Scoot!

The Manchester Evening News has just tweeted that Peel, who own the land where iGas are drilling for shale gas at Barton Moss, have been granted a possession order against the protestors. I guess this means eviction.

Policy incoherence

The incoherence of coalition energy policy has been clear for a long time and proof continues to pile up. In the Telegraph today, we read that the Treasury is going to extend its scheme for energy intensive industry, giving them further relief from the burdens that are driving them out of business.

The energy and business minister will admit that costs are undermining the UK’s competitiveness and that current compensation for manufacturers is failing to offset the growing burden of green levies on energy bills.

It is hard to contain one's contempt for such awe-inspiring numptiness.

Your environment

Ross McKitrick has unveiled an excellent new initiative:

I am very pleased to announce the launch of yourenvironment.ca, a new project of mine. The idea is very simple: to present the complete environmental record of every community across Canada. The site currently shows air emissions by source (back to 1985), air contaminant levels (back to 1974) and monthly average high temperatures (back to 1900) for hundreds of places across the country. Water pollution data are coming this summer.

The layout is self-explanatory and it's very easy to use. The data are all from government agencies, but most of it has not hitherto been disseminated in a usable form to the public. All my sources are, or will soon be, linked and the data I use will all be easily-downloadable.

So the next time you find yourself in a conversation with someone who (i) is convinced that Canada does nothing to protect the environment, or (ii) thinks winters around here used to be a lot colder/longer/snowier; or it never used to be this warm/cold in April/October/ etc, or (iii) worries/guffaws about the alleged/obvious ecological disaster all around us, and you wonder what, if any, of this is true, look at yourenvironment.ca and find out.

I especially hope households with high school students will learn about it, though from the experience at our home it might put some kids at risk of being expelled.

What an excellent idea. I don't think we have anything like this in the UK.

Any volunteers?

Explaining Otto

The Otto et al paper, along with all the other observational estimates of low climate sensitivity, has been a bit of a bore for upholders of the climate consensus, distracting them from the daily grind of generating ever more more outlandish estimates of future warming and ever-more scary tales of the impacts.

Riding to the rescue is Drew Shindell of NASA GISS, who has analysed the models and found that he can explain the discrepancy with the observations:

Understanding climate sensitivity is critical to projecting climate change in response to a given forcing scenario. Recent analyses have suggested that transient climate sensitivity is at the low end of the present model range taking into account the reduced warming rates during the past 10–15 years during which forcing has increased markedly. In contrast, comparisons of modelled feedback processes with observations indicate that the most realistic models have higher sensitivities. Here I analyse results from recent climate modelling intercomparison projects to demonstrate that transient climate sensitivity to historical aerosols and ozone is substantially greater than the transient climate sensitivity to CO₂. This enhanced sensitivity is primarily caused by more of the forcing being located at Northern Hemisphere middle to high latitudes where it triggers more rapid land responses and stronger feedbacks. I find that accounting for this enhancement largely reconciles the two sets of results, and I conclude that the lowest end of the range of transient climate response to CO₂ in present models and assessments (<1.3 °C) is very unlikely.

scary stories and ever

An MSM outing for Paul Homewood

The East Anglian Daily Times has published a supplement on climate change and has invited Paul Homewood to write about that region's climate history. Suffice it to say, it's hard to detect any change in recent years.

Read it here.

Davey stamps his feet

Ed Davey really is starting to turn into a big sulky kid isn't he? Yesterday flew into a complete temper tantrum about global warming sceptics, demanding that we just shut up, shut up, shut up. However, rumours that he also plans to scream and scream until he is sick are said to be unfounded.

Mr Davey told EurActiv, a Brussels-based news website: My recommendation to most politicians who want to talk about the climate is to listen to the scientists and listen to the evidence.

‘Of course you can question it, but when there is overwhelming evidence you should tend to shut it.’

The question is, what he believes that there is overwhelming evidence of. Perhaps when he gets off his potty he will tell us.

The geopolitics of shale

The Ukrainian crisis certainly seems to be concentrating some politicians' minds on the subject of shale gas.

The US, awash with cheap hydrocarbons, is immune to Russian threats to switch off the gas supply. European countries have to play a much more cautious game. The result, according to this article in the New York Times, is that there is now huge pressure in America to speed up the development of export facilities. This will all be too late for the Ukrainians of course, but political strategists at least hope to curb Putin's ambitions in future.

What effect the new political reality will have within David Cameron's cabinet is anyone's guess. The Liberal Democrats have an interesting political calculation to make. A core-vote strategy will see them stick to their "dead-slow" strategy on shale, but this will make them look so entirely divorced from the geopolitical reality that their credibility as a party will be at an end.

Catching up - Josh 262

Recently, particularly since the 'Communicating the pause' blog post and discussion, it seems that Climate Science is trying to play catch up with sceptics. The latest Climate Sensitivity discussions have had a similar tone. Whatever the excuses for tardiness I think this is an entirely welcome development.

Cartoons by Josh

Public views of sceptics

Updated on Mar 7, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Ed Hawkins tweets that most of the public don't see sceptics as lukewarmers. He's right of course. Nigel Lawson, for example, is regularly condemned as a "denier" by the chattering classes. Take these examples:

Robin McKie, the Guardian's science editor (in a letter to Owen Paterson): you arrive at your new post with the strong endorsement of Britain's chief climate change denier, Nigel Lawson, the former chancellor...

