The subsidy cuts and the pea under the thimble

This is a guest post by Phillip Bratby.

Readers will no doubt have seen the apoplexy of Roger Harrabin and others in the media about the cuts in subsidies for rooftop solar power announced by Amber Rudd on 17th December (DECC press release here).  Cuts of 64% (Telegraph, BBC) or 65% (Guardian, Independent, FT) were reported.  The new subsidies (the Feed-in-Tariff scheme which consists of a generation tariff plus an export tariff) were given following a consultation, which had supposedly been proposing cuts of 87%.

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We forgot the geography!

The British Medical Journal recently held a Q&A on climate science with, among others, Brian Hoskins. The results are paywalled, but I was amused by the excerpt from the start of the session in response to a question about why Antarctic sea ice is growing:

The anomaly in the Antarctic is due to its geography. Unlike in the Arctic, where the extent of sea ice is constrained by the North American and Eurasian land masses, Antarctic sea ice forms in the open ocean with less land constraining its formation. Antarctic sea ice is also thinner and mostly melts each summer, whereas Arctic sea ice survives longer (although the amount of sea ice lasting more than two years has declined rapidly since 1979).

If the growth is "due to its geography" you have to wonder why the climate models predicted a decrease. Perhaps climate modellers forgot to put the geography in?

Update on Dec 18, 2015 by Bishop Hill

A reader sends a copy of the full text. This is a shocker. Take this on the little ice age, for example:

The Little Ice Age was particularly apparent in the European region but didn’t represent a major decline in temperatures globally. It was probably caused by a decline in solar output in the second half of the 17th century (known as the Maunder minimum) and a higher level of volcanic activity. These factors cannot account for the long term global warming observed since industrialisation because there has not been a long term increase in solar output or a decline in volcanic activity of the necessary magnitude.

And here's the IPCC's take on the millennial temperature reconstructions, with the Little Ice Age clearly visible in the Northern Hemisphere, the Southern Hemisphere and the global data:

Or what about the BMJ take on climate sensitivity?

A more recent study, based on inserting observed values in a very simple model, estimated the short
term warming to be 1.05-1.80°C. Although the upper end of this estimate is lower than that of the IPCC report, the study’s findings still mean that it would only increase the time taken to reach a given level of warming by a few years. Thus, while there are uncertainties about the precise relation between increases in the rate and concentration of atmospheric CO2 with the rate of global warming, these uncertainties have relatively little bearing on what we need to do in terms of climate policy.

The insinuation that this paper (Lewis and Curry) is an outlier is of course grossly misleading, while the use of 5-95% ranges to hide the huge differences between the GCMs and the observational estimates is straight out the Myles Allen "dirty tricks" book.

In related news, it turns out that one of Hoskins' co-authors is a fan of Stefan Lewandowsky. Go figure.

Surfacestations: the punchline

And what a punchline it is. Anthony has finally published the results of his epic Surfacestations project, and it seems that the surface temperature record is as flawed as we thought. Here's the text of the press release.

SAN FRANCISO, CA – A new study about the surface temperature record presented at the 2015 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union suggests that the 30-year trend of temperatures for the Continental United States (CONUS) since 1979 are about two thirds as strong as officially NOAA temperature trends.

Using NOAA’s U.S. Historical Climatology Network, which comprises 1218 weather stations in the CONUS, the researchers were able to identify a 410 station subset of “unperturbed” stations that have not been moved, had equipment changes, or changes in time of observations, and thus require no “adjustments” to their temperature record to account for these problems. The study focuses on finding trend differences between well sited and poorly sited weather stations, based on a WMO approved metric Leroy (2010)¹ for classification and assessment of the quality of the measurements based on proximity to artificial heat sources and heat sinks which affect temperature measurement...

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Criminal records for Friends of the Earth, Sandbag

Guy Shrubsole: convictYesterday, the green activists who disrupted the Banks Mining facility next to Matt Ridley's home in Northumberland were up in court on charges of aggravated trespass. I have received the following report.

1. Yesterdays court case went ahead as planned at Bedlington Magistrates Court.

2. The nine charged protesters all appeared in court. They brought along a barrister from Manchester.

3. They appeared rather 'sheepish' in court.

4. The barrister argued mitigating circumstances on the basis of that it was a legitimate protest and that the protesters were frustrated by the lack of UK Government action to combat climate change. The judge (a district judge) apparently didn’t think much of this and suggested that it was not appropriate for matters of national politics to be argued by way of illegal obstruction of legitimate coal mining operations in Northumberland.

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The vacuity of Naomi Oreskes

You turn your back for a few hours and suddenly Naomi Oreskes does something even more foolish and generally loathsome than normal. Her op-ed in the Guardian yesterday looked at the subject of nuclear energy, and using her normal considered approach to people with whom she has minor political differences she decided to unleash the 'd' word.

There is also a new, strange form of denial that has appeared on the landscape of late, one that says that renewable sources can’t meet our energy needs.

Oddly, some of these voices include climate scientists, who insist that we must now turn to wholesale expansion of nuclear power. Just this past week, as negotiators were closing in on the Paris agreement, four climate scientists held an off-site session insisting that the only way we can solve the coupled climate/energy problem is with a massive and immediate expansion of nuclear power. More than that, they are blaming environmentalists, suggesting that the opposition to nuclear power stands between all of us and a two-degree world.

Of course nobody with an IQ in double figures takes anything Oreskes says seriously, but we have to welcome this intervention because it does give us the opportunity to laugh at all the people who are quite happy to use the 'd' word about those on the opposite side of the climate debate now venting their spleen over the use of the term in the energy debate.

