UK: Energy policy dominated by “Green lobby”


Just like the 70s

Just like the 70s

In the UK, the forced transition to highly expensive “green” energy is sowing the seeds for a major crisis. I recall the power cuts of the early 1970s (just), where my family had a collection of oil lamps and candles for when the lights went out, but there’s no excuse in 2013.

However there is a glimmer of hope in the darkness:

Britain must abandon its bias towards green policies or face an energy crisis, a key parliamentary adviser has warned.

Peter Lilley, a member of the Prime Minister’s Parliamentary Advisory board, has warned that the UK’s hesitance to embrace shale gas comes at great expense to the country.

He cites decreasing gas prices in American as an example, where gas is a third of the price of what it is in Europe, and questions why Britain is “dragging its feet”.

The UK is potentially sitting on enough shale gas reserves to heat all homes in Britain for at least 100 years, experts at the British Geological Survey claimed in April this year.

However, there has been resistance to excavate the fossil fuel amid concerns about the possibility of earthquakes and water contamination if gases are leaked into the water table while the “fracking” process is carried out.

In an article for The Spectator, the Conservative MP accuses the Department for Energy and Climate Change as being “in disarray” over the issue, with some ministers now beginning to question the direction green policies have been heading.

He claims that the green lobby is in control of the Department for Energy, dominates the EU and is institutionalised in Whitehall via the Climate Change Committee. He also accuses them of deploying “scare stories with reckless disregard for the truth” on a scale comparable to the MMR scare.

“Whatever the power of Big Oil in the past, it has been eclipsed by Big Green,” he said.

(source)

Attempts to cut CO2 are futile – and expensive


Blondie Bjorn

Blondie Bjorn

Bjorn Lomborg makes a sound case for abandoning attempts to cut CO2, and instead look at investing in R & D for renewable energy sources. Even if you accept the worst predictions of the AGW alarmists, it still does not make sense to slash emissions.

All the planet’s efforts to reduce CO2 emissions have passed virtually unnoticed by the atmosphere and climate. The pointlessness of it all is summed up by Lomborg’s claim that the current EU climate policy will cost $20 trillion over the century, and will reduce global temperatures by 0.05 degrees C. How about that for a cost/benefit result?

I have always believed that strong economies lead to strong research and industry, which will lead more quickly to competitive renewable energy sources. The opposite, slashing CO2 emissions and strangling economies, means that such developments will take longer, and in the mean time, the population will suffer unnecessarily.

He writes:

Global warming is a problem for the future but a benefit now. Lots of people like to point out that global warming means more deaths from heat waves, but they forget that fewer die from cold. In Britain and almost everywhere, more people die from cold than from heat.

Likewise, higher temperatures mean higher costs for air-conditioning but lower costs for heating. Temperature rises will push some crops beyond their optimal range and reduce yields, but CO2 in the atmosphere acts as a fertiliser and has increased global yields significantly.

When economists estimate the net damage from global warming as a percentage of gross domestic product, they find it will indeed have an overall negative impact in the long run but the impact of moderate warming (1C-2C) will be beneficial. It is only towards the end of the century, when temperatures have risen much more, that global warming will turn negative. One peer-reviewed model estimates that it will turn into a net cost only by 2070.

We need to stop claiming that it will be the end of the world. Just as it is silly to deny man-made global warming, it is indefensible to describe it as the biggest calamity of the 21st century.

Here is how to quantify this. The most well-known economic model of global warming is the DICE model by William Nordhaus, of Yale University. It calculates the total costs (from heat waves, hurricanes, crop failure and so on) as well as the total benefits (from cold waves and CO2 fertilisation). If you compare these over the next 200 years, the total cost of global warming is estimated at about $33 trillion.

While this is not a trivial number, you have to put it in context. Over the next 200 years, global GDP will run to about $2200 trillion, so global warming constitutes a loss of about 1.5 per cent of this figure. This is not the end of the world but a problem that needs to be solved.

