Marcott et al

Just in the nick of time to be included in the final draft of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment report, we get...the new Hockey Stick, a paper by Marcott et al.

Surface temperature reconstructions of the past 1500 years suggest that recent warming is unprecedented in that time. Here we provide a broader perspective by reconstructing regional and global temperature anomalies for the past 11,300 years from 73 globally distributed records. Early Holocene (10,000 to 5000 years ago) warmth is followed by ~0.7°C cooling through the middle to late Holocene (<5000 years ago), culminating in the coolest temperatures of the Holocene during the Little Ice Age, about 200 years ago. This cooling is largely associated with ~2°C change in the North Atlantic. Current global temperatures of the past decade have not yet exceeded peak interglacial values but are warmer than during ~75% of the Holocene temperature history. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change model projections for 2100 exceed the full distribution of Holocene temperature under all plausible greenhouse gas emission scenarios.

I wonder how those 73 proxies were selected. I wonder which proxies have that extraordinary uptick at the end. And I wonder when the uptick actually started - it looks like 500 years ago to me.

New Scientist covers the paper here. Interestingly they reckon the temperature rise began in the late 19th century.

Then, in the late 19th century, the graph shows temperatures shooting up, driven by humanity's greenhouse gas emissions.

This seems odd, because it is generally understood that carbon dioxide emissions were too small to affect the climate before the 1950s. 

It will be interesting to read the paper in full.

Update on Mar 7, 2013 by Bishop Hill

David Whitehouse reviews the paper here.

Inconsolable - Josh 208

Click image for a larger version

Last week Leo Hickman got into a bit of a tiz with sceptic blogs being nominated for the Weblog Awards, known as the 'Bloggies'. The Bloggies have been going for some years now and sceptic blogs have had a good showing, Watts Up With That has won twice, since the science blog category was introduced.

So what had changed this year to upset Leo? Well this year James Delingpole has been nominated. 

So hurry over there now and vote - there is still time!

Cartoons by Josh

Energy opinion

Readers might like to take part in a survey of opinion on the subject of energy futures run by an undergraduate student at the School of Built Environment at Heriot-Watt university. It comes to me via Eddie Owens, the lecturer who invited me to speak there a year or so ago.

The survey is quite short, so should only take a few minutes of your time.

See it here.

The ethics of global warming policy

Reader Gareth sends this report of last night's debate on the ethics of global warming policy.

I've just got back from the Fisher House / Von Hugel Institute seminar "Global Warming & Equitable Development: the Ethical and Political Priorities" (following your notice of same a few weeks ago).

Chaired by Rowan Williams, with a panel of: Lord Deben, Prof Sir Brian Hoskins, Prof Richard Lindzen, Prof Peter Wadhams (Prof Physics & Head of Polar Ocean Physics Group, Cambridge), Professor Sir Colin Humphrey (Cambridge), Prof John Loughlin Von Hugel Institute), Prof Chris Whitty (long job title - govt advisor) & Peter Lilley (late addition, not advertised), plus a paper by Prof Emeritus Tony Kelly (Cambridge) read by his son as he was unwell.

Click to read more ...

Thought crimes

Maxwell Boykoff has written one of those activism-dressed-up-as-academia papers on the subject of media coverage of climate change. Apparently the media should be ignoring dissenting views. Who would have thought it!

To the extent that mass media misrepresent and/or gratuitously cover these outlier views, they contribute to ongoing illusory, misleading, and counterproductive debates within the public and policy communities, and poorly serve the collective public.

Sounds as though these transgressors are public enemies. Burn them in the streets I say.

Boykoff gets a lot wrong in his two paragraphs on Climategate. This sentence was a goodie:

After 6 months of multiple independent investigations into possible wrongdoing by data manipulation and the violation of U.K. Freedom of Information laws, Phil Jones and the other climate scientists involved in the email discussions were cleared of the legal charges (Adam, 2010).

