Swords at dawn

There is an important FOI story (or, more precisely, an EIR one) at WUWT. It concerns the compliance of the Irish government with the Aarhus Convention, an international agreement to involve the public in formulation of environmental policy, which, at the same time, requires disclosure of environmental information to the public. The convention is the reason we have the Environmental Information Regulations in the UK.

According to anti-windfarm campaigner, Pat Swords:

[T]his is an important decision, because the EU’s renewable energy programme as it currently stands is now proceeding without ‘proper authority’. The public’s right to be informed and to participate in its development and implementation has been by-passed. A process will now be started to ensure that the Committee’s recommendations are addressed; if ultimately they are not, then UNECE has the option of requiring the EU to withdraw from the UN Convention on Human and Environmental Rights.

I wonder what the implications are for the UK?

More thoughts here, where Richard Tol is active in the comments threads.

Shale gas dropped?

Updated on May 20, 2012 by Bishop Hill

The Independent is reporting that shale gas is not seen as a solution to the UK's energy crisis.

The Government has rejected shale gas technology as a solution to Britain's energy crisis, conceding it will do little to cut bills or keep the lights on.

Supporters of the fracking technology – which blasts water, sand and chemicals at extreme pressures to release gas trapped deep in rock – argue it could be the single greatest factor in transforming Britain's energy market, reducing our reliance on foreign imports and dramatically reducing costs.

Click to read more ...

Myles Allen on Berlin's two concepts of liberty

Simon Anthony sends this report of Myles Allen's recent lecture at Oxford.

Myles (I think he'd prefer I call him "Myles" rather than Prof Allen as most people in the audience seemed to refer to him thus) is prof of geo-system science in the school of geography and the environment and heads the climate dynamics group in physics dept, both in Oxford. His main interest has been in attribution of aspects of climate, particularly "extreme events" to human activities. Recently he's been working on how to use scientific evidence to "inform" climate policy.

The lecture's title comes from Isaiah Berlin's contrast between "negative" and "positive" liberty. These can be (slightly) caricatured as, respectively (and perhaps contrarily) freedom from constraints (eg tyranny) and freedom to do particular things (eg vote for the tyrant). Amongst other things, Berlin was concerned about the possible abuse of positive liberty in which the state prescribes what is permitted rather than ensuring the conditions in which inpiduals were free to make their own choices.

Click to read more ...

Is it or ain't it Rashit?

There is an interesting exchange in the comments to Steve McIntyre's recent post on the updated Yamal data he has recently received from Rashit Hantemirov, the Russian climatologist who originally sampled the Yamal trees.

The new data, which now extends right up to 2005, does not have a hockey stick shape - yet another extraordinary turn in this most extraordinary story.

In the comments, there is what purports to be a comment from Hantemirov himself:

Steve, I’m horrified by your slipshod work. You did not define what you compare, what dataset used in each case, how data were processed, and what was the reason for that, what limitation there are, what kind of additional information you need to know. Why didn’t you ask me for all the details? You even aren’t ashamed of using information from stolen letters.

Do carelessness, grubbiness, dishonourableness are the
necessary concomitants of your job?

With disrespect…

Readers were rather taken aback by this comment and there appears to be some doubt over its authenticity - Anthony Watts noted that it was posted from a proxy server. Nevertheless Steve M seems convinced that it is genuine.

The question is, what on Earth has brought this rush of blood to Hantermirov's head (if indeed it is him). Has he been got at?

Jeff Masters on Mann and PCA

Jeff Masters, the meteorologist who blogs at wunderground.com, has written the standard-issue five star review of Mann's Hockey Stick and the Climate Wars.

I thought I'd highlight something Masters wrote about the infamous short-centred principal components analysis used in Mann's paper.

[Mann] takes the reader on a 5-page college-level discussion of the main technique used, Principal Component Analysis (PCA), and shows how his famed "hockey stick" graph came about. It's one of the best descriptions I've seen on how PCA works (though it will be too technical for some.)

Click to read more ...

Number 10 discusses shale gas

This exchange from the House of Commons yesterday on the subject of shale gas is quite interesting.

Graham Stringer (Blackley and Broughton, Labour): Will not the biggest impact on reducing domestic energy bills be achieved by bringing shale gas online as quickly as possible?

Edward Davey (Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Employment Relations, Consumer and Postal Affairs), Business, Innovation and Skills; Kingston and Surbiton, Liberal Democrat): I do not think so. We had a seminar at No. 10 recently, which the Prime Minister participated in, along with myself and the Business Secretary. We heard from experts in the shale gas industry who had been working in America and looking at the major opportunities in places such as Ukraine and China. They were clear that it would take some time for shale gas to be exploited in the UK. They were also clear that we needed strong regulation to proceed and that the shale gas reserves in this country are not quite as large as some people have been speculating.

I'm intrigued by a group of shale gas experts who would be demanding strong regulation and who claim that it will take a long time to do anything and that reserves are not as large as thought. This sounds rather like the Deutsche Bank report on shale. I've glanced at this report in the past and I must say I raised my eyebrows at the suggestion that there would be delays caused by lack of equipment. I mean, can't more equipment be manufactured?

I wonder who Number Ten's experts were?

Rand Simberg reviews the Yamal story

Rand Simberg at PJ Media reviews the Yamal story, quoting extensively from yours truly.

But at a minimum [Yamal] should be the final blow to the hockey stick, and perhaps to the very notion that bristlecone pines and larches are accurate thermometers. It should also be a final blow to the credibility of many of the leading lights of climate “science,” but based on history, it probably won’t be, at least among the political class. What it really should be is the beginning of the major housecleaning necessary if the field is to have any scientific credibility, but that may have to await a general reformation of academia itself. It would help, though, if we get a new government next year that cuts off funding to such charlatans, and the institutions that whitewash their unscientific behavior.

