Bishop Hill On advice to government
Oct 15, 2013 Bureaucrats Climate: IPCC Climate: Parliament ;)
In the email this morning I find a copy of the presentation Sir Mark Walport will give to the cabinet today, purportedly on the subject of the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report. It's a pretty interesting read (see bottom of post for link), although in fact when you get into it there is very little about what the IPCC had to say.
It starts unexceptionably enough, with a slide about surface temperature warming, including not only the IPCC's "Let's hide the pause behind decadal averages" graph, but also the annual averages.
Then there's a rather strange graph showing the emissions scenarios, which invites the reader to understand that temperature rises will be driven by carbon dioxide and carbon dioxide alone. Such confident statements are a bit surprising given the failures of the models.
After that it goes completely off the rails. Slide 3 is a major blooper, which discusses the UK Climate Change Risk Assessment. Unfortunately the UKCCRA is based on the UKCP09 climate predictions, which the Met Office has acknowledged contain a major flaw. Reasonable people might wonder why the Government Chief Scientific Adviser is basing his briefing of the Cabinet on data that is known to be erroneous.
The specific points Walport makes about weather extremes are fairly predictable:
- Peter Stott's claim that the risk of flooding has doubled due to climate change (despite there being no apparent trend in rainfall statistics)
- The "35,000 deaths from European heatwave" story (the Europe-wide mortality from cold far exceeds this figure every year)
If anything it then gets even worse, when Walport outlines possible scenarios for energy futures. We have a high nuclear scenario, with 75GW of atom-splitters, which is surely complete fantasy given the struggle to get even a single such plant built in the UK. Or we have the high renewables scenario, in which we get 82GW of wind, 13GW of CCS, 14GW of solar and 10GW of "marine". Given that CCS and marine power are still in the realms of fairytale this is bad enough, but consider this: David Mackay estimates that if we used the whole of the UK's offshore shelf for windfarms - some 40,000 square kilometers - we would get an average of 120GW. 82GW of wind would therefore require over 27,000 sqkm. (I think the figures Walport gives are average outputs rather than nameplate capacities, otherwise I can't see how he gets to his TWh figure. On the other hand I can't see how you can back up 82GW of wind with such small quantities of dispatchable energy. Can anyone throw any light on this?)
The briefing is, I'm sure readers will agree, woeful. It's a damning indictment of the advice that the government is getting from the scientific establishment. Nevertheless, we should be grateful that it has seen the light of day. People need to see the standards that pertain in Whitehall. Then at least they might understand how we have reached the point at which we wonder if the lights are going to stay on this winter.
Bishop Hill
Paul Homewood in the comments points out that this 82GW of wind is capacity, not output. This means we only need 7000 square kilometers of space for the turbines.
Bishop Hill
The Met Office have acknowledged Nic's points about the flaw in the UKCP09 predictions but ask me to make it clear that they deny that they have acknowledged a flaw. I don't know what they mean either.
Reader Comments (114)
What did the government's chief engineer say in their presentation?
Of course, government isn't advised by professional engineers who study climate only geneticists and biologists who don't.
That is the problem. That is why we get such non-science.
The simple fact is that we scientific climate engineers are far more likely to use the scientific method and base our assessments on the facts than these pseudo-scientists who advise the government.
It is a feature of our post modern civil service that in many areas, climate change being just one, only one side of the story is presented to ministers by their 'advisers'. Formerly, the civil service was scrupulous to present the minister with all shades of opinion on a given topic (even including batty ones) simply to force the minister to decide on the course of action (and therefore he, rather than the civil service, reaps the blame when/if it turns out to be a crap decision). I think the civil service is doing itself a grave disservice in becoming a promoter of particular points of view. The loss of trust in institutions of all kinds in my lifetime is nothing short of astonishing. By becoming partisan, the civil service is inviting that loss of trust to extend to it too. A commonplace observation, none the less true for that: trust takes a long time to build, but is quickly lost (and almost impossible to rebuild).
It isn't the lights that worry me. It's the heating.
Yes, I have gas, but without electricity I have no heating.
Still, 65000 deaths from cold will save the gov a fortune in pension and healthcare costs.
Oh well, I have purchased a 1Kw 12-230V inverter. At least it will power the lights, heating and computer/router.
This is a dreadful presentation, that could lead ignorant politicians to make policy decisions that would wreck the country and cause extreme hardship for the population.
Fortunately, George Osborne is far from stupid and will hopefully consign it to the rubbish bin of history, where it belongs.
"What did the government's chief engineer say in their presentation"
Engineers?
Those grubby little people with dirty fingernails!
There is no place in government for people that know anything useful.
