Another power station to close

SSE has announced that it is to close a coal-fired power station at Ferrybridge in West Yorkshire, taking a further 2GW of capacity out of the grid. I'm not sure whether this has been factored into Ofgem's capacity margin calculations already.

The unions, who have been toeing the green line for years, are squealing loudly. If I were one of their members I would be wondering what I'd been paying them for all this time.

Greens to gross-out over Gaia gains

I commend to readers this brilliant article by Jesse Ausubel at the Breakthrough Institute blog.

Despite predictions of runaway ecological destruction, beginning in the 1970s, Americans began to consume less and tread more lightly on the planet. Over the past several decades, through technological innovation, Americans now grow more food on less acres, eat more sources of meat that are less land-intrusive, and used water more efficiently so that water use is lower than in 1970. The result: lands that were once used for farms and logging operations are now returning as forests and grasslands, along with wildlife, such as the return of humpback whales off the shores of New York City (pictured above). As Jesse Ausubel elucidates in a new essay for Breakthrough Journal, as humans depend less on nature for the well-being, the more nature they have returned.

Wow. Things are getting better for Gaia. Environmentalists are going to hate this.

Sex and the Guardian

As sure as the sun rises every morning, the Guardian's front page will be a mass of distortions, misdirections and misconceptions. Today's effort is about fossil fuels again, and claims that they are "subsidised" to the tune of $10m a minute. Read a little further, and you discover that when they say "subsidy" they mean something rather different.

The vast sum is largely due to polluters not paying the costs imposed on governments by the burning of coal, oil and gas. These include the harm caused to local populations by air pollution as well as to people across the globe affected by the floods, droughts and storms being driven by climate change.

In similar fashion, you can be fairly sure that when the Guardian says "black" it means what people usually refer to as "white", "yes" probably means "no", and that when a Guardian journalist tells you that he "didn't have sex with that woman" the truth is probably entirely indecent.

Roger's obsession with fairness and impartiality

Roger Harrabin is positively revelling in his role as agitator for the green movement today, with an article on the views of Unilever boss Paul Polman, who is apparently demanding decarbonisation.

This is an astonishingly poor article. For a start, we have to wonder why the views of a businessman nobody has ever heard of are considered newsworthy. Of course it fits the BBC's agenda, in a way that "people dying from lack of fossil fuels" just doesn't ("lifting them out of poverty", Roger's concession to the facts on the ground, is not exactly the same as "stopping them dying", in my opinion). Again and again we see the news agenda being set by whatever green-tinged press release happens to pop into its correspondents' inboxes of a morning. GWPF press releases, or even things like the Ecomodernist Manifesto go straight in the bin.

Click to read more ...

With apologies to Joel Pett

I found myself thinking about a well-known climate change cartoon by Joel Pett, and wondered if the wording didn't need to be changed slightly (original here). The words on the left come from the Climategate emails.

Polling all scientists - Josh 327

Roddy Cambell says:

The decent mass of scientific society, in a quiet but significant majority, getting on with it in a civilised and peaceful fashion in the library/laboratory/Antarctica/satellites/rain forest/literature, no shouting please, debating what works and what is right.  The righteous Union of Concerned Climate Hawks with their megaphones, degrowth manifestos, 100-denier underwear, dinner inspections, LSE platforms and disinvestment petitions.  Who wouldn't be a bit shy?

Many thanks to Roddy for the idea of Shy Scientists being like Shy Tories - they won't offer their thoughts when there are so many vocal alarmists ready to shout them down. 

The background to the cartoon is the Lew paper which Richard Betts critiques here and which is being discussed over at Lew's blog here.

Cartoons by Josh

PS If you feel like donating then please do. I am trying to set aside time to put some of the cartoons into a book. Any support would be greatly appreciated!

Pope Francis and Ben Tre

The Pope has apparently lent his approval to a petition by the Catholic Climate Movement, which wants to step up the  pace on global warming policy. The petition's wording is as follows:

Climate change affects everyone, but especially the poor and most vulnerable people. Impelled by our Catholic faith, we call on you to drastically cut carbon emissions to keep the global temperature rise below the dangerous threshold of 1.5°C, and to aid the world’s poorest in coping with climate change impacts.

No fossil fuels for African people then. To save the poorest we had to abandon the poorest. It's Bến Tre all over again.

Lewandowsky and Oreskes: normal service resumed

Updated on May 15, 2015 by Bishop Hill

For those who have been following the unfolding saga of the latest Lew paper, the said work of art has now been published at Global Environmental Change. There is little that will cause anyone any great surprise - it's all out of the standard Lewandowsky playbook: strawman following nonsense following outright falsehood. Take the case he outlines for why there is no pause:

Claims about a “pause” typically invoke a period commencing in 1998; the top panel of the figure shows that that year saw particularly high temperatures owing to an extreme El Niño event. When this single outlying year is omitted (as illustrated in the bottom panel), the purported pause in warming is no longer apparent. Statistically, what one observes is a decrease in the rate of warming—a slowdown, if you will—but this slowdown is at most modest: during the last 15 years (1999–2013) the linear trend is .13 °C/decade, compared to the trend for the overall period (1970–2013) which is .18 °C/decade. It is only when 1998 is arbitrarily used as the starting point to define the “pause” that the recent rate of global warming has been appreciably lower (.10 °C/decade) than the long-term trend.

