Glacial George

George Monbiot, Guardian 27 January 2000

The Himalayan glaciers are retreating so fast that the rivers may dry up in the summer by 2040. The results, if that happens, will be catastrophic.

Dr Bob Bradnock, geographer,  Letter to the Guardian, 4 February 2000

Sadly, in seeking to make easy points about global warming [Monbiot] has got his "facts" wrong. Glaciers contribute virtually nothing to the flow of the Ganges, Brahmaputra and Indus rivers, which depend primarily on monsoon rain and to a much lesser extent on snow melt (not glacier melt).

There has been no long term decline in precipitation in the Himalaya. The idea that the glaciers are retreating so fast that the rivers may dry up by the summer of 2040 displays an embarrassing ignorance of the normal hydrological cycle of all these rivers, whose low flow period is in the winter, and which in summer continue to pour water down from the Himalaya.

George Monbiot, The Guardian, 29 July 2009

India is finally lumbering into action on climate change.

Though this country is likely to be hit harder than almost anywhere else by the climate crash, not least because its food production is largely dependent on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers, which are rapidly retreating, it has almost been a point of pride in India not to respond to the requests of richer nations to limit its emissions.

Scientific American today

A growing number of studies based on satellite data and stream chemistry analyses have found that far less surface water comes from glacier melt than previously assumed. In Peru's Rio Santa, which drains the Cordilleras Blanca mountain range, glacier contribution appears to be between 10 and 20 percent. In the eastern Himalayas, it is less than 5 percent.

...

"There has been a lot of misinformation and confusion about it," said Peter Gleick, co-director of the California-based Pacific Institute for Studies in Development, Environment and Security. "

Yes, indeed.

Snippets from the BMJ conference

A few days back, I mentioned the BMJ conference on the purported links between climate change, security and health. Videos of some of the talks have been posted up on YouTube and I've spent some time going through them.

The discussions were not recorded, but there were still was some surprising (or perhaps not so surprising stuff) in the lectures.

• Prof Sir Andy Haines, the head of the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, reported that the social cost of carbon (the externality in other words) has been estimated in some recent papers to be $1000/tonne, a figure Richard Tol, a specialist in the area, describes as "complete nonsense". Sir Andy has kindly pointed me to the source for this figure - a discussion paper by Ackerman and Stanton of the Stockholm Environment Institute. I think it's fair to say that the paper's upping of the cost of carbon from $21/tonne to $1000 and higher is fairly jawdropping. I think this is what climatologists call "the power of models".
• Prof Hugh Montgomery, director of the UCL Institute for Human Health and Performance, described a fence being built between India and Bangladesh, alleging that this was being done to deal with the threat of climate refugees. Why would you build a fence now to deal with a problem you think will only affect you decades into the future, I wondered? I asked the geographer Bob Bradnock - a Bangladesh specialist - about Prof Montgomery's idea. This was his reply

The plan to build a fence between Bangladesh and India has a long history. When Bangladesh separated from Pakistan in 1971 some 10 million refugees fled across the border 'temporarily'. Most went back, but there has been a long term significant influx of Bangladeshi migrants into India. The building of a fence was planned to prevent this flow, and in its inception and building had nothing to do with the anticipated effects of climate change. It is true that pressure on resources has grown greatly in Bangladesh, despite great increases in agricultural productivity over the last thirty years, because population has also grown fast, doubling over the last thirty years or so. The idea that the fence was constructed to prevent climate induiced migration is completely without foundation, even though today some Indians use threatened climate change as an ex post facto justification

• Jon Snow the newsreader said that the media has "lost faith in climate change" - it won't cover global warming any longer because of Climategate. He speaks of the "war fought by the opponents of the belief in climate change"; "we are in a bad state", he says. (here from about 2min). "We" is an interesting choice of pronoun.

WWF denies it has infiltrated IPCC

From here.

WWF has refuted as "ludicrous" claims in a new climate change denial book that it had "infiltrated" the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the respected international body charged with advancing knowledge on climate change and its impacts.

