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Josh Mar 7, 2012 Greens Josh Wind turbines ;)
We are going to look back and say "Why did we do this to ourselves...again!"
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Cartoons by Josh (a bit of a treat there for you... if you like pigeons)
Josh Mar 7, 2012 Books Climate: Mann Josh Josh
H/t Hilary Ostrov How could I possibly miss that?
Bishop Hill Mar 7, 2012 Energy: wind GWPF The latest GWPF report - on the subject of wind energy - is published today. It makes pretty grim reading.
In his report, Professor Gordon Hughes (Edinburgh University) finds that
* Meeting the UK Government's target for renewable generation in 2020 will require total wind capacity of 36 GW backed up by 13 GW of open cycle gas plants plus large complementary investments in transmission capacity at a cost of about £120 billion.
* The same electricity demand could be met from 21.5 GW of combined cycle gas plants with a cost of £13 billion, i.e. an order of magnitude cheaper than the wind scenario.
* Under the most favourable assumptions for wind power, the Government's wind policy will reduce emissions of CO2 at an average cost of £270 per metric ton (at 2009 prices) which means that meeting the UK's renewable energy target would cost a staggering £78 billion per year in 2020.
Bishop Hill Mar 7, 2012 Climate: Mann Michael Tobis has written an overview of the Hockey Stick story. It's frankly not desperately interesting, reiterating some standard Hockey Team positions without addressing criticisms of them. I thought that this bit was worthy of comment though (emphasis in original):
4) Scientific tradition as it currently stands does not require publication of data. This is a consequence of a competitive environment which traces to the idea that science should run “more like a business”. Expensive data may be collected in an expectation that a given lab’s ownership of the data may give it a competitive advantage in later grant competitions. Although this is an unfortunate turn of the scientific culture, Steve McIntyre seeks to overturn it retroactively by harassment.
This is fine, so long as you are happy for that data not to be used to inform public policy.
Bishop Hill Mar 6, 2012 Climate: WG2 Anthony Watts has posted up details of another example of the extraordinary behaviour those at the forefront of the global warming movement are willing to engage in. It's not quite at the levels of wackiness exhibited by Peter Gleick, but it's not far off.
To understand the back story, you need to read this post, and then take a look at this comment by Anthony.
There are some rum coves among the greens.
Josh Mar 6, 2012 Climate: Mann Josh ;)
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Josh
Added the title to the image, as per the WUWT version following Anthony's suggestion.
Bishop Hill Mar 6, 2012 Books Climate: Mann The PR Michael Mann is getting for his book is amazing - one has to remember that it is published by a university press, a route that was once described to me as "little better than vanity publishing" in terms of reaching new audiences. Yet despite this, the hockey stick illusionist has been almost ubiquitous in the media in recent weeks. I wonder if Columbia University Press is paying for this PR or whether there's somebody else involved?
Whoever is behind it, the message doesn't seem to be getting through. Despite clocking up nearly 100 Amazon reviews, the book is currently around 3500 on the Amazon chart (9500 in the UK). Is this a sign of the changed times or is it just that the market for climate books is dead?
The latest Mann media push was an interview on NPR - the transcript, for those who are interested, is here.
Bishop Hill Mar 6, 2012 Climate: Sceptics Climate: WG2 The Conversation, the Australian site for academic discourse, has carved out something of a name for itself as a site where only the climate orthodoxy can be aired. It is therefore refreshing to see it permit a dissenting opinion to see the light of day, and doubly so when its focus is an activist-academician like Tim Flannery.
The [drought] conditions were so bad that Tim Flannery, now Australia’s Chief Climate Commissioner, declared that cities such as Brisbane would never again have dam-filling rains. Rather bizarrely, in 2007 he stated that hotter soils meant that “even the rain that falls isn’t actually going to fill our dams and river systems”.
Fast forward to 2012 and we see widespread drenching rains, flooded towns and cities, and dams full to the brim and overtopping. Indeed, the rainfall that we had last year not only filled Brisbane City’s Wivenhoe Dam water supply storage, but also all of its flood mitigation capacity. The resultant releases of water required to prevent a truly catastrophic dam failure contributed to the inundation of large parts of metropolitan Brisbane.
How is it that Tim Flannery could have got it so spectacularly wrong? The most obvious factor could well be Flannery’s lack of background in a climate science. He is an academic, however his background is mammalogy – he studied the evolution of mammals.
Bishop Hill Mar 5, 2012 Climate: Models Climate: solar A new paper by Gareth Jones, Mike Lockwood and Peter Stott says that future reductions in solar output will have a limited impact on global warming projections, based on the output from their climate model.