Incredibly, @NaomiOreskes calls top scientists "denialists" for supporting nuclear power to tackle climate change: https://t.co/gAMYVrJ4dc

— Mark Lynas (@mark_lynas) December 16, 2015

Calling everyone who disagrees w/ you about anything a "denier" is a great way to cheapen the word & dilute support for climate science.

— David Roberts (@drvox) December 16, 2015

The best laid plans of Westminster mice

  Do you remember the grid emergency the other day, when the grid was said to have accepted an offer of £2500 per MWh to supply power to the grid, a slight markup on the normal price of £40?  The Commons Energy and Climate Change Committee reckon there may have been some dodgy dealing going on and they have written to Ofgem asking for an investigation:

 

 The best laid plans o' Westminster mice gang aft into a rent-seeker's paradise. Perhaps it might have been a good idea to maintain higher safety margins on the grid?

Sierra Club silliness

Many thanks to John Shade for this hilarious video from the US Congress, which I hadn't seen before.

A fracking corrective

The levels of disinformation about the shale gas industry has been quite overwhelming, although obviously very much par for the course for environmentalists. It's good therefore to have a corrective in the shape of this paper by Kevin Hollinrake, the MP for Thirsk & Malton. 

Hollinrake has been to Pennsylvania to take a look at the shale gas industry on the ground and his approach of just driving around asking people what they thought leads to a powerful rebuttal of the scare stories:

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Windfall

The Press and Journal has details of some truly phenomenal payments to wind farms in order to get them to switch off.

An energy giant was paid nearly £600,000 in less than a month – to turn off its windfarm and not produce any electricity.

Some or all of SSE’s 33 turbines at Strathy North were shut down almost daily between November 12 and December 10.

Last night, campaigners branded the situation “scandalous”, but the power company said it had to play its part in balancing the needs of the National Grid.

Westminster politicians: enabling graft and corruption since 1265AD.

The extraordinary climate effect of land-use change

The latest attempt to conjure up a hypothesis as to why things are going to get much worse on the climate front has appeared in Nature Climate Change, with an author team including Gavin Schmidt and Kate Marvel.

The paper delves deeper into the idea of forcing efficacy, a concept that is explained as follows:

The concept of radiative forcing is used to compare the effects of different physical drivers on the Earth's energy budget. Two forcing agents that produce a similar radiative imbalance might be expected to initiate similar feedbacks and have the same global mean temperature response. However, there can be variations in the size and type of feedbacks engendered by a specific forcing, mainly due to geographical variations in the forcing magnitude. These variations can be characterized by an efficacy that scales for the differences in temperature response. Forcings that project more strongly on the Northern Hemisphere, land or polar regions are systematically more effective at changing temperatures than an equivalent amount of CO2, whose forcing is more uniformly distributed throughout the globe. The converse is true for forcings localized in the Southern Hemisphere or ocean regions.

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Library manoeuvres

Updated on Dec 14, 2015 by Bishop Hill

The opposition have called a debate on the Cumbria floods tomorrow, and so the House of Commons Library has issued a briefing paper to MPs. There's lot to amuse. For example, I read with interest that:

...there is a general understanding that climate change is likely to be linked to increased winter rain in the UK.

I think it's fair to say that this is complete drivel. As Richard Betts has quite rightly noted, predictions of UK climate are incredibly difficult because of our geographical position. Most commentators also agree that GCMs are useless when it comes to rainfall. So predictions about UK rainfall are almost impossible to take seriously. The "increased winter rain" story is of course derived from the UKCP09 climate projections, which are so wrong they put even Lord Deben in the shade. The idea that there is a "general understanding" of anything based on this farce of a computer simulation is preposterous.

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Superforecasting

I'm sure for many readers here, Philip Tetlock's famous studies of the predictions of experts need little introduction. His most famous finding - that specialists are considerably worse at making predictions than generalists - is now quite well known, although less so among the general public and media than it should be.

His more recent work has been a project looking at forecasts in the realm of geopolitics and the results are summarised in his latest book, Superforecasting. The project asked panels of volunteers to make forecasts and then tested how accurate they turned out to be in reality. Much of the book focuses on "superforecasters" - those people who turned out to be noticeably better at it.

Suffice it to say that there was little by way of expertise that made these people stand out from the crowd. They were bright people, but not off-the scale geniuses; numerate but not those inclined to conjure with arcane mathematics. It was more about independence of mind, the ability to constantly recalibrate and to question assumptions, the ability to think in terms of probabilities rather than in black and white terms.

And although the book barely mentions climate, and indeed the focus of the project was on short-term predictions not long-term ones, it was hard while reading it not to keep wondering "do climatologists think like this?"

Co-authored by pop-sci writer Dan Gardner, the text is as light as a feather, making it readily accessible to nearly everyone. A good Christmas pressie for the geek in your life. Buy it here.

Kaye sera sera

I was on the Kaye Adams show this morning, talking about Paris and what one can do about one's personal carbon footprint. Also featured was BH favourite Louise Gray, although we didn't get a chance to interact.

We touched on energy, recycling, the global warming movement and green gestures although I'm not sure Ms Adams realised I was a "bad person" until rather late in the day. It was great fun.

Audio should be available here this afternoon (climate segment was from the top of the show, with me on after about half an hour).

Saudi snow

A reader in Saudi Arabia send this picture which was taken recently in the north of that country.

The naughty thing doesn't seem to be conforming to the local sumptuary laws.

Cold light of day is earlier than usual

As predicted in our lighthearted look at the COPs, the breakthrough moment at COP21 was reached yesterday. The cold light of day appears to have been reached almost immediately afterwards.

Grand promises of Paris climate deal undermined by squalid retrenchments