Holthaus thoroughly maued and knappenburgered

With all the stories of unprecedented weather in recent weeks it's important to observe that none of these claims ever seem to be accompanied by any historical context.

One of these stories has of course revolved around the warm weather at the North Pole. While much amusement was had at the hapless journalist from Time magazine who mistook the settlement of North Pole, Alaska for the actual North Pole, there is no doubt that the pole proper did experience a short burst of unseasonably warm temperatures, bringing the inevitable claims of impending apocalypse from the usual suspects. 

This week's midwinter melt at the North Pole is a scary preview of what’s to come later this century. https://t.co/vPuA2CyxkU

— Eric Holthaus (@EricHolthaus) December 29, 2015

Kudos then to Ryan Maue of Weatherbell for making available his dataset of estimated temperatures for the Pole and to Chip Knappenburger of Cato, who has published the figures as the graph below.

Apocalypse cancelled.

Again.

Update on Jan 1, 2016 by Bishop Hill

More from Chip Knappenburger on Twitter today:

.@RyanMaue @RogerAPielkeSr Here's a comparison of Dec temps at NP in 1999 and 2015. This event is a big deal, why??? pic.twitter.com/G8W8nav3wQ

— Chip Knappenberger (@PCKnappenberger) December 30, 2015

Splitters, deniers, and circular firing squads

A couple of weeks ago, we were treated to the sight of Naomi Oreskes badmouthing a variety of climate scientists for having the temerity to support the expansion of nuclear power. Her use of the d-word caused shock among some parts of the green fraternity, who like to reserve it for people who disagree about the value of climate sensitivity. Oreskes' great contribution to uncivil society has been to apply this unpleasant term of abuse to those who disagree on policy measures too. Splitters, I tell you! Splitters!

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Gong with the wind

The New Year's honours list was published last night and as usual I have scanned it looking for familiar names. Strangely, yours truly has been overlooked again.

The sense of shock is almost palpable. 

Still, it has been suggested that the majority of gongs go to failed politicians, to celebs and to civil servants who have merely been doing their jobs. So a knighthood for David Mackay was probably inevitable, although I don't suppose anyone will begrudge him: he was certainly the most level-headed occupant of the chief scientist's office at DECC for many a year. Ed Davey's knighthood was just a case of the normal gongs for failure that politicians expect.

More interesting was the award of an OBE to Emily Shuckburgh for services to science communication. I must say this rather took me aback. I've met Emily and she's bright and charming, but I watch the climate scene as closely as anyone and she has only attracted my notice on a handful of occasions. I can think of at least a dozen people who have been more active in the area and who have done more to advance public understanding of climate science. Perhaps Emily's contribution has been more behind the scenes than front of stage, or perhaps it's just that her work has been done in Whitehall rather than out there in the wild west of England, like Richard or Tamsin.

Congratulations to both though.

The greens and the fascists

Taking a few days off from the blog has at least given me a chance to finish reading Jonah Goldberg's Liberal Fascism. This book (buy here) was a bit of an eye-opener for me, setting out in mind-boggling detail the links - both historical and philosophical - between fascism and the ideas espoused by modern day liberals and progressives. The sheer weight of evidence is extraordinary - from welfare, to land reform, to greenery, to the worship of the state it's hard to find any area of public policy on which the two  don't have much in common. (Goldberg points out that anti-semitism was part of the Nazi creed, but not that of the Italian or Spanish fascists, and was therefore a policy of Hitlerism, but not really of fascism.)

But what struck me about the book was how often I noticed that there are also clear parallels between fascism and environmentalism. At a high level, both are alt-religions, which their adherents seek to impose on society with Jesuit fervour, spurred on by fear of impending disaster. Both are openly totalitarian, in the original sense of the word: in other words the creed is supposed to apply in every aspect of life, in every area of policy, and in the private sphere as much as in the public.

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The EU's role in the floods

With a bit of luck, BH readers should by now have worked off the excesses of Christmas and be ready to return to the fray.

With flooding back in the news, I thought it might be useful to point readers to this very interesting piece from a couple of weeks ago, which considers the European Union's role in causing the floods.

[I]n order to comply with the obligations imposed on us by the EU we had to stop dredging and embanking and allow rivers to ‘re-connect with their floodplains’, as the currently fashionable jargon has it.

And to ensure this is done, the obligation to dredge has been shifted from the relevant statutory authority (now the Environment Agency) onto each individual landowner, at the same time making sure there are no funds for dredging. And any sand and gravel that might be removed is now classed as ‘hazardous waste’ and cannot be deposited to raise the river banks, as it used to be, but has to be carted away.

And all paid for by you.

Seitz is no guarantee

Readers are no doubt familiar with Harvard physicist Russell Seitz, a frequent commenter in these parts. If so you may be interested in an email I received today:

Take a look at this 1990 article by Russell Seitz, placed online recently here. It's colourfully written, but ironically it sets out a sceptic position rather well. Does this sound like something that you might have written?

A disturbing reality confronts us:  the deliberate creation of a double standard, with one set of facts for internal scientific discourse and another for public consumption.

On whether CO2 is a "big" problem:

Clearly, a sharp-toothed carnivore is on the prowl. But we've yet to see a full-grown specimen.  Are we dealing with Snoopy or Cerberus? It's hard to tell- it's only just a foundling pup, and the question of its diet remains to he wrestled with-it might grow into either. But grow it will-slowly, and for a long while undetectably. One of these centuries, we're going to have a real dog in our front yard. But what kind?  And when?  An interdisciplinary consensus on the magnitude of the "greenhouse effect" and its impact on sea levels in the next century won't come cheap-or soon.

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US usurps EU's role of climate fool

In the Wall Street Journal, Benny Peiser explains (£) that the outcome of Paris appears to be that the EU has allowed itself leeway to move in a more rational direction on climate energy policy, while the USA is going in precisely the opposite direction.

The toothless nature of the Paris agreement finally allows EU member states to abandon unilateral decarbonization policies that have damaged Europe’s economies and its international competitiveness. Under such circumstances, the unconditional climate policies of President Obama would be left out in the cold. The U.S. administration has pledged to cut carbon emissions by 26%-28% by 2025, no matter what China, India and the rest of the world do in coming decades.

The subsidy cuts and the pea under the thimble

This is a guest post by Phillip Bratby.

Readers will no doubt have seen the apoplexy of Roger Harrabin and others in the media about the cuts in subsidies for rooftop solar power announced by Amber Rudd on 17th December (DECC press release here).  Cuts of 64% (Telegraph, BBC) or 65% (Guardian, Independent, FT) were reported.  The new subsidies (the Feed-in-Tariff scheme which consists of a generation tariff plus an export tariff) were given following a consultation, which had supposedly been proposing cuts of 87%.

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We forgot the geography!

The British Medical Journal recently held a Q&A on climate science with, among others, Brian Hoskins. The results are paywalled, but I was amused by the excerpt from the start of the session in response to a question about why Antarctic sea ice is growing:

The anomaly in the Antarctic is due to its geography. Unlike in the Arctic, where the extent of sea ice is constrained by the North American and Eurasian land masses, Antarctic sea ice forms in the open ocean with less land constraining its formation. Antarctic sea ice is also thinner and mostly melts each summer, whereas Arctic sea ice survives longer (although the amount of sea ice lasting more than two years has declined rapidly since 1979).

If the growth is "due to its geography" you have to wonder why the climate models predicted a decrease. Perhaps climate modellers forgot to put the geography in?

Update on Dec 18, 2015 by Bishop Hill

A reader sends a copy of the full text. This is a shocker. Take this on the little ice age, for example:

The Little Ice Age was particularly apparent in the European region but didn’t represent a major decline in temperatures globally. It was probably caused by a decline in solar output in the second half of the 17th century (known as the Maunder minimum) and a higher level of volcanic activity. These factors cannot account for the long term global warming observed since industrialisation because there has not been a long term increase in solar output or a decline in volcanic activity of the necessary magnitude.

And here's the IPCC's take on the millennial temperature reconstructions, with the Little Ice Age clearly visible in the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere and the global data:

Or what about the BMJ take on climate sensitivity?

A more recent study, based on inserting observed values in a very simple model, estimated the short
term warming to be 1.05-1.80°C. Although the upper end of this estimate is lower than that of the IPCC report, the study’s findings still mean that it would only increase the time taken to reach a given level of warming by a few years. Thus, while there are uncertainties about the precise relation between increases in the rate and concentration of atmospheric CO2 with the rate of global warming, these uncertainties have relatively little bearing on what we need to do in terms of climate policy.

The insinuation that this paper (Lewis and Curry) is an outlier is of course grossly misleading, while the use of 5-95% ranges to hide the huge differences between the GCMs and the observational estimates is straight out the Myles Allen "dirty tricks" book.

In related news, it turns out that one of Hoskins' co-authors is a fan of Stefan Lewandowsky. Go figure.

Surfacestations: the punchline

And what a punchline it is. Anthony has finally published the results of his epic Surfacestations project, and it seems that the surface temperature record is as flawed as we thought. Here's the text of the press release.

SAN FRANCISO, CA – A new study about the surface temperature record presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests that the 30-year trend of temperatures for the Continental United States (CONUS) since 1979 are about two thirds as strong as officially NOAA temperature trends.

Using NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network, which comprises 1218 weather stations in the CONUS, the researchers were able to identify a 410 station subset of “unperturbed” stations that have not been moved, had equipment changes, or changes in time of observations, and thus require no “adjustments” to their temperature record to account for these problems. The study focuses on finding trend differences between well sited and poorly sited weather stations, based on a WMO approved metric Leroy (2010)¹ for classification and assessment of the quality of the measurements based on proximity to artificial heat sources and heat sinks which affect temperature measurement...

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Criminal records for Friends of the Earth, Sandbag

Guy Shrubsole: convictYesterday, the green activists who disrupted the Banks Mining facility next to Matt Ridley's home in Northumberland were up in court on charges of aggravated trespass. I have received the following report.

1. Yesterdays court case went ahead as planned at Bedlington Magistrates Court.

2. The nine charged protesters all appeared in court. They brought along a barrister from Manchester.

3. They appeared rather 'sheepish' in court.

4. The barrister argued mitigating circumstances on the basis of that it was a legitimate protest and that the protesters were frustrated by the lack of UK Government action to combat climate change. The judge (a district judge) apparently didn’t think much of this and suggested that it was not appropriate for matters of national politics to be argued by way of illegal obstruction of legitimate coal mining operations in Northumberland.

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The vacuity of Naomi Oreskes

You turn your back for a few hours and suddenly Naomi Oreskes does something even more foolish and generally loathsome than normal. Her op-ed in the Guardian yesterday looked at the subject of nuclear energy, and using her normal considered approach to people with whom she has minor political differences she decided to unleash the 'd' word.

There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.

Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world.

Of course nobody with an IQ in double figures takes anything Oreskes says seriously, but we have to welcome this intervention because it does give us the opportunity to laugh at all the people who are quite happy to use the 'd' word about those on the opposite side of the climate debate now venting their spleen over the use of the term in the energy debate.

Incredibly, @NaomiOreskes calls top scientists "denialists" for supporting nuclear power to tackle climate change: https://t.co/gAMYVrJ4dc

— Mark Lynas (@mark_lynas) December 16, 2015

Calling everyone who disagrees w/ you about anything a "denier" is a great way to cheapen the word & dilute support for climate science.

— David Roberts (@drvox) December 16, 2015

The best laid plans of Westminster mice

  Do you remember the grid emergency the other day, when the grid was said to have accepted an offer of £2500 per MWh to supply power to the grid, a slight markup on the normal price of £40?  The Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee reckon there may have been some dodgy dealing going on and they have written to Ofgem asking for an investigation:

 

 The best laid plans o' Westminster mice gang aft into a rent-seeker's paradise. Perhaps it might have been a good idea to maintain higher safety margins on the grid?

Sierra Club silliness

Many thanks to John Shade for this hilarious video from the US Congress, which I hadn't seen before.

A fracking corrective

The levels of disinformation about the shale gas industry has been quite overwhelming, although obviously very much par for the course for environmentalists. It's good therefore to have a corrective in the shape of this paper by Kevin Hollinrake, the MP for Thirsk & Malton. 

Hollinrake has been to Pennsylvania to take a look at the shale gas industry on the ground and his approach of just driving around asking people what they thought leads to a powerful rebuttal of the scare stories:

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