Books
Click images for more details
Bishop Hill Mar 16, 2011 Blogs I've been asked to get more details of the commenting problems. If you are affected again could you
1. Note exactly what you were doing
2. Give details of the error message
3. Give browser type and version, OS and version and IP address
Bishop Hill Mar 16, 2011 Climate: IPCC Hilary Ostrov continues her dogged pursuit of the IAC (Update: Not forgetting Donna Laframboise too!). She has been analysing the submissions of evidence to their inquiry into the IPCC and, as regular readers of her site know, she has found some amazing things.
The latest revelation is that while the IAC announced that there had been over 400 submissions of evidence, only two hundred or so have been published. The inquiry chairman, Harold Shapiro, is not answering his email.
Stranger and stranger.
Bishop Hill Mar 15, 2011 Energy Politicians Max Hastings, writing in the Mail, notices that we may have a bit of a problem with our energy supplies here in the UK.
To be sure, if Fukushima releases lethal radiation affecting thousands of people, it will become much harder politically for any government to push through a new nuclear programme. But, today, this still seems unlikely.
What could be a catastrophe for Britain, however, is the crisis that will fall upon us ten years hence unless this Government comes to its senses, and starts to plan for a credible energy future which must include nuclear power.
If it continues to duck the issues and leaves policy in the hands of Chris Huhne and his foolish green friends, start hoarding candles.
H/T Breath of Fresh Air
Bishop Hill Mar 15, 2011 Blogs Now the new domain host has been in place for a few days, has anyone noticed an improvement in the commenting problems?
Bishop Hill Mar 15, 2011 Climate: HSI Another review of the Hockey Stick Illusion, this time in The Skinny. I thought this was interesting in that it is treads a middle ground between all-out praise and all-out condemnation. It ends on a good note though...
Montford's account of the development of different scientific arguments on both sides of a very complicated argument is extremely well handled, and as such it’s hugely impressive.
Bishop Hill Mar 14, 2011 Climate: CRU Climate: Parliament Health Graham Stringer has an interesting article in Manchester Confidential. It looks at parallels between the inquiries into the MMR scare and Climategate.
Let me be clear I am not accusing Professor Phil Jones and his colleagues at the Climatic Research Unit of the UEA of Wakefield-style fraud but I am concerned that the two investigations into the leaked e-mails suffered from the same flaws as the medical and scientific investigations into Wakefield.
Bishop Hill Mar 13, 2011 Climate: MWP Climate: Surface
Updated on Mar 13, 2011 by
Bishop Hill
I'm grateful to a reader for this excerpt from The Hot Topic: How To Tackle Climate Change and Still Keep the Lights On, a book by King and Walker published in 2008.
King is Sir David King, the former government chief scientist who is now what you might call one of the great and the good. Here's Wikipedia's take on his current positions:
Director of the Smith School of Enterprise and the Environment at the University of Oxford, Director of Research in Physical Chemistry at the University of Cambridge, Director of the Collegio Carlo Alberto, Chancellor of the University of Liverpool and a senior scientific adviser to UBS.
Bishop Hill Mar 13, 2011 Economics Greens Politicians I have worked in government for 28 years as an economist, and for the last 20 years I have worked on environmental programs. In that time I have not seen a shred of evidence to justify global warming, let alone man made global warming and I have not seen a shred of evidence that there is going to be a green economic boom. The only evidence I have seen is that there is a green economic bust, that money invested in green technologies is usually wasted and simply consumes investment that could be better used elsewhere. I think that anybody in government or industry who can not understand this is either dishonest, stupid, or both. That applies to Cameron - I think he is both.
Bishop Hill Mar 13, 2011 Climate: Sceptics A few interesting bits and pieces this morning, as the Climate Cuttings series reaches its half century.
Bryan Appleyard has an article in the Sunday Times on sceptics, namechecking Piers Corbyn, Lord Monckton, Graham Stringer and Fay Kelly-Tuncay (who is campaigning to repeal the Climate Change Act here in the UK). The article can be seen at Appleyard's site or here.
