Rose bares his thorns

David Rose has hit back at the Committee on Climate Change's denunciation of his climate sensitivity article.

The official watchdog that advises the Government on greenhouse gas emissions targets has launched an astonishing attack on The Mail on Sunday – for accurately reporting that alarming predictions of global warming are wrong.

We disclosed that although highly influential computer models are still estimating huge rises in world temperatures, there has been no statistically significant increase for more than 16 years.

Despite our revelation earlier this month, backed up by a scientifically researched graph, the Committee on Climate Change still clings to flawed predictions.

Yours truly gets a mention.

The tech fix

Matt Sinclair, writing in Conservative Home's Thinker's Corner column, looks at responses to global warming. The insanity of current policy measures, hardly needs stating, of course, but he goes on to look at carbon taxes and concludes that these will not work either:

Some think that the answer is to replace all that with a nice, neat carbon tax. Pigovian taxation looks great on the economist’s blackboard but will never survive contact with reality. Politicians don’t have the information or the incentives to set the right taxes for negative externalities and subsidies for positive externalities. It quickly degenerates into just another excuse to feed the habits of countless subsidy junkies and impose higher taxes on the rest of us.

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Snowdon now and then

BBC News, December 2004

The data collected by experts from the university [of Bangor] suggests that a white Christmas on Snowdon - the tallest mountain in England and Wales - may one day become no more than a memory.

The figures indicated that this winter Snowdon is on track to have less snow than any of the last 10 years.

The results appear to back the growing body of evidence to support climate change.

BBC News, March 2013

Snowdon Mountain Railway will be shut over the Easter weekend after it was hit by 30ft (9.1m) snow drifts.

Workers using two excavators tried but failed to clear the 4.7 mile (7.5km) track.

The railway resumed operations from Llanberis last week after the winter break but they were suspended within days after heavy snow on the mountain.

H/T Stephen.

Climate sensitivity down down under

The low climate sensitivity story has found its way to the Antipodes, where the Australian has picked up on the Economist's article and also quotes David Whitehouse on the warming plateau:

DEBATE about the reality of a two-decade pause in global warming and what it means has made its way from the sceptical fringe to the mainstream.

In a lengthy article this week, The Economist magazine said if climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, then climate sensitivity - the way climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels - would be on negative watch but not yet downgraded.

I notice that Tom Chivers has linked approvingly to the Economist article as well. There's a change in the air.

The Age of Global Warming - Josh 210

There was a book event at The GWPF this week where Rupert Darwall presented his new book called 'The Age of Global Warming'. Josh was there taking some cartoon notes.

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Cold on Nelson's column

It's not new, but Fraser Nelson has a very eloquent denunciation of energy policy and the effect on the old in today's Telegraph.

By now, the Energy Secretary will also have realised another inconvenient truth – that, for Britain, global warming is likely to save far more lives then it threatens. Delve deep enough into the Government’s forecasts, and they speculate that global warming will lead to 6,000 fewer deaths a year, on average, by the end of the decade. This is the supposed threat facing us: children would be less likely to have snow to play in at Christmas, but more likely to have grandparents to visit over Easter. Not a bad trade-off. The greatest uncertainty is whether global warming, which has stalled since 1998, will arrive quickly enough to make a difference.

Met Office or bookie's office?

Roger Harrabin takes a wry look at the Met Office's three-month forecast for last spring. These longer-term forecasts are not published, so Harrabin got it under FOI. The results are most amusing:

The Met Office three-monthly outlook at the end of March stated: "The forecast for average UK rainfall slightly favours drier than average conditions for April-May-June, and slightly favours April being the driest of the three months."

A soul-searching Met Office analysis later confessed: "Given that April was the wettest since detailed records began in 1910 and the April-May-June quarter was also the wettest, this advice was not helpful."

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Well sampled science - Josh 209

Click image for a larger version

Apologies for the lack of cartoons this month but I have been snowed under (!) with the day job. Even sadder when the Climate Blogosphere has had so much hilarious material on offer. This cartoon was inspired by Steve McIntyre's posts on the Marcottian redating of cores. How do they get away with this stuff?

