Compulsory indoctrination in schools

As John Shade and I noted in our Climate Control report, the latest edition of the National Curriculum has removed all mention of "sustainable development", a concept that formed the very basis of the previous edition. The government's decision to rein back on the indoctrination of children in schools has understandably angered some within the green movement, including Joan Walley, the chairman of the Commons' Environmental Audit Committee:

Labour should commit to including sustainable development in the national curriculum, a senior backbencher has said.

The call from Joan Walley, who chairs the Commons' environmental audit committee, comes as the opposition party draws up its policy on green issues ahead of next year's general election.

However, it seems that in the university sector, the momentum is in the other direction:

Walley has been working with Keele University, where chancellor and green champion Jonathan Porritt is introducing a sustainable development core discipline in each subject.

"But what's the point of having that at university if it's not seamless back through college and back through secondary school?" she told Politics.co.uk.

Time to rein back the funding.

Divergence problem solved (allegedly)

An article in Newsweek is claiming that the divergence problem has been solved:

[The] solution is simple, elegant, and intuitive: global dimming. Since the 1960s—exactly when tree-ring data started to go awry—“there’s been large scale decreases in the amount of light that’s reaching the earth,” says Stine. It’s fairly easy to see why, too. In rapidly industrializing parts of the world with fewer emissions laws—like Southeast Asia—the light decline is particularly steep, and continues into the 21st century. On the other hand, in areas like the U.S. and Europe, you see a rapid decline in the middle of the 20th century, but then light levels steady themselves later on—right around the time most air pollution laws were put into place.

The article is largely the normal news magazine misrepresentation of Climategate and the scientific issues around temperature reconstructions and is not really worth the time of anyone other than the global warming faithful. However, the source of the alleged breakthrough is a paper by AR Stine and Peter Huybers, published in Nature Communications.

Annual growth ring variations in Arctic trees are often used to reconstruct surface temperature. In general, however, the growth of Arctic vegetation is limited both by temperature and light availability, suggesting that variations in atmospheric transmissivity may also influence tree-ring characteristics. Here we show that Arctic tree-ring density is sensitive to changes in light availability across two distinct phenomena: explosive volcanic eruptions (P<0.01) and the recent epoch of global dimming (P<0.01). In each case, the greatest response is found in the most light-limited regions of the Arctic. Essentially no late 20th century decline in tree-ring density relative to temperature is seen in the least light-limited regions of the Arctic. Consistent results follow from analysis of tree-ring width and from individually analysing each of seven tree species. Light availability thus appears an important control, opening the possibility for using tree rings to reconstruct historical changes in surface light intensity.

It seems that trees whose growth was said to be limited by temperature are actually sometimes limited by something else altogether.

This is one for Mr McIntyre, I fancy.

Does not compute

This is going to confuse our environmentalist friends. Readers will recall that the only one of GWPF's funders identified to date turned out to be, not a representative of big oil from Dallas or Houston, but an obscure hedge fund guy from Australia, Sir Michael Hintze. Across the world, big-oil-conspiracy theorists scratched their heads in confusion.

Hintze has now upped the ante by giving a £5m donation to the Natural History Museum.

[Hintze] said that museum director Dr Michael Dixon, who said some of the money would be spent on climate change research, was free to spend it as he wished.

Click to read more ...

Investors shun UK energy market

Peter Atherton of Liberum Capital has been liveblogging Centrica's briefing for analysts this morning, and it is clear that all is not well in the UK energy sector (as if we needed reminding):

Centrica expects to continue to shift capital from UK to north America. Lower political risk cited as one of the reasons.

And a few days ago he was telling us about US investors' views on the UK market:

I asked NY investors to rank UK utility sector 1 to 10 for attractiveness. 1 being no way and 10 being unmissable. Average score today was 4.

In Boston, the average was 3.

How are you going to talk your way out of this Mr Davey?

Injecting reality

Many environmentalists - BH favourites Leo Hickman and Richard Dixon among them - are tweeting about a story (£) in the Times today which claims that fracking has been linked to an increase incidence of earthquakes in Oklahoma.

I heard this story yesterday and there is considerably less to it than meets the eye. According to NPR, the US Geological Survey noted an increase in the incidence of magnitude 3 temblors associated with injection wells. These are wells drilled for the purposes of disposing of waste water, often from oil and gas production.

At the head of the NPR story is this:

May 6, 2014

A previous version of this story incorrectly said that the United States Geological Survey had linked an increase in seismic activity in Oklahoma to fracking.

