Wind power is too expensive at any price, you fool

This morning, CityAM published a spectacularly silly article by Ben Goldsmith on energy provision in the UK (which is, as we know, looking pretty dicey right now).

Upon reading the first part of Goldsmith's piece—which dwells on the mind-bendingly high energy price that the government has signed us up to for the Hinkley Point C nuclear power plant—you might find yourself nodding along in agreement. But then you will have read a little further...

It is not surprising that, instead of setting a new competitive low for nuclear generating costs, Hinkley Point has done the reverse at £92.50 MW/h.

The costs of coal and gas power are also rising. Recent Bloomberg research has shown that the price of UK coal and gas power rose by around 17 per cent to £74 MW/h in the past year, despite downward pressure from the advent of US shale gas. Now comes the surprise. Over the same period, the costs of energy from onshore wind fell from £70 MW/h to £55 MW/h–making it cheaper than gas.

Sigh.

Look, running an energy system is not an easy job: you need to be able to keep the energy in the grid at a fairly stable voltage, but demand ebbs and flows considerably—which means that you need to be able to control the supply to the grid too.

And this is where wind power fails spectacularly: not only because it is intermittent, but also because you have almost no control over the output. Even were wind power levels consistent, because the actual output is only a fraction of the theoretical installed capacity (around 29% on average), you would need to install around four times the required capacity to be certain of keeping the lights on.

All of this is made abundantly clear in a recent report by physicist and civil engineer, David Partington (and as reported by Not A Lot of People Know That.

Derek Partington, a former Chartered Engineer, has spent a lot of time in the last six years, researching the effectiveness of wind turbines. His findings are damning:

His report runs to thirteen pages, well worth a read. But some of his tables and charts tell the story.

For instance, how capacity utilisation can vary wildly from month to month.

It's well worth reading the whole thing—but, for now, I will just repeat the conclusions.

Over the period studied, January 2013 to December 2014 inclusive, wind turbine operational capacity connected to the UK Grid has increased from 5,894MW to 8,403MW. The operational capacity in January 2011 was 2,490MW; therefore there has been an increase of almost 3.4x over the four year period.
The conclusions to be drawn from the data analysis are:

1. An increase in the operational capacity does not improve average output. In fact the average monthly capacity factor has fallen over the periods studied, dropping from 33.2% in 2011 to 28.8% in 2014.
2. An increase in the operational capacity does not reduce the periods of low or very low output as measured by the number of hours per year when output was low (less than 10% of installed capacity) or very low (less than 5% of installed capacity). There is a variation from year to year but no pattern emerges. The mean low output over the four years was 1,617 hours/year with a standard deviation of 197 hours/year and the mean very low output was 599 hours with a standard deviation of 96 hours.
3. An increase in the operational capacity does not reduce intermittency. If taken as a measure of intermittency, the average monthly minimum expressed as a percentage of installed capacity was 1.9% with no significant variation from year to year.
4. Taking maximum rise and fall in output over one hour period as a further measure of intermittency, the National Grid is now having to cope with variations in output of over 1,100MW over one hour periods, with this variation increasing by about 250MW per year. This is very significant as it represents the changes in output which the Grid has to cope with and which has to be compensated by conventional fossil fuelled power stations.
5. An increase in the operational capacity does not indicate any possibility of closing any conventional, fossil-fuel power stations as there is no correlation between variations in output from wind turbines and demand on the Grid. Often the opposite is true – when demand rises, output from wind turbines falls and vice versa. This has a significant negative effect as back-up has to be provided from conventional, fossil-fuel power stations not only to cater for increase in demand on the Grid at peak times but also to cover for any possible fall in output from the UK wind turbine fleet at the same time.

Therefore, taking the four criteria above, there is no case for a continued increase in the number of wind turbines connected to the Grid.

As stated in my previous report, it is incumbent upon the Government to ensure that the British consumer is getting value for money from industrial wind turbine installations and that they are not just paying subsidies to developers and operators (through ROCs) whilst getting nothing back in return in terms of CO2 emission reductions through the supplanting of fossil-fuelled power generation.

Based on the results of this and my previous analysis I cannot see why any policy for the continued increase in the number of wind turbines connected to the Grid can be justified.

So, to return to Mr Goldsmith's article, and his lunatic assertion that onshore wind power is "cheaper than gas"... Well, this is clearly barking insanity of the very first order: wind power does not provide stable and controllable power outputs; as such, it does not provide what we require from a power generation source and, therefore, is too expensive at any price.

So, since you would have to be an idiot not to understand all of this, one has to pose the Polly conundrum—is Goldsmith ignorant or is he stupid?

Actually, that is unfair. Because there is a third option in the conundrum, and it is this—"or is he shilling something?" And it is, of course, this last option that explains the article.

Accompanying the piece, in typical (usually decent) CityAM style, is a short biography that coyly explains that Goldsmith is "the founder of Menhaden Capital and WHEB Group". These are investment firms, of course, but what is their speciality? Well, given that Goldsmith is brother to environmentalist nut-job Zac, I think you can guess.

And you'd be right.

