The 'D' Notice - Josh 238

Every other Alarmist tweet these days seems to have the 'D' word in it - is there something happening soon that they are getting excited about?

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In the Australian

I have an article up in the Australian based on my GWPF report on the Cook et al "Consensus" paper.

A close examination of what was done shows the paper is built of straw. The authors’ basic approach was to review the abstracts of scientific papers on the subject of climate change, assessing the extent to which they endorsed the global warming “consensus”. However, this first required a definition of what that consensus was about: there is widespread agreement, including among sceptics, that carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas and that humankind is therefore capable of warming the planet, so the main focus of debate is over how much warming may take place.

You can read the whole thing here.

Sea level rise boosted by PDO

Via Judith Curry we learn that a new paper has been published that suggests that a large chunk of sea level rise may be down to the influence of the PDO.

Understanding and explaining the trend in GMSL has important implications for future projections of sea level rise. While measurements from satellite altimetry have provided accurate estimates of GMSL, the modern altimetry record has only now reached twenty years in length, making it difficult to assess the contribution of decadal to multi-decadal climate signals to the global trend. Here, we use a sea level reconstruction to study the twenty-year trends in sea level since 1950. In particular, we show that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) contributes significantly to the twenty-year trends in GMSL. We estimate the PDO contribution to the GMSL trend over the past twenty years to be approximately 0.49 ± 0.25 mm/year, and find that removing the PDO contribution reduces the acceleration in GMSL estimated over the past sixty years.

The lowlife clearances

West Sussex County Council is going to court on Monday, seeking to have the detritus on the verges outside the Cuadrilla site cleared.

West Sussex County Council has confirmed that the High Court is to hear its application for a possession order for the B2036 London Road, Balcombe, on Monday (September 16).

Appropriate notices about the hearing are today (Friday) being posted on the B2036 so that the people concerned are aware.

Europe's top energy policy shambles

Liberum Capital are trying to identify Europe's most disastrous energy policy moves of recent years. There are lots to choose from (but you knew that). Here's one of the suggestions:

Retail Market Review (UK) - in response to some (relatively) minor miss-selling incidents, Ofgem effectively banned door step selling by energy supply companies. Unfortunately, door step selling was by far the most effective way to get householders to switch. Since Ofgem’s intervention, churn rates for the big six energy suppliers have collapsed from mid-teen percent to mid-single digit. This has saved the supply companies many £10m’s in costs and is a key reason why supply margins have risen in the past 18 months. It also probably means that around 2m households that would have switched to more suitable tariffs are now sitting on the wrong tariff. So to stop active miss selling to a few thousand consumers, Ofgem have caused the passive miss-selling to millions.

Read the whole thing. It's just great.

A new front

Energy company iGas is about to start exploratory drilling for shale gas on a site on the outskirts of Manchester. Amusingly, the site is right up against the side of the M62 motorway, so any protest camp will not be quite the rural idyll that was enjoyed by the Balcombe protestors. This may be some rather canny thinking by iGas.

It will be interesting to see if protestors try to block or disrupt the motorway in the same way they did London Road in Balcombe. I'm not sure that the law enforcement agencies would see the funny side.

Green bloodbath

Via GWPF, The Australian is reporting that the newly installed Abbott administration in Australia is moving quickly to shut down the green machine in Canberra:

Public servants are drawing up plans to collapse 33 climate change schemes run by seven departments and eight agencies into just three bodies run by two departments under a substantial rewrite of the administration of carbon abatement schemes under the Coalition. The move is forecast to save the government tens of millions of dollars. The Climate Change Authority, which sets emissions caps, the Climate Commission, which has conducted research into climate change, and the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, which funds renewable technologies, are all slated to be abolished under the plans.

The shutting down of any sinecure is good news. That Tim Flannery's Climate Commission is among the first to go is doubly welcome.

The end of Sternonomics?

In a really good article in the New York Times, Eduardo Porter explains the economic end of the global warming debate in terms that even the most rabid green could understand. His starting point is the competing estimates of the social cost of carbon:

The estimate of $65 a ton is inspired by a moral stance: if warming will impose a cost of 1 percent of the world’s income in the future, we should spend about 1 percent of our income to prevent it — or perhaps somewhat less to account for the trend that people 100 years from now are likely to be much richer than people today.

Click to read more ...

Long-term trends in sea ice

The BBC has a big article reporting a new low in Arctic sea ice last winter, based on volume measurements from the European Cryosat programme.