Next, consider CO2 levels. With huge, green subsidies showing up on our electricity bills, you would be excused for believing that we have managed to cut CO2 substantially. You would be wrong. Global CO2 has risen relentlessly since 1950. In 1997 the Kyoto protocol put legally binding limits on rich-country emissions. But Kyoto and all our fine policies have had no real impact. The only indication of a CO2 reduction was in 2009 when the global recession put us on track to fulfil Kyoto. Had the recession continued, we might have been able to achieve Kyoto.

Not surprisingly, such a policy has no appeal for politicians or voters in the real world.

Kyoto set a target of 36.6 per cent for the rise in global emissions since 1990. In fact they have gone up by 45.4 per cent. With no Kyoto at all, they would have increased by only about half a percentage point to 45.9 per cent. Put simply, the past two decades of climate discussions have had virtually no impact on global emissions.

The latest peer-reviewed overview of the 311 published estimates show that the entire cost of the most likely future damage is about $5 a tonne. This means that cutting CO2 for less than $5 a tonne is probably a good idea, whereas cutting for more is probably a bad deal.

Unfortunately, almost all policies for fighting global warming are bad deals by this $5 yardstick. Most large nations have managed to enact climate policies for electricity that cost a lot more than the good they do.

China has one of the most efficient climate policies on electricity. Yet it still pays about $46 to cut a tonne of CO2, which is nearly eight times more than the global, long-term benefits. Australia pays about half a billion dollars to cut less than 5 per cent of its electricity emissions, paying about $72 a tonne of CO2, or almost 15 times too much. On biofuels, the excess is even greater and emission reductions even smaller. Australia pays 73 times too much at $364 a tonne of CO2, cutting just 0.1 per cent of its total emissions at a cost of $144m. The US pays a staggering 133 times too much, at $666 a tonne of CO2, costing $17.5bn a year and cutting just 0.5 per cent of its total emissions. (source)

So Australia is paying $364 to solve every $5 worth of problems. An efficiency Gillard and Labor would be proud of.

‘Climatologists are no Einsteins’


Einstein vs Mann or Hansen? No contest.

Einstein vs Mann or Hansen? No contest.

You can say that again! Climatologists are no Einsteins [very funny – Ed]. But it wasn’t me that said it, it was a successor of Einstein himself at Princeton University, Freeman Dyson.

Even putting ‘climatologists’ in the same breath as Einstein is like putting One Direction in the same breath as J S Bach.

Unlike the majority of alarmist climate activists posing as ‘scientists’ today, Einstein was a proper scientist. Can’t remember hearing of him deleting his correspondence or not sharing his data, or worse, fudging it in order to fit a pre-conceived politically-motivated conclusion.

He also wasn’t paid more because the Aether didn’t exist, his revolutionary concept of spacetime provided the missing structure. As well as Einstein’s scientific integrity, world governments were not spending trillions of dollars to prove the existence of the Aether – and then tax it.

If the evidence did not fit the hypothesis, then the hypothesis must be wrong. No point in trying to shoehorn the data into a flawed theory.

And Dyson rightly follows that path:

“I think any good scientist ought to be a skeptic,” Dyson said.

Dyson came to this country from his native England at age 23 and immediately made major breakthroughs in quantum theory. After that he worked on a nuclear-powered rocket (see video below). Then in the late 1970s, he got involved with early research on climate change at the Institute for Energy Analysis in Oak Ridge, Tenn.

That research, which involved scientists from many disciplines, was based on experimentation. The scientists studied such questions as how atmospheric carbon dioxide interacts with plant life and the role of clouds in warming.

But that approach lost out to the computer-modeling approach favored by climate scientists. And that approach was flawed from the beginning, Dyson said.

“I just think they don’t understand the climate,” he said of climatologists. “Their computer models are full of fudge factors.”

A major fudge factor concerns the role of clouds. The greenhouse effect of carbon dioxide on its own is limited. To get to the apocalyptic projections trumpeted by Al Gore and company, the models have to include assumptions that CO-2 will cause clouds to form in a way that produces more warming.

“The models are extremely oversimplified,” he said. “They don’t represent the clouds in detail at all. They simply use a fudge factor to represent the clouds.”

Dyson said his skepticism about those computer models was borne out by recent reports of a study by Ed Hawkins of the University of Reading in Great Britain that showed global temperatures were flat between 2000 and 2010 — even though we humans poured record amounts of CO-2 into the atmosphere during that decade.

