Targeted?

I got an email today. It purported to come from dragonslayer John O'Sullivan, although a cursory look suggested that it was spam; the title was "hey" and the content consisted only of two links to websites, apparently something to do with architecture in France. I deleted the message.

A few hours later, however, David Holland got in touch to say that he'd also received a copy, and pointed out something odd about the message: the list of addresses was, apart from the two of us, as follows: Arthur B Robinson (of Oregon Petition fame), John Roscam of Australia's Institute of Public Affairs, BH regular Don Keiller and Peter Gill, who is also fairly well known in sceptic circles.

Are we being targeted?

The Veolia affair - who knew?

David Rose tweeted last night that Lord Deben has resigned from his position at Veolia Water UK:

It seems from company records that @lorddeben of CCC has resigned as chairman of Veolia. Strange he hasn't announced it, to my knowledge.

Deben's position at the Committee on Climate Change (CCC) was clearly incompatible with working for a company making money from grid connections. What remains unclear is how we got to the situation where his position was deemed acceptable in the first place.

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On the limits to climatology

This is the abstract of Professor Leonard Smith's lecture at the AGU meeting currently taking place on the other side of the pond. There are salutary lessons for climatologists. If anyone can point me to the video, that would be helpful.

Over the last 60 years, the availability of large-scale electronic computers has stimulated rapid and significant advances both in meteorology and in our understanding of the Earth System as a whole. The speed of these advances was due, in large part, to the sudden ability to explore nonlinear systems of equations. The computer allows the meteorologist to carry a physical argument to its conclusion; the time scales of weather phenomena then allow the refinement of physical theory, numerical approximation or both in light of new observations. Prior to this extension, as Charney noted, the practicing meteorologist could ignore the results of theory with good conscience. Today, neither the practicing meteorologist nor the practicing climatologist can do so, but to what extent, and in what contexts, should they place the insights of theory above quantitative simulation? And in what circumstances can one confidently estimate the probability of events in the world from model-based simulations?

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Yeo fights on

The news on Twitter is that Tim Yeo has sounded out support in his constituency and is confident enough to put the question of his standing for the party at the next election to a ballot.

Making fog

Updated on Dec 12, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Readers may remember Nic Lewis's paper demonstrating a major flaw in the UKCP09 climate predictions. In brief summary, the predictions are a weighted average of a series of virtual climates produced by the HadCM3 climate model, the weight each one gets being determined by how well it matches the observations. Nic discovered that the HadCM3 model was incapable of producing virtual climates that match the real-world climate as regards two key parameters - the climate sensitivity and the aerosol forcing. This obviously meant that the average produced is meaningless.

Nic's paper had a response from Julia Slingo which acknowledged that HadCM3 could not produce low-sensitivity/low aerosol forcing climates, explaining that this was an emergent property of the model. Nic noted that she was therefore implicitly accepting his core argument and I mentioned this in a blog post about the related UK Climate Change Risk Assessment.

Shortly afterwards I had an email from a press officer at the Met Office:

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Lights out please

This morning the green movement is making an enormous and apparently coordinated attempt to force the government to switch the lights out.

First up, Lord Deben et al have published a report saying that we must stick to the path of insanity, regardless of the consequences:

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North Sea salvation

The Lords took a couple more evidence sessions on shale gas yesterday, parts of which were well worth watching. The first session, featuring an environmental consultant, somebody from the Institute of Directors and a pair from "Residents’ Action on Fylde Fracking", was mostly worth missing although I was intrigued by one of the anti-frackers. Tina Rothery turns out to have been an organiser for the Occupy the London Stock Exchange protests and revealed during the course of the hearings that she had spent most of the summer in Balcombe. This made me wonder to what extent she is actually a Lancashire resident, whether Fylde against Fracking is genuinely a movement of local residents or whether it is just a part of the green anti-capitalist movement.

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Davey's heroic denial

Updated on Dec 10, 2013 by Bishop Hill

Ed Davey was up in front of the Energy and Climate Change Committee today, to discuss the aftermath of the Warsaw climate summit. It was mainly dull stuff, but there was a moment of hilarity (around 11:44) when Davey appeared to accept that since the advent of the Climate Change Act the UK's total carbon footprint had gone up, and almost in the next breath said that he didn't view this as meaning the approach taken by the government was wrong.

