Helding forth on TCR

A few days ago Andy Revkin put a tweet out asking for comments on an old blog post by Isaac Held. Held had been looking at transient climate response (TCR) which he estimated at 1.8, a number that he observed was on the low side.

I pointed the tweet and the post out to Nic Lewis, who has been examining it in detail and seems to have uncovered a few issues which are appended in a comment to Held's post. These issues might lead to still lower estimates of TCR.

Tweeting Ehrlich - Josh 202

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Cartoons by Josh

I'm following Paul

Can I just recommend the Twitter feed of Paul Ehrlich to my readers. Try these choice excerpts from the last ten days or so.

#Climate disruption. Remember this when denier morons claim snow proves no warming. Just the opposite. #greed. http://bit.ly/Xiwu7G

#Overpopulation and idiocy -- more on the WSJ's latest moron. Right wing struggling to find even dumber "analysts" http://bit.ly/WxTdva

#Climate disruption. Arizona pol gives more evidence we'll never run out of morons http://bit.ly/XfuVW9

Friends of Fraud -- #Republithugs on the rampage #plutocracy #greed http://nyti.ms/UkMJTb

Tricky Dick pioneering the techniques of todays #Republithug #plutocrats. Richard Nixon's Even-Darker Legacy http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/277-75/15846-richard-nixons-even-darker-legacy …

WSJ gibbing idiocy on #population http://on.wsj.com/Ytfg6p  no accident. Part of Murdoch empire's attempt to murder our grandkids for profit.

#Population. Julian Simon proved by example long ago the ultimate resource, which will never be exhausted, is morons http://on.wsj.com/VBAmmd

For those who don't use Twitter, there is a thing called Friday follow, where you suggest good people to follow to your own followers. I think everyone on the dissenting side of the debate should be recommending Ehrlich. He's a hoot.

You can see why Paul Nurse and the other big wigs at the Royal Society would want to elect him a fellow. The voice of calm rationalism is just the thing don't you think?

Your funding bonanza for greens

These details of the European Union's budget agreement are pretty damning. As if anyone needed to be reminded of the EU's depravity.

European heads of state and government have agreed to commit at least 20 percent of the entire European Union budget over the next seven years to climate-related spending. The seven-year budget was agreed at 960 billion euros.

All-night negotiations in Brussels produced agreement among EU leaders on budget proposals for the rest of the decade, from 2014-2020.

Shale - more than we thought

The Times seems to have got sight of the British Geological Survey's new estimates of Britain's shale gas resource. The  previous figure of 1000 tcf, widely pooh-poohed by greens, has been upped to between 1300 and 1500 tcf. Current demand is about 3tcf per annum.

It's only fair to note that not all of this will be extractable and the Times suggests a figure of 20% might apply with current fracking technology. That would be around one hundred years' supply.

I recall Roger Harrabin's tweet back in October:

RHarrabin Belatedly, via @zacgoldsmith, the relatively meagre reality of UK shale gas deposits. http://t.co/RUUJj0rN

The flow of good news continues unabated. Read the whole thing here.

Global warming overestimated by factor of two

A new paper in PNAS entitled 'Using data to attribute episodes of warming and cooling in instrumental records' looks important. Ka-Kit Tung and Jiansong Zhou of the University of Washington report that anthropogenic global warming has been overcooked. A lot.

The observed global-warming rate has been nonuniform, and the cause of each episode of slowing in the expected warming rate is the subject of intense debate. To explain this, nonrecurrent events have commonly been invoked for each episode separately. After reviewing evidence in both the latest global data (HadCRUT4) and the longest instrumental record, Central England Temperature, a revised picture is emerging that gives a consistent attribution for each multidecadal episode of warming and cooling in recent history, and suggests that the anthropogenic global warming trends might have been overestimated by a factor of two in the second half of the 20th century. A recurrent multidecadal oscillation is found to extend to the preindustrial era in the 353-y Central England Temperature and is likely an internal variability related to the Atlantic Multidecadal Oscillation (AMO), possibly caused by the thermohaline circulation variability. The perspective of a long record helps in quantifying the contribution from internal variability, especially one with a period so long that it is often confused with secular trends in shorter records. Solar contribution is found to be minimal for the second half of the 20th century and less than 10% for the first half. The underlying net anthropogenic warming rate in the industrial era is found to have been steady since 1910 at 0.07–0.08 °C/decade, with superimposed AMO-related ups and downs that included the early 20th century warming, the cooling of the 1960s and 1970s, the accelerated warming of the 1980s and 1990s, and the recent slowing of the warming rates. Quantitatively, the recurrent multidecadal internal variability, often underestimated in attribution studies, accounts for 40% of the observed recent 50-y warming trend.

www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/10.1073/pnas.1212471110

The long tales

The University of East Anglia is having a conference on writing and climate change. It features well known climate writers Giles Foden, Mike Hulme and, erm, Phil Jones (click for full size)

This comes to me via Richard Bean, who was invited but can't make it. My own invitation appears to have been lost in the post.

Senator Paul on his water closet

Senator Rand Paul of Kentucky takes a bureaucrat to task for enforcing her preferences of lavatory (and light bulb) on him. Fantastic stuff.