Ben Goldsmith, brother of Conservative MP and environmental campaigner Zac Goldsmith, is floating an investment fund backed by high-profile business figures to invest in green businesses.

Menhaden Capital will target business opportunities that specialise in saving resources such as energy and water or cutting waste.
...

Goldsmith said investment in green projects was no longer an act of faith and that there were many opportunities to make good returns from backing environmental businesses.
...

Ben Goldsmith is the founder of WHEB, an investment firm focused on energy efficiency, clean technology and sustainable development.

Can it be that "investment in green projects" is, in fact, "an act of faith". And could it be, with the government steadily rowing back from subsidising these white elephants, that Mr Ben is having trouble persuading people to invest money into his fantasyland adventures?

You might say that: I couldn't possibly comment...

Wind farms cause climate change...

Today's hilarious headline was found via Danny Weston on Facebook—apparently wind farms cause climate change...

Wind farms can cause climate change, according to new research, that shows for the first time the new technology is already pushing up temperatures.

Usually at night the air closer to the ground becomes colder when the sun goes down and the earth cools.
But on huge wind farms the motion of the turbines mixes the air higher in the atmosphere that is warmer, pushing up the overall temperature.

Satellite data over a large area in Texas, that is now covered by four of the world's largest wind farms, found that over a decade the local temperature went up by almost a centigrade as more turbines are built.

This could have long term effects on wildlife living in the immediate areas of larger wind farms.

It could also affect regional weather patterns as warmer areas affect the formation of cloud and even wind speeds.

Aaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahaha! Aaaahahahahaha! Aaahaha! Ah ha! Ha.

Oh, oh, wait. Uh... Here it comes... AAAAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHHAAHAHAHAHAHAHA! Aaaahahaha! Ahahaha! Ah ha! Ha! Ha.

Am I done yet? Oh, no, doesn't look like it...

Aaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahaha...

*wipes away tears of hilarity*

So, let's summarise: wind farms cost billions in subsidies, transfer money from the poor to the rich, slice up rare wild birds, dice up bats by the hundred, emit more CO2 in their construction than they save over a lifetime, don't generate any worthwhile or consistent electrical power.

And now they cause climate change...?

I think that I've split my sides from laughing.

Well done, Greenies—oh, very well done!

Green economics = profligacy and poverty

Matthew Sinclair has an article up at the Spectator Coffeehouse, outlining the economically insane attitude of many anti-climate change activists.

Essentially, they argue that there is too much uncertainty about the costs and we can’t quantify them, so it is better to just accept the targets for emissions cuts as a given and argue about how to achieve them, write a blank cheque for climate policy.

And what kind of size is this "blank cheque"?

William Nordhaus, Sterling Professor of Economics at Yale, isn’t a climate sceptic. He has spent decades refining his model of the economic effects of climate change. When he applied the 2007 version of that model to the recommendations from the Stern Review produced for the last government, he found that the plan would reduce climate change harms by about $14 trillion, but at a cost of nearly $28 trillion. The cure would be worse than the disease.

Matthew's point—though it might seem crazy to your average sandal-wearing, tofu-eating Greenie wack-job—is really rather simple: he simply argues that the benefits of the action that we take should outweigh the cost.

... politicians need to be more realistic. Investment in research and development to make low carbon energy cheaper is a more realistic prospect than a global deal to make energy from fossil fuels more expensive. The best way to ensure than Britain can cope with climate change is to bet on growth, and build a country rich and free enough to survive whatever the climate throws at it.

Indeed, as your humble Devil has blogged many times, this is precisely the course recommended by the IPCC, in their Special Economic Scenarios—specifically the A1 family.

In this family of scenarios, not only are the Western nations rich enough to deal with the possible effects of catastrophic climate change, but the developing countries are too. In fact, the scenario predicts the end of any difference in general affluence between countries at all.

It seems, however, that our Greenie chums not only have little interest in ensuring that the poor of the world remain poor—they want to ensure that that everyone else lives in grinding fucking poverty too.

Which is why these Gaia-worshipping nutters are little better than common murderers...

Heresy!

In an admirable act of honesty—on 13 September, Physics Nobel Laureate Dr. Ivar Giaever resigned as a Fellow from the American Physical Society, citing the organisation's stance on catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (CACC).

Sent: Tuesday, September 13, 2011 3:42 PM
To: xxxx@aps.org
Cc: Robert H. Austin; 'William Happer'; 'Larry Gould'; 'S. Fred Singer'; Roger Cohen
Subject: I resign from APS

Dear Ms. Kirby

Thank you for your letter inquiring about my membership. I did not renew it because I can not live with the statement below:

Emissions of greenhouse gases from human activities are changing the atmosphere in ways that affect the Earth's climate. Greenhouse gases include carbon dioxide as well as methane, nitrous oxide and other gases. They are emitted from fossil fuel combustion and a range of industrial and agricultural processes.

The evidence is incontrovertible: Global warming is occurring.
If no mitigating actions are taken, significant disruptions in the Earth's physical and ecological systems, social systems, security and human health are likely to occur. We must reduce emissions of greenhouse gases beginning now.