The BEST on offer - Josh 123

 

Click for a bigger image

All your BEST jokes please, dont hold back now.

Sensitivity analysis

Hilary Ostrov is taking some potshots at poor old Peter Gleick, who seems to have made himself look a bit foolish by jumping up and down accusing Donna LaF of lying and then failing to provide any evidence of such lies.

I have my own little anecdote on this subject too. You will recall that it was suggested some time ago that Gleick had written his review of the Delinquent Teenager without actually having read the book. At the time I thought I'd ask if this was true, so I sent him a tweet. This is the subseqent exchange.

Click to read more ...

Peter Foster on the Delinquent Teenager

H/T to Hilary O for this review of the Delinquent Teenager in the Financial Post in Canada.

In a meticulously referenced and deservedly praised page-turner, Ms. Laframboise, an accomplished journalist who turned to the skeptical blogosphere, demonstrates how the IPCC is a thoroughly political organization. Far from objectively weighing the best available science, it cherry-picks egregiously to support its main objective: to serve its government masters. Its lead authors are not the world’s leading scientists but frequently wet-behind-the-ears graduates, and/or ardent activists. They are also selected on the basis of gender and country “diversity” rather than expertise. The organization, Ms. Laframboise demonstrates, has also been thoroughly infiltrated by environmental NGOs, in particular the World Wildlife Fund.

Getting some MSM coverage can make a big difference to a book. The review in the FP is the first time I've come across an MSM outlet reviewing a self-published book, and to my mind this shows just how important Donna's work is.

Briggs on BEST

Matt Briggs has penned his own critique of the BEST paper, noting in the process that he broadly agrees with Doug Keenan's points. It's not for the mathematically faint of heart though. Here's the conclusion.

Statisticians and those who use statistics never or rarely speak of model uncertainty (same with your more vocal sort of climatologist). The reason is simple: there aren't cookbook recipes that give automatic measures of this uncertainty. There can't be, either, because the truth of a model can only be ascertained externally.

Yet all statistical results are conditioned on the models' truth. Experience with statistical models shows that they are often too sure, especially when they are complex, as the BEST model is (and which assumes that temperature varies so smoothly over geography). No, I can't prove this. But I have given good reason to suspect it is true. You may continue to believe in the certainty of the model, but this would be yet another example of the triumph of hope over experience. What it means is that the uncertainty bounds should be widened further still. By how much, I don't know.

Channel Four on BEST

Tom Clarke, the Channel Four science correspondent, manages to display an almost complete ignorance of what Climategate was about in last night's segment on the BEST paper.

This is rather surprising, because he was closely involved in the Climategate story at the time.

BEST paper in the papers

David Whitehouse has done a round up of press coverage of the BEST paper. He doesn't reckon they've done a good job.

There are very few people who do not believe the world has warmed, in various episodes, since the instrumental record began about 150 years ago. We are today warmer than the Little Ice Age, warmer than the Victorian Era, indeed warmer than the 1970s. The proper question is, of course, why? The Berkeley team have no conclusions about this.

So all the headlines that basically say sceptics have been trounced because the world really is warming are trivial. The Berkeley team confirm what has been found in three other datasets and what "both sides" of the debate already agree on. I could say "so what," and "is it news?" Well, news is what reporters print.

He ends by noting a comment in one of the BEST papers about attribution:

The researchers find a strong correlation between North Atlantic temperature cycles lasting decades, and the global land surface temperature. They admit that the influence in recent decades of oceanic temperature cycles has been unappreciated and may explain most, if not all, of the global warming that has taken place, stating the possibility that the “human component of global warming may be somewhat overestimated.”

I think this will probably engender a great deal of discussion over the weekend.

Keenan's response to the BEST paper

Doug Keenan has posted up his correspondence with the Economist and Richard Muller about the BEST paper. I reproduce it here with permission.

The Economist asked me to comment on four research papers from the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project. The four papers were as follows.

