- Bishop Hill blog

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.