Independent - nope. The Russell inquiry was to all intents and purposes run by a former colleague of Jones. And no legal charges were ever brought because of the statute of limitations, so nobody was "cleared" of anything. But Jones was found guilty of misleading policymakers over "hide the decline", so the allegation of data manipulation stuck. Oh yes, and we still have no investigation of the allegations of journal nobbling, so the questions over the integrity of the climate literature remain.

I wonder what the rest of the paper is like?

Spamvertising - Josh 207

A bit of an anniversary cartoon as it was a year ago this month that The Tree Hut Gang were were exposed in Opengate. Now they have branched out into Spamvertising (H/t Lucia) with Al Gore's Climate Reality Project. Read about on BH here, Lucia's here and WUWT here.

Let's hope they keep up this kind of tactic, it is so entertaining.

Click the image for a larger version

Cartoons by Josh

UK's "fuel low" indicator just came on

Bloomberg has just reported that the UK's low fuel indicator just switched on:

U.K. stores of natural gas, pushed to record lows by a dearth of tanker imports, will be exhausted in about two weeks unless temperatures rise, reducing demand for the heating fuel.

The CHART OF THE DAY shows inventories at Rough, the U.K.’s largest gas-storage facility, are at the lowest level on record for the time of year. There were 6,490 gigawatt-hours of gas in storage yesterday, which will be depleted in 15 days if the average rate of withdrawal over the past two weeks continues, according to National Grid Plc (NG/) data.

See the chart here.

To hell with the environment - give us biofuels

The House of Commons Delegated Legislation Committee is going to consider proposals for new biofuels subsidies today. The proposals are contained in the draft Renewables Obligation (Amendment) Order 2013, a Byzantine document that demonstrates conclusively that government involvement in the energy market will lead inevitably to disaster. Read this section for example.

Roger Harrabin has an article covering the hearings here. It gives interesting background for the uninitiated, but has some lacunae which need filling. Harrabin says on Twitter that he is unaware of whether this is EU legislation, but says that Germany and Holland have stopped subsidies. Some clarity over these questions would be useful, particularly as we know that an earlier EU biofuels directive was corrupt and was the result of subversion of the legislative process by vested interests.

Details of the committee members and of their discussions earlier in the week are here. The hearing will be streamed here at 2:30pm.

 [Update - it definitely is EU legislation. Parliament are rubber stamping EU corruption]

Costs exceed benefits

A new book on the history of the UK's relationship with climate change by Rupert Darwall is published today. I hope to have a review in due course. In the meantime Darwall has an article in the Telegraph to launch the book. I don't think there's much that will be new to the BH reader, but it's important to keep reiterating the lunacy of the policies of successive governments.

One reason Britain has gone so far down the green path is that politicians have not been honest about its economic implications. During the passage of the Climate Change Act in 2008, which commits Britain to cutting net carbon emissions by at least 80 per cent by 2050, the energy minister Phil Woolas rejected his own department’s estimate that the costs could exceed the benefits by £95 billion. The House of Commons never debated the costs and the Bill was passed, with only five MPs voting against.

An even more egregious example is provided by Ed Miliband, when he was climate change secretary. The Tory MP Peter Lilley had written to Mr Miliband to say that, based on his department’s own impact statement, the Climate Change Act would cost households an average of between £16,000 and £20,000. The future Labour leader replied that the statement showed that the benefits to British society of successful action on climate change would be far higher than the cost. Mr Miliband should have known this was untrue; if he didn’t, he had no business certifying that he’d read the impact statement, which he’d signed just six weeks earlier. The statement only estimated the benefits of slightly cooler temperatures for the world as a whole, not for the UK.

Organised astroturfing

Barry Woods alerts us to Al Gore's organised astroturfing organisation, in which people are encouraged to copy text from the Reality Drop website and paste it into climate-related comments threads.

George Monbiot has been very vocal against this sort of thing. It will be interesting to see how he responds, particularly since the Guardian's own pages are being targeted.