In the APS it is ok to discuss whether the mass of the proton changes over time and how a multi-universe behaves, but the evidence of global warming is incontrovertible? The claim (how can you measure the average temperature of the whole earth for a whole year?) is that the temperature has changed from ~288.0 to ~288.8 degree Kelvin in about 150 years, which (if true) means to me is that the temperature has been amazingly stable, and both human health and happiness have definitely improved in this 'warming' period.

Best regards,

Ivar Giaever

As His Ecclesiastical Eminence points out, surely this cannot happen...?

It's funny, but I thought that scepticism on the global warming question was tantamount to being "anti-science". Isn't that what all the unthinking science gurus say - the Simon Singhs, the Paul Nurses, the New Scientist clique and the Scientific American gang and the Chris Mooneys and the George Monbiots?

How long before Dr Giaever is dismissed as a crank or a pretend scientist, I wonder?

In the meantime, well done that man...

Scientists hoist by their own petard

Now, as we all know, there is a pressing problem that we have—all this carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is warming the planet and we are all going to fry unless we severely reduce our output of said gas.

Unfortunately, nearly all of the effective ways of generating the energy that makes our world go round emit CO₂ to a large extent; but, so severe is the problem, our politicians have responded to the urging of the scientific experts and put in place a number of measures to make carbon emission—and thus energy generation—much more expensive.

Now, do remember that this is all climate scientists because, of course, there is a "consensus" on the climate change topic. And almost all other scientists have urged us to listen to the climate scientists because they know what they are talking about and we laymen—even those who have a rather more specialist knowledge of statistical analysis or computer model programming—have no idea at all.

So, basically, we can say that the vast majority of the world's scientists back urgent action on carbon emissions: energy must be made much more expensive. Oh, wait, we didn't mean for us!

World-class research into future sources of green energy is under threat in Britain from an environmental tax designed to boost energy efficiency and drive down carbon emissions, scientists claim.

Some facilities must find hundreds of thousands of pounds to settle green tax bills, putting jobs and research at risk.

Altogether now... Aaaaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahaha! Aaaaahahahaha! Ah-ha! Ha!

Wait—let me catch my breath.

Aaaaaaaaaahaahahahahahahahaa! Aaaaaahahaha.

Whew.

Right. I... Aaaaahahaha. Ha.

OK, no, really, I'm sorry. I haven't laughed that much since Chris Huhne admitted that he drove a car.

Anyway, so, what are these scientists going to do? Could it be that they are going to cough up gladly, pointing out that this is precisely the outcome that they wanted? Ah, no.

The unexpected impact of the government's carbon reduction commitment (CRC) scheme is so severe that scientists and research funders have lobbied ministers for an exemption to reduce the bills.

No, absolutely not.

Alright, I admit that a good deal of the satisfaction of the above is based purely on spite: you bastards (as in the scientific community) insisted that we take action on climate change—and you got it. I don't see why everyone but you should suffer.

Yes, it might seem counter-intuitive that government-funded initiatives should have to pay government taxes (in the same way that it might seem odd that government-funded jobs need to pay taxes) but there are, as Timmy points out, a couple of valid reasons (i.e. ones not based on spite) why scientists should not be exempt.

1. It would be a subsidy. And we want subsidies to be out in the open. We want to be able to add up what whatever rule or regulation, tax or charge, actually costs us. So we don’t want any hidden subsidies at all. This applies to everything: council house rents should be full market rents, even if that means everyone gets housing benefit. We can then look at the benefit bill and see how much housing the poor costs us. Trains and farmers should pay full whack on fuel duty, even if that means we then have to send them a cheque to compensate. We want to be able to see, exactly, what their subsidy is.


2. We absolutely do not want things run by politicians and bureaucrats to be free of the rules politicians and bureuacrats impose upon the rest of us. It’s our only hope of reducing the complexities, that they have to struggle with their impositions as we do. Note the screams from MPs as their expenses are doled out in the same manner the dole is doled out. Quite bloody right too.

But it is very entertaining, nonetheless, to listen to the various sob stories highlitedby the Grauniad article...

Among the worst hit is the Culham Centre for Fusion Energy in Oxfordshire, a facility for research into almost limitless carbon-free energy. The lab faces an estimated £400,000 payment next year, raising the spectre of job losses and operational cuts. "Considering our research is aimed at producing zero-carbon energy, it seems ironic and perverse to clobber us with an extra bill," a senior scientist at the lab said. "We have to use electricity to run the machine and there is no way of getting around that."

And that is different from other businesses how, exactly?

Oh, by the way, you're flogging a dead horse: you may have the largest fusion reactor in Europe but if it actually generated, you know, any electricity then you could offset the costs, eh? But it doesn't.

Another Oxfordshire laboratory, the Diamond synchrotron light source, expects a £300,000 bill under the CRC. A spokesman said the lab hoped to offset the bill by investing in better climate control and motion-sensitive lighting.

Well, that's what the government is telling private businesses to do—why should it not apply to these scientist types?

At the Daresbury laboratory in Cheshire, the CRC bill will worsen financial woes that have forced managers to draft redundancy packages and consider cutting back on equipment. "Science is already struggling here and now we are being charged an additional premium to go about our everyday business while working to address the government's own stated grand challenges in science for the 21st century.," said Lee Jones, an accelerator physicist at the laboratory.