And fewer places for people who are professional and believe in truth.
DEFINITELY no place for an engineer!
@Roger Longstaff @ "George Osborne is far from stupid"
I assume either irony or sarcasm ?
George is as stupid as he is paid to be.
"I assume either irony or sarcasm ?"
Neither - he is the only one who seems to have a clear world view (in my opinion).
Have a look at the graph on page 10 of this report from the Office of National Statistics. It plots the mean number of daily deaths against the average temperature per month in England and Wales between 1993 and 2007 (which includes the 2003 heatwave). It shows that January (coldest) has about 15,000 more deaths than August (warmest) annually.
Yes, I have gas, but without electricity I have no heating.
Oct 15, 2013 at 10:00 AM | Unregistered CommenterJohnR
Last winter Arran had a major powercut that left people without power for weeks, despite being rural over the years the reliability of the power supply had people installing central heating systems that did not work without electricity. During the powercuts that all changed and fireplaces were recommissioned and small generators fitted to run the control boxes and pumps for the central heating. Considering the prospect of blackouts is increasing you need to invest in a small petrol powered genny and modify your house wiring so the central heating can be isolated from the mains and fed from the genny.
Not sure that your use of “pertain” is correct; perhaps “prevail” might have been more appropriate.
Anyhoo…
The standards that do, erm... prevail do seem to be abysmal. I have been in correspondence with my own MP, who has finally concluded the argument with the usual, “We must agree to disagree” argument. No, I replied, it is not a difference of opinion, it is a distortion of science, a distortion that is set to destroy this country. Methinks my protestations fell upon stony ground or, at least, cloth ears.
I wonder what Sir Mark Walport will actually say during the presentation? There are only 6 slides in it. Is it possible that he might point out some of the problems with the IPCC scenarios or with this country's planned mixed of energy technologies? For instance, take the slide on energy sources. Does anyone really think that Sir Walport is naive enough not see that there might be problems associated with wind energy?
Depending on what he actually says during the presentation, it may not be as bad as the slides suggest.
"On the other hand I can't see how you can back up 82GW of wind with such small quantities of dispatchable energy. Can anyone throw any light on this?"
This has come up time and time again on Tim Worstell's blog.
The Greenshirt's religious conviction is that there is always somewhere where the wind is blowing. Supposedly, super efficient interconnects between different parts of the UK compensate for this.
When it's pointed out that the UK is often becalmed — just when we need the most energy – their argument becomes even bigger interconnects to Continental Europe and even further afield.
The fact that Europe is often becalmed doesn't hold any water for them either. Nor does the argument that the energy they are importing from Europe will most likely be expensive, French nuclear (therefore evil), or coal powered.
Failing that then the backup is STOR.
So, the answer to the backup for lovely clean green wind energy is tens of thousands of dirty, smelly, polluting, CO2 emitting diesel generators crammed together in industrial units.
O Brave New World!
JohnR: "There is no place in government for people that know anything useful."
My father who worked in GCHQ often quoted the way in the civil service "you are promoted to your level of incompetence".
I think he may have meant that everyone got promotion until they were incompetent to do the job and then stopped ... which meant that most people were doing a job they were incompetent to do.
I understood it to mean that in the civil service, people can't be sacked. Therefore a department head that wanted to get rid of someone had no other means than to get them promoted.
I've also noticed the tendency in the civil service to move someone as soon as they are competent to another job where they are incompetent.
I also know people in technical positions who in order to get promotion have to be BOTH extremely good at their competence AND ALSO fit the (arts based) criteria of the civil service (arts) elite.
Which is why the top civil service have very few people who have any actual competence in their job. So, not having a clue how to understand technology ... they think it is "science" ... and phone an academic chum to advise them who is no more competent than they in the subject of climate science.
This is why we don't get a "chief engineering adviser", because the civil service are practically hostile to those who know what they are doing.
It's not obvious at all what will happen when uncontrollable and intermittent renewable energy production gets close to matching the demand. There will be very little in the way of large generators operating to maintain grid stability. Non-embedded renewable generation can be isolated (involving massive constraints payments), but embedded generation cannot be isolated. I think there will either be lots of localised blackouts occurring all the time or there will be lots of loud bangs and clouds of smoke, Either way, National Grid and the DNOs will earn a fortune putting the system right, which may take years. All the excess renewables will have to be scrapped and new despatchable power stations constructed. Of course the economy will have imploded by then, we will effectively be a third world country and there will be no money for reconstruction.
If you are young enough, the only solution is to sell up and emigrate in the next few years.
Such a pity that MW's presentation was not Peer-Reviewed - or, even better, BLOG-Reviewed! I do hope that he reads BH.
