The shonky cost of carbon

A new paper has appeared in Nature Climate Change which puts a social cost of global warming at $200 per ton of carbon dioxide. The authors are Frances Moore and Delavane Diaz of Stanford.

The SCC is of course is a figure that greens can manipulate pretty much to their hearts' content - witness Frank Ackerman's hilarious $1000 figure of a few years back. The entertainment comes in working out what particular dodges have been pulled to hike the figure upwards and the new paper explains that it is picking up on an earlier study by Dell et al, which sought to make revised estimates of the damage that climate change would cause by examining the effect of short-term fluctuations in the weather on economic output.

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Another unthinking BBC correspondent

Helen Briggs, the BBC's latest environmentalist recruit has decided to throw herself - and the thus the corporation's considerable weight - behind the greens' divestment campaign. Her advertorial today appears to have been written for her by someone in Greenpeace or the Guardian, without even the pretence of having any news value.

The "pros and cons" section has to be seen to be believed. If you can credit it, the BBC has an employee who doesn't seem to realise that people in Africa are dying in their hundreds of thousands for lack of access to fossil fuels. Does Ms Briggs think that dead Africans are not a "con" of her campaign?

SMH - the voice of the hidden vested interest

The Sydney Morning Herald is giving much publicity to the anti-Lomborg rantings of someone called Professor Ray Wills.

Adjunct Professor Wills, who has been a spokesman for the university on climate change issues for the past seven years, said there was a lot of disquiet among the university ranks about the centre.

"The appointment tarnishes the reputation of the university," he told Fairfax Media.

"It's like appointing Brian Burke to look after your economics.

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Lewis on the SciAm article

This article, by Nic Lewis, is crossposted from Climate Audit.

A Scientific American article concerning Bjorn Stevens’ recent paper “Rethinking the lower bound on aerosol radiative forcing” has led to some confusion. The article states, referring to a blog post of mine at Climate Audit, “The misinterpretation of Stevens’ paper began with Nic Lewis, an independent climate scientist.”. My blog post showed how climate sensitivity estimates given in Lewis and Curry (2014) (LC14) would change if the estimate for aerosol forcing from Stevens’ recent paper were used instead of the estimate thereof given in the IPCC 5th Assessment Working Group 1 report (AR5 WG1). To clarify, Bjorn Stevens has never suggested that my blog post misinterpreted or misrepresented his paper.

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This is what ambulance chasing looks like

Not wanting to be outdone on the disgusting specimen front, James Murray of Business Green is trying to make climate change hay out of the plight of Mediterreanean refugees.

Is there a competition on to see who can be the most revolting climate change activist at the moment?

Update on Apr 25, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Gaia Fawkes picks up the story too.

Lomborg and the Africans

Bjorn Lomborg argues that we should focus our spending on immediate problems, such as ensuring Africans have access to clean water. For this he is vilified, attacked and has his livelihood threatened.

His critics wish to see money spent on climate change mitigation measures instead.

A tragedy for the Africans.

When drilling isn't drilling

In a startlingly misleading article today, the Telegraph is trying to insinuate a link between oil and gas drilling and earthquakes. It's one of those articles that is so bad that nobody wants to own up to having written it. It's an agency piece, but without even the name of the agency!

Richard Black and co are trying to hype things up of course:

Scientists more certain than ever that oil, gas drilling causes earth tremors

...but you wouldn't look to ECIU if you're interested in the facts. If you read a little further it seems that this is an article about wastewater injection.

"The picture is very clear" that wastewater injection can cause faults to move, said USGS geophysicist William Ellsworth.

Until recently, Oklahoma - one of the biggest energy-producing states - had been cautious about linking the spate of quakes to drilling. But the Oklahoma Geological Survey acknowledged earlier this week that it is "very likely" that recent seismic activity was caused by the injection of wastewater into disposal wells.

They are beyond redemption.

SciAm's climate sensitivity car crash

Updated on Apr 25, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Updated on Apr 25, 2015 by Bishop Hill

When the climate alarmist is struggling to make his case, he tends to reach for either the ad-hominem argument or some other rhetorical technique from the depths of the propagandist armoury.

Readers will recall the Bjorn Stevens paper on aerosols, which I suggested at the time gave alarmism "one helluva beating", as indeed it does. My headline seemed to amuse others and it was echoed by James Delingpole at Breitbart, his article later reproduced at Fox News.

The inevitable response was a statement by Stevens that sought to calm the troubled waters, suggesting that unidentified parties were claiming that it was the end of the global warming hypothesis. This was a fairly obvious straw man argument, but one that was sufficiently robust for Scientific American, which has now picked up the story in rather embarrassing fashion.

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For the environmentalist, lies are a way of life

Global warming is real - it is man-made and it is an important problem. But it is not the end of the world.

Bjorn Lomborg on climate change

Now take a look at what environmentalists and lefties have to say. The tsunami of lies is quite, quite extraordinary:

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The climatologist's privilege

The BBC has infamously decided that climatologists should not be challenged on air. They are, in the corporation's considered view Science Personified; the very voice of truth. As if to emphasise the point, the Today programme this morning invited Sir Brian Hoskins on air to talk about climate change. Ostensibly this was to allow him to air his grievance that the election debate has largely eschewed consideration of the subject, but also gave him plenty of time to discuss his views on climate policy and what he sees as the need to prioritise climate over wealth creation. And all without a word of challenge from anyone.

The climatologist's privilege is creeping ever wider by the looks of it.

Audio below.