Well, we are all doing that, Lee: after all, some of us have to try to "address the government's own stated grand challenges" for GDP growth over the next five years—also in the face of rising costs and taxes.

So, with all due respect, o science types, you can take your exemption and stuff it up your pontificating arseholes.

Shades of grey

There were a few comments on my last (epic) climate change post that seem to misunderstand the way in which science is done—especially as regards catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.

The main problem is that there is a certain amount of polarisation in the positions—how else can one possibly describe the "climate deniers" label (without using a goodly number of swearwords)?

So, let me try to explain some very fundamental points about this particular debate...

1. Climate change
   
   No one really believes that the climate is entirely static; it quite obviously isn't, or we wouldn't have seasons or ice ages. Or, for that matter, the Mediaeval Warm Period and Little Ice Age.
   
   The climate changes, that is a fact: the question is, what makes it change?


2. Anthropogenic
   
   Are these changes—indeed, can these changes—be triggered by human activity? If so, to what extent and, if these changes are significant, are they good or bad?


3. Catastropic
   
   If these changes are both significant and bad—for given definitions of "bad"—then how catastrophic are they? Do they threaten the existence of our species (or others)? or are they just mildly inconvenient?
   
   And how catastrophic are these changes, in terms of allocating our scarce resources? Is it better to mitigate or to adapt?

Sensibly, all of these questions should be answered. Where a mechanism of change is encountered, then data should be gathered to test the hypotheses.

So, what do we know?

Well, actually we know extremely little.

We know that the Earth has been both considerably hotter and considerably colder in the past; it has also been very slightly hotter and very slightly colder.

We do know that when a very slightly hotter period became a very slightly colder period, then millions of humans died.

But, the problem is that we can't actually take tremendously accurate readings because there were no instruments to do so. We also know that, even where we try to reconstruct temperature series with proxies, our picture of the plant's climate covers a very short period of time geologically and is, not to put too fine a point on it, woefully inadequate.

Even where we do have direct measurements, we don't know how accurate those are. If you were to believe surfacestations.org—or, indeed, Anthony Watts's so-to-be-published paper—then there may be significant problems with this surely simple data set.

Thus, one of the main problems is that we don't really know whether there has, actually, been any significant warming over the last century—we think that it has been about 1°C but we are not really certain. Not least because the scientists don't seem to be tremendously good at understanding statistical analysis.

We do think that the increase in CO₂ emissions by humans over the last century has the potential to increase global temperatures through, for instance, well-understood theories such as the Greenhouse Effect. But we don't know to what extent CO₂ actually affects the climate through that mechanism.

Nor do we know what feedbacks are inherent in the system: or whether they are positive or negative.

In short, we don't know much—except that we are spending billions of pounds a year on trying to fund a mitigation solution to something that we don't even know is a problem.

I intend to pick up this baton again, but let's be clear—we are arguing questions of degree here, not absolutes.

It's the sun wot done it

A little while after the CRUDgate debacle, you may recall that Phil Jones (the head of the CRU) did an interesting Q&A; session with the BBC's Roger "the Dodger" Harrabin. During this debate, Phil Jones admitted that there were four main periods, since records began, when the temperature rise was statistically significant: these were 1860–1880, 1910–1940, 1975–1998 and 1975–2009 (these latter two being, for all intents and purposes, one).

However, the really interesting admission was not that there were other statistically significant periods of warming—periods when CO₂ was less likely to be a factor—but the reason for settling on CO₂ being chosen as the warming factor in the first place...

H: If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

PJ: The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing—see my answer to your question D [where he referenced Chapter 9 of the IPCC AR4].

Essentially, these scientists chose CO₂—and, by extension, man-made CO₂—because they were unable to attribute the warming to any other likely factor.

There are, of course, significant problems with this approach, especially in a system as chaotic as Earth's climate. The main problem, of course, is that Jones and his Hockey Team buddies don't seem to have properly investigated other factors—even those which might directly affect their own theory—or, if they suspected that these factors might derail their theory, they attempted to hide them.

To refresh our memories, let us summarise some of the problems...

• The "decline"
  The decline—of "hide the decline" fame—is a subset of the "divergence problem". Put simply, this is the fact that the tree-rings that many palaeoclimatologists reply on for temperature reconstructions do not follow modern temperatures; in fact, whilst direct measurements show a rise in temperature, the tree rings show a decline.
  
  Here is the problem shown in two easy-to-understand charts.
  
  If these tree-rings are not a reliable proxy for current temperatures, then why on earth would they be a reliable proxy for past temperatures. And if we cannot reliably build up a picture of past temperatures, then we cannot say that today's warming is unprecedented.


• CO₂ climate sensitivity and positive feedbacks
  One of the big problems with the whole anthropogenic carbon dioxide disaster theory is that just pumping lots of CO₂ into the atmosphere will not warm the planet to disastrous levels—as explained over at Climate Skeptic.
  