Stern's nut graph

We had an interesting chat a couple of weeks ago about the way the noble Lord Stern had portrayed the effects on climate change on wheat yields. However, alongside his wheat graph is another graph portraying a similar effect of raised temperatures on ground nuts (click for full size).

The cited paper, Vara Prasad et al (2001), is not online, but the abstract is here. Unlike the wheat paper, Vara Prasad appears to look only at the effects of temperature on groundnuts and Stern's graph seems to reflect the abstract pretty much exactly.

Click to read more ...

A book review

Maurizio Morabito points us to this rather interesting review of a book entitled A Perfect Moral Storm: The Ethical Tragedy of Climate Change.

Adam Smith once noted that we are less troubled by the prospect of a hundred million people dying as a result of an earthquake in some distant location than of losing our little finger, but would nevertheless be horrified by the idea we might allow them to die in order to save it. Climate change effectively transforms the former scenario into the latter, and so places unprecedented demands on our moral imagination. Almost every little thing we do contributes to our carbon footprint, which increases greenhouse gases, which could in turn ultimately threaten hundreds of millions of lives in some remote time and place – the uncertainty only adding to the sublime awfulness of our responsibilities.

IPCC reversion

We learned a couple of days ago that the UK government had noted that the amendment of the IPCC's procedures, which appeared to prevent reviewers seeing the other review comments, had been made in error.

The text deleted was this:

All written expert, and government review comments will be made available to reviewers on request during the review process

Now, Marcel Crok is able to confirm that this deletion will indeed by reversed, pointing to this document, which proposes a reversion to the original text be made at the next IPCC meeting at the start of June.

...the deletion of the first part of the original sentence was erroneous. The IPCC-33 decision only pertained to the open availability of drafts, comments and responses, and not to the availability to reviewers on request. Hence, the erroneous deletion of the “All written . . . review process” should be corrected.

In an email, David Holland notes that it remains unclear as to whether the reviewers will be able to see the lead authors' responses.

Perpetual nonsense

Holly Williams, Sky News's China correspondent, reports on a Chinese farmer who has discovered a solution to the world energy crisis. The answer, it seems, is a hybrid electric/wind powered car. Apparently, above 40mph, a wind turbine kicks in and starts to generate power for the car.

Yes, our Holly has uncovered a perpetual motion machine!

Watch the video while you can.

(H/T Niels)

International Disinformation Agency

This from ESI-Africa, a website focused on energy issues for Africa.

Ambassador Richard H. Jones, deputy director of the International Energy Agency (IEA), opened the IEA's April conference by-lined Clean Energy Progress, by saying global temperatures are "probably" going to rise by "six degrees Celsius" by about 2050.

According to the IEA website, Jones has a degree in mathematics. I guess this was a long time ago.

(The Hockey Stick Illusion gets a mention in the article too)

Update on May 16, 2012 by Bishop Hill

In the comments, Jonathan Jones notes that Bloomberg are reporting a slightly different version of events, namely that emissions by 2050 will lead to 6 degrees of warming.

Dealing with The Heretic

Mr Richard Bean
Director
Melbourne Theatre Company

Richard Bean's play The Heretic has been causing a few ructions in Australia ahead of its opening in Melbourne. Richard forwards this email, which was sent to him by Andrew Glikson, a scientist at the Australian National University.

Dear Mr Richard Bean

As an Earth and paleo-climate scientist of some 45 years-long experience and more than 150 peer-reviewed publications, I suggest the show “The Heretic”, which I have not seen but about which I have read, can only lead to trivialization and further denial of what the scientific world regards as the greatest threat humanity and nature are facing.

Click to read more ...

Worse than we thought

The wires are beginning to buzz with the news that a new set of climate talks are about to begin in Berlin. The reports are all breathless with the news that UNFCCC Climate boss Christiana Figueres reckons that it's worse than we thought.

As UN climate chief Christiana Figueres urged all states to turn political pledges into concrete action to save the planet, observers and developing states insisted the rich world should commit to tougher reduction goals.

Figueres cited new research which predicted Earth's temperature rising by as much as five degrees Celsius (41 degrees Fahrenheit) from pre-industrial levels on current pledges, instead of the 2 C limit being targeted.

It may be, however that it is Ms Figueres' mathematics that is "worse than we thought".

H/T Mike.

[Updated to correct Figueres' affiliation]

Stocker in Action

This is a guest post by David Holland

Simon Anthony’s excellent report on Thomas Stocker in Oxford reminds me that I should add a postscript to the piece that Andrew and I posted after the 33rd IPCC Session when the IPCC decided to make the drafts and comments of its Assessment Reports confidential. We did not say so at the time but that was the handiwork work of Thomas Stocker. How he did it is a good story in the style of the "hockey stick" and I have posted a rough draft of it here. In short, it was achieved by the sort of chicanery that we have come to expect from the "directing circle". However for the first time to my knowledge the British Government seems to have has woken up to what’s going and in a letter sent to my MP, has stated,

We are aware that this new text would mean that reviewers would not have the opportunity to see how their comments had been addressed by IPCC authors before acceptance of the final report. It was not the IPCC’s intention to change the procedures in this way and it is likely a drafting error. Indeed, the intention of the update in the procedures was to increase openness in the way that IPCC reports are prepared. We understand that the IPCC is aware of this issue and intends to address it at the next appropriate opportunity.

We shall see - but I will not be holding my breath. If the rule is agreed to be that Expert Reviewers get to see the responses to their comments before each draft of the AR5 Report is published what is to stop them from blowing the whistle if we have another bit of chicanery?

Update:  As Paul points out in the comments, Steve McIntyre did a great forensic post on Stocker's earmark in January this year.