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Bishop Hill Aug 14, 2014 Energy: gas As greens try to put a spanner in the works of the shale gas industry in Colorado, the Colorado shale gas industry is fighting back with a series of attack ads. Here's one, pointing out some of the ethical implications of relying on energy from the middle east.
And here's another about the oligarchs.
They're a bit racier than Cuadrilla's offerings, don't you think?
Bishop Hill Aug 13, 2014 Blogs Squarespace have emailed to say they think they have fixed the speed issues with the site. If you are still having problems, can you let me know in the comments.
Thanks
Bishop Hill Aug 13, 2014 Bureaucrats Climate: CRU Oxford economist Simon Wren-Lewis has a blog on the subject of macroeconomics called Mainly Macro. I chanced upon it this morning via my Twitter feed.
His latest post is about policy-based evidencemaking and who you should trust. There's plenty of good stuff in there, but plenty to take issue with too. For example, being an academic, he has an overly high opinion of academics:
I know I’ll get it in the neck for saying this, but if the analysis is done by academics you can be relatively confident that the analysis is of a reasonable quality and not overtly biased. In contrast, work commissioned from, say, an economic consultancy is less trustworthy. This follows from the incentives either group faces.
In the climate debate at least, this confidence is misplaced.
Bishop Hill Aug 12, 2014 Climate: MetOffice Diary dates Julia Slingo is giving a public lecture at the Institute of Physics in London next month on the subject of climate models.
Taking the planet into uncharted territory: What climate models can tell us about the future
Climate change is arguably one of the greatest challenges that human civilisation will face in the 21st century. With the rise in carbon emissions continuing unabated and the evidence for human-induced climate change stacking up, the need to take action to mitigate future climate change grows. So what are these climate models on that so much of our decision-making rests?
Dame Julia’s lecture will examine how fundamental physics has shaped our understanding of the climate system, and how over the course of her career as a climate scientist, this has been encapsulated in climate models.
Bishop Hill Aug 12, 2014 Climate: WG3 Greens Academics are sometimes their own worst enemies aren't they? They so desperately want to be taken seriously but the otherwordliness of some members of the academy is so overwhelming as to make academia look more like a lunatic asylum than somewhere were knowledge is sought.
As an example, take the story carried at WUWT today. A group of academics at the University of Southampton - one of them a former airline pilot - have written a paper calling for a global regulator of air travel to be put in place.
A global regulator with ‘teeth’ needs to be established, but investing such a body with the appropriate level of authority requires securing an international agreement which history would suggest is going to be very difficult. … the ticket price-increases necessary to induce the required reduction in traffic growth-rates place a monetary-value on CO2 emissions of approximately 7–100 times greater than other common valuations. It is clear that, whilst aviation must remain one piece of the transport-jigsaw, environmentally a global regulator with ‘teeth’ is urgently required.”
We could have a "green halfwit of the year" award, if it wasn't for the fact that the team from Southampton have probably just killed off any sense of expectation.
Bishop Hill Aug 12, 2014 Energy: gas Energy: solar Energy: wind I was having an exchange of views with Michael Liebreich on Twitter yesterday. He was getting a bit excited about the number of vehicle movements associated with developing a shale gas pad, saying that the public needed to know that they would be on the receiving end of 60 HGV movements per day. We talked about the duration of these 60 movements per day and I pointed out that the AMEC report on shale had come up with a range of 14-51 movements per day, depending on whether water was tankered in or came straight from the mains.
This seems to have prompted a blog post from David McKay, the former chief scientist at DECC, who set out an analysis of vehicle movements for construction of a shale gas pad, a windfarm and a solar array. He came up with a range of 2900-20,000 movements in total for a 10-well pad, as compared to 7000 for an 8-turbine windfarm. I pointed out to him that his figures had nothing to cover access road construction, and so he redid the figures, coming up with a revised estimate of 7800. One could consider adding more to cover removal of soil for the foundations, but since this might be disposed of onsite, it is arguably valid to leave it out.
Bishop Hill Aug 12, 2014 Climate: Sceptics Anthony is reporting some sad news from the US. I'm sure the thoughts of everyone in the climate debate are with Dr Christy.
Bishop Hill Aug 12, 2014 Climate: WG2
Updated on Aug 12, 2014 by
Bishop Hill
It's often said that canny users of financial accounts read them from back to front. Disreputable managers hide the problems away in the last few notes to the balance sheet, out of the view of anyone who chooses merely to glance at the profit and loss account.
This is probably a good approach to newspaper articles about climate change too, Steve Connor's latest offering in the Independent being a case in point. Were you to read only the headline you would come away with the impression that:
Rapid rise in Arctic temperatures to blame for world’s extreme weather
Bishop Hill Aug 11, 2014 Climate: WG2 Labour I have an article up at the Spectator Coffee House blog about Labour's Maria Eagle.
