interesting (seriously!) report on changes to land management practices in the Sahel, which is apparently having an extraordinarily beneficial effect on life in that difficult part of the world.

The bushes turned out to be clusters of shoots from the buried stumps of long-felled trees, whose root systems still drew water and nutrients from far beneath the arid soil. The shoots could never grow much before being cut or eaten by livestock, but when Rinaudo pruned them down to a single stem and kept the animals away, they shot up into substantial trees within four years.

As the trees grew, so did crops. And as local farmers began reaping good harvests, neighbours and visitors followed suit. Now, two decades later, some 200 million trees have been regenerated in this way, covering five million hectares of Maradi and the neighbouring region of Zinder, enabling the growing of enough extra grain to feed two-and-a-half million people.

The greening of the Sahel has been noted from time to time as a benefit of climate change, but perhaps there are other effects in play as well.

Green jobs figures are fiction

David Rose has a short piece in the Mail on Sunday reporting some FOI work by Ben Pile. It seems that the oft-quoted figures for green jobs are almostly entirely fictional.

The LCEGS figures also include billions of pounds from activities which few people would class as ‘green’ – such as water supply, landfill sites for rubbish and, most bizarrely of all – accounting for almost £9 billion – ordinary windows and doors.

Read the whole thing (it's at the bottom of the preceding article by James Delingpole, which is itself well worth a look).

Commons to look at data and statistics

The House of Commons Public Administration Select Committee has announced an inquiry into data and statistics.

The Public Administration Select Committee (PASC) is conducting an inquiry into statistics and open data in Government, with a focus on the progress of the Government in implementing its Open Data strategy. This is part of PASC's programme of work on statistics and their use in government.

Details of the questions they intend to address are here. Unfortunately, the questions seem to be more about data than the use of questionable statistical procedures, but there is plenty of scope to raise the difficulties over, say, the lack of quality control in CRUTEM.

IPCC vice-chairman flaunts his bias

The underemployed in the green blogosphere have been kicking up a minor fuss in recent days over the decision of Google to hold a fundraiser for sceptic senator Jim Inhofe. Interestingly, the pressure on Google has now been taken up by none other than IPCC vice chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, who tweeted as follows.

.@EricSchmidt Are you OK with @Google, your company, funding climate #skeptics? http://thinkprogress.org/?p=2257691  @climatecentral @revkin

I think this fairly conclusively kills the idea that the IPCC is a body that tries to make an even handed assessment of the global warming question.

Nurse's pants

Steve McIntyre has written a splendid take down of Paul Nurse, and in particular the criticisms he made of yours truly in his correspondence with Nigel Lawson.

In respect to the vituperativeness of Nurse’s response both to the sentence in paragraph 121 (page 36) of Nullius in Verba and to Lawson’s letter, one is also reminded of another Lucia suggestion:

put on your big boy pants.

And before anyone asks, no I didn't put Steve up to doing this. Indeed I knew nothing of it until I read the article at Climate Audit just now.

You really have to read the whole thing though.

Lindzen broadcast

Last night Al Jazeera broadcast the Lindzen debate at the Oxford Union, which readers may remember took place a couple of months ago.

It is repeated on 13 July 13 at 13:00 BST; 14 July at 02:00 BST; and 15 July at 07:00 BST.

Details here.