Bishop Hill Sep 3, 2015 Climate: Surface Climate: WG2 Polar bears are remarkable creatures, but I bet you don't know just how remarkable they are. Scientists tracking some of these majestic beasts in the Southern Beaufort sea using radio-collars have determined that some of them spent the whole of the month of August in an area in which there was almost no sea ice! ;)
Bishop Hill Sep 2, 2015 Greens Mark Lynas By almost any measure, the UK - and England in particular - is seriously overpopulated. According to the Optimum Population Trust, our numbers are growing by more than 320,000 a year. Addressing this doesn't mean forced sterilisations or a Chinese-style, one-child policy, but it does mean giving incentives for people to have smaller families and addressing rising levels of immigration.
Mark Lynas, vintage 2007
Perhaps today the circumstances have changed...
See you there! #refugeeswelcome pic.twitter.com/enjuk1dP6l
— Mark Lynas (@mark_lynas) September 2, 2015Today's words of wisdom come from Ruth Dixon's review of Lord Stern's latest opus.
Stern is...selective in his choice of data. He frequently ignores mainstream scientific evidence (such as that found in the authoritative reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)) in favour of outlying estimates.
The type of small-scale solar PV [Stern] describes is a good way to supply electricity for lights, phone and internet access to remote communities, but it is fanciful to suppose that such systems can provide enough power for cooking.
Even in his own words, Stern makes clear that he does not view objectivity as an overriding concern.
Bishop Hill Sep 2, 2015 Climate: other The Geological Society is holding an event in the autumn which looks as though it is going to ask some slightly awkward questions about this whole global warming malarkey:
Environmental conditions at the Earth's surface have been continuously suitable for life for more than three billion years. Temperatures, for example, have only varied by few tens of centigrade despite large changes in solar luminosity and atmospheric composition. Since the Archean, the planet has not once been rendered sterile. However, the reasons for this long-term life-friendliness remain contentious. How has Earth’s climate avoided the runaway warming shown on Venus or the runaway cooling of Mars? Has Earth’s relative stability resulted from geochemical feedback (e.g. through silicate weathering), the stabilizing influence of a complex biosphere (i.e. the Gaia hypothesis), good luck (e.g. purely fortuitous cancellation of solar warming by decreased greenhouse gas concentrations) or is long-term life-friendliness simply the consequence of life’s extraordinary adaptability (allowing it to survive even Snowball Earth events)?
This conference will bring together proponents of these various views in an attempt to forge a consensus on how to move the debate forward. This debate will be informed by data relating to the latest understanding of silicate weathering, Neoproterozoic ice ages, and the environmental history of Earth.
This meeting would be suitable for anyone interested in the long-term habitability of the Earth, its long-term climate history, geo-biochemical cycles, the highly controversial Gaia hypothesis or the likelihood of habitable worlds beyond the solar system.
Bishop Hill Sep 2, 2015 A few people have reported problems with the Captcha on the comments. Could you describe the problems in the comments please, plus all the usual stuff about OS, browser etc.
Thanks
Bishop Hill Sep 1, 2015 Climate: MWP The climate change world has, I think it's fair to say, been a little quiet recently, but thank goodness we have David Appell around to provide entertainment.
In his latest offering he announces a "long and useful list of studies that find a hockey stick from reconstructions of paleoclimate data".
Sounds interesting. Here's one of them.
;)
I have to say, an ice hockey team armed with sticks shaped like that would be a sight to behold.
Josh?
Bishop Hill Sep 1, 2015 Ethics ;)
Jose Duarte has posted an update on his efforts to have Stefan Lewandowsky deal with the errors and ethical breaches in his Conspiracist Ideation paper.
The journal, PLOS ONE, has forced the authors to publish a correction dealing with most (but not all) of the errors. Lew, rather gracelessly refuses to name Duarte as the person who discovered the problems, prompting Richard Tol to post a comment on the PLOS website:
The anonymous reader referred to in the correction is not Lord Voldemort, but rather Dr Joe Duarte.
However, but it seems fairly clear that university offficials - from the vice-chancellor down - are thumbing their noses at the very idea that ethical considerations might apply to their staff and they appear to be trying to give Lewandowsky retrospective permission for his use of minors in the survey. They are in essence covering up for Lew.
As Joe puts it, it is an "ethical collapse".
Bishop Hill Aug 31, 2015 Recycling ;)
Another recycling plant has gone up in smoke. This time the facility involved is in Wales, and there is apparently a fear that it could burn for days.
In related news a plastics recycling facility in Thailand was wiped out by fire a few hours ago.
On Saturday, it was a facility in Virginia that proved incendiary.
On Friday, there were two facilities in flames, one in Forth Worth and one in South Carolina.