Bishop Hill Aug 11, 2014 Climate: other A new survey of climate scientists has been published. The author team is headed by Bart Verheggen and includes John Cook. Here's the abstract:
Results are presented from a survey held among 1868 scientists studying various aspects of climate change, including physical climate, climate impacts, and mitigation. The survey was unique in its size, broadness and level of detail. Consistent with other research, we found that, as the level of expertise in climate science grew, so too did the level of agreement on anthropogenic causation. 90% of respondents with more than 10 climate-related peer-reviewed publications (about half of all respondents), explicitly agreed with anthropogenic greenhouse gases (GHGs) being the dominant driver of recent global warming. The respondents’ quantitative estimate of the GHG contribution appeared to strongly depend on their judgment or knowledge of the cooling effect of aerosols. The phrasing of the IPCC attribution statement in its fourth assessment report (AR4) providing a lower limit for the isolated GHG contribution may have led to an underestimation of the GHG influence on recent warming. The phrasing was improved in AR5. We also report on the respondents’ views on other factors contributing to global warming; of these Land Use and Land Cover Change (LULCC) was considered the most important. Respondents who characterized human influence on climate as insignificant, reported having had the most frequent media coverage regarding their views on climate change.
Having Cook on the author team is obviously going to lead many people to write the paper off without even taking a look at it. When you are proven to have set out to write a paper to meet a predetermined conclusion, that is the way people will treat your work.
But I'm sure we will all look at the paper carefully. Thoughts in the comments please.
Bishop Hill Aug 11, 2014 Energy: grid Several nuclear reactors have been forced to close down temporarily due to a fault identified during routine inspection of their boilers. Initial estimates are that it will take eight weeks to fix the affected plant in Heysham and Hartlepool.
If it takes much longer, the capacity margins for the winter will start to look very interesting indeed.
Bishop Hill Aug 11, 2014 Energy: gas The UK Onshore Operators group has released the results of an opinion poll on shale gas, finding that 57% are in favour of going ahead, with only 16% against. Whether said survey is any more reliable than the windfarm one that claimed that the public were overwhelmingly in favour of carpeting the countryside with turbines is anyone's guess. But it should be good for a headline or two.
Bishop Hill Aug 11, 2014 Climate: Surface Climate: WG2 The decline of the Arctic sea ice is a perennial favourite among our millennarian friends, with "Death Spiral" being favoured buzzwords used to keep the subject in the front of people's minds. Here's an example from shouty* (official) skeptic Phil Plait.
However, new light is thrown on the subject by a paper in Geophysical Research Letters (H/T Hockey Schtick) which finds strong covariability between sea ice levels and the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation. In other words a significant chunk of the variability seems to be entirely natural.
It's life, Jim, and just as we know it.
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*Is it just me, or is everyone involved in the Skeptics Society incapable of speaking without shouting?
Bishop Hill Aug 11, 2014 Climate: Mann Paul Krugman is considering Michael Mann this morning. Amazingly, the great man is trying to resurrect the Hockey Stick.
Mann, as some of you may know, is a hard-working scientist who used indirect evidence from tree rings and ice cores in an attempt to create a long-run climate record. His result was the famous “hockey stick” of sharply rising temperatures in the age of industrialization and fossil fuel consumption. His reward for that hard work was not simply assertions that he was wrong — which he wasn’t — but a concerted effort to destroy his life and career with accusations of professional malpractice, involving the usual suspects on the right but also public officials, like the former Attorney General of Virginia.
He wasn't wrong? Like our friend Anders, Mr Krugman could really do with getting himself a copy of The Hockey Stick Illusion. Like Anders, I don't suppose he will.
Mr Krugman, you really do need to centre your data if you are going to do principal components analysis. Really you do. There is not a reputable statistician who has ever looked at this question and concluded that Mann got it right. I wonder if Mr Krugman is a fan of the Mann view that not centring your data properly is "modern" (and therefore OK) or whether he favours the Gerald North view that you can use a biased method and inappropriate data and still arrive at the right answer.
Homeopathy has nothing on climate science.
Bishop Hill Aug 10, 2014 Media This is a guest post by Danny Weston.
Just a few days ago our old friend, the Telegraph’s Geoffrey Lean, was rightly excoriated on this blog for yet another appallingly biased - not to mention incompetent – screed further justifying his apparent fear of imminent human caused thermageddon. Now it’s not news to any regular readers here that many of our glorious hacks appear to throw out all pretense of professionalism and impartiality when it comes to the issue of the seemingly ever omnipotent CO2 molecule belched from the belly of human industry. Motivated reasoning seems to be the root cause. Or is it? I’d like to propose an altogether more frightening theory – that in many cases it is in fact sheer incompetence that is the driving force and the reliance on climate catastrophist talking points is more an effect than a cause. It gives them a nice, tidy, heuristic for them to hang everything on, minimising their need to do their own research, editing or indeed, even thinking.
To explain why I’d like to talk through a number of personal anecdotes that all tie in together in various ways with both Lean’s article and his behaviour.