Hoskins, Today 22 April 2015

Update on Apr 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

In Unthreaded, reader Harry Passfield notes that James Lovelock was invited onto Today last weekend to make the same point as Hoskins about the lack of climate change on the election agenda.

Deben's new witchhunt

Readers may be aware that Bjorn Lomborg has been lucky enough to win a significant tranche of funding for his think tank from the Australian government, a story that was widely reported at the end of last week.

The result, I suppose, was inevitable and it seems that a new witchhunt has been launched by the illiberal left. At the forefront is our very own Lord Deben:

.@Thom_Mitchell @marxdeane Surely no responsible academic institution would connive at this blatant bias against science?

— John Deben (@lorddeben) April 22, 2015

This displays many of the hallmarks of the great Lord Deb. It is well known that Lomborg accepts all of mainstream climate science as gospel - his work is focused on climate policy and more specifically considers how spending on climate issues should rank compared to spending on other matters. Deben is therefore fairly nakedly fabricating a false allegation that the Dane thinks otherwise. The other way that this tweet epitomises Deben's malign influence on the climate debate is the immediate attempt to destroy Lomborg's livelihood. Deben has no arguments to put forward, no case to make. He simply wants dissent silenced.

You can't imagine ever voting for a party that had Deben in it, can you?

Update on Apr 22, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Jo Nova looks at the Australian reaction here.

Solar heat

A fire at Hove Town Hall was caused by solar panels on its roof, it emerged today.

"The source of the fire is believed to be an electrical fault with a solar panel on the roof. An investigation is under way."

The council said all its solar panels were checked annually, with those at the town hall checked two weeks ago.

ESF&RS said solar panels were no more dangerous than any other electrical product.

Although according to this website, this is not actually true

Research commissioned by the DCLG and carried out by BRE on fire safety and solar electric/photovoltaic systems, identifies the major obstacle facing firefighters: “In contrast to the power used by conventional mains electrical equipment, the power that PV systems generate is DC (direct current) and parts of the system cannot be switched off. DC installations have a continuous current, making them more hazardous (volt for volt) than normal AC (alternating current) electrical installations.”  

The issue is that a household’s AC supply can easily be shut off by firefighters, however, the DC current supplied by the solar panels will also be generating as long as the sun is out.

The whole article is pretty interesting, pointing out for example that if a fire breaks out in your solar panels, it is not going to get picked up by your smoke detectors.

The Iris Hypothesis from the archives

Today, most mainstream researchers consider Dr. Lindzen’s theory discredited.

Justin Gillis in the New York Times

...the basis of Lindzen’s argument, which itself is the basis of all remaining relatively credible climate contrarianism, is entirely false...

Dana Nuccitelli

You have people who keep propping [the discredited theory] up,...Lindzen may still hold to it, but no one would still be listening to him. He wouldn't be given a platform.

Prof Joel Norris of Scripps

Refuted by four peer-reviewed studies within a year of the publication of Lindzen's hypothesis.

Nuccitelli again

Iris hypothesis bridges model-observation gap

Some months ago I picked up wind of a new paper that was going to provide some support for Richard Lindzen's Iris Hypothesis - the idea that in a warming planet there would be reduced levels of cirrus cloud, which would allow the extra heat to escape from Earth.

The paper in question seems to be this one, published in Nature Geoscience. The authors are Bjorn Stevens and Thorsten Mauritzen, the former the author of a much-discussed paper on aerosols and the latter best known for his paper on the subject of GCM tuning.

Here's the abstract:

Missing iris effect as a possible cause of muted hydrological change and high climate sensitivity in models

Equilibrium climate sensitivity to a doubling of CO₂ falls between 2.0 and 4.6 K in current climate models, and they suggest a weak increase in global mean precipitation. Inferences from the observational record, however, place climate sensitivity near the lower end of this range and indicate that models underestimate some of the changes in the hydrological cycle. These discrepancies raise the possibility that important feedbacks are missing from the models. A controversial hypothesis suggests that the dry and clear regions of the tropical atmosphere expand in a warming climate and thereby allow more infrared radiation to escape to space. This so-called iris effect could constitute a negative feedback that is not included in climate models. We find that inclusion of such an effect in a climate model moves the simulated responses of both temperature and the hydrological cycle to rising atmospheric greenhouse gas concentrations closer to observations. Alternative suggestions for shortcomings of models — such as aerosol cooling, volcanic eruptions or insufficient ocean heat uptake — may explain a slow observed transient warming relative to models, but not the observed enhancement of the hydrological cycle. We propose that, if precipitating convective clouds are more likely to cluster into larger clouds as temperatures rise, this process could constitute a plausible physical mechanism for an iris effect.

Diary dates, daily edition

The BBC's Daily Politics is having an energy and environment feature today, with representatives of all the main parties in attendance. My expectations are low.

Daily Politics Environment Debate line-up with @afneil & @RHarrabin - Mon 20 April 2pm BBC2 #bbcdp (1/9) pic.twitter.com/GaK4vQamim

— roger harrabin (@RHarrabin) April 18, 2015

This will mean that we will have a series of half-baked claims about the climate from the Conservative, Labour, LibDem and Green spokesmen, with Roger Helmer expected to rebut the lot of them. I'm not even sure we will get heat, let alone any light. It will be largely declarations of the faith and damning of the heterodox.

Roger Harrabin's presence is interesting. I'm not a regular viewer of the show, but I can't recall an occasion on which Andrew Neil was given an overseer. Are BBC managers worried he might ask awkward questions?