And 24GW of back-up gas. Which will no doubt be going a lot of the time. 77GW of reasonably dependable energy (solar during the day and assuming 'marine' works) so I'd guess 82GW from wind is installed capacity not achievable output.
The high renewables scenario is the usual wibble - everyone in an electric car which gets used to balance the network (so when do we drive them?), super efficient homes, bacofoil suits, personal jetpacks, etc.
Mike,
Thanks!
This looks more like reality than "42"
Just to give perspective to Wind output, I've just checked (at 10.40am) present output on the National Grid site: -
Total Demand - 41.95 GW, Wind - 0.90 GW !
Nothing to worry about then!
I hope the Bishop's post above is forwarded to a climate realist in the Cabinet - if there are any.
The Bishop´s presentation exudes sadnes.
Bad arguments are put forward from people who should know better. In Sweden we also have a lot of political correctnes which is prominent in our climate policy. Due to decisons taken some fourty years ago we are in the happy situation where nuclear and waterpower fill 95 % of our needs. What is to worry about now is the imminent collapse in Germany´s system, which will increase our electricity export and thus Swedish prices.
The signature "bill" wrote something of which I know quite a lot. That is the relation between top politicians and their advisors. A long time ago I was such an advisor but my observations are different from bill´s. In the 70ies we as Swedish bureaucrats were "pushy". We put forward and argumented for solutions which we "believed in". First after the politician had decided we turned into loyal executioners. When I, much later, for shorter periods, worked for ministries I abserved a significant change. The young bureaucrats were now figuratively "leaning forward" listening for signals from the politician and acted on those signals regardless of their factual correctness. As we then know that the "political signals" nowadays often are produced through interaction beetween interest groups and the media, and the media in Sweden has a huge share of green people we then have almost no countervailing powers in climate and energy questions. We (as you) have a lot of disgruntled people (like me) who flock around blogs which argue for different interpretations of "signals" and policies but we do not reach "the people" and the decison makers. And even when a politician tries to do wrestle free from what is correct he meets media with its power to wreck a career.
Also we the get somewhat sad, from time to time.
The briefing is not just woeful, it's totally misleading and thus fraudulent.
Presumably, since it has turned up on BH it will get more attention than in the Cabinet meeting itself. Politicians used to be bright sparks with hinterland, now they seem to be media types or celebrity types - no wonder the politicians are so craven. Woe betide the whistle blower.
It would be interesting to find out which civil servants put together this fraudulent presentation.
Wasn’t the heat wave of 2003 supposed to be repeated more and more frequently in subsequent years as global warming accelerated? 2003 seems a long time ago now, and since then we have had the coldest December since records began.
France is said to be the country which suffered most under the ‘European heatwave’. However, if we look at the mortality statistics for France during 2003 we see nothing exceptional.
Deaths per 1000 of population
Year : France: UK
2001 : 9.14 : 10.35
2002 : 9.09 : 10.30
2003 : 9.04 : 10.21
2004 : 9.06 : 10.19
2005 : 9.08 : 10.18
LinkText Here
The same is true for other European countries, no noticeable ‘blip’ around 2003. So where does the Chief Scientists get his figures from?
I can't begin to imagine the amount of damage which would be caused by lining the Entire Coast of the UK with wind turbines. Ecologic, economic, psychologic.......
Woeful but unsurprising.
Tell them what they want to hear and they'll give you money.
Says quite a lot about both Walport and the people who prepared his script eh?
What about doing "The Bishop's Brief" - and sending a copy to every cabinet member?
MikeB
In France the entire country goes on holiday for the month of August. If memory serves correctly, I stand to be corrected, a lot of press coverage concerned deaths amongst the elderly whose families were on holiday.
"It's not obvious at all what will happen when uncontrollable and intermittent renewable energy production gets close to matching the demand."
As a former engineering manager, it will probably be similar to my own experience with poorly maintained equipment. What happens is this. As the pressure grows (i.e. as the level of base load to intermittent load veers off the road), the first sign is a lot of small breakdowns. These are the result of the stress of too little capacity forcing engineering to make decisions prioritising between the big problems and the smaller ones. The result is that the smaller issues are bodged or just ignored. So, e.g. a problem that would cause a long outage gets priority over a short-term, localised outage or regular maintenace. As such I would expect to see a sharp drop in "quality" of power and a rise in "normal" problems like local power cuts.
However, this can rapidly escalate. This is because if the smaller faults are being skipped and not properly dealt with. Eventually their number increases until they consume far more resource than they would if they had been dealt with properly. This adds to the problem and effectively reduces the available machinery putting the rest under much more pressure. But by this time not only has all the routine maintenance been skipped on the smaller issues it has also been skipped on the larger issues.
