Getting your message straight

From the beginning of Ed Davey's speech

If businesses don’t have confidence in the security of energy supply, their costs go up.

Higher insurance premiums, expensive back-up systems.

From the end of Ed Davey's speech

Demand Side Balancing Reserve will not force any single business or household to switch off or reduce their electricity.

It is entirely voluntary. Nobody will get cut off. No economic activity will be curtailed.

This is about rewarding volunteer businesses. With the flexibility to reduce their use of National Grid supplied electricity. At peak times only. If called upon.

By changing a shift pattern maybe. Or switching to on-site generation rather than relying on the Grid.

Delusional Davey

As if we needed any confirmation of it, Ed Davey has given a speech in which he has confirmed that he has lost all grip on reality. Yes, he has been discussing with National Grid whether they will be able to cope when England win the World Cup next month.

I can announce today, that I have spoken to National Grid about England winning the World Cup.

And I can report that National Grid have assured me that the UK has enough electricity generating capacity ready to meet any World Cup spike – through the group stages and beyond.

So if Stevie Gerrard lifts the World Cup, Britain’s lights – and televisions - will stay on.

We're doomed, I tell you, doomed.

Mann's green lizards

Michael Mann has a splendidly bonkers article in the Huffington Post, hammering on the theme that he is being got at by green lizards from Alpha Centauri.

Or something like that.

The Kochs, Scaifes & others have used their billions to construct a vast "Potemkin Village" (in the words of science historian Naomi Oreskes) of denialism, by funding groups like "Americans For Prosperity", the "Heartland Institute", the "Competitive Enterprise Institute" and a whole cadre of other front groups, organizations, and hired guns implicated in the campaign to discredit climate science and climate scientists. I should know since, as I describe in my book The Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars, I found myself at the center of that campaign more than a decade ago because of my scientific work establishing the unprecedented nature of recent global warming.

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British Banana Republic

More evidence is emerging of Britain's decline into banana republic status, driven by the politicial establishment's eccentric attachment to all things green.

Britain may be forced to use “last resort” measures to avert blackouts in coming winters, Ed Davey, the energy secretary, will say on Tuesday.

Factories will be paid to switch off at times of peak demand in order to keep households’ lights on, if Britain’s dwindling power plants are unable to provide enough electricity, under the backstop measures from National Grid.

I am in awe of Mr Davey, who is trying to spin this as an opportunity for businesses:

He told the Telegraph businesses were “delighted” to get paid to reduce demand. Some would not actually “switch off” and would instead fire up their own on-site generators to replace grid supplies. Others, such as large-scale refrigeration firms, could temporarily cut power without any negative effects.

Of course the reason they are "delighted" is that they are going to be paid a great deal of money for switching off and using their own generators. The fact that this is going to cost consumers a great deal of money and increase carbon emissions to boot is, of course, not worthy of a mention.

The layman's guide to Mann vs Steyn

Legal blogger Jonathan Adler has written an excellent layman's summary of the state of play on the Mann vs Steyn and Steyn vs Mann cases. For those following these things closely there is unlikely to be anything new, but for those who need to be brought up to speed this is the place to go.

The climate policy debate is quite heated.  Partisans hurl charges against each others with impunity, challenging the honesty, intelligence, and integrity of those on the other side.  So it’s understandable that many environmentalists hope Mann will win.  Yet should he prevail, many on his side may come to rue this result.  Should Mann win, it will not be long before defamation suits are filed in the other direction.  Every time an environmental activist suggests someone on the other side is “bought” by fossil fuel interests, they had better be able to substantiate their claim, or they will be inviting a lawsuit.

The poetry of global warming

Dame Julia Slingo has, like so many of her colleagues, been turning her mind to climate change communication, and reckons that talking about the science in dull technical reports may not be the way forward. Getting the message of impending disaster out requires a dose of funky, a dash of sexy, and a whole lot of poetry.

“We have to look increasingly at what society requires of us… We increasingly recognise that to reach the general public we have to use all sorts of different channels of communication,” Dame Julia told a recent gathering of leading climate change scientists at the University of Exeter.

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Statistical sierra

Sierra Rayne, writing at the American Thinker blog over the weekend, took a gentle pop at AP's Seth Borenstein for making alarmist claims regional temperature trends in the USA while barely paying lipservice to standard statistical techniques.

The AP used "the least squares regression method" to calculate the annual temperature trend for all these regions, but then proceeded to ignore entirely whether the regression method indicated if the trend was statistically significant (the typical criteria would be a p-value<0.05).

This is first-year statistics level stuff.  Quite simply, if your statistical test ("least squares regression method") tells you the trend isn't significant, you cannot claim there is a trend, since the null hypothesis (i.e., no trend) cannot be rejected with any reasonable degree of confidence.

In an area like climate, you would have thought an experienced journalist like Borenstein would take some statistical advice before writing.

A la Southern Annual Mode

As I understand it, GCMs say that ice extent at both poles should be reducing as global warming hits the poles in advance of the rest of the planet. The increase in Antarctic sea ice is therefore another question mark over the veracity and trustworthiness of climate model output.

That's the way I understand it, anyway. According to this article at The Conversation, I'm completely wrong. The increase in extent is due to changes in the Southern Annual Mode, a sort of El Nino of the Antarctic.

Here’s the kicker: the strengthening of SAM over recent decades has been directly linked to human activity. Since the 1940s, ozone depletion and increasing greenhouse gases have caused the westerly winds to intensify and migrate south towards Antarctica. The net effect of this drives sea ice further north and increases its total extent.

There is still plenty of great work ahead to improve our understanding and modelling of Antarctica’s climate, but a basic message is emerging. Far from discounting climate change in the Southern Hemisphere, the apparent paradox of Antarctic sea ice is telling us that it is real and that we are contributing to it.