Cartoons by Josh 

UK takes the German path

The government has just released its provisional figures for 2012 greenhouse gas emissions, and it's not good news. Emission are up sharply, taking them back to the levels prevalent in 2009, when the Climate Change Act had just been put in place.

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Hayes out, Fallon in

It is reported that energy minister John Hayes has been moved from his position. He will now be working alongside David Cameron in Number 10.

Hayes' seemed very sceptical of the green policy when he arrived, although his tone became much more green during his tenure. I'm struggling to put my finger on anything he did to change the insane course of government energy policy.

His replacement is Michael Fallon, who Guido suggests is from the same somewhat sceptical mould as Hayes:

Just last week Fallon asked whether “specific targets, for example on climate change, are the best way of focusing our spending where it is most needed”. Nonetheless a blow for wind campaigners…

I imagine, however, that he will be as powerless to change anything as Hayes was.

Update on Mar 28, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Greenpeace's Joss Garman begs to differ, tweeting as follows:

I think its significant that in opposition Fallon authored a Private Members Bill specifically to drive investment in renewables.

Update on Mar 28, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Jonathan Leake agrees:

Michael Fallon in Opposition described the renewables sector as “the work force of tomorrow"

Personally speaking I think politicians say anything that will get them elected, so we should probably not be reading too much into these kinds of quotes.

The Economist on climate sensitivity

The Economist covers the climate sensitivity debate in a must-read article and accompanying leader article.

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

This is an absolute must-read. Wow.

Article here.

Diary dates

A couple of diary dates for readers in London:

On 5 April there's the Polis Journalism conference, which looks at trust in the media. The first session in particular looks to be of interest:

0915 Trust and the BBC

Chair: Steve Hewlett

Speaker TBC

Details here.

Meanwhile, on 9 April there's a debate on fracking.

In December 2012 the UK government gave the green light to start exploratory hydraulic fracturing for shale gas in the UK. Politically at least, it looks like we have moved beyond the “do we / don’t we” stage of the debate.

Fracking has become an emotive issue in the UK. Public concern about hydraulic fracturing and its effect on our energy, environment and geological processes often plays out in a highly contentious way. How much impact does the science behind the process of shale gas extraction have on the public and media debates? How much of what has been reported in the media follows experiences from the United States?

To explore the issues we are delighted to welcome from the US, leading expert and author of the first peer reviewed study into the impacts, Professor Robert B. Jackson – Nicholas Chair of Global Environmental Change, Duke University. 

Attracting an audience from across the scientific, geological, energy and media communities, Prospect  will seek to contribute to improving the quality of the debate about this topic in the UK.

Details here.

David Whitehouse on the CCC

David Whitehouse's response to the CCC blog post is pretty devastating:

If this kind of data were from a drugs trial it would have been stopped long ago, even allowing for the little understood stopping bias effect which occurs when looking for the first signs of effectiveness or harm in such trials.

Spend to save

Ed Davey's statement on energy costs is getting a great deal of attention, and I think it's fair to say that nobody is impressed:

£286 green tax on energy bills: But ministers insist 'efficient appliances' will SAVE us money

• Energy Secretary insisted households will be better off due to initiatives
• But families will only benefit if they buy more efficient domestic appliances
• Average bill is now £1,267 with £112 of that amount going on green taxes
• By 2020 green taxes will have risen by over 150 per cent - £286 per family
• DECC reckons households will be saving £452 a year then due to schemes
• Charity said government 'embarrassed by terrifying cost of green policies'
• Claimed it is 'covering up' with a 'whitewash of wildly optimistic assumptions'

The CCC abandons science

Brian Hoskins and Steve Smith, advisers to the Committee on Climate Change, have written (yet another) riposte to David Rose's article in the Mail on Sunday. This is crazy, crazy stuff:

A chart of observed global temperatures against climate model outputs is the main evidence provided in the article. It claims that the chart “blows apart the scientific basis” for reducing emissions. This is simply incorrect, and reveals a misunderstanding of what the chart shows – a pattern of observed temperature over the last sixty years within the range of model outputs (see detailed notes below).

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