Bishop Hill Questions, questions
Jun 25, 2013 Climate: Parliament This is a guest post by Doug Keenan.
The recent Bishop Hill post “Met Office admits claims of significant temperature rise untenable” was the topic of a post at Watts Up With That, “Uh oh, the Met Office has set the cat amongst the pigeons”. In the latter post, Lord Donoughue left a comment, saying in particular that if anyone would like to suggest further Parliamentary Questions for him to table, he would welcome such. Afterwards, Martin A set up a Bishop Hill Discussion entitled “Questions to suggest to Lord Donoughue”.
There have been many really good suggestions, for which Lord Donoughue is highly grateful. Thus far, eight of the suggested Parliamentary Questions have been tabled. The eight Questions are listed below. A couple issues should be noted. First, there were more than eight good suggestions for Questions; there are limits, though, on how many Questions can be tabled. Second, there are strict rules on the wording of Parliamentary Questions; the wordings below were obtained after discussions between Lord Donoughue and the officials at the Lords Table.
- Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Newby on 22 April (WA 358) which stated that "it is the role of the scientific community to assess and decide between various methods when studying various time series", what mechanisms exist within the Government to ensure (1) appropriate oversight of scientific advice, and (2) that scientists advising them are accountable to (a) Ministers, and (b) Parliament. HL966
- Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Verma on 22 April (WA 358), whether, on the basis of a driftless third-order autoregressive integrated model, they consider the recorded increase in global temperatures of 0.8 degrees celsius to be statistically significant. HL967
- Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have carried out any risk analysis to assess any actual or potential losses to the United Kingdom attributable to any failures in the accuracy of climate forecasts. HL968
- Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government, further to the Written Answer by Baroness Verma on 21 May (WA 44–5) and the briefing paper by the Chief Scientist of the Met Office, "Statistical Models and the Global Temperature Records", issued on 31 May, which stated that a linear trend model was "less likely to emulate the global temperature time series than the third-order autoregressive integrated model", why the Met Office favours a linear trend model. HL969
- Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether the Met Office has set a date by which, in the event of no further increase in global temperatures, it would reassess the validity of its general circulation models. HL1080
- Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether there has been an independent audit of the accuracy of the Met Office’s recent forecasts of (1) wetter winters, (2) dryer summers, and (3) higher global temperatures. HL1081
- Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government whether they have co-ordinated a cost-benefit analysis of their policies to introduce wind farms, on- and off-shore, as part of the United Kingdom’s national energy generation; whether any such analysis took account of any specified forecast reductions in global temperatures; and, if so, what reductions. HL1082
- Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government what estimate they have made of the comparative carbon footprints resulting from converting Drax power station from coal to biomass, including the estimated total costs, in money and carbon, of mining, logging, processing and transporting, and the relative energy outputs and efficiency. HL1083
Lord Donoughue intends to table more of the suggested Questions. He would also be grateful for additional recommendations. One topic for which recommendations would be particularly appreciated is the recent claim about “97% of scientists”: that claim has been influential with the government, and it would be helpful to table Questions that would bring out the truth about it.
Reader Comments (54)
I'd like to see the definition of the C in CAGW, 30 years of CAGW with 150 years of industrial advancement should be able to show us some sort of C.
The only part of C I am aware of is the corruption of academia, politics and economics, even the broken promise of the C of children not know what snow is still lays feet deep each winter.
■Lord Donoughue to ask Her Majesty’s Government, following the reference to the Flat Earth Society by the President of the United Sates, whether they believed that was a reference to the IPCC whose models are all based on a flat earth? :)
I would go for a populist approach, in two parts:
A) What would be the benefit to the average household in Pounds per annum if the government was to scrap all of its climate measures immediately - all of the subsidies, tax breaks, special tariffs, carbon taxes, quangos, bureaucracies, etc..
B) What impact would that have on global climate projections?
To ask Her Majesty’s Government to tabulate historically by year the total number of conventional and unconventional oil and gas exploration and /or development wells which have used fracture stimulation treatment
(a) in the UK onshore,
and
(b) in the UK offshore sector.
Supplementary to the above to tabulate and summarise any environmentally adverse effects detected and specifically determined as caused by said fracture stimulation operations.