Gary Yohe's fictional citation

Updated on Aug 14, 2015 by Bishop Hill

It is...irresponsible to ignore the preponderance of evidence on floods, extreme precipitation events (and if it is winter, these are snow storms), wildfires, etc. These were anticipated to occur as the climate changes. They have occurred around the world (U.S., Russia, Indonesia, Japan, Argentina, etc..), and they are getting worse and more frequent^[2].

The quote is from famous environmental economist Gary Yohe, writing at Climate Feedback, a site where climate scientists rate media articles on their scientific content. Yohe was writing about a Bjorn Lomborg piece.

Yohe's citation is to the detection and attribution chapter of AR5, which is, on the face of it, a bizarre thing given that there are whole chapters in the IPCC about observations of the climate. Intrigued, I looked at the chapter cited.

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The FCO misleads

Sir David King, the Foreign Office's adviser on climate change, has commissioned a report into the effects of climate change on food security. There's a monster team of authors featuring among others Tim Benton, a population ecologist and the "UK Champion for Global Food Security", and Rob Bailey, a former executive at Oxfam who now works at Chatham House.

The underlying study is a mega-hypothesis of course - it's computer models all the way down, you might say - so it's of no practical use, but with the project led by someone like Sir David, one can be reasonably sure that it will at least provide some entertainment.

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The night remains dark

As the latest paper to try to explain the pause appears, it's hard not to smile. Reason follows explanation follows rationale follows excuse, and the interested layman is left with the abiding impression that the night remains very very dark indeed.

This is not to say that these are not valiant efforts to get to the bottom of things, but let us not kid ourselves, a la Guardian, that anyone really has much of a clue about what is going on yet. Claims that climate models are even more accurate than previously thought are the scientific equivalent of a fart joke and deserve the same response.

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Is there a backstory to the EPA pollution incident?

Further to the story that the EPA was responsible for a major pollution incident in Colarado a few days ago, Ivo Vegter posted a scan of a letter that was published in the local newspaper a few days before EPA started work. It's a bit hard to read, but well worth it if you can decipher sufficiently.

Fracking planning

I haven't a lot of time to write this morning, but here is a thread to discuss the government's announcement that it is going to try to expedite the planning process for shale gas developments.

This year's walrus articles

So I wake this morning to find two stories about walruses in my Twitter feed. Why the sudden interest. There doesn't appear to be any news as such, but the Associated Press are telling readers that there is a steep decline in the walrus harvest in Alaska:

Hunters and scientists say walrus migration patterns are veering from historical hunting grounds as temperatures warm and the ocean ice used by the animals to dive and rest recedes farther north. Village elders also tell biologists the wind is blowing in new directions. In 2013, a late-season icepack clustered around St. Lawrence Island, blocking hunters from the sea.

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Cameron's great white elephant

Nuclear power is in the news at the moment. The Japanese have switched on a nuclear power plant for the first time since Fukishima, as the authorities realise the full cost of their knee-jerk reaction to the tsunami. Here in the UK, there is a growing concern over the cost of Hinkley Point, a project that increasingly resembles a fiscal black hole.

However, less commented upon have been a few apparently small developments in the nuclear market that may make for a better future for the industry.

Firstly, a US developer of small modular nuclear reactors has given regulators the heads-up that it will submit its first designs next year, ahead of possible deployment in 2023. An array of competitors are working on similar timescales and, encouragingly, regulators seem to be responding constructively too, aiming to have the new rulebook in place in time to keep the commercial operators moving forward.

Meanwhile (if somewhat less credibly), Revkin is looking at a claim that we could have nuclear fusion on stream in a decade.

If all goes to plan it is quite conceivable that Hinkley C could be a white elephant before it is even completed.

In Poland, workers and windfarms sit idle

It's hot in parts of Eastern Europe at the moment - this happens in summertime I believe - and so people are switching on the airconditioning in droves.

In Poland this has produced some pretty major problems because the electricity grid can't supply sufficient electricity to meet demand. It's a familiar story: Poland relies on coal for the bulk of its electricity, but nobody wants to invest in new coal-fired power plants because the market is being rigged in favour of renewables and the EU is going to shut them all down anyway. Meanwhile there is hardly a puff of wind to be found anywhere in Europe so Poland's wind fleet is not helping either.

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The first five years of the RCPs

Further to yesterday's post on butterflies and RCPs, I wondered just how things were panning out for the RCPs since they were issued five years ago. I wasn't really expecting very much from this analysis since five years is not very long, but it turned out that there is more of a difference than might be expected.

The RCP data is for the mid-year carbon dioxide concentration and it turns out that the June figure from Mauna Loa has just tipped the 400ppm mark. RCP8.5 predicted that 2015 would be the first year in which the 400ppm mark was breached at the mid-year point, so at first glance we are indeed on the RCP8.5 pathway.

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In which Nature Climate validates my predictive models

In order for a predictive model to be useful it needs to be validated in some way. Here are two predictive models that I suggest might be useful in interpreting scientific papers.