That was vindication for a man who was termed “a civil heretic” in a New York Times Magazine article on his contrarian views. Dyson embraces that label, with its implication that what he opposes is a religious movement. So does his fellow Princeton physicist and fellow skeptic, William Happer.

“There are people who just need a cause that’s bigger than themselves,” said Happer. “Then they can feel virtuous and say other people are not virtuous.”

To show how uncivil this crowd can get, Happer e-mailed me an article about an Australian professor who proposes — quite seriously — the death penalty for heretics such as Dyson. As did Galileo, they can get a reprieve if they recant.

I hope that guy never gets to hear Dyson’s most heretical assertion: Atmospheric CO-2 may actually be improving the environment.

“It’s certainly true that carbon dioxide is good for vegetation,” Dyson said. “About 15 percent of agricultural yields are due to CO-2 we put in the atmosphere. From that point of view, it’s a real plus to burn coal and oil.”

In fact, there’s more solid evidence for the beneficial effects of CO-2 than the negative effects, he said. So why does the public hear only one side of this debate? Because the media do an awful job of reporting it.

“They’re absolutely lousy,” he said of American journalists. “That’s true also in Europe. I don’t know why they’ve been brainwashed.” [And in Australia – Ed]

I know why: They’re lazy. Instead of digging into the details, most journalists are content to repeat that mantra about “consensus” among climate scientists.

The problem, said Dyson, is that the consensus is based on those computer models. Computers are great for analyzing what happened in the past, he said, but not so good at figuring out what will happen in the future. But a lot of scientists have built their careers on them. Hence the hatred for dissenters.

“It was similar in the Soviet Union,” he said. “Who could doubt Marxist economics was the future? Everything else was in the dustbin.” (source)

When you hear an eminent physicist speak such common sense, it’s like a breath of fresh air amid the fetid stench of climate science.

(h/t Lubos)

Summer not so angry after all


Who can spot the angry summer?

Who can spot the angry summer?

The emotive language and graphics of the Climate Commission are there to scare the population into thinking the worst. It’s pure alarmism.

As mentioned in the last post, the Climate Commission, Flannery, Steffen and the rest will all be gone by the end of the year – good riddance.

Murry Salby, professor of climate at Macquarie University, dismantles their latest explosion of hysteria:

CLAIMS from the latest report by the Climate Commission, titled The Angry Summer, have been widely circulated through international media. On the basis of a few sporadic episodes, which in any other era would have been regarded as marginal weather (infrequent but perennial), the Climate Commission has proclaimed that such events are now the norm – the signature of climate change come home to roost.

This report is but the latest in a series of dire proclamations from this panel. It just happens to buttress the government’s controversial carbon tax, a maladroit policy that will be pivotal in the forthcoming federal election.

The commission’s position, as proclaimed by its chief commissioner, is that “the baseline has shifted” like “an athlete (who) takes steroids”. “The same thing is happening to our climate system . . . We’re getting fewer cold days and cold events and many more record hot events” (The New York Times, March 4).

The evocative nature of these claims is matched only by the imagination behind them. On a continental scale (the scale relevant to climate), Australian temperature this summer was unremarkable – it was within the range of previous variability.

The Climate Commission was enshrined as an “independent panel of experts”. It was installed and paid for by the government. The panel is comprised of biologists and ecologists, a materials engineer and members of the business community. It has no demonstrated expertise in the physics or chemistry of climate, or even in meteorology, the scientific underpinnings of its conclusions.

Figure 1 displays the record of Australia mean temperature during January (blue) in its anomalous value (the departure from the long-term average January temperature). Last January was warmer than recent Januaries, but hardly unprecedented. It lies about a standard deviation above the average January temperature. And even during the relatively short satellite era, two Januaries were warmer. Superimposed is anomalous summertime temperature (red). It is even less remarkable. Near the three-decade average, it is no more significant than in preceding years. Neither record evidences a sustained shift in the continental baseline.

Figure 2 displays the record of anomalous temperature for all months. It places the summer of 2012-13 into perspective. Anomalous temperature (red solid circles) lies well within the envelope of other warm anomalies during the preceding three decades. Cold anomalies are just as numerous. If anything, they are even stronger.

For many on Australia’s eastern seaboard, this summer was not anomalously hot but, rather, anomalously cool and wet. This is confirmed by the temperature record at Sydney. The central station reported only two marginal days. And during the entire summer maximum temperature reached 32C on only three days.

In the light of the satellite record, as well as the absence of any systematic change in global temperature for almost two decades, the proclaimed interpretation of this summer should be recognised for what it is: a simplistic explanation of a complex physical system. (source)

No-one’s listening any more chaps.

Flannery, your days are numbered


The Climate Commission, 15 September 2013

The Climate Commission, 15 September 2013

Ah, the sweet satisfaction of seeing that government propaganda mouthpiece the Climate Commission shut down, and all its staff sent packing into the night.

Tim Flannery will, with luck, disappear and never be heard of again, except in reference to his laughably hopeless “predictions”. Will Steffen can go back to being an obscure academic, and we won’t have to suffer his endless alarmism on an almost daily basis.

And most importantly, the taxpayer will breathe a sigh of relief.

Here’s hoping:

A COALITION government would dismantle the climate change bureaucracy and put commissioners including Tim Flannery out of a job, Tony Abbott predicted yesterday as a report painted a gloomy picture of the future.

The Opposition Leader, who vows to remove the carbon tax if elected in September, said there would be no further need for the bureaucracy that supports it.

When the carbon tax goes all of those bureaucracies will go and I think you’ll find that particular position you’re referring to will go with them,” Mr Abbott said.

Mr Abbott will consider dumping the Howard government’s renewable energy target, which he says is “significantly increasing the cost of power”. [yes, finally – Ed]

Speaking to Sky News last night, he equivocated on his previous support for the scheme, which aims to ensure 20 per cent of electricity comes from renewable sources by 2020. “There is going to be a serious review of this, should there be a change of government,” he said. “We’ll wait for the review before deciding what we do, but I take your point that renewable energy is increasing the price of power.”

The report, The Critical Decade: Extreme Weather, suggests worsening weather exacerbated by global warming is inevitable in coming decades, even if action is taken immediately to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

Report lead author, climate commissioner Will Steffen, and Climate Change Minister Greg Combet warned against complacency. “The action we take now in terms of getting emissions down . . . will have a big effect on what these extreme events will look like in the future,” Professor Steffen said in Sydney. (source)

Yes, that’s right Will, Australia’s 20% reduction of our 1.5% of global emissions (total, at absolute most, 0.3%) will really have a “big effect”… case closed.

Twenty year hiatus in warming


Burn the heretics

Burn the heretics

Throw another heretic on the fire. Graham Lloyd explores the view, becoming more accepted by the day, that global warming has slowed or plateaued over the past 15 or so years.

It follows on from the Economist article which has caused quite a stir (see ACM here). Cue headbangers whining that even considering hypotheses that contradict the incessant alarmism of the AGW religion is part of a ‘war on science’, or some other such BS.

DEBATE about the reality of a two-decade pause in global warming and what it means has made its way from the sceptical fringe to the mainstream.

In a lengthy article this week, The Economist magazine said if climate scientists were credit-rating agencies, then climate sensitivity – the way climate reacts to changes in carbon-dioxide levels – would be on negative watch but not yet downgraded. Another paper published by leading climate scientist James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for S

pace Studies, says the lower than expected temperature rise between 2000 and the present could be explained by increased emissions from burning coal.

For Hansen the pause is a fact, but it’s good news that probably won’t last.

International Panel on Climate Change chairman Rajendra Pachauri recently told The Weekend Australian the hiatus would have to last 30 to 40 years “at least” to break the long-term warming trend.

But the fact that global surface temperatures have not followed the expected global warming pattern is now widely accepted. Research by Ed Hawkins of University of Reading shows surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range projections derived from 20 climate models and if they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

“The global temperature standstill shows that climate models are diverging from observations,” says David Whitehouse of the Global Warming Policy Foundation.

“If we have not passed it already, we are on the threshold of global observations becoming incompatible with the consensus theory of climate change,” he says. Whitehouse argues that whatever has happened to make temperatures remain constant requires an explanation because the pause in temperature rise has occurred despite a sharp increase in global carbon emissions.

The Economist says the world has added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010, about one-quarter of all the carbon dioxide put there by humans since 1750. This mismatch between rising greenhouse gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now, The Economist article says.

Lew & Cook: economical with the truth


Climate clowns.

Lew & Cook: climate clowns.

A retarded amoeba with a half-a-dozen neurons for a brain could see that the Lew & Cook conspiracy papers are a transparent attack on heretics of their AGW religion, and that they give junk science a bad name.

As a result of information obtained from FOI requests that ACM put in last year, Steve McIntyre posts a withering attack on their integrity:

Last fall, Geoff Chambers and Barry Woods established beyond a shadow of a doubt that no blog post linking to the Lewandowsky survey had ever been published at the Skeptical Science (SKS) blog. Chambers reasonably suggested at the time that the authors correct the claim in the article to reflect the lack of any link at the SKS blog. I reviewed the then available information on this incident in September 2012 here.

Since then, information obtained through FOI has shown that responses by both Lewandowsky and Cook to questions from Chambers and Woods were untrue. Actually, “untrue” does not really do justice to the measure of untruthfulness, as the FOI correspondence shows that the untruthful answers were given deliberately and intentionally. Chambers, in a post entitled Lewandowsky the Liar, minced no words in calling Lewandowsky “a liar, a fool, a charlatan and a fraud.”

Even though the untruthfulness of Lewandowsky and Cook’s stories had been clearly demonstrated by Geoff Chambers in a series of blog articles (e.g. here), in the published version of the Hoax paper, instead of correcting prior untrue claims about SKS, Lewandowsky doubled down, repeating and substantially amplifying the untrue claim.

I’m getting a little weary of giving this pair of clowns any more air time, but McIntyre’s (and others’) work exposing them is worth repeating.

Apocalypse delayed?


© The Economist

Times are changing…

The Economist tackles the issue to which many are intentionally blind, including the usual headbangers, our own Climate Commission, the IPCC and the majority of Western governments, namely, why have global temperatures levelled off despite ever increasing CO2 in the atmosphere?

In an editorial, it writes:

IT MAY come as a surprise to a walrus wondering where all the Arctic’s summer sea ice has gone. It could be news to a Staten Islander still coming to terms with what he lost to Hurricane Sandy. But some scientists are arguing that man-made climate change is not quite so bad a threat as it appeared to be a few years ago. They point to various reasons for thinking that the planet’s “climate sensitivity”—the amount of warming that can be expected for a doubling in the carbon-dioxide level—may not be as high as was previously thought. The most obvious reason is that, despite a marked warming over the course of the 20th century, temperatures have not really risen over the past ten years.

And it dares to question the drive for alternative energy without regard to consequences:

Bad climate policies, such as backing renewable energy with no thought for the cost, or insisting on biofuels despite the damage they do, are bad whatever the climate’s sensitivity to greenhouse gases.

In an accompanying article it deals with the science in some detail:

OVER the past 15 years air temperatures at the Earth’s surface have been flat while greenhouse-gas emissions have continued to soar. The world added roughly 100 billion tonnes of carbon to the atmosphere between 2000 and 2010. That is about a quarter of all the CO₂ put there by humanity since 1750. And yet, as James Hansen, the head of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies, observes, “the five-year mean global temperature has been flat for a decade.”

Temperatures fluctuate over short periods, but this lack of new warming is a surprise. Ed Hawkins, of the University of Reading, in Britain, points out that surface temperatures since 2005 are already at the low end of the range of projections derived from 20 climate models (see chart 1). If they remain flat, they will fall outside the models’ range within a few years.

The mismatch between rising greenhouse-gas emissions and not-rising temperatures is among the biggest puzzles in climate science just now. It does not mean global warming is a delusion. Flat though they are, temperatures in the first decade of the 21st century remain almost 1°C above their level in the first decade of the 20th. But the puzzle does need explaining.

The mismatch might mean that—for some unexplained reason—there has been a temporary lag between more carbon dioxide and higher temperatures in 2000-10. Or it might be that the 1990s, when temperatures were rising fast, was the anomalous period. Or, as an increasing body of research is suggesting, it may be that the climate is responding to higher concentrations of carbon dioxide in ways that had not been properly understood before. This possibility, if true, could have profound significance both for climate science and for environmental and social policy.

It is a very encouraging sign that finally some in the mainstream media are beginning to acknowledge the divergence between models and observations, and are starting to ask questions. I encourage you to read it all.

(And wait for the inevitable headbanger backlash at Un-Skeptical Pseudo-Science, amongst other places, where they are always desperate to defend their religion at any cost. UPDATE: As predicted, here it is.)

Amazing slow motion video


100,000 fps!

100,000 fps!

And some science as well! Something a little different today – an exploration of Prince Rupert’s Drop – formed when molten glass is dropped into cold water. This video uses ultra-high-speed cameras to investigate these strange objects. Amazing! Enjoy.

Gillard, Labor, CO2 tax: all likely gone in six months


Why are you all smiling, you bunch of utter incompetents? You should be hanging your heads in abject shame.

Why are you all smiling, you bunch of utter incompetents? You should be hanging your heads in abject shame.

The Labor ‘government’ of Julia Gillard (in quotes because it isn’t really a government any more, it’s just a rabble) is in terminal decline after last week’s chaotic leadership non-contest. Newspoll puts Labor at 42% and the Coalition on 58% in the two party preferred, meaning Labor would be annihilated.

Half of her most experienced ministers have either resigned or been sacked, leaving the PM scraping the bottom of the cockatoo cage to fill the Cabinet. Craig Emerson [shudder] has been appointed minister for just about everything, including the kitchen sink, and the other spaces have been filled by political nobodies.

So one thing we can be sure of is that the ‘government’ of this country will be even worse than it was before (if that is physically possible).

The Australian reports:

JULIA Gillard’s personal standing has crashed to a 19-month low and Tony Abbott is clearly back in front as the nation’s preferred prime minister after Labor’s “appalling” two weeks of political and policy failure.

Labor’s primary vote has slumped five points to a disastrous 30 per cent after a fortnight ending with an aborted leadership spill and mass cabinet resignations, with one in two voters now siding with the Coalition.

The collapse in the Labor vote has completely wiped out the party’s recovery in the second half of last year, which was built on the back of the carbon tax compensation, and has entrenched the prospect of a landslide vote against the ALP in the election scheduled for September 14. After taking into account preference flows, federal Labor’s support is eight percentage points below its level at the 2010 election, at 42 per cent – a swing that if replicated in September would remove about 30 Labor MPs and could even put Kevin Rudd’s Queensland seat of Griffith at risk.

The Prime Minister said yesterday she was appalled at Labor’s “self-indulgence” during last week’s leadership bid, which was brought on after the party’s proposed media laws collapsed. She declared she wanted to show “self-belief” and that Labor’s “eyes” would be on the “Australian people”. But the latest Newspoll survey, taken exclusively for The Australian on the weekend, shows voter satisfaction with Ms Gillard down six percentage points to 26 per cent in the past two weeks.

Dissatisfaction with the Prime Minister rose eight points to 65 per cent, her worst personal ratings since September 2011 when she hit a record low satisfaction level of 23 per cent. There is now more than twice the number of voters dissatisfied with the way Ms Gillard is doing her job as Prime Minister than satisfied after a steady 12-point fall in satisfaction since January and a sharper rise of 16 points in dissatisfaction during the same period.

On the question of who would make the better prime minister, Ms Gillard’s support dropped seven percentage points to 35 per cent, its lowest since October 2011, while Mr Abbott’s support jumped five points to 43 per cent, his highest since September 2011.

Which means, of course, that when the election comes, the disastrous policies of this bunch of losers can be reversed and Australia may, MAY I add, be able to climb out of this enormous hole it’s in.

And we will almost certainly wave goodbye to the mining tax and the carbon tax. All we need is for the independents to do what they should have done months ago and put this government down.