  While the climate models are complex, and the actual climate even, err, complexer, we can shortcut the reaction of global temperatures to CO2 to a single figure called climate sensitivity. How many degrees of warming should the world expect for each doubling of CO2 concentrations (the relationship is logarithmic, so that is why sensitivity is based on doublings, rather than absolute increases — an increase of CO2 from 280 to 290 ppm should have a higher impact on temperatures than the increase from, say, 380 to 390 ppm).
  
  The IPCC reached a climate sensitivity to CO2 of about 3C per doubling. More popular (at least in the media) catastrophic forecasts range from 5C on up to about any number you can imagine, way past any range one might consider reasonable.
  
  But here is the key fact — Most folks, including the IPCC, believe the warming sensitivity from CO2 alone (before feedbacks) is around 1C or a bit higher (arch-alarmist Michael Mann did the research the IPCC relied on for this figure). All the rest of the sensitivity between this 1C and 3C or 5C or whatever the forecast is comes from feedbacks (e.g. hotter weather melts ice, which causes less sunlight to be reflected, which warms the world more). Feedbacks, by the way can be negative as well, acting to reduce the warming effect. In fact, most feedbacks in our physical world are negative, but alarmist climate scientists tend to assume very high positive feedbacks.
  
  What this means is that 70-80% or more of the warming in catastrophic warming forecasts comes from feedback, not CO2 acting alone. If it turns out that feedbacks are not wildly positive, or even are negative, then the climate sensitivity is 1C or less, and we likely will see little warming over the next century due to man.
  
  This means that the only really important question in the manmade global warming debate is the sign and magnitude of feedbacks.

  
  Right now, there are some very important—and unanswered—questions regarding feedbacks and general climate sensitivity. Some of these include:
  
  • What is the real sensitvity of climate to CO₂ alone? The IPCC seem to be using about 1–1.2°C per doubling, but a recent paper seems to contradict that figure—placing it nearer 0.41°C per doubling.
  
  
  • Do clouds contribute to negative or positive feedback? This is a colossal issue! Most scientists accept that most of the warmth retention on the Earth is caused by water vapour in the air—indeed, it may account for anywhere between 75% and 95% of the greenhouse effect. You will have encountered this effect yourselves: a clear night is often very cold, whilst a cloudy one can be warm and muggy.
    
    And yet no one really knows whether water vapour has a positive or negative effect on global temperatures! For instance, clouds keep the warmth in but they also reflect sunlight back into space by increasing the Earth's albedo; is this effect positive, negative or, of course, neutral?
    
    Again, a recent paper sheds some more light on this.
    

    As I have written a zillion times, most of the projected warming from CO2 is not from CO2 directly but from positive feedback effects hypothesized in the climate. The largest of these is water vapor. Water is (unlike CO2) a strong greenhouse gas and if small amounts of warming increase water vapor in the atmosphere, that would be a positive feedback effect that would amplify warming. Most climate modellers assume relative humidity stays roughly flat as the world warms, meaning total water vapor content in the atmosphere will rise. In fact, this does not appear to have been the case over the last 50 years, as relative humidity has fallen while temperatures have risen. Further, in a peer-reviewed article, scientists suggest certain negative feedbacks that would tend to reduce atmospheric water vapor.

    
    So, whilst this would suggest that water vapour would have a negative, rather than positive, feedback effect on global temperatures, we still don't really know.
  
  
  • Why don't we know? Because, as Dr Roy Spencer points out in no uncertain terms, no one is seriously trying to answer these questions.
    

    In fact, NO ONE HAS YET FOUND A WAY WITH OBSERVATIONAL DATA TO TEST CLIMATE MODEL SENSITIVITY. This means we have no idea which of the climate models projections are more likely to come true.
    
    This dirty little secret of the climate modeling community is seldom mentioned outside the community. Don’t tell anyone I told you.
    
    This is why climate researchers talk about probable ranges of climate sensitivity. Whatever that means!…there is no statistical probability involved with one-of-a-kind events like global warming!
    
    There is HUGE uncertainty on this issue. And I will continue to contend that this uncertainty is a DIRECT RESULT of researchers not distinguishing between cause and effect when analyzing data.

  
  And yet we are apparently still willing to spend $78 billion per year to avoid 0.01°C of warming in 2100. Or, to put it another way...
  

  This is over $7 trillion a year per degree of avoided warming, again using even the EPA’s overly high climate sensitivity numbers. For scale, this is almost half the entire US GDP.

  
  Which is why, as I have said many times, the Precautionary Principle is utter bullshit—it assumes that the cost of acting is near-zero when it quite obviously is not.


• Climate models do not produce new data
  Far too many people seem to believe that climate models produce data—they do not. They produce models that need to be verified with the real world and, so far, these models have not been very good at doing so.
  
  There are many reasons for this. One of the major ones is that we do not know all of the factors to be included, e.g. the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO)—which has been blamed for the recent lack of warming—was only noticed in 1997.
  
  One of the other reasons is that—as the HARRY_READ_ME.txt file showed—scientists are not particularly good or thorough programmers. Nor are they good or thorough archivers of data.
  
  And another reason is that we simply have not been measuring the climate long enough to understand some of the massive forces at work. The climate may not be inherently unknowable, but we certainly don't know enough at this stage.

