Geek slapped

James Wilsdon has set down his views on the Royal Society elections at the Guardian. This has provoked Bob Ward into one of his inimitable responses. Wilsdon, however, seems more than up to the task of fending off the slings and arrows of outrageous Bobisms. I particularly enjoyed this bit:

I'm also pleased to note that my time as director of science policy was less controversial than Bob's own; years later, we were still clearing up problems caused by Bob's ham-fisted approach to the communication of climate science and climate policy; a service which he now provides with his unique brand of terrier-like tenacity for the LSE's Grantham Institute.

Ouch.

Royal pickle

Updated on May 5, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Last week, the Royal Society announced the list of new appointments to the fellowship for 2013. For climate geeks the only familiar name that of Imperial's Joanna Haigh, who specialises in the solar influence on climate and who, to the best of my knowledge, has not been associated with any kind of activism. I've spotted one other climate scientist, but not one I've come across before.

Unfortunately, the society seems to have got itself into a bit of a pickle over its decision to elevate Prince Andrew to the fellowship too.

As James Wilsdon bluntly puts it this morning:

Click to read more ...

UKIP Scotland's climate spokesman

Congratulations to BH regular Mike Haseler, who has been appointed UKIP's climate change spokesman for Scotland. The press release is as follows:

Mike Haseler known to many through his pseudo-name "Scottish Sceptic" and through his work on the Scottish Climate & Energy Forum has been selected by the UK Independence Party in Scotland to be their spokesman on Energy and Climate.

Click to read more ...

DECC in chaos

A week ago DECC's director of energy strategy and futures resigned, a story reported in the Guardian:

Brearley did not turn up to a renewable energy conference in Scotland, where he was meant to be speaking on the EMR on Monday.

Delegates to the event, organised by the Infrastructure Journal, were told the civil servant was not coming because he had left the department.

But a spokesman for DECC said Brearley was not formally leaving until the summer, having completed the main policy work on the EMR.

Today, one of his colleagues Ravi Gurumurthy, director of strategy, has gone too - he's off to work with David Miliband in New York.

One could be forgiven for thinking that the ship is sinking and that all manner of livestock is heading for safer ground.

Thanks for everything you have done for us, gentlemen.

Quote of the day

Seen on Twitter:

I love the smell of napalm - sorry I mean council “climate change” officers clearing their desks - in the morning #UKIPCouncils

Shell shuns shale

The Telegraph is reporting that Shell will shun UK shale gas development:

Simon Henry, Shell’s chief financial officer, said it had already allocated more than $6bn (£3.8bn) to shale globally and was not going to exceed that sum.

“We have a successful and growing business in North America, we have great opportunities in China, Ukraine and Russia,” he said. “The UK has to compete directly with them and right now nobody even knows whether the gas will flow.”

“Do we want to be first in and be in the headlines every day in the UK? Well, your answer is: we are not,” he said.

We appear to find ourselves in something of a Catch 22 situation. Nobody will invest in the new generating capacity that the government wants because nobody believes that the government policy of institutionalised insanity will last - taxpayers will not bear the kind of price rises that Davey wants to impose on everyone. But while the government is insisting that insanity is the way forward, nobody is going to invest in the UK energy industry at all.

Whether to trust statistics

Betsey Stevenson and Justin Wolfers, writing at Bloomberg's website, consider some rules of thumb for helping the layman decide whether they should trust someone's statistical analysis or not. Here's the first of them:

Focus on how robust a finding is, meaning that different ways of looking at the evidence point to the same conclusion. Do the same patterns repeat in many data sets, in different countries, industries or eras? Are the findings fragile, changing as one makes small changes in how phenomena are measured, and do the results depend on whether particularly influential observations are included? Thanks to Moore’s Law of increasing computing power, it has never been easier or cheaper to assess, test and retest an interesting finding. If the author hasn’t made a convincing case, then don’t be convinced.

It's hard not to recall the case of the Hockey Stick and its reliance on the bristlecones. And all the other paleoclimate studies that are said to support the Mannian stick, and which rely on bristlecones too.

Book burners

Anthony Watts' story about some academics in the US burning a sceptic book is rather wonderful. University folk can be quite extraordinarily foolish can't they?

More evidence that nobody believes in climate policy

The Economist notes that far from pulling back from the oil and gas business, governments - allegedly concerned with climate targets - are actually expanding their fossil fuel businesses and that exploration activity is expanding across the board:

Such behaviour, on the face of it, makes no sense. One possible explanation is that companies are betting that government climate policies will fail; they will be able to burn all their reserves, including new ones, after all. This implies that global temperatures would either soar past the 2°C mark, or be restrained by a technological fix, such as carbon capture and storage, or geo-engineering.