So this means that the models don't recreate the Southern Annular Mode then?

LWEC Report Card: A microcosm of global warming exaggeration and errors

This is a guest post by reader 'Peartreefruiting'.

[Addition below by author's request 11.30am, 7.6.2014]

In the Annual Review 2013 of the British Trust for Ornithology there is an article entitled “There will be changes afoot”, which details observed and expected changes to British habitat as a result of global warming.  It contains the statement “warmer springs have also led to a trend towards many biological events becoming earlier”.  Since 2013 was the coldest British spring for 50 years, it seemed strange timing for such a statement, so I decided to probe into it.  The article on its own has no verifiable data, but it gives a link to this page at the LWEC website, which in turn links to a document entitled “Biodiversity English for Web.pdf”.   LWEC is the organization “Living with Environmental Change”, and its website states that it is a partnership of 22 major UK public sector funders and users of environmental research, including the research councils and central government departments.

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Environmentalists trashing the environment, part 324

One of the greens' most successful campaigns in recent years has been to persuade EU bureaucrats to ban the class of pesticides known as the neonicotinoids. This was pretty much the precautionary principle in its pure form, with only anecdotal evidence that there was a problem.

Unfortunately quite a lot of systematic evidence has now been produced which seems to show that there is not actually a problem with bee deaths at all.

The commission’s moratorium vote, which took effect throughout the EU in December 2013, came despite contradictory field evidence—and well before the release of a spate of new studies suggesting that bee health is now improving globally. The U.S. Department of Agriculture reported in May that bee deaths dropped more than 25 percent this past winter, and that the overall population has increased 13 percent since 2008.

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Climate policy and the poor

Tony Kelly's final paper, a GWPF briefing note entitled "Climate Policy and the Poor" has just been published.

The changes imposed thus far have not dealt with the risks of climate change through a sensible, steady and sustained improvement in energy and other technologies and have therefore failed to address the problems of the here and now, of which the abject poverty of large numbers of people is perhaps the most pressing. In this, the consequences of the Kyoto Protocol have been immoral.

Shut your eyes, Mr Davey

The central premise of government energy policy is that fossil fuel prices are going to continue to rise. All the claimed benefits of renewables are calculated against a such a rising baseline for a fossil-fuelled future.

It's therefore interesting to see that UK natural gas prices are now falling and have reached a six-month low:

The largest deliveries of liquefied natural gas cargoes to the U.K. in a year are sending prices for the day-ahead fuel in Europe’s biggest market to a sixth monthly decline, the longest losing streak since at least 2007.

The day-ahead contract on the National Balancing Point gas hub dropped to the lowest since October 2011, heading for an 8.2 percent drop this month, broker data compiled by Bloomberg showed. Ten cargoes from Qatar arrived at the U.K.’s South Hook terminal this month, the most in a year, according to port authorities and ship-tracking data on Bloomberg.

I think Ed Davey will need to turn a Nelsonian eye to this one.

Anthony Kelly

Tony Kelly, an stalwart member of GWPF's Academic Advisory Council, has passed away. This is the notice posted at GWPF.

Professor Anthony Kelly CBE FREng FRS died on 3 June 2014 aged 85. He is regarded by many as the father of composite materials in the UK.

In 2011 he was honoured for his distinguished career, spanning more than 60 years, with the President’s Medal of the Royal Academy of Engineering for contributing significantly to the Academy’s aims and work through excellence in engineering.

After an early career in Cambridge, where he was a founding Fellow of Churchill College, he was director of the National Physical Laboratory and subsequently Vice-Chancellor of Surrey University before returning to Cambridge and Churchill College on his retirement in 1996.

He was a scientist of the old school, who took ‘Nullius in verba’ as a matter of daily practice. He was properly sceptical until the real world data confirmed his or others’ ideas. He was not impressed by the modern tendency to use incomplete data to weave elaborate stories that could be undone by hard data, or worse, were not capable of falsification. He led the successful effort to get 43 Fellows to petition the Council of the Royal Society to modify its public stance on climate science in 2010, and was unhappy with the most recent announcements of that body. He played a key role in helping the Global Warming Policy Foundation get set up and was a founding and active member of its Academic Advisory Council. He spent his later years as a critic of some aspects of climate science where the consequential actions seemed to him to be doing more harm than good to humanity.

I met Professor Kelly on a number of occasions and interviewed him about the Rebellion of the 43 as part of my research for the Nullius in Verba report. He was someone who cared deeply about where climate science was going wrong and the effect this was having on ordinary people around the world.

A great loss.

The new review

A new review of The Hockey Stick Illusion has appeared at the Texas GOPVote blog:

With the recent news of a leading scientist being gagged from reporting his finding and the recent attempt by many in the climatologists' circle to destroy the reputation of those who disagree with their finds, Andrew Montford’s The Hockey Stick Illusion is worth reading, simply to understand the mindset of the climate alarmists and how far they are willing to go. This book reads like a mystery as opposed to science as Montford exposes how a major study, declared as the silver bullet for proof of man-made climate change, proved to be wrong and how much of the scientific establishment went out of its way to defend what they should have condemned.

Explain this

Updated on Jun 5, 2014 by Bishop Hill

A group of academics has written to the Guardian calling for the country to just get a move on with developing our shale resources.

It says: "As geoscientists and petroleum engineers from Britain's leading academic institutions, we call on all political and decision-makers at all levels to put aside their political differences and focus on the undeniable economic, environmental and national security benefits on offer to the UK from the responsible development of natural gas from Lancashire's shale."

The Guardian is predictably sniffy about these benefits pointing, as always, to claims that shale developments in the UK will not lead to price reductions because of the pipeline connections to the continent.

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