Security oversight

The Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee is going to be considering security of supply this morning from 10am (they are doing the Green Deal at time of writing). The are going to hear from:

• Cordi O'Hara, Director, UK System Operator
• Duncan Burt, Head, Operate the System
• Ro Quinn, Head, Energy Strategy and Policy, National Grid.

With this latest incarnation of the committee, it's probably best not to hold any great expectations of penetrating questions being delivered.

More 403s

Readers are still complaining of 403 errors, which seems to be caused by posting of multiple comments in a short space of time. I have chased Squarespace and they have asked for more screenshots of the error messages - they think there may be a different one now. If readers could oblige by sending pics to me or to Squarespace (via the email address given previously) that would be good.

Quote of the day, science with Guardian characteristics edition

Without a Paris agreement, global warming is set to reach as much as 5C (41F) above pre-industrial levels. Scientists estimate that warming above 2C (35.6F) will result in catastrophic and irreversible changes to the weather, including droughts, floods, heatwaves, fiercer storms and sea level rises.

Fiona Harvey, award winning environment writer for the Guardian, struggles with mathematics

Exxon knew what the IPCC didn't

Bernie Lewin has posted another of his must-read climate history pieces, this time looking at the history of claims about detection and attribution of temperature changes to mankind. His point is that claims that "Exxon knew" back in the 1970s are absurd when set in the context of what climate science was saying on the subject of an anthropogenic influence ten, or even twenty years later.

It's beautifully written and confirms Bernie's place as an important historian of global warming science. You must be able to get a very comical juxtaposition by reading Bernie's erudite thoughts after perusing the effusions of a "proper" historian like Naomi Oreskes.

A change to the playing field

Doug Keenan has posted a note at the bottom of the notice about his £100,000 challenge, indicating that he has reissued the 1000 data series. This was apparently because it was pointed out to him that the challenge could be "gamed" by hacking the (pseudo)random number generator he had used.

Brandon Shollenberger emails to say that this is a terrible thing, but I can't get terribly excited about it. Presumably it doesn't make any difference to those who think they can detect the difference between trending and non-trending series.

Settled science

Much amusement is to be had from a posting at a blog called Sudden Oak Life. The author has recorded images of the Radcliffe surface temperature station in Oxford, part of the Central England Temperature Record and one of the longest temperature records there is.

It's fair to say the quality of the record has declined since the 18th century.

Read the whole thing.

Backing fracking

In a bit of a turnup for the books, a pro-fracking demonstration took place in Lancashire yesterday ahead of the appeal against the county council's decision to block Cuadrilla's planning application.

Video here from 9 minutes (expires tonight).

Ironically the following item is about the "Northern Powerhouse" strategy, with one talking head saying that it is a mirage and that there is no new investment coming to the North of England.

Funny that.

Eco journalists just can't help themselves

Made up of 33 low-lying coral atolls, Kiribati is shrinking as sea levels rise.

Claim made by Paul Gregoire, without citation, in Vice magazine

4.84, 4.66, 3.57, 0.48

Percentage increase in area per decade of islands in Tarawa, the main atoll in Kiribati, as reported by Kench et al.

Gas crackers

A team from the Karlsruhe Institute for Technology claims to have made a breakthrough on the energy front. They have developed a process to "crack" methane, removing the hydrogen, which can be used as a fuel, and leaving behind black carbon rather than carbon dioxide.

My initial reaction to this was to wonder what we would do with all that black carbon, but the press release has this to say:

It is already widely employed in the production of steel, carbon fibres and many carbon-based structural materials. The black carbon derived from the novel cracking process is of high quality and particularly pure powder. Its value as a marketable product therefore enhances the economic viability of methane cracking. Alternatively, black carbon can be stored away, using procedures that are much simpler, safer and cheaper than the storing of carbon dioxide.

It would be interesting to do the maths here - just how much black carbon might be produced, how much energy would be required to turn it into structural materials and so on. At the moment I remain somewhat unconvinced that this is the breakthrough claimed.

Guardian goes full ecobonkers

Yesterday, the IUCN, the body set up to worry about endangered species, issued the latest estimates on polar bear numbers. As Susan Crockford reports, the polar bear population seems to be at a record high, although the IUCN will not be drawn on the current trend and they seem to have been persuaded to leave the bears' status as "vulnerable".

Meanwhile, over in cloud cuckoo land, the Guardian is going the full ecobonkers on the report, with a gory headline about climate change being polar bears' 'single biggest threat'. Three subpopulations, they tell us, are in decline already. Strangely they seem to have neglected to mention the overall increase, and also the fact that two of these allegedly declining subpopulations were determined to be so more than ten years ago.

What's in a tax?

One of the most interesting parts of Amber Rudd's speech yesterday was the suggestion that renewables operators must pay for all the extra costs they bring to the system. Most people seem to be concluding that this means some kind of a tax on renewables.