David Conn of the Guardian: Nigel Lawson, a very much ex-politician, now a well known climate change denier, getting a platform on the BBC: why?

Click to read more ...

Goodbye industry

I recall the extinction of the European textile industry happening before my eyes as a young graduate at Courtaulds in the 1980s. Chemicals could go the same way. It could well be another European dinosaur.

Ineos boss Jim Ratcliffe tells the European Commission that the chemicals industry could be extinct in Europe within a decade.

Update on Mar 7, 2014 by Bishop Hill

In the circumstances, you have to wonder why chemical companies like Boots, BASF and Unilever are sponsoring environmental groups like the Green Alliance. Perhaps we need to spell it out to them...

Don't do this. They're trying to put you out of business!

Orlowski on the GWPF report

Andrew Orlowski in the Register has an interview with Nic Lewis here. I liked this bit:

You've spent a lifetime modelling - surely [models are] not completely useless"

Lewis: Models are extremely useful but better at somethings than others. They're pretty good at atmospheric circulation. But when it comes to ECS there's really no reason to think they’re going to be accurate.

Myles' model mystery

The Science Media Centre has put out a response to the GWPF report here. I was struck by Myles' Allen's contribution:

Their [TCR] prediction of 1.35 degrees C is, even if correct, only 25% lower than the average of the general circulation models used in the IPCC 5th Assessment.  A 25% reduction in TCR means the warming we might have expected by 2050 might take until the early 2060s instead.  Their 5-95% range of uncertainty in TCR (kindly provided by Nic Lewis) is 0.9-2.5 degrees C, almost exactly in line with the range of the models shown in their figure (1.1-2.6 degrees C).

Compare this with what is said in the Lewis/Crok report (long version):

Click to read more ...

Sherwood's fabrication

The Guardian has a quote from Professor Stephen Sherwood of the University of New South Wales, in which he takes a pot shot at the Lewis Crok report.

The report is standard cherry-picking.  It offers no new evidence not already considered by the IPCC, relying very heavily on a few strands of evidence that seem to point toward lower sensitivity while ignoring all the evidence pointing to higher sensitivity.

It relies heavily on the estimate by Forster and Gregory, which was an interesting effort but whose methodology has been shown not to work; this study did not cause the IPCC to conclude that sensitivity had to be low, even though both Forster and Gregory were IPCC lead authors and were obviously aware of their own paper.

Click to read more ...

IPCC hides the good news

From GWPF:

A new report published by the Global Warming Policy Foundation shows that the best observational evidence indicates our climate is considerably less sensitive to greenhouse gases than climate models are estimating.

The clues for this and the relevant scientific papers are all referred to in the recently published Fifth Assessment report (AR5) of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). However, this important conclusion was not drawn in the full IPCC report – it is only mentioned as a possibility – and is ignored in the IPCC's Summary for Policymakers (SPM).

For over thirty years climate scientists have presented a range for climate sensitivity (ECS) that has hardly changed. It was 1.5-4.5°C in 1979 and this range is still the same today in AR5. The new report suggests that the inclusion of recent evidence, reflected in AR5, justifies a lower observationally-based temperature range of 1.25–3.0°C, with a best estimate of 1.75°C, for a doubling of CO2. By contrast, the climate models used for projections in AR5 indicate a range of 2-4.5°C, with an average of 3.2°C.

This is one of the key findings of the new report Oversensitive: how the IPCC hid the good news on global warming, written by independent UK climate scientist Nic Lewis and Dutch science writer Marcel Crok. Lewis and Crok were both expert reviewers of the IPCC report, and Lewis was an author of two relevant papers cited in it.

In recent years it has become possible to make good empirical estimates of climate sensitivity from observational data such as temperature and ocean heat records. These estimates, published in leading scientific journals, point to climate sensitivity per doubling of CO2 most likely being under 2°C for long-term warming, with a best estimate of only 1.3-1.4°C for warming over a seventy year period.

“The observational evidence strongly suggest that climate models display too much sensitivity to carbon dioxide concentrations and in almost all cases exaggerate the likely path of global warming,” says Nic Lewis.

These lower, observationally-based estimates for both long-term climate sensitivity and the seventy-year response suggest that considerably less global warming and sea level rise is to be expected in the 21st century than most climate model projections currently imply.

“We estimate that on the IPCC’s second highest emissions scenario warming would still be around the international target of 2°C in 2081-2100,” Lewis says.

The full report is here.

Update on Mar 6, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Piers Forster has penned a response at Ed Hawkins' Climate Lab Book site.

Whole lotta wally

Anthony Watts is covering Bob Ward's latest attempt to enliven the global warming debate. Bob's main problem is that he has only one card to play, namely to accuse his opponents of dishonesty, usually at the top of his voice. In this case, he has accused no less than three people: Nic Lewis, Donna Laframboise and Richard Lindzen.

As you can tell, this rather betrays Bob's other problems, namely an almost complete lack of a sense of proportion and and almost unerring ability to overplay his hand. People don't generally lie very much, particularly when they are giving evidence to Parliament. So to accuse three witnesses on the same panel of dishonesty smacks of a desperation rather than meaningful criticism. The committee are going to find themselves thinking that he is a bit of a wally. Or a lot of a wally.

They wouldn't be the first.

Update on Mar 5, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Donna's post on the subject is here.