Prof Andy Shepherd, from Leeds University, said: "Now that we have three years of data, we can see that some parts of the ice pack have thinned more rapidly than others. At the end of winter, the ice was thinner than usual. Although this summer's extent will not get near its all-time satellite-era minimum set last year, the very thin winter floes going into the melt season could mean that the summer volume still gets very close to its record low," he told BBC News.

I'm not sure talk of record lows can be seen as anything other than propaganda, for a data series that is so short.

Auditor general: 'You're having us on'

The Auditor General for Scotland has issued a report on the country's progress towards achieving its renewable energy targets. As ever with this kind of report, one has to read between the lines a little, but your humble host exists to help readers understand what is really going on.

Progress towards the 2020 targets has been, the report insists, 'steady', but actually meeting them will be 'challenging'. Translated from Sirhumphreyan (mandarin?) into English, I think this means 'fat chance'.

Similarly, the report notes the figures for job creation that are bandied about in Holyrood and declares that it is 'difficult' to identify the number of people actually employed in renewables businesses, for which readers might understand that they can't actually find any. Meanwhile, projections of future employment in the sector are described as 'optimistic', for which I think reasonable people would read 'concocted'.

The report is here.

Farage channels Rose

David Rose's Arctic sea ice article has gone completely viral, clocking up something like 180,000 likes on Facebook. It's even made it onto the political headlines, with Nigel Farage waving the graphs for 2012 and 2013 sea ice at EU President Barroso (a former communist we gather - who knew?) at today's "State of the Union" address (at about 2:30).

Extraordinary times.

Time series analysis for experts

One regular criticism that is made of climatologists is that their statistical analyses tend not to make use of up-to-date methods, particularly as regards time series analysis. This course in Germany therefore looks to be useful:

Advanced Course in Climate Time Series Analysis, Hannover, Germany, 20 to 24 January 2014

I'm not sure how advanced though:

• Level: academic (PhD students and postdocs), industry (researchers and analysts)
• Audience: Climatologists, Geographers, Geologists, Hydrologists, Meteorologists, Physicists, Risk analysts, Statisticians
• Basic knowledge in statistics is required (e.g., you should know what "standard deviation" means).

Showdown for the greenshirts

The protestors at Balcombe apparently failed to clear the roadside outside Cuadrilla's site in Balcombe yesterday, putting them in breach of an official instruction to do so. The council have now instituted court proceedings to begin forceable removal.

West Sussex County Council today (Tuesday) confirmed that it has now instructed its agents to seek an order for possession which will lead to people, roadside tents, canopies and caravans being removed on the B2036 London Road, Balcombe, in an area close to the site where energy company Cuadrilla is completing exploratory drilling work.

The Council, as the Highways Authority, is taking the action over increased concerns for the safety of all road users.

In related news, those delightful environmentalists have taken to verbally abusing the locals:

Fed up with them. Received verbal abuse yesterday lunchtime. Not nice people. #balcombe

Smelly, obnoxious, threatening soap-dodgers who are trying to destroy jobs and take us back to the Middle Ages. What's not to like?

The ancient history of the Hockey Stick

Bernie Lewin is in the blogging saddle again and has written a fascinating account of the early history of the millennial temperature reconstructions.

There is one temperature reconstruction of the last millennium that skeptics love to hate. And there is another that skeptics idolize in its place. The one is the ‘Hockey Stick’ northern hemisphere reconstruction, while the other appears as a schematic global trend line in the First Assessment Report of the IPCC. But neither graph is any good. They both obscure and distort the underlying science. Moreover, the skeptic’s idol itself usurped yet another dubious graph that reigned through the late 1970s and early 1980s. Thus, since global climate change anxiety emerged in the 1970s, we find a succession of three iconic millennium temperature graphs, each as different from the other as they are obscure in their scientific grounding. What is strange is that such plastic transformations are not found with the conventional reconstructions at smaller and larger timescales. The trend on the geological scale was only being refined over the same period. The large scale 100-year trend line has been more controversial. But both have maintained their general characteristics throughout the cooling and then warming alarm. So, what is it about the 1000-year timeframe? In the next couple of posts we uncover the origins of the two predecessors to the Hockey Stick. While the earliest version is as obscure in its origins as it is forgotten today (Part II not yet posted), the other remains the idol of the skeptic (Part I). And so smash it we do!

I'm not sure that the Lamb hockey stick is idolised as such, but this probing into the early history of the paleoclimate scene looks as though it will be pretty interesting. Read the whole thing.

Future of the Climate Change Act

MPs are currently debating the future of the Climate Change Act. I have just heard it described as "ludicrous" and "the most foolish piece of legislation" MPs are ever likely to hear.