An illustration of this last point is the reason that I started this essay. Having waded through the above, you might remember that Phil Jones maintained that the climate scientists attributed the Earth's warming to man-made CO₂ because they couldn't "explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing".

Now, it is true that the sunlight level—or Total Solar Irradiance (TSI)—was, if you smooth for seasonal variations, pretty static over the period in question. However...

Via The Englishman, I am pointed to this detailed article at Irish Weather Online, which has some interesting revelations regarding TSI and the PDO.

The influence of the sun has been discounted in the climate models as a contributor to the warming observed between 1975 and 1998. Those who support the theory of anthropogenic global warming (AGW), now known as anthropogenic climate change (even more recently described as climate disruption) so that recent cooling can be included in their scenario, always deny that the sun has anything to do with recent global temperature movements.

The reason given is that Total Solar Irradiance (TSI) varied so little over that period that it cannot explain the warming that was observed. I don’t yet accept that TSI tells the whole story because it is ill defined and speculative as regards it’s representation of all the different ways the sun could affect the Earth via the entire available range of physical processes.

Despite the limitations of TSI as an indicator of solar influence I think there are conclusions we can draw from the records we do have. Oddly, I have not seen them discussed properly anywhere else, especially not by AGW enthusiasts.

Helpfully, however, the author has included a graph showing the TSI over the last few hundred years. [Click the image for bigger version.]

It is true that, as the alarmists say, since 1961 the average level of TSI has been approximately level if one averages out the peaks and troughs from solar cycles 19 through to 23.

However, those solar cycles show substantially higher levels of TSI than have ever previously occurred in the historical record.

Because of the height of the TSI level one cannot simply ignore it as the IPCC and the modellers have done.

Indeed not. Because here is a smoking gun as far as solar irradiance is concerned...

The critical issue is that having achieved such high levels of TSI by 1961 the sun was already producing more heat than was required to maintain a stable Earth temperature. On that basis alone the theory of AGW cannot be sustained and should now die.
Throughout the period 1961 to about 2001, there was a steady cumulative net warming effect within the oceans from the sun. The fact that TSI was, on average, level during that period is entirely irrelevant and misleading.

Quite so.

It is hardly likely that such a high level of TSI compared to historical levels is going to have no effect at all on global temperature changes and indeed during most of that period there was also an enhanced period of positive Pacific Decadal Oscillation that imparted increasing warmth from the oceans to the atmosphere. My link [...] contains details of my view that the sun drives the various oceanic oscillations which in turn drive global temperature variations with all other influences including CO2 being minor and often cancelling themselves out leaving the solar/oceanic driver supreme.

It could be said that the increase in TSI from a little over 1363 to a little under 1367 Watts per square metre over the 400 year period shown is pretty insignificant. However a square metre is a miniscule portion of the surface of the planet so that even a tiny increase or decrease in the heat being received on average over each such tiny area translates into a huge change in total heat budget for the entire planet. The smallness of the apparent range of variation is a function of the smallness of the area subdivision used rather than an indication of insignificance. It is fortunate for us that the sun is not more variable.

One square metre is, indeed, a tiny proportion of the planet's surface: the Earth has a surface area of approximately 510,072,000 km² which is (and feel free to correct me on this: all these noughts get me confused) 510,072,000,000 m². Or over five hundred and ten billion square metres.

The small increase from 1363 Watts per m² to 1367 Watts per m² would lead to an energy increase of some 2,040,288,000,000 Watts—or a little over 2 trillion Watts.

To put that into perspective, a large coal-fired power station produces about 700 MW, which is 700,000,000 Watts: so, this small increase in solar output is equivalent to the output of about 2,915 large coal-fired power stations.

Amongst other things [this link] shows how the negative PDO from 1961 to 1975 cancelled out the warming effects of solar cycles 18 and 19 by imparting less warmth from oceans to air and led to a slight cooling trend during those years despite the relatively high TSI levels. The switch to a positive PDO from 1975 to 2001 allowed the solar warming influence in the air to resume. We now have both a falling TSI and a negative PDO which is an entirely different (indeed opposite) scenario to the one which led to the concerns about runaway warming.

If the current scenario continues for a few more years then real world observations will resolve most of the disputed issues. For the past 10 years the real world has been moving in the direction predicted by the solar driver theory and in my articles I have described the oceanic mechanism that transfers solar input to the atmosphere and then to Space.

If global temperatures were to resume warming despite a reduction in solar activity and/or a negative PDO then the alarmist position might be vindicated. The alarmist camp is predicting such a resumption of warming. The Hadley Centre suggested 2010 but others have more recently suggested 2015. If there is no resumption of warming by 2015 then AGW is dead as a theory. It would not count in favour of AGW if any resumed warming were accompanied by increased solar activity or a positive PDO because that would put the solar driver back in control.

So, it's a wait and see policy...

The trouble, of course, is that if this theory is correct, we humans are very much luckier than we would suppose. Because, as far as we can ascertain, a change of just 4 Watts per square metre in TSI means the difference between the mini-Ice Age and a warming planet. That is not a pleasant thought, as the author ennumerates in his conclusion.

