UK energy prices unaffordable by 2015

That is the conclusion of price comparison website Uswitch.com:

According to the research, household energy bills have more than doubled in the last eight years. If this trend continues, uSwitch.com says the average annual bill is set to break the £1,500 barrier by 2015 and will continue upwards to hit £2,766 a year by 2018.

An annual energy bill of £1,500 is the tipping point at which energy bills will become unaffordable in the UK, says the research. When this point is reached, 77% will be forced to ration their energy use, 59% will go without adequate heating and 36% will be forced to turn their heating off entirely.

I wouldn't like to be a politician when that happens.

(H/T Haunting the Library)

That's telling him

This just in from the Telegraph:

Peter Atherton, Citigroup’s head of utilities research, said the SNP’s radical renewable power targets require up to £7 billion of investment a year but the figure at the moment is only £750 million.

The industry expert, who advises the bank's clients where to invest their money, said utility share prices are “dire” and green energy manufacturers have proved a “terrible, catastrophic investment” in recent years.

It is “borderline fantasy” that this difference can be made good because banks and international investors do not think green energy schemes provide reliable returns, he said.

Tim Osborn responds to the Yamal furore

I've just noticed that UEA has posted a response to the recent flurry of postings about Yamal, both at Climate Audit and here.

It's authored by Tim Osborn and can be seen here.

Gatekeeping continues

Hans von Storch interviews Reiner Grundmann about his recent Climategate paper. It looks as though gatekeeping of inconvenient climate papers extends to some of the social science journals too:

One editor responsible for handling my manuscript was apologetic about the negative verdict, pointing out that the topic was too hot to handle for some referees in the field. He thought it was very difficult in the current situation to get such material published. I took this as a strong indication that the politicization of climate change had had an effect in STS scholarship, something which is not thematized sufficiently in the community.

Talkfest podcast

The podcast of the Talkfest meeting I mentioned the other day is now available. It's really extremely interesting.

I particularly recommend the segment by Felicity Mellor (from 11 min). It's striking that her research, which informed the BBC's review of science coverage, shows that the BBC has rarely sought balancing views in its science coverage. The BBC appears to have concluded from this that even less coverage should be sought from dissenters from the climatologicial mainstream.

Hide da d.cline - Josh 169

Hopefully you've watched the video, read the posts and comments here and at Climate Audit and Watts Up With That. Basically Myles Allen has been castigating journalists for getting Climategate wrong while getting it spectacularly wrong himself. Nice one Myles. Honest error or disingenuous?

Cartoons by Josh

Tying the threads together

In a post that rather ties together several of the recent threads at this site, Anthony Watts looks at the recent interest in Myles Allen's talk, the importance of the Hockey Stick and discusses a recent paper that looks at the tendency to see expertise where there is none.

[The Hockey Stick] was a good gamble at the time, but as Climategate has shown us, it may have been a winning hand with a one time jackpot, but they are losing the card game as the other players slowly realize they have a cheat in their midst.

The logic at Yale

USA Today reports on a new paper in Nature Climate Change (and to slightly misquote Carl Wunsch, just because it's in Nature Climate Change, doesn't make it wrong). The paper in question reports the results of a survey into opinion on climate change.

Support for climate science doesn't increase with science literacy, a survey suggests. Rather, people with technical backgrounds just dig in harder on their views about global warming, finds the study in the Nature Climate Change journal.

Click to read more ...

Climategate and HADCRUT

I'm sure most readers are aware of Steve McIntyre's post on the Myles Allen video. The comments thread is also very interesting. I was particularly taken with Lucia Liljegren's response to a comment made by Myles on the subject of the relevance of the temperature records to CRUTEM. This is what Myles said:

I stand by the assertion that, thanks to the sloppy coverage the affair received in the media, it wasn’t just Sarah Palin who got the impression that the instrumental temperature record was seriously compromised: The Times opened the relevant story with “A science blogger has uncovered a catalogue of errors in Met Office records…”

Click to read more ...

Frackonomics

Doug Proctor points me to this article about the economics of shale gas. Considering it is on a website called Smartplanet, it's argued in a pretty sane and sensible manner, concluding that $2/mcf is a function of oversupply rather than the true cost of shale gas.

I don't have a problem with this argument actually. Figures in the range of $5-7/mcf are often quoted for the range in which fracking operations become economic, perhaps more outside the US where the shales are more readily exploited than in the UK. This would still be much cheaper than the kinds of prices we pay for gas now and there are energy security considerations in favour of shale too.

Click to read more ...

YouTube stills

Updated on May 28, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Myles Allen and I have exchanged a couple of emails in the last few days. Myles accused me, amongst other things, of trawling through the YouTube video of him to find the least flattering image possible for the still that appears when the video is embedded.

In response, I explained that this was simply the default image and pointed him to the Google search results for "Myles Allen youtube". This returns precisely the same still frame for the Communicate 2011 video as the one embedded on my posting:

 

Click to read more ...

Caption competition

Myles Allen recently met rapper Will.I.Am in Oxford, the latter's arrival in a large helicopter being much noted by the press. Readers are cordially invited to suggest a caption for the photo below.

The prize for the best entry will be a coffee mug adorned with the Josh cartoon of your choice.

A new dark age?

Thanks to Alex Cull for this transcript of a segment on yesterday's Today programme on BBC Radio 4. This concerned the alleged threat of an end to enlightenment values.

Earlier this year, the President of the AAAS, America's leading academy of science, claimed that the politicisation of science, on issues such as climate change, genetic modification, evolution even, was driving the U.S. into a new Dark Age. And over here, scientists complain that politicians routinely cherry-pick data, casually disregard the facts when they don't fit their preconceptions. So are we descending into a new Age of Unreason in public policy? Our science correspondent, Tom Feilden, has been weighing the evidence, and has found some encouraging signs that the geeks are fighting back.

Myles Allen writes

Myles Allen has asked me to post this response to the thread in which we discussed his Communicate 2011 lecture.

I do think it is sad for democracy that so much energy in the debate on climate change has been expended on pseudo-debates about the science, leaving no room for public debate about the policy response. In the run-up to Copenhagen, public discussion of effective alternatives to a global cap-and-trade regime (which I would personally view with as much scepticism as most of the readers of this blog) was remarkably absent. It still is, and it always will be as long as the public are kept distracted by a debate over the Medieval Warm Period, which has only ever featured in one of the lines of evidence for human influence on climate (and not, in my view, a particularly strong one). The data we primarily rely upon is the instrumental temperature record, which, as I explained in the talk, emerged from the CRU e-mail affair pretty much unscathed (and I stand by the assertion that one would not have got this impression from media coverage of the issue).

Click to read more ...

'Vermin Supreme', honest, that's his name - Josh 168

Head over to Lucia's for an explanation and the video. And you can tweet him @VerminSupreme 

Cartoons by Josh