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.

More on the ice age scare

In Quadrant magazine, Tony Thomas has been doing some fascinating research on the 1970s ice age scare.

A great embarrassment to the warming-catastrophic community is that 40 years ago the climatology scare was about cooling and onset of an ice age. Warmists today go, “Pooh! That cooling stuff  then was just a few hyped-up articles in magazines. Cooling never got any traction in the real science community!”

Really? Then explain this away

Read the whole thing.

Greens running scared of debate

Scaredy cat photo by Iris under CC. https://www.flickr.com/photos/irisphotos/8340124055Greens have never been keen on being challenged on their views and with the spotlight on Paris at the moment they are even more keen that they only get soft interviews. I did a BBC interview a while ago and was told when the booking was made that I was up against Lord Deben. However, shortly beforehand I was told that the great man was "no longer available", no doubt not wanting to have anything he'd said about his business interests to the Energy and Climate Change Commmittee mentioned on air.

Prince Charles is a case in point too. According to the Guardian he has said that he will only appear on Channel Four news if he is allowed to vet the questions beforehand and has full editorial control. Channel Four has told him where to go of course, although the article hints that Sky News may have agreed to the same terms in a recent interview with HRH.

Meanwhile Natalie Bennet, the leader of the Green party has refused to appear on the Week in Westminster opposite Nigel Lawson.

Could be talking to Week in Westminster on #climatechange. Declined to be on with Nigel Lawson - preposterous views shouldn't be legitimised

— Natalie Bennett (@natalieben) December 2, 2015

Not that this will make any difference. The greens have so many supporters in the mainstream media that they will always be able to line up some more soft interviews.

Update on Dec 4, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Of course Natalie Bennet is happy in the company of violent thugs:

Solving the Uruguay mystery

According to Wikipedia, in 2013, Uruguay had 10MW of wind power capacity out of a total electricity generating capacity of 2337MW. That's 0.4%. Fully 1538MW or 66% was hydro. It suggests wind as a percentage of generating capacity would hit 30% by 2016.

Six months ago, Bloomberg reported that wind capacity was due to hit 800MW this year.

But today, according Jonathan Watts in the Guardian, Uruguay has made a "dramatic shift to nearly 95% electricity from clean energy". The picture at the top of the article is, of course, of a wind turbine and we learn that:

Uruguay gets 94.5% of its electricity from renewables. In addition to old hydropower plants, a hefty investment in wind, biomass and solar in recent years has raised the share of these sources in the total energy mix to 55%, compared with a global average of 12%, and about 20% in Europe.

Click to read more ...

Silencing dissent

Is that a brown shirt?A group called Ecojustice has called for an investigation into global warming dissenters, under Canada's Competition Act. Their case, if you can credit it, is that the act forbids anyone from making misleading statements when selling stuff or for promoting their business interests.

Interestingly, the groups targeted are Friends of Science, the International Climate Science Coalition, and the Heartland Institute. Given that none of these are businesses, the investigation promises to be rather short.

Interestingly, one of those involved is Danny Harvey, an academic from the University of Toronto. He gets a mention in the Climategate emails, where he was involved in Hockey Team efforts to dish out retribution after the publication of the Soon and Baliunas paper (Hockey Stick Illusion p. 406). I understand that he is now an editor at Climatic Change too. I imagine you have to take care about what you submit to that journal.

The decline and fall of the university

'Is it OK to write "kooky", I wonder'.A series of stories in recent days leaves me with the impression that the university system in the Anglosphere countries is on the verge of total collapse.

Take for example the story that students at Brown University are going underground in order to meet and discuss current affairs free of university policies on "safe spaces", which, for the unitiated, are designed to restrict any speech that challenges left-wing memes.

Tales of similar left-wing attacks on free speech at other American univerities are rife as well.

Until recently, I had rather blithely assumed that such foolishness had not yet crossed the Atlantic, but how wrong I was. This video of a debate on gender politics at the University of Bristol is a case in point. The constant hesitation by the panel chairman, as he tries to work out whether what the speakers have said falls foul of the "safe spaces" policy, is something to behold. Is "kooky" OK, the panellists wonder at one point.

Click to read more ...