Click to read more ...

Barker takes the rotating door

Everybody breathed a sigh of relief with the news last year that Greg Barker was going to stand down as an MP. Having been one of the leading lights of the crony capitalist wing of the Conservative Party, his exit could only be a positive development.

Not that Barker was going to let things improve if he could help it, and news comes to us today that he has miraculously been appointed to the board of green lobbyists the Climate Group, who "work with corporate and government partners to develop climate finance mechanisms, business models which promote innovation, and supportive policy frameworks".

I wonder if Amber Rudd has started putting out feelers yet?

Is there any point to universities?

Bjorn Lomborg's opinion piece in the Wall Street Journal looks at the hate campaign that saw his proposed thinktank at the University of Western Australia consigned to ashes.

The new center in Perth was to be a collaboration with a think tank I run, Copenhagen Consensus, which for a decade has conducted similar research. Working with more than 100 economists, including seven Nobel laureates, we have produced research that measures the social and economic benefits of a wide range of policies, such as fighting malaria, reducing malnutrition, cutting air pollution, improving education and tackling climate change.

Therein lay the problem. This kind of comparison can upset those who are committed to advocating less effective investments, particularly poor responses to climate change.

Click to read more ...

The lukewarmer meme

The talking point this morning is going to be the history of the use of the term "lukewarmer" at the Making Science Public blog. It focuses on its appearances in the mainstream press, and thus misses the older history, going right back to the late John Daly. Nevertheless it's fun to see the way the term crept into the legacy media after doing the rounds of new media for years beforehand. 

It would have also been interesting to juxtapose the term against the responses from the mainstream, principally the use of the d-word. Mind you, in the era when even President Obama is casually referred to as a climate denier for not toeing the green line, you can see that you are dealing with desperate attempts to smear rather than to enlighten.

The Vatican blinks

Anthony is reporting rumours that the Vatican just blinked on climate change.

Word has it, according to Vaticanist Sandro Magister, Pope Francis has decided to postpone the publication of his long-awaited encyclical on the environment. The reason, according to Magister, is that the Pope realized that the document in its current state had no chance of receiving the approval of the Congregation of the Doctrine of the Faith under the leadership of Cardinal Gerhard Müller.

Mind you, once one realises the horrors that climate change policy is dishing out in the developing world, the Pope should probably be shuddering, as well as blinking.

Science is often flawed

That is the message of this long piece at Vox.com

Recently, the conversation about science's wrongness has gone mainstream. You can read, in publications like Vox, the New York Times or the Economist, about how the research process is far from perfect — from flaws in peer review to the fact that many published results simply can't be replicated. The crisis has gotten so bad that the editor of The Lancet medical journal Richard Horton recently lamented, "Much of the scientific literature, perhaps half, may simply be untrue."

That science can fail, however, shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. It's a human construct, after all. And if we simply accepted that science often works imperfectly, we'd be better off. We'd stop considering science a collection of immutable facts. We'd stop assuming every single study has definitive answers that should be trumpeted in over-the-top headlines. Instead, we'd start to appreciate science for what it is: a long and grinding process carried out by fallible humans, involving false starts, dead ends, and, along the way, incorrect and unimportant studies that only grope at the truth, slowly and incrementally.

I'm not sure that this is meant to apply to climate science though.

Sir Paul's new politicking

With his time at the helm of the Royal Society winding down over the rest of the year, Sir Paul Nurse must have been starting to wonder how he could continue his work as a political agitator once he no longer had access to the Royal Society's pulpit. News today reveals that he may be exploring new niches:

A high level group of scientists is to be recruited to provide independent advice to the European Commission.

The panel will supersede the role of chief scientific advisor that was controversially abolished last year by new EC President Jean-Claude Juncker.

The commission wants also to strengthen its relationship with the national academies across Europe.

Sir Paul is going to be advising Mr Juncker on the recruitment of this group of scientists, so it will be interesting to see (a) if he ends up on the panel himself and (b) if its ranks are filled with the doomsters and millennarians whose company Sir Paul seems to find so congenial.

Diary dates, divestment edition

There's a Guardian campaign afoot, and academia is leaping into action to help the cause of right-on folk. This time it's the Cambridge lot.

Climate Damage, Portfolio Risk and Fossil Fuel Investments
Date: 12:30-14:00, Monday 27th April 2015
Venue: KH107, Keynes House, Judge Business School, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, CB2 1AG

CSaP Policy Fellow Howard Covington is giving the first EPRG Energy & Environment Seminar of the Easter term 2015. At 12:30 on Monday 27th April Howard will give a paper on "Climate Damage, Portfolio Risk and Fossil Fuel Investments".

Howard is a former investment banker and asset manager, and has been chief executive of two City firms. He is a Trustee of the Science Museum and the Royal Institution, and the first non-academic chairman of the Isaac Newton Institute for Mathematical Sciences at Cambridge. He has written op-ed pieces on climate change for the Wall Street Journal and Financial Times. He is now the Chairman of Science Museum's Finance and Strategy Committee.

Mr Covington seems chummy with Chris Rapley.