EU for turning?

The Wall Street Journal is reporting the existence of a draft EU document that may turn out to be significant:

European policy makers must factor in the impact of the region’s deep financial crisis and stumbling economies as they design climate and energy policies, according to a draft European Union document seen by The Wall Street Journal.

The document signals that the 27-nation bloc may be reining in its ambition to lead the world in tackling climate change.

The paper, whose final version is expected to be published March 27, aims to start a debate ahead of the drafting of the EU climate and energy policy for the decade between 2020 and 2030, of which a first version should be ready by the end of this year.

Who knows what kind of a mess we could be in by 2020, but at least this report suggests the EU has now noticed that there is a problem.

St Andrews Green Week

Whenever a new batch of Climategate files comes along I always seem to be in the middle of something. Climategate 2 happened while I was at Holyrood talking to MSPs about climate change. Yesterday I had an engagement at the University of St Andrews, where I had been booked to appear on a panel for the "Grill an Environmentalist" session. Herewith a brief report.

The panel consisted of paleoclimatologist Rob Wilson, myself, the university's environmental policy officer, and and economist called Felix Fitzroy and we were overseen by one of the student organisers. Fitzroy was of particular interest because he had written a very (ahem) critical letter about me to the town magazine a couple of years ago. It therefore seemed likely that he was going to provide the floorshow. In the event this expectation proved to be correct.

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Climategate 3.0

This message from FOIA was forwarded to me.

It's time to tie up loose ends and dispel some of the speculation surrounding the Climategate affair.

Indeed, it's singular "I" this time.  After certain career developments I can no longer use the papal plural ;-)

If this email seems slightly disjointed it's probably my linguistic background and the problem of trying to address both the wider audience (I expect this will be partially reproduced sooner or later) and the email recipients (whom I haven't decided yet on).

The "all.7z" password is [redacted]

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Book Review: ‘Climate Change: Natural or Manmade?’

This review of 'Climate Change: Natural or Manmade?' is by John Shade of Climate Lessons blog.

It soon becomes clear which way the author is inclined to answer the question in the book’s title.  On page 22,  we see these words ‘the biggest scientific fraud in history’, on page 77 ‘global temperature is not a function of CO₂’,  page 83 ‘one of the biggest scientific shams in history’, page 89 ‘CO₂ emissions have nothing to do with climate’, page 106 ‘the flawed hypothesis that humans are causing catastrophic global warming’, and similar sentiments are to be found on pages 117, 135, 137, 140, 149, 156, 164, 175, 186, and 109.  They are also to be found in the Appendix which reproduces the resignation letter of the distinguished physicist Hal Lewis who wrote, upon leaving the American Physical Society (APS) in 2010 ‘…the global warming scam … has carried APS before it like a rogue wave.  It is the greatest and most successful pseudoscientific fraud I have seen in my long life as a physicist.’

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The MPs and the form letter

Tony Newbery has been looking at the responses given to a couple of people who contacted their MPs about 28gate and notices a certain similarity (or identity) in what MPs had to say. He is pondering what this says about the process of contacting one's parliamentary representative:

The availability of a form letter reply suggests that a considerable number of people contacted their MPs who, presumably, then contacted the oh-so-helpful folk at the BBC.

This then raises the question of whether MPs are simply contacting the BBC, who fob them off with a form letter, which the MPs then rewrite in their own words and pass on to the constituents. If so, it makes something of a nonsense of the whole process.

Tony is looking for other people who might have written to their MPs about 28gate. See the full post here.

The ups and downs of the Marcott

This is just a brief post to point to a few analyses of the Marcott hockey stick.

The National Journal has a science-lite round up of the paper including this quote:

To be clear, the study finds that temperatures in about a fifth of this historical period were higher than they are today. But the key, said lead author Shaun Marcott of Oregon State University, is that temperatures are shooting through the roof faster than we've ever seen.

"What we found is that temperatures increased in the last hundred years as much as they had cooled in the last six or seven thousand," he said. "In other words, the rate of change is much greater than anything we've seen in the whole Holocene," referring to the current geologic time period, which began around 11,500 years ago.

Meanwhile Rud Istvan, writing at Judy Curry's, notes there's just a small problem with the National Journal's case:

The proxy selection was deliberately weighted toward ‘low frequency’ resolution, since the entire Holocene was being assessed...there is no statistically valid resolution to the combined proxy set for anything less than 300-year periods...

Marcott neglected to tell NPR his methodology did not recognize ‘fast’ century changes at all–until recent thermometer records were spliced onto the 73 paleosites.

David Middleton, at WUWT has more.

Kremlin watching

Also in the Telegraph letters page is this from Graham Stringer MP.

SIR – I agree with Graham Brady MP ("Liberate MPs from their party shackles", Comment, March 8) that MPs should wrest control of the business in the House of Commons from the Government.

