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Bishop Hill Jul 31, 2015 Climate: WG2 The Natural History Museum has put on display a bit of fossilised coral reef discovered in what is now Wiltshire. It's a pretty thing.
;)
The museum tells us that the fossil is 160 million years old and that some of the species included are relatives of those alive today, an observation that seems to have important implications for global warming alarmism:
Bishop Hill Jul 31, 2015 Academia Bureaucrats EU Greens A few days ago, Universities UK set up its own campaign to support Britain's continuing membership of the European Union - another example of the abuse of state funding for political ends.
Daniel Hannan has responded with this rather amusing video about those, like UUK and our old muckers at Friends of the Earth, who are being so vocal about the necessity of keeping in with Brussels.
Bishop Hill Jul 31, 2015 BBC Climate: Parliament Energy: grid Anti-capitalist green groups and crony capitalists are annoyed about George Osborne's decision to cut renewables subsidies and have written to the Prime Minister to say he's a bad boy. With depressing inevitability, the BBC has launched a full-scale PR campaign to back them up.
So we have a Roger Harrabin article about the letter here, a segment on the Today programme here (from 1:17.35), which is essentially an opportunity for a series of opponents of the new policy to air their views. Interestingly, there was less quoting of green anti-capitalists this time round. Perhaps my criticisms of Harrabin's last piece made an impact. But not much of an impact - the nearest thing to a supporter of the policy changes was someone from KPMG, who thought the subsidy removal was necessary but taking place too quickly.
I gather the FiveLive phone in features anti-capitalist campaigner from Friends of the Earth as well.
Bishop Hill Look at what the Guardian put out the other day: an article by the head of Veolia UK protesting against the government's decision to slash subsidies for renewable energy and touting the idea of a "circular economy", in which a lot of recycling goes on.
Which is perhaps unsurprising for a business involved in connecting windfarms to the grid and with a subsidiary making large sums of money from recycling.
But a little hypocritical of a publication that gets uppity about alleged vested interests elsewhere.
Bishop Hill Jul 30, 2015 Climate: Models Climate: Surface A new paper by Kevin Cowtan et al claims that the divergence of models and observations is not as big as we thought.
Global mean temperatures from climate model simulations are typically calculated using surface air temperatures, while the corresponding observations are based on a blend of air and sea surface temperatures. This work quantifies a systematic bias in model-observation comparisons arising from differential warming rates between sea surface temperatures and surface air temperatures over oceans. A further bias arises from the treatment of temperatures in regions where the sea ice boundary has changed. Applying the methodology of the HadCRUT4 record to climate model temperature fields accounts for 38% of the discrepancy in trend between models and observations over the period 1975-2014.
It sounds a bit odd to me, but I don't have a copy as yet, so I'm going to hold off further comment for the minute. One assumes though that even if the findings are sound the divergence of satellite temperatures from the models is unaffected.
Bishop Hill
Thanks to readers who have sent the paper along. Here's what the authors have done:
Global averages of the observational temperature records are typically compared to near surface air temperature from an ensemble of climate model simulations...most studies have used the surface
air temperature field from models rather than blended land-ocean temperatures...A true like-with-like comparison would involve blending the air and sea surface temperature fields from the models in a manner consistent with the observational records. The purpose of this work is to evaluate the impact of comparing air temperatures from models with the blended observational data, and to establish guidelines for the determination of blended temperature comparisons.
This seems unexceptionable to me.
Bishop Hill Jul 30, 2015 Climate: Surface The Scotsman is reporting that gritting lorries have been out on the streets in rural Perthshire overnight, with forecasters pointing to the possibility of snow, hail and frost.
It's a worry, this global warming stuff.
Bishop Hill Jul 29, 2015 Climate: Parliament Tim Yeo is suing the Sunday Times for libel over its "sting" operation and subsequent articles that alleged that Yeo was offering himself as a parliamentarian for hire.
Story here.
Bishop Hill Jul 29, 2015 Climate: WG2 The World Resources Institute blog has a fascinating article about the greening of Ethiopia in recent years. This is largely based on a paper in Science of the Total Environment by Nyssen et al.
Jan Nyssen, a geographer at the University of Ghent, together with a large team of colleagues reviewed historic photographs of the Ethiopian highlands comparing them to more recent pictures of the same locations. They then assessed the change in greenery in the landscape, using a benchmarking methodology to assign a value, before performing a multiple regression analysis against possible causes.
