The cost of climate

We could be doing so much more, Prime MinisterThis posting came to me in an email this morning. It's from a correspondent who prefers to remain anonymous.

Some 7,800 people die during winter because they can’t afford to heat their homes properly, says fuel poverty expert Professor Christine Liddell of the University of Ulster. That works out at 65 deaths a day. 

Hitler managed to kill 65,000 civilians in the UK during World War 2, an average of  about 12,000 tragic deaths annually for each of the five and a half years of the war. So, ConLibLab's expensive energy policies are killing us at 2/3rds the rate Hitler managed. WW2's civilians can be said to have died in the struggle for our freedom. How can ConLibLab justify the lonely death of people in their own homes in peacetime, what noble cause are they dying for?  Do Mr. Cameron & Mr. Clegg feel proud of their policies to make electricity more expensive? How does Mr. Cameron's father in law feel about pocketing a reported £1,000 a day from the windmills sited on his land?  Does Mr. Clegg's lawyer wife feel working for one of Europe's largest installers of windfarms is socially acceptable?  Does Mr. Milliband still feel comfortable with his record as a minister in bringing into law the 2008 Climate Change Act which set targets for the reduction of CO2 which underpin today's expensive energy bills?

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Energy gloom

Updated on Oct 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Oct 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Oct 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

David Cameron had a vision of a greener life, lived closer to natureIt's hard not to lose heart sometimes. Looking around the news on the energy front this morning, the bad news is overwhelming.

It's not online, but the FT has apparently reported that the coalition is considering accelerating the retreat from fossil fuels, with coal-fired power stations only operating as load-balancing capacity. This is because the coalition is frightened that Lord Oxburgh's Energy Bill amendment in the House of Lords will win through and that a ruinous decarbonisation target will be put in place.

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Deben before the ECC

Lord Deben appeared before the Science and Technology Committee this morning, in a hearing that was frankly a waste of everyone's time. His later appearance before the Energy and CLimate Change Committee was much better, particularly the early exchanges in which Peter Lilley asked Lord D about climate sensitivity. There was some pretty amusing wriggling by the witness

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Climate fairy tales

Climatologists have achieved a remarkable consensusThere's a really sensible article in the Guardian by Ehsan Masood, which is a complete antidote to all the nonsense being spouted in Parliament this morning by all and sundry. It effortlessly knocks down the fairy tale constructed by the mainstream media, with its invocation of bad oil-funded deniers prowling threateningly around the peace and harmony of the scientific endeavour:

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Mackay bashes Lawson

In his evidence to the Science and Technology Committee this morning, DECC chief scientist David Mackay attacked Nigel Lawson for (allegedly) saying in an article a few weeks ago that the IPCC was advocating a complete phase-out of fossil fuels.

The article in question is this one at the Telegraph. I think there is a bit of a snafu here. The text of the article is as follows:

What we should emphatically not do is what Dr Pachauri, Lord Stern and that gang are calling for and decarbonise the global economy by phasing out fossil fuels.

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Slip sliding away

I was going to start this morning by writing something about the House of Commons Science and Technology Committee, currently taking evidence from people like Lord Deben and David Warrilow, the UK's representative on the IPCC. However, it's a bit of a waste of time, to tell the truth, with the committee so far interested in exchanging platitudes with the witnesses.

Instead, take a look at the latest from Euan Mearns' blog, where he examines oil production in the UK which, despite massive new investment, is in precipitous decline.

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AR5 - Lindzen's thoughts

Richard Lindzen has published his conclusions on the Fifth Assessment Report. His statement is reproduced over at GWPF and it's fair to say that it's pretty scathing.  I liked this bit, which is along similar lines to my own ones in the Consensus? What Consensus? report.

In attempting to convince the public to accept the need to for the environmental movement’s agenda, continual reference is made to consensus. This is dishonest not because of the absence of a consensus, but because the consensus concerning such things as the existence of irregular (and small compared to normal regional variability) net warming since about 1850, the existence of climate change (which has occurred over the earths entire existence), the fact that added greenhouse gases should have some impact (though small unless the climate system acts so as to greatly amplify this effect)over the past 60 years with little impact before then, and the fact that greenhouse gases have increased over the past 200 years or so, and that their greenhouse impact is already about 80% of what one expects from a doubling of CO2 are all perfectly consistent with there being no serious problem. Even the text of the IPCC Scientific Assessment agrees that catastrophic consequences are highly unlikely, and that connections of warming to extreme weather have not been found. The IPCC iconic statement that there is a high degree of certainty that most of the warming of the past 50 years is due to man’s emissions is, whether true or not, completely consistent with there being no problem. To say that most of a small change is due to man is hardly an argument for the likelihood of large changes.

The song remains the same

The American Tradition Institute, which has been at the forefront of efforts to get public servants in the USA to behave like servants of the public has changed its name to the Energy and Environment Legal Institute.

But its work continues along very much the same lines as before, with its struggle to expose the emails of public servant Jonathan Overpeck to the gaze of the people who pay his salary currently to the fore.

A Washington, D.C.-based advocacy group has sued the University of Arizona demanding the release of a cache of documents — including two professors’ emails — related to climate change and global warming.

The Energy and Environment Legal Institute, which until recently was known as the American Tradition Institute, first requested the documents in December 2011. It sued in Pima County Superior Court in September, after the university released some of the documents, but withheld most on what the institute considers questionable grounds.