So not really earthquakes, and not fracking.

Update on May 8, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Leo is insisting that some of the water will have come from fracking operations and that it's therefore OK to say that fracking caused these tremors.

Dessler rebuts

Updated on May 8, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Is it just me that reads every paper by Andrew Dessler as an attempted rebuttal of some sceptic position or another? His latest paper was submitted to Geophysical Research Letters just three weeks after the publication of the Lewis and Crok report on climate sensitivity and reads as though it was written in direct response to it. Here's the abstract:

Estimates of the Earth's equilibrium climate sensitivity (ECS) from 20^th-century observations predict a lower ECS than estimates from climate models, paleoclimate data, and interannual variability. Here we show that estimates of ECS from 20^th-century observations are sensitive to the assumed efficacy of aerosol and ozone forcing (efficacy for a forcer is the amount of warming per unit global average forcing divided by the warming per unit forcing from CO₂).

Click to read more ...

Lords tell government to get fracking

The House of Lords Economic Affairs Committee has told the government to get the finger out on shale gas development.

We recommend that:

• the Prime Minister should establish a new Committee or Sub-Committee of the Cabinet, chaired by the Chancellor, dedicated to ensuring that his commitment to “go all out for shale” is matched by action;
• the Government should streamline and improve the unwieldy regulatory structure to make it effective as well as rigorous;
• the Government should take the lead in setting out the economic benefits of shale and in reassuring the public that with proper regulation environmental and health risks of developing it are low;
• the industry should engage better with local communities, building on its community benefit schemes, ensuring that its plans are clear and well-explained, meticulously observing regulations and planning conditions and generally being a good neighbour;
• exploration, appraisal and then development of the United Kingdom’s substantial shale gas and oil resources should be recognised as an urgent national priority.

This is nice stuff, but one has to wonder whether it will have any effect at all. The bureaucracy at DECC is in the hands of environmentalists, the ministers are all greens too, the brakes have applied and there is no sign that they will be released any time soon; the only solution I can see is a dedicated ministry for unconventional fossil fuels. But with Cameron and Clegg wedded to the green vote this is only a pipe dream.

We await a cold winter with interest.

Update on May 8, 2014 by Bishop Hill

In related news, the Scottish government has rejected calls for an all-out ban on unconventional gas developments, although you have to wonder if their buffer zones plan will have the same effect.

Diary date: Happy Thursdays

The House of Lords is releasing its report on shale gas tomorrow and to mark the occasion Benny Peiser is going to be debating unconvential gas on a new subscription radio service called Fubar. He's up against a gentleman known only as "Bez", who apparently used to be in a famous beat combo called the Happy Mondays (who came after Duran Duran and are therefore beyond my ken).

Fubar comes to you via a mobile app, but there is a free 30-day trial, so everyone can listen if they like.

The show is between 10am and 1pm, but there is no indication of when the shale segment will be.

Update on May 7, 2014 by Bishop Hill

In related news, Ed Davey has taken to the pages of the Sun (£) to emphasise the energy security benefits of shale gas in the light of the Ukraine crisis.

Update on May 7, 2014 by Bishop Hill

Benny emails to say that the debate is at 10:30 or thereabouts.

What the public needs to know about GCMs

Anthony has a completely brilliant comment from Robert Brown about the ensemble of climate models and the truth about them that is never explained to the public:

...until the people doing “statistics” on the output of the GCMs come to their senses and stop treating each GCM as if it is an independent and identically distributed sample drawn from a distribution of perfectly written GCM codes plus unknown but unbiased internal errors — which is precisely what AR5 does, as is explicitly acknowledged in section 9.2 in precisely two paragraphs hidden neatly in the middle that more or less add up to “all of the `confidence’ given the estimates listed at the beginning of chapter 9 is basically human opinion bullshit, not something that can be backed up by any sort of axiomatically correct statistical analysis” — the public will be safely protected from any “dangerous” knowledge of the ongoing failure of the GCMs to actually predict or hindcast anything at all particularly accurately outside of the reference interval.

De Lange and Carter on sea level

Willem de Lange and Bob Carter have written a report on sea level rise for the GWPF. This is really good stuff and I thoroughly recommend it to readers. Here is the press release:

A new report published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation stresses the importance of revising the current expensive policies that seek to mitigate an assumed global sea-level rise by cutting human carbon dioxide emissions.