During the 20th century, solar activity increased in magnitude to a so-called grand maximum. It is probable that this high level of solar activity is at or near its end. It is of great interest whether any future reduction in solar activity could have a significant impact on climate that could partially offset the projected anthropogenic warming. Observations and reconstructions of solar activity over the last 9000 years are used as a constraint on possible future variations to produce probability distributions of total solar irradiance over the next 100 years. Using this information, with a simple climate model, we present results of the potential implications for future projections of climate on decadal to multidecadal timescales. Using one of the most recent reconstructions of historic total solar irradiance, the likely reduction in the warming by 2100 is found to be between 0.06 and 0.1 K, a very small fraction of the projected anthropogenic warming. However, if past total solar irradiance variations are larger and climate models substantially underestimate the response to solar variations, then there is a potential for a reduction in solar activity to mitigate a small proportion of the future warming, a scenario we cannot totally rule out. While the Sun is not expected to provide substantial delays in the time to reach critical temperature thresholds, any small delays it might provide are likely to be greater for lower anthropogenic emissions scenarios than for higher-emissions scenarios.
I hope they have made suitable caveats about the validation (or lack of it) of their computer model's ability to project future global warming.
Bishop Hill Mar 5, 2012 Energy: wind Matt Ridley Matt Ridley's essay in the Spectator is a nice summary of the arguments against wind power. I wasn't aware of this point:
I have it on good authority from a marine engineer that keeping wind turbines upright in the gravel, tides and storms of the North Sea for 25 years is a near hopeless quest, so the repair bill is going to be horrific and the output disappointing. Already the grouting in the foundations of hundreds of turbines off Kent, Denmark and the Dogger Bank has failed, necessitating costly repairs.
Booker in the Telegraph is ploughing a similiar furrow.
Bishop Hill Mar 3, 2012 Climate: other Here is a very interesting essay by the blogger Pointman, about the asymmetrical nature of the climate wars:
The problem the alarmists had, was that there was never anything substantial to hit back at. They had the equivalents of the big guns and the massive air support but there never was a skeptic HQ to be pounded, no big central organisation, no massed ranks of skeptic soldiers or even any third-party backing the resistance. Every one of the skeptics was a lone volunteer guerilla fighter, who needed absolutely no logistical support of any kind to continue the fight indefinitely. The alarmists never understood this, preferring to think that there simply had to be some massive hidden organisation orchestrating the resistance. While they wasted time and effort attacking targets that only existed in their head, each of the guerillas chewed on them mercilessly in their own particular way.
H/T Ross McKitrick.
Bishop Hill Mar 3, 2012 Climate: Mann FOI The quest of Virginia Attorney General, Ken Cuccinelli, to extract Michael Mann's email correspondence from his time at the University of Virginia has finally failed.
The Virginia Supreme Court halted Attorney General Kenneth Cuccinelli's demand for a former University of Virginia climate researcher's emails Friday, ruling that he lacked authority to subpoena the records.
The ruling is a victory for the university, researcher Michael Mann and higher education officials and faculty who claimed Cuccinelli's "civil investigative demand" threatened to chill academic freedom and scientific research.
Bishop Hill Mar 3, 2012 Climate: Sceptics Royal Society In his Dimbleby lecture the other day, Paul Nurse briefly covered the subject of academic freedom:
The scientific endeavour is at its most successful when there is freedom of thought. Scientists need to be able to freely express doubts, to be sceptical about established orthodoxy, and must not be too strongly directed from the top, which stifles creativity.
This are nice words, but whether there is to be any follow-through remains in doubt.
Bishop Hill Mar 2, 2012 Blogs If you are concerned about privacy or your identity you should ensure that you register with a pseudonym as user name rather than your real name. Although there is a display name, the username can still be seen in various places on the system.
If you want me to change your username, let me know by email.
Bishop Hill Mar 2, 2012 Blogs The irritations of comment moderation and captcha should, I hope, now be a thing of the past. It is now possible to register as a commenter on the site, enabling you to bypass captcha and moderation. If you are already a subscriber, your existing membership will do this for you and you need take no further steps.
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Bishop Hill
Dreadnought. I just replied to the email you sent, but it is bouncing. I have manually confirmed your account, so you should be able to log in now.
At Lucia's blog, on Feb 15th, Branden Shollenberger commented:
"I just received my copy of Michael Mann’s book. The first sentence of it is (emphasis mine):
Two pages later, there are these two sentences:
That’s as far as I’ve gotten, but it shows a disturbing trend. Ideas which are possible, but by no means known to be true, are stated as fact. If this is remotely representative of the book’s accuracy, there is no way the people giving it glowing reviews read it with an open mind."
Over the next few days Brandon finds more errors as he reads the book. It is quite fun to follow the unfolding story but you can download the whole review as a pdf here.
And there's more! This weekend Brandon hopes to share a second document covering other issues and which we will add as an update to this post.
Frank O'Dwyer has his own opinions on Brandon's review which you can read here - he doesn't like it.
Posted by Josh