The upshot of their paper is that these welcome changes seem to be largely the result of human activity - the landscape has greened the most in areas of higher population density. This seems to be related to factors such as the planting of eucalyptus trees in response to market demand for poles as well as more obvious conservation measures such as the use of terracing to prevent water run-off and soil erosion.
Bishop Hill Jul 29, 2015 BBC Energy: gas Cluff Resources' underground coal gasification project looks at the moment as if it might have escaped Holyrood's moratorium on fracking projects, and greens have therefore launched a concerted campaign to address this regrettable loophole. The latest development is that Frack Off have obtained a letter written in January by Cluff Resources to Scottish ministers. This is breathtakingly dull stuff. The company introduces themselves, explains how much they are planning on investing and the inquire whether they were covered by the moratorium.
In other words it's a complete non-story. Nevertheless it has been hyped up by the greens, who have characterised it as "holding the country to ransom", and this ridiculous claim has inevitably been given maximum publicity by the BBC's David Miller here. He also follows the corporation's normal policy of getting comments from two separate anti-capitalist environmentalist groups (in this case WWF and FoE) to liven things up, although in fairness they do seem to have tried and failed to get a response from Cluff, whose PR team seems to exhibit the same ineptitude as Cuadrilla's.
Bishop Hill ;)
Further to the last post, I've just bought myself a copy of Wilfried Huismann's Panda Leaks, an exposé of some of the problems with WWF. It is based on a German language documentary, which WWF apparently went to considerable lengths to try to suppress, using threats of legal action, injunctions and the like.
Buy it here.
Bishop Hill Jul 28, 2015 Greens Readers will no doubt remember the scandalous tale of WWF thugs attacking forest peoples in Cameroon. But apparently it doesn't stop there. French TV station Canal Plus has recently uncovered widespread human rights abuses in the WWF-sponsored Kanha Tiger Reserve in India. There's a transcript of the programme here.
...in the Kanha Reserve, 2200 families are affected. Some villages...will be resettled. Others...simply removed, with no place for their inhabitants to stay. From this document we learn that resettlements began forty years ago and that dozens of villages...have been eradicated like the others. We also find that, in the two other reserves on Nouvelle Frontières' tour, people are being moved left, right and centre. 2374 more families. At least 22,000 people resettled.
Some of these tribes are apparently thought to have been living in the forest for 20,000 years.
Bishop Hill Jul 28, 2015 Academia Climate: WG2 Journals I see too many studies...assigning causation to climate change when the evidence for this is quite poor...I think this is bad for climate science in general and authors and journal editors need to try to avoid the temptation of headline-grabbing when it is not justified by the evidence.
This comes from Professor Ian Boyd, the chief scientist at Defra, whose blog can be found here. It doesn't seem to be updated often, and the quote is from an old post. But fun nevertheless.
Bishop Hill Jul 28, 2015 Energy: wind Foreign Interesting news from Spain, where it has been revealed that the country has failed to install a single megawatt of wind power capacity in the last six months. This comes after managing just 27 MW in 2014.
This makes the country's plans to put a further 5000 MW in place by 2020 look just a tad optimistic.
(Link to Spanish language article)
Bishop Hill Jul 27, 2015 Climate: WG3 Greens Mark Wilson, the boss of insurance giant Aviva has been getting in on the climate alarm act, with a speech to a city audience in which he outlined his shock at the horrors ahead and explained what Aviva intends to do about it. The bare bones of the plan can be seen here, and is headed by this summary of Mr Wilson's thinking.
If we do not take urgent action to limit global temperature increases to within 2°C the impacts upon the economy, society, and our business will be nothing short of devastating.
To which the only plausible response is "drivel". I don't think there is a single reputable scientist who would support Mr Wilson's view. The IPCC doesn't think this. Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office doesn't either. The academic literature is clear that the target is a political convenience. Even Ottmar Edenhofer, who came up with the idea of a target has confirmed that view. "Two degrees brings chaos" is mainly the preserve of the wilder fringes of the green movement.
Bishop Hill Jul 27, 2015 Climate: WG3 Deben In my Twitter feed yesterday came something entirely without precedent: a tweet from Lord Deben. This was something of a shock, as the noble lord has hitherto made it a matter of policy never to address me directly, leaving his followers in the slightly strange position of trying to work out who it is that he is insulting.
I assume that this was an error on his part.
He was responding to a tweet from someone who asked rather alarmingly:
