About that tech solution to climate change...

I can still remember the early days of the internet, reading Junkscience.com and Numberwatch on all the bad things scientists got up to then. They still do.

I was therefore thrilled to see that a familiar name from those days is still fighting the good fight, although I haven't come across him for years, as my interests have been elsewhere. Wade Allison has been trying to point out the preposterous stringency of our nuclear regulations and the scientific idiocy of the linear no threshold model for radiation exposure for decades. He was recently the subject of an article in the Wall Street Journal:

Wade Allison, emeritus professor of physics at Oxford, has a more realistic idea for fighting global warming than any being promoted at this week’s climate summit in Paris: Increase by 1,000-fold the allowable limits for radiation exposure to the public and workers from nuclear power plants.

Click to read more ...

A state ideology

Mark Steyn was breathtakingly good in his Congressional Testimony today.

Self-criticism

It's a few days old now, but I have been meaning to mention a rather interesting article at Times Higher Education. It's about a secret dossier government dossier, warning that fraud is rife in biomedical research:

The draft "Confidential dossier on fraud in UK biomedical research" concludes that some research institutes, university administrators, funders, journals and science leaders have been covering up malpractice.

THE has also got hold of a comment on the dossier from somebody at the Royal Society, who thinks that although the dossier may overstate the case, it recognises the twin problems of malpractice and it being covered up by scientific institutions.

Including, presumably, the Royal Society itself.

Happer days

Greenpeace are getting very excited about some of their latest "undercover" reporting. It seems that some of their staff posed as representatives of a coal-mining company and asked Will Happer to write them a report. Happer seems to have said yes, but said that the proceeds should go to his sceptic organisation, the CO2 Alliance.

I think their case is that Happer doesn't actually believe any of the things he says, but that in return for large quantities of money he is willing to say anything required. I'm not sure this is going to fly.

There is also a fairly feeble attempt to involve GWPF in the story, insinuating that Indur Goklany's report was reviewed only by people internal to GWPF. Benny Peiser has said in no uncertain terms that this is not true.

Professor Happer made his scientific views clear from the outset, including the need to address pollution problems arising from fossil fuel consumption. Any insinuation against his integrity as a scientist is outrageous and is clearly refuted by the correspondence.

Nor did Professor Happer offer to put a report "commissioned by a fossil fuel company" through the GWPF peer review process. This is a sheer fabrication by Greenpeace. 

The GWPF does not undertake externally-commissioned research and does not accept support of any kind from fossil fuel companies or anyone with a significant interest in the energy industry. The correspondence shows that Professor  Happer explained to the undercover "journalist" that there were several different forms of peer review and that the peer review process used by the GWPF is as rigorous as that for most journals. 

Greenpeace claims with no supporting evidence that the report by Dr Indur Goklany was reviewed exclusively by 25 scientists who are members of the GWPF's Academic Advisory Council (AAC). This is false. Dr Goklany's report, like most of our reports, was also reviewed by outside experts who are not scientific advisers to the GWPF.

The quality of Dr Goklany's report is self-evident to any open-minded reader. As Professor Freeman Dyson said in the foreword, "To any unprejudiced person reading this account, the facts should be obvious: that the non-climatic effects of carbon dioxide as a sustainer of wildlife and crop plants are enormously beneficial, that the possibly harmful climatic effects of carbon dioxide have been greatly exaggerated, and that the benefits clearly outweigh the possible damage."

Professor Colin Prentice of the Grantham Institute concurred even while claiming to be dismayed by the report's publication: "Much of it is quite correct and moreover, well-established in the scientific literature...the various benefits of rising CO2 are actually well established in the scientific literature, even if sometime ignored. They are indeed 'good news'."

The cack-handed attempt by Greenpeace to manufacture a scandal around Dr Goklany's report, and to smear Professor Happer's reputation, only points to the need for the Global Warming Policy Foundation to redouble its efforts to bring balanced, rigorous and apolitical research on climate and energy policy issues to the public's attention, as counter to the misleading noise and activist rhetoric from groups like Greenpeace.

Update on Dec 9, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In my absence last night, Patrick Moore has reported Greenpeace to the FBI:

I have reported Greenpeace to the FBI under 18 USC 96 (RICO statute); 18 USC 1343 (wire fraud); 18 USC 1512 (tampering with a witness due to appear at a Congressional hearing); and 18 USC 1505 (obstruction of proceedings before committees).

I shall also be asking the Bureau to investigate Greenpeace’s sources of funding. It is now an enemy of the State, an enemy of humanity and, indeed, an enemy of all species on Earth.

The same old story

Update on Dec 8, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In the comments ATTP says that the Christiansen reconstruction is a 2000 year one. I therefore provide this updated figure to give the comparison he wants.

On expertise

Poor old Chris Huhne. After losing his position at DECC and spending some time at Her Majesty's pleasure, he is now forced to look for gainful employment elsewhere.

According to his website, this "expert on energy and climate change" is available to speak at public events (and children's parties?).

I can hardly contain my excitement.

But you have to say, in the wake of Dieter Helm's comments about Huhne's disastrous gamble on rising energy prices, you have to wonder whether that's the kind of expert that anyone is going to want to hear from.

Except maybe Gamblers Anonymous.

Dieter Helm on "misguided" Huhne, Davey and Miliband

Dieter Helm recently gave a lecture on energy policy at the Institution of Engineering and Technology, discussing the sheer scale of the disaster wrought by Ed Miliband, Chris Huhne and Ed Davey. Here's the blurb.

The falls in oil, gas and coal prices have confounded the peak oil advocates and the predictions of both ever higher prices and price volatility on which much of current energy policy is based.

Wholesale electricity prices are not going up as DECC predicted. They have been going down.

The existing renewables will now need permanent subsidies and nuclear has been adversely affected.

Carbon and energy policies will need to be recast. Disruptive new technologies are further undermining the “winners” politicians have been picking.

The lecture will set out the new key features of the new energy landscape, and the implications for energy policy in the UK and Europe, and the implications for the structure and competitiveness of the energy companies.

It will include recommendations for the reform of EMR, the UK Government's Energy Market policy and the key components of the EU’s Energy Union.

On the floods in Cumbria

The floods in Cumbria are obviously attracting a lot of attention this morning. A couple of things are exercising my mind.

Firstly, as readers are pointing out, the claim that 340mm of rain fell in 24 hours seems suspect. Nobody seems quite sure where it came from. I have seen it suggested that this was the amount that fell over two days and in Unthreaded, Mike Post wonders if it is actually the November rainfall total.

Secondly, how do we know what the 100-year flood is in any given river basin? The process looks less than straightforward and involves a wealth of assumptions.

The first assumption is often but not always valid and should be tested on a case by case basis. The second assumption is often valid if the extreme events are observed under similar climate conditions. For example, if the extreme events on record all come from late summer thunder storms (as is the case in the southwest U.S.), or from snow pack melting (as is the case in north-central U.S.), then this assumption should be valid. If, however, there are some extreme events taken from thunder storms, others from snow pack melting, and others from hurricanes, then this assumption is most likely not valid. The third assumption is only a problem when trying to forecast a low, but maximum flow event (for example, an event smaller than a 2-year flood). Since this is not typically a goal in extreme analysis, or in civil engineering design, then the situation rarely presents itself. The final assumption about stationarity is difficult to test from data for a single site because of the large uncertainties in even the longest flood records^[3] (see next section). More broadly, substantial evidence of climate change strongly suggests that the probability distribution is also changing^[7] and that managing flood risks in the future will become even more difficult.^[8] The simplest implication of this is that not all of the historical data are, or can be, considered valid as input into the extreme event analysis.

Lots to dig into.

Update on Dec 7, 2015 by Bishop Hill

On Twitter, Derek Sorensen tracks it down to Honister.