There is also ongoing legal work related to the University of Virginia's refusal to release Michael Mann's emails.

Shale will be too late

Benedict Brogan sets out the painful truth that any developments on the shale gas front are likely to come too late to prevent a power crisis in the UK. With the energy policies of successive governments disjointed, disconnected, uncoordinated, unthinking and unfeeling we are left with the likelihood of power cuts, brownouts or, more likely in my opinion, price rises on an unimaginable scale.

The National Grid yesterday announced that its reserve supply of domestically produced electricity had dropped to troubling levels, and that only the availability of power from the Continent would prevent blackouts. Long before we might hope to begin banking the shale windfall, the lights will go out.

This is the inevitable consequence of handing over control of a key industry to politicians. It is planning that is the problem, not the solution.

Amine a minor setback for Svensmark

CERN has been doing some more tinkering with Svensmark's cosmoclimatology theory, trying to detect the effect of simulated galactic cosmic rays on cloud formation in the presence of various gases. The results are not altogether favourable for Svensmark, but it's also fair to say that the story is anything but over:

The CLOUD researchers made two key discoveries. Firstly, they found that minute concentrations of amine vapours combine with sulphuric acid to form aerosol particles at rates similar to those observed in the atmosphere. Then, using a pion beam from the CERN Proton Synchrotron, they found that ionising radiation such as the cosmic radiation that bombards the atmosphere from space has negligible influence on the formation rates of these particular aerosols.

However, the story of the cosmoclimatology theory is not over by any means:

This is the first time that atmospheric particle formation has been reproduced with complete knowledge of the participating molecules”, said Kirkby. “However our measurements leave open the possibility that the formation of aerosols in the atmosphere may also proceed with other vapours, for which the effect of cosmic rays may be different. This is an important step forward, but we still have a long way to go before we fully understand the processes of aerosol formation and their effects on clouds and climate.”

Oceans are unprecedentedly alkaline

Mollie seemed more sensitive to acid waters than her friendsRuth Dixon has an interesting blog post on ocean acidification and in particular Fiona Harvey's claim that oceans are "more acidic now than they have been for at least 300m years". Following the claim to its source reveals that the truth has been lost in translation.

Hönisch et al. 2012, cited by the State of the Oceans report, showed in Figure 4D that

the ocean has been more acidic for most of the past 300 million years than it is now. The rate of acidfication may be faster now, but Hönisch’s graph has a resolution of 20 million years, so cannot address that question.

It is unfortunate that an environmental journalist should confuse the rate of acidification with levels of acidity, but appalling that this story was tweeted uncritically by Nature Geoscience and other influential accounts. This is not some esoteric area of climate science. It is well known that CO₂ was much higher during parts of the past 300 million years than it is today and therefore ocean surface pH would be expected to be lower. Why was Harvey’s assertion that “[the] oceans are more acidic now than they have been for at least 300m years” not challenged (as far as I can see) by anyone from the scientific establishment?

Ball or aerosol?

The Economist has rather perspicaciously realised that aerosols have emerged from the Fifth Assessment Report as one of the most interesting talking points, and covers the area in some depth in this week's issue.

The IPCC report itself suggests that

There is high confidence that aerosols and their interactions with clouds have offset a substantial portion of global mean forcing from well-mixed greenhouse gases.

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Lovers of the environment

This picture appeared on Twitter earlier today, and shows what appears to be the mess left behind by the Balcombe anti-fracking protestors. I'm told that these people are very concerned about the state of the environment.

Note the abandoned wheelchair.

See also this.

Update on Oct 7, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Compare the protestors' 'clear up' to the way Cuadrilla left their site.

Speed reviewing

The IPCC report is, famously, the most-reviewed document in human history or something like that. Which is why I was so intrigued by this graph sent to me by a BH correspondent. It shows the number of review comments received on each page of the Second Order Draft of the Working Group II report, leaked to this blog just a few days ago.

The labels on the x-axis appear at the start of each chapter, and you can see that after an initial flurry of activity on the first page or so interest tails off rapidly.

I think we can say then that this is the report with the most thoroughly reviewed chapter title pages in history.

SOD comment stats

Delingpole bashes the IPCC

James Delingpole has struck a well-aimed blow at the Fifth Assessment Report, providing a very useful summary of the issues to date and summarising thus:

As I argued here the other week, there is more than enough solid evidence now to demonstrate to any neutral party prepared to cast half an eye over it that the doomsday prognostications the warmist establishment has been trying to frighten us with these last two decades are a nonsense. The man-made global warming scare story has not a shred of scientific credibility. It's over. And while I don't expect the alarmists to admit this any time soon, I do think the rest of us should stop indulging them in their poisonous fantasy.

Also in the Telegraph, Booker's comment is quite closely related to the discussion on Clive James, with the case being made that scientists are a pressure group:

In years to come this will be looked back on as the most astonishing example in history of how the prestige of “science” can be used to promote a particular belief system, in this case with the aid of those skewed computer models that can be seen ever more clearly not to accord with the observed evidence.

All this would not be so serious if the IPCC had not been so successfully sold to the world as an objective scientific body rather than as just a political pressure group, because this has taken in no one more damagingly than all those credulous politicians who use the IPCC’s bogus prestige to justify landing us with some of the most disastrously misconceived policies the world has ever seen.