Neither side is winning this fight, though the greens are on the ropes. As they slug it out, the language grows ever more vicious and the claims of both sides ever more extreme. To the sceptics the greens are lying, cheating, catastrophe-crazed group thinkers; to the warmists, the sceptics are mad, bad, neo-fascist defenders of Big Oil.
At the margins it is, admittedly, all too easy to find evidence for all these charges. But in the middle, the ground occupied by the reasonable person, there is only confusion and uncertainty. Meanwhile, the planet cycles on regardless. In time, it will make its own decisions about the viability of our troublesome species.
As if to emphasise the tottering of the global warming edifice, Ford are getting out of the electric vehicle market.
We still don’t know what the winning technology is going to be…We’re continuing to invest in hydrogen, we’re continuing to invest in biofuels.”
It's not hard to see why greens are struggling when they take desperate steps like calling for action on global warming because of the tsunami in Japan.
Jonathan Adler of everybody's favourite US law blog, the Volokh Conspiracy, looks at alternatives to regulation of carbon dioxide. Judy Curry responds.
Bishop Hill Mar 12, 2011 Blogs Joe Bastardi has set up his new online home at www.weatherbell.com.
Welcome back Joe.
Bishop Hill Mar 12, 2011 Climate: Sceptics Climate: other Tamino has written an article about Josh, criticising his Paul Nurse cartoon. He fully admits that Josh is correct, but apparently he's a bad man for mentioning it. I can only describe this argument as, well, Taminoesque.
Those who deny the reality, human cause, or danger of global warming, don’t always tell outright lies. One of their common tactics is to say what’s technically true, but is also irrelevant, misleading, or more often, both.
This is a remarkable thing to say, when one remembers Tamino's outrageous quoting out of context in his RealClimate article on the Hockey Stick Illusion. I'm not sure why it was OK for the Horizon programme to say incorrect things about the relative size of human and natural CO2 emissions while correcting these errors was blameworthy in some way. If the ratio is irrelevant and misleading when Josh puts it in a cartoon, why is it not equally irrelevant when Dr Bindschadler speaks about it?
Bishop Hill Mar 12, 2011 Blogs The changeover to a new domain host took place just now. Let's see if this makes any difference to the commenting problems. It may take 24 hours for the new settings to propagate around the internet though.
Bishop Hill Mar 11, 2011 Climate: Parliament The Energy and Commerce Subcomittee of the US House of Representatives has voted to strip the Environmental Protection Agency of the power to regulate greenhouse gases.
The sharply partisan vote was preordained by the Republican takeover of the House. Republicans and their industry allies accuse the administration of levying taxes on traditional energy sources through costly environmental regulations, threatening the economic recovery and driving jobs overseas.
Bishop Hill
The headline here is wrong, as several people have pointed out, as the bill has a long legislative path to tread before it becomes law (if indeed it does).
Bishop Hill Mar 11, 2011 Climate: other Education A high school student in Australia is struggling to keep quiet during climate change lessons...
For the third lesson the PowerPoint was brought out again with even more questionable statements claiming that putting more carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is causing: an increase in temperature by one degree; a rise in sea levels; more bush fires; more droughts; more animals to become extinct; malaria to become more widespread (so much so that it would spread to the Northern Territory); the Arctic Ocean to be ice-free by 2050; the extinction of the polar bear; and, my personal favourite, “China and Indonesia will be too hot to grow rice.”
H/T Deadman
Bishop Hill Mar 11, 2011 Energy This is interesting - a new paper that looks at carbon capture and wonders about the extra energy used in capturing and storing the carbon. If you use extra energy, you are releasing extra CO2, right?
Carbon Capture and Storage is being actively developed for deployment in fossil fuel power stations in an attempt to reduce future emissions of CO2 due to concerns about climate change. The deployment of this technology will cause an inevitable reduction in the overall efficiency of any electricity generation plant leading to an increase in demand for the fossil fuels used to power the generation process. This paper estimates the average reduction in generation efficiency caused by the imposition of Carbon Capture and Storage and considers its effects upon the depletion rate of global coal reserves. Future production of coal is modelled using a symmetrical production curve. The results suggest that the widespread adoption of Carbon Capture and Storage may result in the exhaustion of coal reserves several decades in advance of when this may happen if CCS is not deployed.