• If the paper is published in a Nature journal it's probably nonsense. Particularly if it's in (a) Nature itself or (b) Nature Climate Change
• If it calls RCP8.5 "business as usual" it is political drivel.

With these predictions in mind, readers may be interested in this new paper from Nature Climate Change:

Climate change is expected to increase the frequency of some climatic extremes^{1, 2}. These may have drastic impacts on biodiversity^{3, 4}, particularly if meteorological thresholds are crossed, leading to population collapses. Should this occur repeatedly, populations may be unable to recover, resulting in local extinctions. Comprehensive time series data on butterflies in Great Britain provide a rare opportunity to quantify population responses to both past severe drought and the interaction with habitat area and fragmentation. Here, we combine this knowledge with future projections from multiple climate models, for different Representative Concentration Pathways (RCPs), and for simultaneous modelled responses to different landscape characteristics. Under RCP8.5, which is associated with ‘business as usual’ emissions, widespread drought-sensitive butterfly population extinctions could occur as early as 2050. However, by managing landscapes and particularly reducing habitat fragmentation, the probability of persistence until mid-century improves from around zero to between 6 and 42% (95% confidence interval). Achieving persistence with a greater than 50% chance and right through to 2100 is possible only under both low climate change (RCP2.6) and semi-natural habitat restoration. Our data show that, for these drought-sensitive butterflies, persistence is achieved more effectively by restoring semi-natural landscapes to reduce fragmentation, rather than simply focusing on increasing habitat area, but this will only be successful in combination with substantial emission reductions.

My predictive models appears to be working splendidly.

Environmental regulators trashing the environment

My concern over a massive discharge of polluted water into a river in Colorado is lightened at least slightly by the discovery that the culprit was the Environmental Protection Agency.

The city of Durango and La Plata County, Colorado, have declared a state of emergency after a federal cleanup crew accidentally released mine waste into the water.

An estimated 1 million gallons of waste water spilled out of an abandoned mine area in the southern part of the state last week, turning the Animas River orange and prompting the Environmental Protection Agency to tell locals to avoid it.

A deserving case, I would say.

Social licences

A few weeks ago I chanced across an oil company executive who was expounding earnestly on his company's "social licence to operate". I raised an eyebrow at the time because it struck me as a case of big oil adopting the language of the environmentalists.

Interestingly though, it turns out that the whole concept of a social licence was introduced by a mining company executive:

[Jim] Cooney was racking his brain for a concept to describe why projects from Peru to Angola were getting delayed and shut down by protests. The companies lacked “social license,” he told the audience.

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Thoughts on aerosols

I've been reading a bit about aerosols in recent days. As many BH readers will know, these are one of the great uncertainties in the Earth's climate and so they crop up all the time.

This interest was provoked in part by a conversation I was having with Ed Hawkins about his new paper. I had invoked Bjorn Stevens' study from which it is possible to infer a value of -0.5 Wm^-2 for the overall effect of aerosols, around half of the IPCC's best estimate of -0.9 Wm^-2. This of course would imply that climate sensitivity would have to be much lower than the IPCC suggests it is.

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Letts accuse

For such a trifling programme, Quentin Letts' What's the Point of the Met Office is really making waves. Booker reviews it over at the Mail and there's some interesting coverage by Damian Thompson at the Spectator.

Yesterday [Harrabin] went into overdrive. ‘Accusation’, he declared, as he linked to Black’s attack on Letts. The sceptics got ‘their’ programme when the BBC allowed Quentin Letts to raise an eyebrow at the Met Office’s alarmist and utterly false claim that thermometers would shoot up between 2004 and 2014.

Don’t get me wrong: Roger Harrabin is a highly respected science writer. He doesn’t set out to deceive his readers. But, as Letts might put it, What’s the Point of a supposedly impartial ‘environment analyst’ who – apparently – takes offence at his bosses allowing another journalist to offer views different to his own?

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What DECC knew

Updated on Aug 6, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Greenpeace have been doing some rather odd FOI work in recent months. It seems they have decided to investigate the series of parliamentary questions that Lord Donoughue put to to DECC ministers about the Met Office's statistical reasoning. Readers will recall that these questions were formulated with Doug Keenan's advice, were aimed at determining how the Met Office justified its claim that recent temperature rises were statistically significant, and that the eventual result, after months of non-answers from the Met Office, was that they effectively withdrew the claim.

The documents Greenpeace have made public are very interesting but I'm not sure that our environmentalist friends have considered exactly what it is they have got.

It does rather come across as if the DECC team wanted to "move on". In Document 4, the briefing ahead of the meeting between Keenan, Donoughue and the DECC team of Baroness Verma, David Mackay and David Warrilow, officials list their objectives for the meeting as being:

• to demonstrate a willingness to listen
• to demonstrate to Lord Donoughue that DECC's scientists are reasonable and, erm, scientific
• to steer Lord Donoughue away from Keenan.

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