The whole of modern civilisation has been made possible by a period of solar stability within a band of less than 4 Watts per square metre. It will not be a result of anything we do if solar changes suddenly go outside that band. On a balance of probability it is more likely that the TSI will soon drop back from the recent unusual highs but remaining within the band of 4 Watts per square metre. It would need the arrival of the next ice age to go significantly below 1363 but even a reduction down to 1365 from present levels could introduce a dangerous level of cooling depending on where the tipping point currently lies.

A period of several decades of reduced solar activity will quickly need more emissions producing activity to SAVE the planet yet nonetheless the populations of most living species will be decimated. At present human population levels a repeat of the Little Ice Age a mere 400 years ago will cause mass starvation worldwide.

Indeed. The last severe reduction in temperature, at the end of the Mediaeval Warm Period, caused widespread famine across the entirety of the Northern hemisphere and caused millions of deaths over a number of years.

The AGW risk analysis process (if anyone ever bothered with one) is seriously flawed.

The whole article is worth reading—even though I have quoted much of it here—and chimes with some of the other bits and pieces that I have been looking into recently.

If the author is correct, let us sincerely hope that our societies are more ready for the temperature downturn than those of 1315...

UN persecutes sceptics

A number of commenters have berated me for not focusing on the coming General Election—to which my reply is "what's the fucking point?"

It's an argument that I'm sure EUReferendum would agree with, but even were we not in the EU, Britain would, no doubt, still be affected by the attempts at forming a burgeoning world government.

As a taster of what's to come—whichever bunch of statist wankers are running the British government on May 7th—Climate Skeptic has helpfully highlighted this piece of delight from the UN.

A campaign to declare the mass destruction of ecosystems an international crime against peace—alongside genocide and crimes against humanity—is being launched in the UK.

The proposal for the United Nations to accept "ecocide" as a fifth "crime against peace", which could be tried at the International Criminal Court (ICC), is the brainchild of British lawyer-turned-campaigner Polly Higgins.

The radical idea would have a profound effect on industries blamed for widespread damage to the environment like fossil fuels, mining, agriculture, chemicals and forestry.

Supporters of a new ecocide law also believe it could be used to prosecute "climate deniers" who distort science and facts to discourage voters and politicians from taking action to tackle global warming and climate change.

"Ecocide"? Why not just go the whole hog and refer to it as the fucking Gaiacaust?

It's typical though: here they are, losing the battle on the facts, on the science—and simply because we sceptics keep inconveniently telling the truth and now, after fuck knows how long, we are finally being heard. So, what's their solution?

Is it to re-examine the facts, to carry out more studies and to do more, you know, actual science? Nope. Regardless of whether or not their position is based in any kind of reality, these people hold their cause as an article of faith.

And what do these morons do when you faith in under attack? That's right... Pretty much the same as the Catholic Church did with the Spanish Inquisition—prosecute and destroy those people pointing out that the evidence shows that the Earth goes around the sun.

This is yet another indicator of the totalitarian nature of these disgusting Green cunts, and just goes to prove that the only thing worse than a fanatic Gaia-worshipper is a fanatical Gaia-worshipper who is also a bastard lawyer.

And if this comes to pass, will any of our political parties protect our freedoms?

Will they fuck.

When Green loons realise that they've made a mistake...

... they move their threatening articles off their websites and post, instead, a mealy-mouthed apology from someone called Ananth.

Well, we’ve taken down that post from our website. It’s very easy to misconstrue that line, take it out of context and suggest it means something wholly different from the practice of peaceful civil disobedience, which is what the post was about. Anyone who knows Gene knows he’s an entirely peaceful guy. In the interest of transparency we have moved it off site to this location, where you can read the offending quotes in context and judge for yourself:

We got this one wrong, no doubt about it. I’m holding up my hands on behalf of the organisation and saying sorry for that. Peaceful action is at the very core of what we do, so any language that even comes close to suggesting that’s not the case is something we cannot support.

Uh huh.

Of course, in the interests of transparency, Anthony Watts has archived the article in situ, so that you can constantly remind yourself of the kid of thing that Greenpeace "cannot support" but did anyway.

Gene in his blog asks: “What do you do when patient petitioning, protest marches and court orders fail? What do you do when all the protocols and cheat codes of democracy fail? This is what you do: you reclaim the language of democracy from the twisted bunch that have hijacked, cannibalized and subverted it.”

Oh, that's a bit harsh on Phil Jones and the Hockey Team—where's your tol... Oh, you mean us? You're talking about the sceptics and the way that we've "hijacked, cannibalized and subverted" the language with our demands for such "twisted" things as "evidence".

Well, fuck me sideways.

We need to reclaim the language of democracy and tolerance.

Well, you've done a bang-up job there, Ananth. I must say that it was definitely "the language of democracy and tolerance" that I saw in Gene's article.

A language that is clear and precise.

Oh, Gene's language was very clear and very precise.

A language that does not confuse integrity of protest and civil disobedience with anger. One which establishes the fundamental tenets of protecting the planet for all life forms.

Except, presumably, the "twisted bunch" that Gene is so angry at, eh?

The climate change debate is often characterised by more heat than light, and for that reason we all need to be careful about how we express ourselves.