I look forward to Graham Brady, who is chairman of the 1922 Committee, putting forward his ideas in a concrete form with all-party support to be voted on in the House.

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Scientists: "poor must cough up"

The scientific establishment is in full voice this morning, with a letter in the Telegraph demanding yet more money from the hard-pressed taxpayer.

We urge the Government to demonstrate its long-term commitment to funding science and engineering as part of a strategy to boost growth and enable Britain to meet the social and technological challenges of the 21st century.

In 2010, the core research budget disbursed by the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) was ring-fenced. However, the overall science budget has since been eroded by cuts in capital expenditure by BIS and to research and development in other departments, combined with the depreciating effect of inflation.

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Booker on Drax

Christopher Booker reviews the madness of the decision to convert the UK's biggest power station from coal to biomass.

As from next month, Drax will embark on a £700 million switch away from burning coal for which it was designed, in order to convert its six colossal boilers to burn millions of tons a year of wood chips instead.

Most of these chips will come from trees felled in forests covering a staggering 4,600 square miles in the USA, from where they will be shipped 3,000 miles across the Atlantic to Britain.

I know of several people who have bought home generators. Booker's article may push a few more that way.

Read the whole thing.

Gotcha

Stuart Young, an anti-windfarm campaigner from the far north of Scotland, has issued a formal complaint to the presiding officer of the Scottish Parliament over the behaviour of Energy Minister Fergus Ewing. According to an article in the Press and Journal:

Energy Minister Fergus Ewing has been urged to apologise to MSPs amid claims he "knowingly" allowed them to be misled about the impact of renewable energy on consumers' bills. Highland anti-windfarm campaigner Stuart Young has urged Holyrood's deputy presiding officer John Scott to take action against the SNP MSP for failing to correct his Nationalist colleague Mike MacKenzie. Speaking in a debate on February 21, the backbencher referred to "the myth consumers are paying very high premiums to subsidise renewables now known to be of the order of £21 per annum - a tiny fraction of annual fuel bills. Mr Young, a retired construction worker who stays near Thurso, claimed Mr Ewing knew the figure was actually £64.15...

Young's correspondence with Scott and Ewing, together with a dossier of background information can be seen via the link below.

Young files

Review of ‘What counts as good evidence for policy?’

This is a guest post by Mark Piney. It looks at the Institute of Physics seminar on science policy of a few weeks back. Although the seminar has already been reported on here, Mark brings up different aspects of the event, which I thought were interesting.

Perhaps 100 of us sat in a rather airless meeting room, early evening on Monday 4th February at the Institute of Physics (IOP) to listen to four speakers (Roger Pielke, Georgina Mace, Richard Horton and Jonathan Breckon) give us their take on evidence and policy. The event was chaired by James Wilsdon from Sussex university’s SPRU.

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Lindzen at the Oxford Union - Cartoon Notes by Josh

Updated on Jul 15, 2013 by Josh

The Oxford Union debate with Richard Lindzen was one of the most fun Climate Science events I have been to recently. Here are my cartoon notes to add to the Bish's post and other comments.

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Lindzen at the Oxford Union

The Lindzen debate at the Oxford Union was, I think, a rather significant moment in the climate debate. One in which sceptic views got a fair hearing in an open debate. Lindzen was to be accompanied by a panel of invited experts consisting of David Rose, Mark Lynas and Myles Allen. Part 1 was an interview of Lindzen with interjections from the panel, while part 2 opened up the debate to the floor.

A few of us sceptics - Josh, Tallbloke, David Holland and others had met up beforehand and I think it's fair to say that we all expected little from the evening. Mehdi Hasan, the left-wing journalist who was to compere the event had been using the d-word a couple of evenings ago and had said he wasn't a neutral. This didn't bode well. In the event he ran through the gamut of "questions you ask sceptics" - denialism, big oil funding and do on - and in a way that was quite aggressive (but not unfairly so), but I think it fair to say that didn't go the way he expected. I should add that Hasan's handling of the Q&A was exemplary.

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Air quality

Over the last few weeks I've been noticing green activists posting lots of comments about air quality. All this activity has culminated in litigation against the government, as reported here by Roger Harrabin.

The government is facing a case in the UK Supreme Court later over its failure to cut air pollution in line with legal limits.

...An environment charity, ClientEarth, will now argue in the Supreme Court that the national courts must enforce EU environment law in the UK.

As reader Ron (to whom a tip of the hat is due) points out there is a certain irony in environmentalists doing this. In dutiful obedience to their wishes, wood-pellet boilers and other biomass heating devices have been made exempt from the provisions of the Clean Air Act.

So the greens demand actions that make the air dirtier and then sue the government for allowing this to happen. This is what is called joined-up environmentalism.

Travelling

I'm off to Oxford today, where I'll be attending the Lindzen debate at the Oxford Union. I have lined up a couple of posts for while I'm on the move, and I may be able to check in from time to time.