This is all well and good, but the devil is in the details. So when the minister says:

In the same way generators should pay the cost of pollution, we also want intermittent generators to be responsible for the pressures they add to the system when the wind does not blow or the sun does not shine.

Does she mean that the rest of the grid is going to have to pick up the tab for connecting all those hundreds of wind turbines to the grid?

Watch this space.

A new edition of the Hockey Stick Illusion

The Hockey Stick Illusion went out of print recently. This meant that the rights to the title reverted to me and I have spent most of the last couple of weeks trying to put my own edition out there so that it remains available.

The Kindle version is now available. A print version will follow in due course.

Details here.

A $100,000 climate prize

Climatologists often claim that they are able to detect the global warming signal in the temperature records. If they are right then they are going to be having a very happy Christmas indeed, because Doug Keenan is offering them the chance to win a very large cash prize at his expense. Here are the details.

There have been many claims of observational evidence for global-warming alarmism. I have argued that all such claims rely on invalid statistical analyses. Some people, though, have asserted that the analyses are valid. Those people assert, in particular, that they can determine, via statistical analysis, whether global temperatures are increasing more that would be reasonably expected by random natural variation. Those people do not present any counter to my argument, but they make their assertions anyway.

In response to that, I am sponsoring a contest: the prize is $100 000. In essence, the prize will be awared to anyone who can demonstrate, via statistical analysis, that the increase in global temperatures is probably not due to random natural variation.

---

The file Series1000.txt contains 1000 time series. Each series has length 135 (about the same as that of the most commonly studied series of global temperatures). The series were generated via trendless statistical models fit for global temperatures. Some series then had a trend added to them. Each trend averaged 1°C/century—which is greater than the trend claimed for global temperatures. Some trends were positive; others were negative.

A prize of $100 000 (one hundred thousand U.S. dollars) will be awarded to the first person, or group of people, who correctly identifies at least 900 series: i.e. which series were generated by a trendless process and which were generated by a trending process.

Each entry in the contest must be accompanied by a payment of $10; this is being done to inhibit non-serious entries. The contest closes at the end of 30 November 2016.

The file Answers1000.txt identifies which series were generated by a trendless process and which by a trending process. The file is encrypted. The encryption key and method will be made available when someone submits a prize-winning answer or, if no prize-winning answers are submitted, when the contest closes.

More here.

DECC consistently misled public over electricity costs

An interesting tweet from former DECC chief scientist David Mackay yesterday:

.@paulyb2008 I agree, LCOE is an unhelpful metric. We need to think about whole-system cost.

— David MacKay FRS (@davidjcmackay) November 17, 2015

As readers here know, I have been quite strongly against the use of levelised costs (LCOE), referring to it as "the great levelised costs lie". It's therefore gratifying to see Mackay publicly agreeing with me.

Click to read more ...

Stuff their mouths with gold

In all the trailers for Amber Rudd's big energy speech today, the news that has struck me is not the phase out of coal, most of which was going to happen anyway because of low natural gas prices and EU regulations.

No, what is interesting is that Rudd will apparently admit that in order to get any gas-fired power stations built they are going to have to be subsidised. So a big "bravo" to the political establishment for managing to turn a functioning energy system into one in which everybody participating will be in receipt of taxpayer largesse. Oh well done indeed.

The six-million dollar question is, of course, just how much subsidy is going to be required to tempt investors back into the market. The political risk of taking part is going to be sky-high. Over the lifespan of a power station, governments will come and go. Will anyone want to risk that the bungs will survive so much change? My guess is that getting anything done is going to involve "stuffing their mouths with gold", and then some.

Update on Nov 18, 2015 by Bishop Hill

Perhaps I have done Ms Rudd a disservice. (This is what comes of my having treated the Guardian as a reliable source.) Here is the text of her speech:

We now have an electricity system where no form of power generation, not even gas-fired power stations, can be built without government intervention.

And a legacy of ageing, often unreliable plant.

Perversely, even with the huge growth in renewables, our dependence on coal, the dirtiest fossil fuel, hasn’t been reduced.

Indeed a higher proportion of our electricity came from coal in 2014 than in 1999.

So we still haven’t found the right balance.

We need a course correction using the tools we have already developed through Electricity Market Reform.

We know competition works. It keeps costs low and can deliver a clean and reliable energy system.

We want a consumer-led, competition focussed energy system that has energy security at the heart of it and delivers for families and businesses.

We want to see a competitive electricity market, with government out of the way as much as possible, by 2025.

Getting there will not be easy. The process of privatisation itself spanned five Parliaments.

Indeed, moving to a new model without risking energy security will require government to continue to intervene. But that should diminish over time.

We need to start that work now.

So how do we do that?