The result is that it is no longer possible to prioritise work. Everything is falling apart and all available machinery is forced to operate well past its normal maintenance schedules. Management then start jumping up and down demanding that equipment gets back online immediately all effort gets directed to short-term fix fire fighting. This just makes the problem worse because priority is given to the problems that are present and not preventing the multitude of problems that could be prevented by routine maintenance.
Eventually there is no routine maintenance except that bodged during one of the many equipment failures.
Finally, something massive goes wrong - usually followed quickly by another and another as the failure of one piece of equipment puts stress on others to produce more which given their poor condition means they are far more likely to fail and eventually so much is offline that there will be a severe and prolonged outage.
This was the stage I came in. The only solution was to stop fire fighting ... tell people that equipment is just not available. Management hate it and that is where I learnt to have my thick skin. For a very prolongued period machine availability is much much lower.
On the power system that would be a period like a 4-day week - not because there wasn't enough supply, but because problems have built up due to political pressure to maintain supply.
This PLANNED low output, then allows the engineering staff to start dealing with the backlog of equipment and if the management have any sense they will also buy new equipment so that there was some freeway in the system. Engineers have to take the hit of management/politician wrath (and it doesn't help to point out that the management caused the problem by not listening to their engineers). Eventually one stops bodging repairs and instead regular maintenance begines to take over allowing some leeway to completely overhaul the older equipment to bring them back up to a reasonable standard.
And ... finally maintenance is back under control, outages are again very low .... then some dum accountant asks "what on earth did you need all that spare equipment you have on inventory" ... and you feel like clobbering the idiot that caused the problem in the first place by skimping on the machinery & maintenance.
Batty ideas, it takes a war or a similar threat to national existence before batty ideas are tried out. i first saw this film of may favourite batty idea being tested many years ago but it still makes me smile.
the great panjandrum
Steve Goddard is always posting old newspaper stories regarding historical natural disasters which disprove the "worst ever" tag. He also posts old newspaper predictions of doom dating back decades or longer. I find them a great antidote to current batch.
Slides 2 and 3 are from Slingo's "How to mislead the Government with false statistics and unvalidated computer models".
I'm not sure where slide 4 came from, somewhere in the MO or the Tyndal Centre or a collaboration between the two.
Slides 5 and 6 are from the Ministry of Fantasyland (aka DECC).
In France most of the technical aspects of the French state are run by graduates of the Engineering Grandes Ecoles who then go onto the Ecole National d' Adminstration: the equivalent in the UK would be engineering graduates from the top 10 university departments . The problem is that in the UK, the A stream civil servants largely come from art back grounds. Also I am wondering about the Government' s Chief Scientific Adviser: there appears to be many pure scientists from low numeracy backgrounds who do not have experience of solving problems. Having applied scientist/engineers who have experience of solving problems would be more useful. I would also like to assess the calibre of those entering the civil service. Until the mid 80s there were still civil servants who had the practical experience of fighting in World Wars and or undertaking national service: they understood the difference between practice and theory. Now civil servant appear devoid of any practical experience.
I am also wondering whether the science establishment will support any party which increases public spending on science.
It is a national disgrace that the cabinet should be misled in such a way.
@ Gösta Oscarsson
Many thanks for your interesting comment.
Walport appears to be as ignorant of real science as Beddington.
Q: So where does the Chief Scientists get his figures from?
A: The models?
My understanding of the polar bear panic is that a notional modelled population is in decline and so we must act, irrespective of the fact that the number of actual bears is stable if adjusted figures are taken or on the increase if measurements are unadjusted.
Mike Haseler, what you describe is the classic timeline of a catastrophe. It has all the elements: little problems not being dealt with; other priorities overriding standard procedures; checks and balances gone AWOL and so on.
One of the best things I ever did (in educational terms) was an analysis of the Challenger space shuttle disaster as part of my Master's degree. Since then, I have had to try to rescue both policy disasters and IT disasters. They all had the same characteristics.
Running a country's electricity grid on a wing and a prayer invites not the question "if?", but the question "when?".
And if anyone thinks that some generators here and there are going to make up for it when the crunch comes, they're dreamin'.
Notice on slide 5 that the top box for each scenario has a number for "energy saving per capita", and they range from 31% to 54% reduction.
My house is electrically heated - do they REALLY expect me to reduce my consumption by 1/2?
Cloud-f*****-cuckoo land.
Johanna, as an engineer I greatly valued the expression I first found used in "the challenger launch decision" by Diane Vaughn and have unfortunately had to use it in my work life quite frequenty. - the normalisation of deviance.