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Geological Society does woo!

From time to time I have noted the pronouncements issued by the Royal Society, and observed that those at the helm have used and abused the society's good name in order to advance their own political agendas: the fellows are rarely if ever consulted about the policy positions that are taken in their name.

Today the Geological Society has issued an addendum to its position paper on climate science, which appears to have been put together in exactly the same way.

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More windmill deterioration

David Mackay has left a comment on the earlier thread, saying that in fact he maintains that Gordon Hughes' estimates of windfarm deterioration are incorrect.

Christopher Booker did not check his facts: Booker asserts that "David MacKay ... could not dispute [Hughes's] findings", but this is poppycock. You can find a technical report I wrote, pointing out a significant flaw in Hughes's analysis here or here. Another paper is about to come out in a peer-reviewed journal, by Iain Staffell and Richard Green, which does the analysis properly, combining wind data with weather data. There is a decline in wind farm output, but it is much smaller than Hughes asserted.

As Guido would say: "Developing".

Diary date: IPCC edition

On 5 February next year, the Royal Meteorological Society is having a meeting in London to discuss the IPCC's Fifth Assessment Report.

Lead Authors of the report will present key new findings of the AR5, and the associated evidence base, also highlighting outstanding research challenges.  The target audience is the UK climate science community and other interested scientists. The meeting is being organised by the National Centre for Atmospheric Science, the Met Office, the Royal Meteorological Society and the Environmental Physics Group of the Institute of Physics.

Details here.

Chinese renewables

An article in the Financial Post in Canada looks at China's much-vaunted renewables industry and shows that it is nearing collapse:

Sinovel – one of the world’s largest wind turbine manufacturers – went from earning hundreds of millions of dollars in profits in 2010 when the renewable energy industry was booming to millions in losses that grow by the day. Revenues are now just a fifth of what they were in 2010. The company has closed its overseas offices and recently laid off thousands of employees.

And it seems that the solar industry is doing just as badly. In China, just as in Europe, renewable energy was only able to survive if it was regularly hosed down with public funds. As soon as the taps were switched off, the industry was in trouble.

A mysterious change of tune

Over at Climate Audit, Nic Lewis examines the strange divergence between observational and climate-model-based estimates of transient climate response. There's lots to enjoy, particularly for the more technically minded among us. But there's also something of a mystery:

So, in their capacity as authors of Otto et al. (2013), we have fourteen lead or coordinating lead authors of the WG1 chapters relevant to climate sensitivity stating that the most reliable data and methodology give ‘likely’ and 5–95% ranges for TCR of 1.1–1.7°C and 0.9–2.0°C, respectively. They go on to suggest that some CMIP5 models have TCRs that are too high to be consistent with recent observations. On the other hand, we have Chapter 12, Box 12.2, stating that the ranges of TCR estimated from the observed warming and from AOGCMs agree well. Were the Chapter 10 and 12 authors misled by the flawed TCR estimates included in Figure 10.20a? Or, given the key role of the CMIP5 models in AR5, did the IPCC process offer the authors little choice but to endorse the CMIP5 models’ range of TCR values?

Why would all these IPCC bigwigs say one thing in the primary literature and something completely different in the IPCC report?

I just can't imagine.

No hope, no change

The foolhardiness of the current government's energy policy need hardly be reiterated, but word is getting round the political and economic mainstream that Labour is potentially just as bad. Last week Liberum Capital put out a briefing note estimating the damage done to the UK economy by the party's proposed price freeze:

The heightened political risk faced by the UK utility sector following the announcement of the Labour Party’s price freeze has materially impacted on the valuation of the sector and reversed the five year utility sector trade of Long UK / Short Europe. Total shareholder value lost so far amounts to between £7bn to £11bn. In our view, if the UK government is successful in politically neutralising Labour’s price freeze policy then some of this loss, but probably not all, could be regained. Some of the loss is likely to be permanent in our view because it is now apparent that UK politicians (like those in Europe) are unwilling to stand by the logic of their own energy policy and enforce the higher costs onto consumers that naturally follow from their de-carbonisation strategy.

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AR5 - the Synthesis Report

Tallbloke has got hold of the pre-first order draft of the AR5 WGI Synthesis Report.

Read it here.