Diary dates, hunger games edition

Word reaches me of an event in Aberdeen next week:

How To Feed The World
19 May 2015, 18:00 – 19:30 New King’s 6, Old Aberdeen

A panel of experts will discuss the challenge of feeding the ever-growing population.

The world will have to produce more food in the next 50 years than we have consumed in all of human history; an even more daunting challenge considering this increased production has to come from a finite amount of agricultural land amid a changing climate. As a result, business as usual will not do it and novel strategies are required.

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Humanitarianism versus environmentalism

Edinburgh University has decided that it will shun the trend among its fellows and refuse to divest its pension fund from the fossil fuelled part of the energy industry. Instead it will require companies in which it invests to report on their emissions.

Companies will be required to report on their emissions and benchmark them according to best performance in their sector.

In addition, the University will focus specifically on companies involved in the extraction of the highest carbon-emitting fossil fuels: coal and tar sands.

The University will withdraw from investment in these companies if: realistic alternative sources of energy are available and the companies involved are not investing in technologies that help address the effects of carbon emissions and climate change.

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The consolation prize

After the appointment of a green tinged minister at DECC, the realist community's consolation prize from the Cameron government is the appointment of a windfarm sceptic as one of her underlings. Andrea Leadsom has campaigned vigorously and consistently against onshore wind but despite this has managed to get herself a role as minister of state at DECC.

However, what this signfies is unclear. One wouldn't put it past Mr Cameron to try to spend his way out of a corner by going for the eye-wateringly expensive offshore wind instead.

Heatwaves affect wheat yields without causing problems

Further to the last post, the news on wheat yields is similarly interesting. Today Tack et al report that the wheat yields are affected by both extreme spring heat and freezing events in the autumn. Their regression analyses reveal that the benefits from warmer temperatures - namely fewer freezing events - will be outweighed by the losses from increasingly prevalent spring heatwaves. It's all going to be worse than we thought.

Meanwhile, the United Nations is expecting a bumper wheat harvest.

The world is awash in wheat and is likely to remain that way, the UN FAO said in its latest semi-annual Food Outlook report. The past two years have both seen record wheat crops, leaving exceptionally large inventories—and lower prices.

It will be a disaster, but not yet.

Sea level rising faster without causing problems

Two papers on sea level have caught the eye this week. Chris Watson and colleagues from the University of Tasmania claim to have detected an error in the satellite measurements for the 1990s. Having corrected the alleged error, more recent decades are warming relatively faster and so a certain amount of vindication of the climate models' projections of acceleration is claimed.

Meanwhile, Kench and colleagues working at the University of Auckland have found no evidence that coral atolls are sinking beneath the waves. Having monitored 29 islands in Funafuti Atoll, they find if anything a slight increase in land area.

Voters hiding in deep ocean - Josh 326

One of the main things we learned from the recent UK General Election was that the forecasters got it catastrophically wrong - catastrophic in that the pollsters reputations are now in shreds. The collective narrative was that it had to be a hung parliament, nothing else was possible - even Nate Silver agreed so it had to be true.

Yet how wrong they were.

Not everyone was wrong - Dan Hodges got it about right, as did Janet Daley, and I am sure there were others.

It is horriblly like that other consensus - the one that always has to be 97% and which we all know is also catastrophically wrong. 

H/t to Paul Matthews whose excellent blog post has the reference to voters hiding in the deep ocean.

Cartoons by Josh

Cameron's ruddy duck

So David Cameron won himself a majority and the chance to return some sanity to the UK's energy policy after the disastrous tenures of Ed Davey and, before him, Ed Milliband. All it was going to take was the gumption to face down the green blob and put the consumer interest ahead of the vested interest.

Unfortunately, Mr Cameron may well have ducked this particular challenge, as it has now emerged that the DECC portfolio is being handed to Amber Rudd, formerly a junior minister in the department, who is seen as a green friendly appointment. In an interview last year she had this to say:

The main purpose for me [here] is to get up to speed with the relationships and the issues to do with delivering one of the most important things we're ever going to do, which is limiting global warming to under 2°C.

I don't think you could get a cigarette paper between me and Labour on our commitment to getting a deal in Paris.

Lucky old vested interests.

Update on May 11, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Interestingly, the Culture portfolio has gone to John Whittingdale, a man who has described the BBC licence fee as "worse than the poll tax". Fair to say though, that with a wafer thin majority, the chances of Cameron getting a bill to abolish the licence fee are close to zero.

Update on May 11, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Rudd is apparently pro-shale gas too. Is it paying lip-service to greenery on the one hand and going hell for leather for gas on the other? It doesn't seem very sensible if so, given that the subsidies that go with the greenery make burning gas unprofitable.

Rebecca Roache's potty time

Readers may remember a paper I wrote about a few years back which considered whether the human race shouldn't biomedically modify itself to have a smaller impact on Gaia. This tinkering with a kind of eco-eugenics was the stuff of 15-minute headlines, and was quickly forgotten, but one of the paper's author's came to my attention again over the weekend when Maurizio tweeted about her ramblings in the wake of the election result. Here's her considered view of Cameron's victory, published at the Practical Ethics blog of the University of Oxford:

One of the first things I did after seeing the depressing election news this morning was check to see which of my Facebook friends ‘like’ the pages of the Conservatives or David Cameron, and unfriend them. (Thankfully, none of my friends ‘like’ the UKIP page.) Life is too short, I thought, to hang out with people who hold abhorrent political views, even if it’s just online...

