Light posting

I'm busy over the weekend, so posting will be light-to-nonexistent.

Giving FOI officers a break

Among my email correspondence relating to the Climategate affair, there are many expressions of sympathy for David Palmer, the UEA Freedom of Information officer. Although his involvement in the various false statements issued by the university cannot be determined with certainty, one did rather get the impression that he was struggling valiantly to comply with the legislation.

This cannot have been an easy task. A blog posting (here) by Paul Gibbons, an FOI officer in local government, reveals some of the pressures that senior officials in public bodies use to try to corrupt their FOI staff:

FOI Officers often find themselves in tricky situations. I’ve referred previously to a meeting on one occasion where the Mayor of London’s then Director of Communications once lightly suggested that if I couldn’t be more helpful, I and my team might find ourselves redundant. Wiser heads calmed the situation but I suspect I’m not the only FOI Officer to find themselves on the wrong side of an argument with the powers-that-be. Other FOI Officers I know have been persona non grata in parts of their organisation. And all for doing their jobs.

As Gibbons says, requesters should give FOI officers a break.

Green light for fracking

The joint report of the Royal Society and the Royal Academy of Engineering has given the green light to fracking going ahead in the UK.

The Royal Academy of Engineering and the Royal Society said in a report published on Friday that the UK's current regulatory systems were sufficient for shale gas fracking if they were adequately enforced, but also said that closer monitoring of shale gas exploration sites should be put in place, in order to ensure their safety.

Guardian report here.

UK Conference of Science Journalists

This is a guest post by Doug Keenan.

The 2012 UK Conference of Science Journalists was held on June 25th. The programme is available on the UKCSJ web site. I attended two of the sessions: the first was a session was entitled “What can journalists do to uncover scientific misconduct?”; the second was the plenary at the end. What follows is my perspective on those sessions.

___________________

Misconduct session

Misconduct is what most people call “fraud”. This session had three speakers.

The first speaker was the Editor-in-Chief of the journal Anaesthesia, Steve Yentis. Yentis told about the case of Joachim Boldt, an anesthesiologist who has had over 80 papers retracted. He also told about the case of case of Yoshitaka Fujii, an anesthesiologist who seems to have published 193 bogus papers. A third case was also cited, though I did not get the details. Yentis has been leading the charge to get more integrity in anesthesiology.

Click to read more ...

VAT on fuel

UK readers will be aware that VAT is levied on energy at a reduced rate of 5% - regardless of the source of the energy.

Here is how National Geographic describes the situation.

A reduced value added tax levied for the use of natural gas for heating fuel and power amounted to a subsidy of $4.4bn...in 2010. The UK also levies a reduced value added tax for petroleum and coal on a smaller scale.

Wow. That's quite a misrepresentation isn't it?

UK energy policy faltering

The Telegraph is reporting that the government body charged with reviewing major state projects has sounded the alarm bell over UK energy policy.

Up to six flagship projects have been classified as "high risk" by the spending watchdog, including new nuclear power stations and key reforms of the electricity market.

However, the watchdog is “doubtful” that Britain can have a reliable energy supply from green sources and keep energy bills affordable under the current plans.

The authority, set up by David Cameron last year, has described the Coalition’s plans to encourage more wind farms and nuclear power stations as “feasible”.

Gergis to resubmit at end of July

The University of Melbourne's page on the Gergis paper has been updated:

An issue has been identified in the processing of the data used in the study, "Evidence of unusual late 20th century warming from an Australasian temperature reconstruction spanning the last millennium" by Joelle Gergis, Raphael Neukom, Stephen Phipps, Ailie Gallant and David Karoly, accepted for publication in the Journal of Climate. 

The authors are currently reviewing the data and methods. The revised paper will be re-submitted to the Journal of Climate by the end of July and it will be sent out for peer review again.

I do think that this time around the Journal of Climate should ask the authors to archive the data series that didn't pass the screening as well as those that did.

Maddox prize

Roger Pielke Jr notes the advent of the Maddox Prize, named after the great editor of Nature magazine.

The John Maddox Prize will reward an individual who has promoted sound science and evidence on a matter of public interest. Its emphasis is on those who have faced difficulty or hostility in doing so.

Nominations of people at an early stage in their careers are particularly welcomed.

Click to read more ...

So long, and Fanks for all the corrections

More quotes from Sam Fankhauser, carbon economist, and Gordon Hughes, energy economist:

Much has been made of the intermittent nature of wind, which cannot produce electricity reliably on demand. However, the cost penalty and grid system challenges of intermittency are often exaggerated. There are ways of compensating for this variability, such as additional capacity from fossil fuel power plants to meet balancing requirements at peak demand, bulk storage of electricity, greater interconnection, and a more diversified mix of renewable sources, as well as measures to manage demand, like smart grids and improved load management.

Sam Fankhauser, carbon economist

And now Gordon Hughes, energy economist, on additional capacity from fossil fuel backup:

Wind power is intermittent and requires backup sources of power – either gas or coal. These backup sources achieve much lower levels of thermal efficiency – defined as the proportion of the energy content of the fuel that is converted into electricity - than conventional power plants using the same fuel which operate all or most of the time. The loss in thermal efficiency is even greater if the backup sources have to run for extended periods as spinning reserve, using fuel but not delivering power to the grid, in order to smooth fluctuations in either demand or supply from wind sources. Hence, the loss in thermal efficiency when plants run as backup sources may outweigh the reduction in the total amount of power generated from fossil fuels when wind generation is added to the system...