Recent events make such a bet seem rational. On April 16th the European Parliament voted against attempts to shore up Europe’s emissions trading system against collapse. The system is the EU’s flagship environmental policy and the world’s largest carbon market.

Putting it at risk suggests that Europeans have lost their will to endure short-term pain for long-term environmental gain. Nor is this the only such sign. Several cash-strapped EU countries are cutting subsidies for renewable energy. And governments around the world have failed to make progress towards a new global climate-change treaty. Betting against tough climate policies seems almost prudent.

Royal Society responds to Lawson?

Readers may remember that Nigel Lawson had responded positively to Paul Nurse's offer to put forward some scientists who wanted to engage on the great global warming questions. Today, Hannah Devlin, the science editor at the Times, has tweeted that the Royal Society has now sent GWPF a list of scientists who are willing to take part:

I hear @royalsociety has sent @TheGWPF list of top scientists who'd be happy to provide sound advice on evidence for climate change 1/2

I do hope @TheGWPF takes @royalsociety up on this offer to engage with mainstream scientific community 2/2

Nothing from GWPF itself yet.

Update on May 2, 2013 by Bishop Hill

GWPF tweet that they have had nothing from Sir Paul:

@hannahdev @royalsociety sorry, but we have received no such letter

Somebody at the Royal Society press office may be in trouble, I reckon.

50 to 1

This looks like an excellent project - a proposal for a short video looking at the cost of mitigation versus adaptation. The guys behind it are looking for crowdsourcing support, so point your wallets and purses in this direction.

Lords of misrule

I thought yesterday's Liberum Capital note was very interesting, particularly the suggestion that investors reckon that government energy policy is risible. When one thinks about it, the idea that voters would tolerate the vast spike in energy costs that our political masters seem to want is preposterous.

It's interesting then to see today's House of Lords report on EU energy policy (see here, BBC coverage here). Their lordships have decided that there are two things putting off potential investors: the incorporation of a minimum carbon price into the ETS and the lack of a requirement for a fixed proportion of renewables in the energy mix by 2030.

The calculation seems to be that investors will be enticed in if the public are fleeced sufficiently; big bad capitalists will simply be unable to resist all that easy money. Liberum, on the other hand, seem to have thought things through a little further, asking themselves whether the public will tolerate being fleeced to the extent envisaged in Westminster and Brussels. They conclude, correctly in my opinion, that transfers to big business on this scale will be seen as intolerable.

The difference in opinion between the real world and the political world is rather stark, don't you think?

Quote of the day

[It's a] struggle to find a single fund manager that believes energy policy is credible... That is why they are not investing.

Peter Atherton

The lights may stay on, but the economy may go out

Peter Atherton, the head of utilities research at UK broker Liberum Capital has issued an extraordinarily damning assessment of UK energy policy. The good news is that he reckons the lights may not go out. The bad news is that he thinks that this will be because of a "huge spike" in energy prices. This will of course extinguish much of the UK economy.

Here are a few of the highlights in the report.

UK energy policy is not plausible...

The Energy Bill ...effectively re-nationalises the investment-making decision process in the power sector. But it is not clear that policy makers yet appreciate that this also means that the risks and costs associated with these decisions must also transfer to the public.

Click to read more ...

Diary date

This panel debate is tonight in central London.

Will the lights go out?

In February this year, Alistair Buchanan of OFGEM, warned that Britain was on an 'energy rollercoaster' with the combination of old coal and atomic power plants closing and overseas gas supplies shrinking leaving future domestic energy reserves "uncomfortably tight". More recently the finger was again pointed at government for significantly underestimating the scale of the capacity crunch facing the country.  But with government denying any complacency and confident of the provision of secure supplies and the current cold snap testing the stored gas supplies, we ask 'Will the lights go out?' '  FES has brought together 4 excellent and highly knowledgeable speakers covering a range of specialist perspectives to find out;

• Volker Beckers, Former Group CEO, RWE nPower plc 
• Ian Marlee, Senior Partner, SG&G Transmission at OFGEM
• Peter Atherton, Utility Research at Liberum Capital and giver of the FES 2012 annual  lecture - Utility Finance in the 2010s
• Gaynor Hartnell, Chief Executive of the Renewable Energy Association.

Details here. As always, if someone can do me a report, that would interesting.