• Decadal variations in the global atmospheric land temperatures
• Influence of urban heating on the global temperature land average using rural sites identified from MODIS classifications
• Berkeley Earth temperature averaging process
• Earth atmospheric land surface temperature and station quality

Below is some of the correspondence that we had. (Note: my comments were written under time pressure, and are unpolished.)

Click to read more ...

The press and scientific papers

I've been enjoying the back and forth on the BEST thread about the way the publicity for the team's papers was handled, with some people concerned about the team going to the press before peer review had taken place.

Circulating drafts of a paper seems unobjectionable to me - this is surely an everyday occurrence in the academy. Going to the press before those drafts have been examined seems somewhat more questionable. That said, given my own views on peer review - namely that it's not worth a whole lot - then some interesting questions are raised.

Click to read more ...

BEST paper out

There appears to be quite a lot of interest in the publication of the BEST team's reworking of the global temperature index, which, as expected, come to pretty much the same conclusion as the other series.

The Economist's coverage is here, the Guardian here.

I liked the quote the Guardian got from Peter Cox, a climatologist at Exeter.

These studies seem to confirm the global warming estimated from the existing datasets, which is pleasing but not exactly a surprise to those of us who know how carefully the existing datasets are put together.

Wasn't it CRU who had lost their raw data?

Update on Oct 20, 2011 by Bishop Hill

Oops. The paper is not out at all - this is just pre-peerreview-publicity (a new concept to me!).

Anthony W explains.

Update on Oct 20, 2011 by Bishop Hill

To mark the occasion the BBC has dusted off some of its old hockey stick pictures for its front page. It really is an amazing graph - like a drug to some people.

How immoral?

The government is apparently going to consider cuts in subsidies to solar panel installations. Apparently wind power is going to be targeted too.

Intense discussions are taking place about precisely how far to cut the small-scale solar “feed-in tariff” (FiT) which pays households and companies for energy produced.

Some officials in the Department of Energy and Climate Change are calling for a reduction in the subsidy by three-quarters, according to industry sources.

That would mean a fall from the current level of up to 43p per kilowatt hour generated, to as little as 9p per kWh – a move which the industry claims would be devastating. If the government follows past precedent, any change would not affect homeowners with existing solar panels.

So the lucky few wealthy people will continue to be subsidised by the poor. It's just a matter of how much immorality the government decides to retain in the system.

Huhne is not telling the truth

Andrew Neil, writing at his BBC blog, has done some thinking on UK energy prices.

...retail prices have risen again and are now above their 2008 peak. Despite lower wholesale prices compared with three years ago our fuel bills are higher than three years ago.

So, contrary to the Energy Secretary's position, higher fossil fuel prices cannot explain our current very high energy bills. And, contrary to the energy companies, they are not merely passing on the extra wholesale costs of energy.

Two further thoughts. It is clear that the energy market is not functioning like a proper competitive market, otherwise retail prices would not just go up in line with wholesale prices but come down too.

And maybe the Huhne green agenda, involving huge subsidies to wind generation, which end up on all our fuel bills, is much larger than we've been told.

This is a good point. Huhne is telling us things that can't be true about energy prices and meanwhile refuses to release his own figures on the impact of his green energy policies.

Would it be wrong of me to be suspicious?

Longannet scrapped

The flagship carbon capture and storage project at Longannet - just up the road from me - has been scrapped.

A decision has been made not to proceed with Longannet but to pursue other projects with the one billion pounds funding made available by the government," the Department of Energy and Climate Change said today.

Energy Secretary Chris Huhne insisted the idea can still work elsewhere, and promised that the £1bn would be available for other projects.

I can't help but recall the speech by the oil industry bigwig at the Oil Club dinner last year, when CCS essentially formed the core of the industry's vision for the future. For the whole idea to be jettisoned so soon seems, well, odd.

How much of industry's green credentials are just a matter of keeping public and politicians out of their hair? Quite a lot, I would guess.