Bishop Hill Aug 31, 2015 Media
Updated on Aug 31, 2015 by
Bishop Hill
Updated on Aug 31, 2015 by
Bishop Hill
John WebsterHot on the heels of the story about the BBC's accepting paid-for programming (aka propaganda) from environmental groups comes the news that the EU has been paying for programmes too. Chief among these were a piece extolling the virtues of...the European Union, which was faithfully aired by the BBC back in March, and a forthcoming show about climate change entitled Little Yellow Boots. A demo reel for the latter can be seen here.
As these things go it's pretty run of the mill, but fairly nauseating and you may prefer just to cast your eyes over the blurb:
Filmmaker John Webster has become ever more concerned about climate change. Together with his imaginary great-granddaughter he sets out to find a solution that will both cure him of the demons that haunt him, but also help her in the very different world she will inherit from us.
Bishop Hill Aug 28, 2015 Climate: MWP Climate: Mann ;)
Journalist David Appell appears a couple of times in The Hockey Stick Illusion, firstly in Chapter 4, in the section entitled "Mann's mouthpiece", where he is the source (if perhaps not the ultimate source) of the (false) claim that Mann sent McIntyre an Excel spreadsheet. It's worth reading again if you have a moment.
Anyway, in the wake of Mark Steyn's book on Michael Mann, Appell has written to Jonathan Jones enquiring about the latter's comments on the Hockey Stick and the results have been written up in a blog post here. It's hilarious.
For example, Jones observes that bristlecones are not reliable temperature proxies and that principal components analysis requires data to be centred, before following up with similar scientific objections to a couple of other papers that Appell has cited in support of Mann. Appell's response to all of these objections is, in total:
This is clearly just a lot of hand-waving.
Read the rest of it too. The guy is away with the fairies.
Bishop Hill Aug 28, 2015 Climate: WG2 ;)
Climate models eh? If nothing else, they are at least the cause of some wonderfully convoluted arguments among climate scientists as they pore over the outputs like psychics gazing at the tea leaves in a saucer.
Recall, if you will, the story over the Sahel. GWPF put out a briefing pointing out that earlier claims that global warming was going to lead to perennial drought there were nullified by a long period of greening. This led to a cod debunking from Desmog, but later to a paper by Dong and Sutton, which claimed, on the basis of a GCM study, that the greening was in fact caused by greenhouse gases (background here).
The latest development is a new paper (£) by Alessandra Giannini of the Earth Institute at Columbia, which critiques Dong and Sutton. Her case is that there is a well-established link between sea-surface temperatures and Sahelian drought:
Bishop Hill Aug 28, 2015 Energy: wind ;)
It's not a good day to be a green or a crony capitalist: the government has announced its proposals on feed-in-tariffs and it makes pretty ugly reading for all those who feed at the trough of government subsidies.
The headline news is that rooftop solar subsidies are going to be slashed from 12.6p to a token 1.6p per kWh. All those claims that solar is close to being cost-competitive with traditional forms of electricity are therefore now going to be given a fairly rigorous testing. If the claims are true then we can look forward to solar panels spreading to every rooftop.
And if they are not, it will mean the end of all those cold calls.
[Updated to reflect that these are proposals rather than commitments]
Bishop Hill Aug 27, 2015 Climate: Parliament Energy: wind ;)
The renewable energy sector is of vital importance to North Wales, [which] is becoming a powerhouse for renewable energy.
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones, December 2014
[W]e’ve been saying for a long time, as have Tata, energy costs in the UK are too high.
“When compared to other countries, even in Europe, it’s very difficult for our industries to use a lot of energy to actually be competitive.
Welsh First Minister Carwyn Jones, today
Wales has to move to a green economy as fast as possible, says First Minister Carwyn Jones...Mr Jones told a renewable energy conference in Cardiff that he had taken personal responsibility for energy policy within the Welsh government.
BBC News report, 2011
Bishop Hill Aug 27, 2015 Energy: grid I thought it might be interesting to see how the DECC fossil fuel price forecast - you know, the one that is said to justify all those subsidies, feed-in-tariffs and renewables obligations. The comparison is startling - I've added a dot with today's Brent crude price.
The claim that decarbonisation would only cost a few percentage points off GDP seems to have been a fairy story.
In related news, GWPF have again called for DECC to be closed down.
Bishop Hill Aug 27, 2015 Economics ;)
Lord Stern ponders what positions he might adopt after lunchLord Stern has mounted his high horse, ready to slay the dragon of opposition to anything he deems a good idea at the time.
The problem is that Lord Stern's views seem fluid to say the least. Back in 2009 he was telling the world that rich nations would have to forgo growth in order to stop climate change.
Now he is telling us that portraying economic growth and climate change action as being in conflict is "diversionary" and a "misunderstanding of economic development".
The question readers want answered is "Does Lord Stern ever actually mean anything he says?".
(H/T Richard Tol)
Bishop Hill
Josh points out that the Guardian, rather hilariously, even has the evidence on the same page as Stern's new article!
;)