Incidentally, the Met Office are thanked on Reality Drop's "About" page. I wonder what their involvement is?

Update on Mar 5, 2013 by Bishop Hill

The flaw in Al Gore's cunning plan is that there are going to be a series of identical comments posted on each thread. I think this is going to mightily annoy website owners.

Update on Mar 5, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Dave Britton, the press officer at the Met Office, writes to say that they have no idea why Al Gore's people think the Met Office is involved.

Lindzen vs Hasan

This just in:

Head to Head Debates with Mehdi Hasan - FRIDAY 8TH MARCH at 7.30pm - PROF RICHARD LINDZEN

Message: Al Jazeera English is launching a new discussion series called Head to Head, presented by Mehdi Hasan. Head to Head tackles the big issues of our times, from foreign intervention to faith and American supremacy.

Click to read more ...

A despotism over the mind

American schoolchildren are to have what looks like a monolithic view of global warming imposed upon them:

New national science standards that make the teaching of global warming part of the public school curriculum are slated to be released this month, potentially ending an era in which climate skepticism has been allowed to seep into the nation's classrooms.

They recommend that educators teach the evidence for man-made climate change starting as early as elementary school and incorporate it into all science classes, ranging from earth science to chemistry. By eighth grade, students should understand that "human activities, such as the release of greenhouse gases from burning fossil fuels, are major factors in the current rise in Earth’s mean surface temperature (global warming)," the standards say.

Click to read more ...

The benefits of shale

There is lots of huffing and puffing over the nationalities of the owners of the companies who own onshore gas rights in the UK. The Mail is one of the media outlets reporting the story:

Most of the companies licensed to drill for the fuel using the controversial technique known as fracking are not UK-owned, it can be revealed.

The biggest is IGas, which controls a sixth of the exploration rights issued so far. Last month, its largest shareholder was bought by the Chinese government.

Johnny Foreigner investing in the UK! How ghastly! Barry Gardiner MP, a prominent voice in energy and climate policy, is one of those who seems to be struggling with this idea:

It is never the case that the benefits are going to end up back in the domestic country unless there is a state monopoly. But the concern is that the ultimate beneficiaries will end up being elsewhere.

This is the perennial problem with politicians seeing the only benefit of an economic activity as the bottom line profits. These are, of course, only one rather minor benefit. The big benefits are the lower gas prices enjoyed by consumers, the wages that flow to the employees, the cheques sent suppliers of drilling equipment and to hotels and restaurants and snackbars near the wells and so on. Perhaps even the tax revenues that get sucked up by the state.

It's amazing that one has to explain this to someone charged with representing the public in Westminster.

Start of a long struggle

I really am a glutton for punishment. My latest fray in the world of FOI is a request for correspondence relating to the formulation of the Stern Review. I've asked for related correspondence from Stern himself, Gordon Brown, and Brown's special advisers.

If I recall correctly, the Treasury are pretty notorious for flouting transparency legislation, and this looks as if it is going to be no exception. My request was made under the Environmental Information Regulations but the Treasury are insisting that it should be handled under the FOI Act (which will allow them to reject it on cost grounds). They say that because they are an economics and finance ministry, the correspondence I'm after will not be communicating environmental information. The fact that they have come up with this response without actually referring to the EIR legislation tells you everything you need to know.

Click to read more ...

Desperate woo

Biased BBC is decidedly unimpressed with yesterday's Today Programme on BBC Radio 4, which tried to pin the blame for Ludlow Castle's tendency to collapse on climate change.

Colin Richards, head of conservation and archaeology for Shropshire, said: “It’s amazing that they have stood for 800 years and the climate change that has affected them over the last couple of years has wreaked so much damage.

This is, not to put too fine a point on it, desperate woo, a point that BBBC makes forcefully.

Readers may also be interested in the comments thread, where a reader has noted a dissenting view on AGW finding its way into the magazine of Mensa.