Wonderful !
"It is a national disgrace that the cabinet should be misled in such a way."
Two options.
1. It's fraud. The presentation contains out and out lies. And people will die if they are acted on. Wolpert should be prosecuted.
2. Wolpert is an imbecile, is incapable of doing his own research, and has been misled by other imbeciles. And that can't be true, surely?
Note Walport, although nominally the CSA for the government, has little if any expertise in many (most) of the subjects that come within his remit. As a consequence in most cases he merely acts as a mouthpiece for information fed to him by other Government scientists.
Since this is the case why be surprised that his presentation promotes MO and DECC messages rather than being an independent and objective viewpoint
Using a linear trend I found that in Scotland alone there are 700 extra winter deaths for each 1C colder it is.
That suggests that in the last 17 years if it has been 0.8C warmer that nearly 10,000 people did not die an early death.
Who doesn't believe that if the current scare were for global cooling, that that kind of figure would be stuffed down our throats every time someone like Mark Walport called us "global cooling deniers".
PS. I was an engineering manager in a textile plant. I learnt a lot about "denier" because this is the measurement of yarn.
It is worrying to find anyone repeating Peter Stott's claim that the risk of flooding has doubled due to climate change – even Peter Stott.
According to the most recent evidence from the IPCC, Assessment Report 5, Working Group 1, Chapter 2 :
So why do these myths of extreme weather keep been repeated? Not just by the press, but by so-called scientific advisors to government? Are they totally unaware of the evidence?
vorsprung durch technik!
Germany builds coal fired power stations and protects their base industries (Stuff the IPCC if it jeopardises Das Autos! ).
What do we do? When is somebody going to look at the IPCC with the well being of the UK's citizens in mind? when is somebody going to carry out some proper due diligence?
" Germany delays EU limit on CO2 emissions from cars
There are other reasons for Stott (and the ubiquitous Allen) to expect flooding in the UK.
I knew someone who worked in sea-defence and land drainage engineering in two different areas of England. In one he used to feel sorry that he could not tell home owners that the nearby sea wall was being hollowed-out by erosion and lack of maintenance.
He was later involved with the Environment Agency in another region. He recounted tales of housing developers going to dubious lengths to get EA reports used for approval to build on flood plains.
In both instances he was confident that when home-owners later had their homes destroyed or rendered unsellable/uninsurable, natural causes could be unfairly blamed. Just substitute "climate-change" for "natural causes" and it seems you have a handy excuse for abdication from pretty much any responsibility, culpability, or liability. Why not put all the blame in one place in advance?
'Government Chief Engineering Adviser'..?
Are you mad..?
You want the government to be told cold hard facts - not what they want to hear..?
He/she would only get asked once - and ignored thereafter....
MH
What you were describing, as you doubtless know, is the 'Peter principle' in which productive and useful people get promoted into management positions that they never wanted and are thus promoted to their 'level of maximum incompetence'. In bureaucracies, this is aided and abetted by the the 'Dilbert principle', where incompetent people are promoted to get them out of the way. Unfortunately, some of these end up in government.
Link
UK peak demand is around 60GW and base load demand about 30 GW. They have 13 GW of CCS (by which they probably mean coal), 16GW of nuclear and 24 GW of "back up gas" giving 53 GW of dispatchable. This leaves only 7 GW to come from the 82 GW of wind and 14 GW of solar - so even on a calm day butterflies flapping their wings should keep some of these turbines moving.
The higher renewables option has 159 GW of capacity to meet 60 GW of demand - which I guess means doubling our generating infrastructure - MORE EFFICIENT - ha!
Curiously, the Germans have gone more the solar route which is more reliably correlated with demand.
This must present a bit of a dilemma for HMG. Whom to believe, doom-mongering boffins or doom-mongering bean counters..?
Link
michael hart 12:48 PM
I doubt this brief for cabinet was a solo effort - in fact I'm pretty certain it will have been cooked up by some names familiar to the congregation here - I'd bet the EA share some advisors with Walport..... just who is working the good doctor's mouth here?
Now that somebody else has mentioned them ... Not the half of it - The Environment Agency have been torturing meteorology and just spouting piles of lies about rainfall and flooding across government departments and local government - read a bit over at the "inside the Environment Agency" blog (particularly the section on bribes and favoritism!) for a starter on the procession of incompetences and bad behaviour pouring from Millbank Tower, Horizon House and their regional outposts.
I can recall the "Great Panjamdrum" being tested at Warmington- on - Sea. It was subject to a BBC historical documentary called "Dad,s Army".