Hammer of the Scots - Josh 201

SNP hammering the Scots

The Scottish Tories, armed with their bright and shiny new energy policy (which can be summarised as "we're not going to be quite as silly as the SNP"), have decided to let rip at the Holyrood powers that be accusing them of driving Scots into fuel poverty:

A Scots politician has claimed wind farm subsidies are plunging Scots into fuel poverty.

In a Scottish Government debate on fuel poverty, Mid-Scotland and Fife MSP Murdo Fraser attacked the SNP for its staunch backing of onshore wind projects.

Opponents of the Government policy have claimed the generous grants awarded to wind farm developers have pushed electricity costs through the roof, leaving Scotland with some of the highest energy bills in Europe.

The subsidies were introduced across the UK last year and are expected to have cost up to £1 billion.

They offer a huge benefit to the energy companies as they push ahead with wind power projects but their cost in added on to household bills.

All this is quite true, of course, but I think we have a long way to go before Holyrood sits up and takes notice. Fuel poverty and frozen pensioners are secondary concerns when there is the green vote to pursue.

Science, advocacy and the Royal

Eleanor Beal, writing at the Royal Society's In Verba blog reviews the debate at the University of Sussex earlier this week over what counts as good evidence for policy. It's an interesting report, and one bit in particular struck me as worthy of comment:

Should there be a separation between scientists and campaigners? Is such a separation possible? Richard Horton pointed out that for a public health researcher, not being an activist is the exception. However, Pielke pointed out that for climate science, experts being activists can actually lessen their credibility.

Perhaps this helps explain Sir Paul Nurse's keenness to take the Royal Society into the policy realm and the concerns some of have about the wisdom of such a move. Personally, I find the idea of public health researchers using my money to tell me how to behave no more welcome than anyone else doing so. I'm sure I'm not alone.

Relentless good news

The flow of good news is relentless isn't it? After all that lower climate sensitivity stuff, we have some excellent news from the Amazon (well, Exeter actually):

The Amazon rainforest is less vulnerable to die off because of global warming than widely believed because the greenhouse gas carbon dioxide also acts as an airborne fertilizer, a study showed on Wednesday.

The boost to growth from CO2, the main gas from burning fossil fuels blamed for causing climate change, was likely to exceed damaging effects of rising temperatures this century such as drought, it said.

"I am no longer so worried about a catastrophic die-back due to CO2-induced climate change," Professor Peter Cox of the University of Exeter in England told Reuters of the study he led in the journal Nature. "In that sense it's good news."

Cox was also the main author of a much-quoted study in 2000 that projected that the Amazon rainforest might dry out from about 2050 and die off because of warming. Others have since suggested fires could transform much the forest into savannah.

More revolving door

The Department of Business Industry and Skills is busily, industriously and skillfully hosing down insiders with public funds it seems. Here is the latest:

The government is buying a multi-million pound equity stake in a series of onshore windfarms in an unusual move that is likely to anger Conservative backbench MPs campaigning against public subsidies for one of the most controversial forms of renewable energy.

The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills (BIS) is spending £50m on six windfarms – five onshore and one offshore – through a "cornerstone" stake in a renewable energy fund called Greencoat UK Wind, launched on Wednesday. Some of the farms are being bought outright, while others involve a stake of less than 50% being purchased from two of the big six energy companies, RWE and SSE.

So that's pretty bad. But now consider this. Greencoat UK Wind is a subsidiary of Greencoat Capital. Greencoat Capital is run by Richard Nourse. And this is Richard Nourse's former page at the Department of Business Industry and Skills. It appears that he used to be a member of the Shareholder Executive, the group charged with looking after the government's interests in commercial and quasi-commercial companies. Kind of like all those wind farms that BIS has just bought into.

The notice of the intention to list Greencoat UK Wind on the stock exchange is here. It includes some interesting information about the company's board:

The Company has a strong Board of independent non-executive directors from relevant and complementary backgrounds, offering experience in the investment management of listed funds, as well as in the energy sector both from a public policy and a commercial perspective. The Board will be chaired by Tim Ingram, former chief executive of Caledonia Investments from 2002 until 2010 and will also comprise Shonaid Jemmett-Page, former KPMG partner Financial Services, and William Rickett, former Director General for the Department of Energy & Climate Change. The Company intends to appoint a fourth director to the Board post-Admission.

William Rickett was Director General of the Energy Group at DECC.

Good lord

This just in:

Just minutes ago it was announced that Viscount Ridley was elected to a sit in the House of Lords, taking the seat vacated by the death of Earl Ferrers.

Congratulations to Matt from everyone at BH.

More corruption at DECC

Guido reports that Charles Hendry, the former Energy Minister, has got a new job.

[Hendry has] just been announced as the chairman of the wind energy giants Forewind. The consortium comprising of four international companies -Scottish and Southern, RWE, Statoil and Statkraf – was awarded the contract in 2010 to build the huge “Dogger Bank” windfarm 125km off the Yorkshire coast.

Yeo, Deben, Hendry. There is no end to it.

Update on Feb 6, 2013 by Bishop Hill

And Huhne too. As the Mail reminds us, Huhne is a paid consultant to Nationwide Energy Services.

Update on Feb 6, 2013 by Bishop Hill

In the comments, we are reminded that the last chairman of Forewind was Lord Deben.