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Bishop Hill Oct 13, 2012 Climate: other In case you missed it, yesterday was International Disaster Reduction Day. A worthy cause, if it can be done sensibly, but this is what Martin Bell had to say about it:
Bishop Hill Oct 12, 2012 Energy: CCS Politicians Scotland "If England's going down the drain with its energy policies, why not take Scotland with us? That must be what Davey is thinking- nothing else could explain this madness.
Bishop Hill Oct 12, 2012 Economics Energy: wind Wind power is a folly for which businesses and, let us not forget, domestic consumers pay dearly.
Bishop Hill Oct 12, 2012 Greens Is there anything the Environment Agency doesn't influence?
Bishop Hill Oct 11, 2012 Energy: wind Scotland A £103m fund to help boost investment in renewable energy has been launched
Bishop Hill Oct 11, 2012 I came across this organisation called Climate South West, which, by the address, is linked to the Environment Agency, and which provides information to people and groups in the SW of England on climate change. Their declared mission: To help the South West Region of England to adapt sustainably to the impacts of climate change.
Bishop Hill Oct 10, 2012 DECC Energy: biofuels Old coal and nuclear power stations are coming to the end of their lives. We face a race against time to ensure our energy security. We need to secure £110billion of investment in a secure, diverse and low carbon power mix. It is a huge challenge, but an equally huge opportunity, with the Coalition’s reforms to the electricity market having the potential to support a quarter of a million jobs, many of these highly skilled. New nuclear, gas-fired power stations, carbon capture and storage and renewable energy will bring new investment to all parts of the country, developing supply chains which won’t just serve the UK market, but the global market too. [Block quote added 7.45pm, 11.10.12]
From Powering the Nation, article by Energy Minister John Hayes for DECC
http://www.decc.gov.uk/en/content/cms/news/housemag/housemag.aspx
A number of unanswered questions within that paragraph, such as why don't we prevent the closure of the older power stations until we are sure we can manage without them.? Where is £110 billion coming from? What reforms to the energy market- smart meters? No thanks. A quarter of a million jobs- ever heard of Bastiat? CCS?- it doesn't work.....and so on.
[Update: figure on last paragraph corrected to £110 billion, 5.00pm]
Bishop Hill Oct 10, 2012 Education Energy: solar Five lessons on how to waste money.
Thanks to Max Farquhar for this link.
Bishop Hill Oct 10, 2012 Climate: sensitivity After my posting on climate sensitivity and policy attracted so much attention, I thought it would be interesting to see whether my arguments on the priority of empirical measurement over theory for policy purposes carried any weight with mainstream scientists.
I therefore set up a very short survey and emailed it around a bunch of mainstream scientists and a few journalists. The questions essentially sought a single value for climate sensitivity and a range of values that the respondents thought should inform policymakers.
Bishop Hill Brussels has placed itself on a collision course with Britain's ruling Conservative party by issuing a blunt warning on the dangers of stifling the green agenda.
As David Cameron faced pressure from the Tory right to adopt a more confrontational approach to the EU, Europe's environment chief spoke out against critics of environmental regulations for making "untrue" claims.
Janez Potočnik, the European environment commissioner, told the Guardian that for politicians to suggest that green legislation was a burden was "very unhelpful, because it is untrue".
http://www.euractiv.com/climate-environment/uk-tories-warned-eu-stifling-gre-news-515259
Personally, I'm all for a bit of green agenda stifling.
Bishop Hill Oct 9, 2012 Energy: wind Politicians [Owen Paterson at the Conservative Party conference] warned renewable developments can upset communities and promised to make sure this is taken into account when subsidies for wind farms are put up for review.
Bishop Hill Oct 9, 2012 IPCC Matt Ridley Matt Ridley: The Perils Of Confirmation Bias. Read it at GWPF [updated at 12.25pm to prevent confusion]
The modus operandi of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) has been to accumulate evidence to champion rather than challenge a hypothesis, namely that rising carbon dioxide levels will in future cause dangerous climate change.
A good example is the IPCC’s claim that only models that incorporate high-sensitivity carbon dioxide-induced warming countered by aerosol induced cooling can match (or “hindcast”) the recent upward progress of global average temperatures. The problem with this is that different models use different values of assumed cooling from aerosols. That is to say, the cooling effect of aerosols has been picked so that it fills the gap between observed and expected warming. The modellers are therefore in effect saying: we observe warming of X, we predicted warming of X+5, so there must have been cooling of 5, therefore our prediction is correct.
Read more here
http://www.thegwpf.org/matt-ridley-the-perils-of-confirmation-bias/
Bishop Hill From Climate Change to Climate Justice. Professor Alan Miller.
This lecture is taking place in Edinburgh tonight. Any takers?
http://www.ed.ac.uk/schools-departments/biomedical-sciences/changing-world/lectures/2012-091012
Bishop Hill Oct 9, 2012 It's half term here - tattie-lifting holiday in the local parlance. Blogging will therefore be light for a week or so, although there will not be a complete dearth of posts.