Click to read more ...

Levelised costs

Two quotes on levelised costs as a metric for energy generation types:

The standard measure used by many public agencies to compare the costs of generating electricity using different technologies is the levelised cost per MWh. As will be explained below, this can be a perfectly adequate measure for making comparisons in a centrally planned electricity system when the issue is whether to build nuclear, coal-fired or gas-fired plants to operate most of the time – i.e. on or close to base load. Unfortunately, this measure may be quite misleading as a basis for making cost comparisons when considering investment decisions for either (a) electricity systems that operate on the basis of market pools (such as the UK), and/or (b) technologies which are inherently intermittent, such as many forms of renewable generation (such as wind power).

Gordon Hughes - Why is wind power so expensive?

A key attraction of onshore wind over other low-carbon forms of electricity generation is cost. In terms of levelised cost onshore wind is currently the cheapest renewable technology in the UK. It could become fully competitive with older conventional sources of energy as early as 2016, according to analysts at Bloomberg.

Sam Fankhauser, LSE blog

The fall of Forest 2006?

Nic Lewis is best known to the sceptic blogosphere as one of the co-authors of the O'Donnell et al paper, which found significant flaws in Steig's paper on Antarctic warming. Lewis has just published an extremely important article about Forest et al 2006, one of the key climate sensitivity papers shown in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report. Forest et al found a climate sensitivity of 3°C/doubling, rather higher than many other studies. However, although his research has been hampered by the fact that Forest appears to have lost the raw data (!), Lewis has concluded that there must have been a misprocessing of the figures and that the correct figure for climate sensitivity would be only 1°C/doubling.

If I am right, then correct processing of the data used in Forest 2006 would lead to the conclusion that equilibrium climate sensitivity (to a doubling of CO2 in the atmosphere) is close to 1°C, not 3°C, implying that likely future warming has been grossly overestimated by the IPCC.

It is hard to overstate how important this finding is, if correct.

Read the whole thing.

UK science journos talk "false balance"

The UK Conference of Science Journalists are discussing "false balance" in science reporting today, their session on the subject featuring Professor Steve Jones, whose report on the BBC's science coverage and whose shoddy behaviour along the way have been noted here from time to time.

From the tweets so far, it seems that some of Jones' talk has not been taken very seriously:

Ed Yong ‏@edyong209

I may die of laughter. RT @llantwit: #ukcsj Steve Jones: scientists tend to agree on most things...

On the other hand, Felicity Mellor has repeated her suggestion that science reporting needs more dissenting voices, not fewer.

Frank Nuijens ‏@FrankNu

Underuse of balance in BBC reporting, says Felicity Mellor. Little room for critical voices in science reports. #ukcsj

Click to read more ...

Will Hutton's Rio postmortem

Will Hutton, a stockbroker turned left-wing talking head, reviews the climate debate in the aftermath of the Rio conference. It's mostly fairly ill-informed:

The ideology driving the sceptics is most obvious in the exchanges over the impact on future generations. US Tea Party activists and their bombastic British representative, Niall Ferguson – now delivering the Reith lectures – like to terrify their audiences with how much public debt today's generation is leaving its children. Yet the same argument is not applied to the planet. At the end of his first lecture Professor Ferguson was asked if he applied the same logic on future generations to climate change: he was flummoxed, and dodged the question.

He was right to be embarrassed. Climate change is already hurting and, unchecked, will turn into a catastrophe. Economists use what is called a discount rate to compare income and welfare in the future with income and welfare today. If we forgo just a little welfare today through burning less fossil fuel, even applying a modest discount rate, we can guarantee that there will be no catastrophic loss of welfare in 2050. This is exactly the same argument that Ferguson, Osborne et al use in reverse when asking us to accept austerity today for the joy of being free of public debt in decades to come. But it is not OK to use it for climate change.

There is so much nonsense in here: the fact that the UK hasn't actually cut spending yet; the remoteness of a possibility of a catastrophic loss of welfare by 2050; the equating of spending cuts with nobbling the economy. But I'm not sure anyone is listening to the Huttons of this world any longer.

British science journalists on Climategate

Tomorrow the Association of British Science Writers begin their annual conference in London. Browsing idly to see what they were up to, I chanced upon a podcast of a session of their first conference in 2010, in which they discussed Climategate.

It really is amazing stuff. Here's a brief summary of what was said

Bob Watson

• Seems under the impression that Climategate was about CRUTEM
• Says inquiries reported that there was no perversion of peer review, no perversion of IPCC process, no scientific wrongdoing
• Uses the d-word

Click to read more ...

Sustainable development and meaningless drivel

Booker pens a post-mortem on the Rio Conference, boldly declaring that the global warming scare is over.

The great global warming scare has long been dying on its feet, but that sad fiasco of a conference in Rio last week saw it finally dead and buried. “It’s pathetic, it’s appalling,” wailed a spokesman for WWF, one of the thousands of green activists who flew to Rio, many at taxpayers’ expense, to see the last rites read over their lost dream. Their cause has even been abandoned by one of its most outspoken champions, the green guru James Lovelock of “Gaia” fame, who now admits that the warming scare was all a tragic mistake, and that talk of “sustainable development” is just “meaningless drivel”.

When I spoke in St Andrews the other week, I noted that you can now get a degree in sustainable development. Edinburgh runs a similar course too.

I wouldn't like to be studying for that qualification now.