Bovine thought for the day

If you wanted any more evidence that the BBC is now openly working for the green movement, take a listen to this recent edition of Thought for the Day, when journalist (and part-time vicar) Martin Wroe was given free rein to tell the Radio Four audience that we should be acting on climate change because we want to leave a world without extreme weather to posterity.

I kid you not.

Audio below.

Wroe Thought for the Day

Climate talks progress

Progress at Paris talks as world leaders agree cardboard to go out on Tuesday night

 An agreement that cardboard for recycling will be put out on a Tuesday night has been reached at the UN climate summit in Paris. The historic deal will see cardboard across the developed world kerbside and ready for collection on a Wednesday morning, though it is acknowledged that some less developed countries may not manage until after lunchtime

 H/T Newsbiscuit

Quote of the day, Lewandowsky edition

[T]he level of obfuscation the authors went to, in order to disguise their actual data, was intense. Statistical techniques appeared to have been chosen that would hide the study’s true results. And it appeared that no peer reviewers, or journal editors, took the time, or went to the effort of scrutinizing the study in a way that was sufficient to identify the bold misrepresentations.

A psychologist considers the work of Stefan Lewandowsky

Is underlying warming only 0.8 degrees per century?

A new paper by Craig Loehle tries to address an area that has frequently been the cause of criticism of mainstream climate science -namely the blind eye it tends to turn to questions of natural variability. It's not online, but here's the abstract.

Multidecadal climate variability has proven difficult to deal with when estimating temperature trends. This possible unforced internal oscillation of the climate system provides an opportunity to correct temperature trends. The Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO) is proposed as a potential index for this unforced variability. The AMO pattern does not appear to correspond to forcing histories used by the IPCC. Subtracting a scaled version of the AMO from the Hadley global temperature data produced damped decadal-scale fluctuations in the temperature data. The adjusted dataset is highly correlated with the anthropogenic forcing history from IPCC AR5. The linear post-1970 temperature trend is 0.83°C/century vs. 1.63°C/century for the raw data. Thus almost exactly half of the post-1970 warming is possibly natural. The use of the AMO as an index of unforced variability is supported by the fact that subtracting it simplifies the temperature response by damping the peaks and troughs consistently.

 In the main text, Loehle says that these results imply estimates for ECS of 1.5 and for TCR of 1.21.

Letts laugh at the BBC

Quentin Letts account of the way the BBC handled the complaint over his letting sceptics appear on his radio programme about the Met Office is very funny.

First, an apology. Thanks to me, all journalists at BBC Radio’s ethics and religion division are being sent for indoctrination in climate change. Sorry. In July I made a short Radio 4 programme with them called What’s the Point of the Met Office?, which accidentally sent orthodox warmists into a boiling tizzy.

Read the whole thing.

Precipitation - steady as she goes

A new paper by van Wijngaarden and Syed in the Journal of Hydrology notes a claim by the IPCC:

...the IPCC has reported that precipitation increased in some regions by as much as 1% in each decade of the 20th century.

The paper's authors then set about testing this claim.

The percentage annual precipitation change relative to 1961–90 was plotted for 6 continents; as well as for stations at different latitudes and those experiencing low, moderate and high annual precipitation totals. The trends for precipitation change together with their 95% confidence intervals were found for various periods of time. Most trends exhibited no clear precipitation change. The global changes in precipitation over the Earth’s land mass excluding Antarctica relative to 1961–90 were estimated to be:
1.2 ± 1.7, 2.6 ± 2.5 and
5.4 ± 8.1% per century for the periods 1850–2000, 1900–2000 and 1950–2000, respectively. A change of 1% per century corresponds to a precipitation change of 0.09 mm/year.

So if my maths is correct, the IPCC is out by as much as an order of magnitude. Perhaps the regions they were testing were smaller.

Quote of the day, academic extremism edition

People who become intoxicated by the progress of knowledge, often become the enemies of freedom.

Friedrich von Hayek, quoted at No Tricks Zone.