The report, co-authored by Dr Willem de Lange (Waikato University) and Dr Bob Carter (formerly Otago and James Cook Universities), provides a succinct summary of the primary scientific issues relevant to devising cost-effective policies regarding sea-level change, and identifies that adaptation is more cost-effective than mitigation, a similar conclusion to that reached by the IPCC in their recent 5th Assessment Report. 

"Though sea-level change is presented to the public as a singular issue of damaging global rise, such simplicity only exists in the virtual reality imagined by computer models," said Dr Carter, continuing that "the reality is that at different locations around the world sea-level is either rising or falling at individual rates of up to several mm/year, depending upon the local circumstances."

The report argues that such local and regional variability must be recognized in any sensible national sea-level policy plan, which must deal with the reality of measured sea-level change on nearby coasts rather than with a notional and speculative global average sea-level.

Dr de Lange stresses that some excellent coastal management plans of this type already exist, for example the UK¹s Thames Estuary 2100 project. "This plan assesses the vulnerability of the City of London to storm surge and flood impacts associated with relative sea-level rise, and it is one of first major flood risk assessments in the world that places adaptation to climate change at its core," said Dr de Lange.

The new report presents three major sea-level policy conclusions, which are:

• Abandonment of costly and ineffectual policies aimed at stopping 'global' sea-level rise.
• Recognition of the local or regional nature of sea-level hazard and the requirement for location specific policy that needs to cover particular cases of both rising and falling sea-level.
• Use of planning controls that are flexible and adaptive in nature, including the deployment of environmentally suitable engineering solutions to particular coastal problems.

Read the whole thing.

Swedes abandon CCS

The Swedish energy giant Vattenfall has decided that carbon capture and storage is a dead duck and will wind up its research efforts in the area.

The state-owned giant had been investing in this technology for more than 10 years, with plans for a power plant equipped with CCS in 2016.

Capturing and liquifying CO2 coming from carbon combustion to later store it underground was meant to curb greenhouse effect gas emissions, but its costs and the energy it requires make the technology unviable.

This really does put a question mark over the direction taken by Ed Davey, who is hosing down oil majors with money in an attempt to keep them working on the technology. It's the 1970s all over again - ministers pick winners while the public watches them sink without trace, all the time wondering if it would have been better simply to have burnt the cash in a power station, which at least would have generated something useful.

Worst BBC show ever?

BBC Radio 4's Costing the Earth show took a break from its normal magazine format this week, going instead for a panel debate about the future of food. It may just have been the most toe-curling piece of radio I've ever heard from our national broadcaster. I think I must have switched off something like a dozen times during the course of the half-hour show as one preposterous position after another was put forward by the hand-picked halfwits who made up the majority of the panel. It was archetypal BBC stuff:

• Audience of noisy left wing hippies - check
• Biased panel - check
• Frequent climate change references - check
• Calls for world government - check

Click to read more ...

Tip drive

It's time I did a tip drive again I think. If you want to help keep the BH show on the road, you can donate or subscribe using the links over there on the right.

Grateful thanks to everyone who helps out.

Diary date: Exetertwitterers edition

On 8 May, the University of Exeter is holding a Twitter-based Q&A session with some of its climate gurus:

Do you have a burning question about climate science?

We’ll be letting our researchers take over the @UofE_Research Twitter account on Thursday 8 May between 11.30 – 12.30. Professors Neil Adger, Mat Collins, Peter Cox, Richard Betts, and Dr Saffron O'Neill will be on hand to answer your questions on the latest developments in climate science. Each of our participants has contributed to the recently published Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report.

Details here.

More from the empty set

Readers may remember the fun we had with a couple of papers at the start of the year. Cai et al found that climate models that simulated extreme rainfall well predicted more frequent El Ninos. Meanwhile Sherwood et al found that climate models that simulated clouds well had high climate sensitivity, a position that I characterised as "the best cloud simulators are the worst temperature simulators". Much amusement ensued when it emerged that the intersection of "best cloud simulators" with "best rainfall simulators" was in fact the empty set.

Leo Hickman now points us to a new paper by Su et al, which examines some climate models and concludes:

New model performance metrics proposed in this work, which emphasize how models reproduce satellite observed spatial variations of zonal-mean cloud fraction and relative humidity associated with the Hadley Circulation, indicate that the models closer to the satellite observations tend to have equilibrium climate sensitivity higher than the multi-model-mean.

This is an admirable confirmation of Sherwood's findings. Like I said: the best cloud simulators are the worst temperature simulators.