I don’t want to be friends with racists, sexists, or homophobes. And I don’t want to be friends with Conservatives either.

There is some interesting discussion in the comments as to whether her astonishing bigotry makes it impossible for anyone of right-wing political views to attend Ms Roache's course. Last week, someone helpfully pointed out to me that something like 90% of UK academics have left-wing views of one kind or another. That being the case, and in the light of the kind of behaviour described above, what future is there for the universities?

BBC metropolitan elite, moi?

Result confirms my suspicion about uncaring ignorant Britain the moment you step outside of London.

Gaia Vince is not amused

Lomborg axed

The Australian media reports:

The University of Western Australia has cancelled the contract for a policy centre that was to be headed up by controversial academic Bjorn Lomborg after a "passionate emotional reaction" to the plan.

The Federal Government had pledged to contribute $4 million to the Consensus Centre, a think tank that was to use methods similar to those used by Dr Lomberg's Copenhagen Centre.

If you are an academic, dissent on climate change or climate change policy will lead to a loss of your livelihood.

You have been warned.

DECCline and fall?

I was half-jokingly suggesting that we should start a campaign to have Owen Paterson made the next energy and climate change minister - in reality I can't see Cameron having the gumption to stand up to the green blob for even five minutes. However, Jonathan Jones points me to an interesting post at Ruth Dixon's blog, which raises an interesting possibility:

For what it’s worth (and based entirely on gut feeling) I don’t think the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC) will survive to the end of the forthcoming 5-year parliament. I predict that its functions will be returned to their original departments (out of which DECC was carved in 2008). Energy will go back to Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) and Climate Change will go to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA).

If energy were to be transferred to BIS, it would at least give the country a chance of dealing with the energy supply crisis without having any practical policies choked off at source by the blob. It's a good idea.

Which probably means it will not happen.

Give us this day our Davey toast

So there was an election yesterday, an event that has been occupying other people rather more than it has me. I'm increasingly of the opinion that the government always gets in.

Still, it's worth surveying the results so far as regards prominent parliamentary participants in the climate change debate. The good news is that Ed Davey is history, while prominent questioners of the climate consensus such as Graham Stringer, Peter Lilley, Owen Paterson and Douglas Carswell have all retained their seats. Caroline Lucas remains, as do fellow members of the climate-very-concerned contingent Zac Goldsmith and Barry Gardiner.

A good day to bury bad science

The University of Bristol has a high tolerance for hoary old tosh, but you have to wonder if they have not been just a bit embarrassed by Stefan Lewandowsky, whose oeuvre could best be described as "Goebbels with graphs". How else do we explain the fact that they have elected to do the press release for the great man's latest psychological petard on the day of the general election? A good day to bury bad science?

Professor Stephan Lewandowsky, from Bristol’s School of Experimental Psychology and the Cabot Institute, and colleagues from Harvard University and three institutions in Australia show how the language used by people who oppose the scientific consensus on climate change has seeped into scientists’ discussion of the alleged recent ‘hiatus’ or ‘pause’ in global warming, and has thereby unwittingly reinforced a misleading message.

What insight! What erudition!

What a waste of money.

Update on May 7, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Observations about the UK election don't apply to this paper published today, which is written by two Americans, but it's just as bad as Lew's by the looks of it:

Environmental communication researchers have focused on the role of media frames in the formation of public opinion. Yet, little is known about how citizens incorporate such frames into everyday conversations. We address this issue by examining the stream of Twitter conversations about climate change over two years. We demonstrate that hoax frames that question the reality of climate change prevail in the US, particularly in “red states” compared to the UK, Canada, and Australia or “blue states” in the US. We also investigate the use of terms, “global warming” and “climate change.” We find that red states prefer “global warming” to “climate change” compared to blue states and “global warming” is particularly associated with hoax frames

There's something about Bristol

There is a really violent undercurrent to this election:

Vandals targeted a Conservative MP days before the election by deliberately flooding her garden with 1,300 litres of sticky oil.

Last week cars belonging to Ms Leslie and her elderly father Ian, 70, were daubed with paint and the words 'Tory Scum' were scrawled along the bodywork.

Charlotte Leslie has written about her shock at finding that vandals had punctured the oil tank in her garden, causing her parents' entire heating supply for the year to seep into the ground.

The thuggery seems to have been prompted by Ms Leslie's support for unconventional oil and gas development. In other words it's the environmentalists again.

What goes around...

Environmentalists have two main features to their modus operandi.

• Making up tall stories
• Trying to suppress dissenting views

One of the ways in which they try to achieve the second of these aims has been through complaints to media and advertising "regulators", bodies that they have tended to wholeheartedly support.

Until, that is, those bodies start coming up with the wrong answers. Or, worse still, when their opponents adopt the same approach. Given the other part of the green MO noted above, environmentalists are of couse wide open to retaliation and today brings the satisfying news that Greenpeace have been well and truly hoist with their own petard:

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