Of course the anti-science brigade on the web has seized on the line in Gene's post and run with it (and will run and run and run), taken it out of context and run with it some more – it’s what the climate contrarians exist to do.

Um... Maybe that is what we "climate contrarians" exist to do—and thank you for eschewing the word "deniers", Ananth. Truly, you have avoided using the language of "anger".

Or maybe—just maybe—we try to look at the evidence and try to assess, rationally, whether the risk of anthropogenic climate change, and the consequences of it, are severe enough to warrant the millions of deaths that your advocated measures will entail.

Some of us even look to one of your own gods—the IPCC—and their SRES families and note that even that UN body does not believe that the measures that you want to embrace are the best outcome. Or not, at least, for humans.

And not really for the environment either, Ananth. Which country has the cleanest rivers—China or Britain? Which country has the healthiest, and growth of area of, woodlands—the USA or India? Concern for the environment is a rich people's game, Ananth, and thus you should support measures which ensure that everyone in the world gets as rich as possible as quickly as possible—and that means embracing the A1 family of SRE Scenarios, which is summarised as follows.

The A1 storyline is a case of rapid and successful economic development, in which regional average income per capita converge—current distinctions between "poor" and "rich" countries eventually dissolve. The primary dynamics are:

• Strong commitment to market-based solutions.


• High savings and commitment to education at the household level.


• High rates of investment and innovation in education, technology, and institutions at the national and international levels.


• International mobility of people, ideas, and technology.

So, will Greenpeace now endorse this model?

Will it fuck.

The new Green narrative

With the science around catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (CACC) starting to unravel and more and more evidence of exaggeration of the consequences coming to light, the eco-loons are scrabbling around frantically for a new narrative with which to fuel the terror needed to sustain their quasi-religious dogma.

And it seems that they have found it, and that narrative can be summed up in two simple words—Godwin's Law.

Don't believe me? Via Bishop Hill, here's arch-Greenie James Lovelock—writing on the 29 March—telling us how we should confront this impending doom. [Emphasis mine.]

One of the main obstructions to meaningful action is "modern democracy", he added. "Even the best democracies agree that when a major war approaches, democracy must be put on hold for the time being. I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

Now, as regular readers of The Kitchen will know, I am no fan of democracy—it simply being the tyranny of the majority expressed in a voting system—but it is the best system that we know for preserving liberty. And why?

Because some demagogue cunt like James Lovelock cannot oppress us in order to pursue his lunatic obsession. Of course, the disadvantage of democracy is that all of our main parties are also oppressing us to pursue their lunatic Green credentials but, then, since so much of said oppression is had down from their EU masters on high, their is little that any of these lily-livered politicos can do about it.

But, just to ram home the point, I shall steal Longrider's words in order to paint a picture of the kind of hideousness that Lovelock is contemplating.

Close your eyes for a moment and picture Gordon Brown deciding that he will now lead a war cabinet – a coalition government of national unity for the foreseeable future and this will be a long war. How does that make you feel? So, should we follow Lovelocks’s thinking and suspend democracy?

Horrible, I think you'll agree. Anyway, I digress...

Lovelock has already espoused the idea that climate change is akin to a Total War situation for, remember, the last time that we suspended democracy in this country was in World War II.

So, imagine my total lack of surprise when, via the prolific Tom Nelson, I find an article by the High Priest of CACC, James Hansen, written on 5 April and also drawing a parallel between CACC and the second world war.

The predominant moral issue of the 21st century, almost surely, will be climate change, comparable to Nazism faced by Churchill in the 20th century and slavery faced by Lincoln in the 19th century. Our fossil fuel addiction, if unabated, threatens our children and grandchildren, and most species on the planet.

These moral equivalences have been drawn before by loony Green nutters, but now that the big boys have broken cover with their narrative du jour, expect to see a lot more of this "CACC is like fighting the Nazis" bullshit.

That is, of course, if these watermelon bastards—such as Greenpeace—aren't actively threatening you.

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

Sssh, I think I hear Greenpeace at the door! Oh god, they're coming in! What—what do you want...?

"For you, Devil, ze war is over. It is off to ze work camps for you, schnell..."

Noooooooooooo...

TRANSMISSION TERMINATES.

When Green loons start to lose the argument...

... like every thug there's ever been, they like to resort to threats. The anthropogenic climate change (ACC) alarmists have been steadily losing the scientific argument and—whilst the politicians continue to proceed as though none of the contre temps of the last few months have happened—even the media have started to pay attention.

So, given my little introduction, how do you think Greenpeace responded to the latest questioning of their quasi-religious beliefs? With rational science—or with threats?

Bingo!

The proper channels have failed. It's time for mass civil disobedience to cut off the financial oxygen from denial and skepticism.

If you're one of those who believe that this is not just necessary but also possible, speak to us. Let's talk about what that mass civil disobedience is going to look like.

If you're one of those who have spent their lives undermining progressive climate legislation, bankrolling junk science, fueling spurious debates around false solutions, and cattle-prodding democratically-elected governments into submission, then hear this:

We know who you are. We know where you live. We know where you work.

And we be many, but you be few.

And so, as the foundations of their religion start to crumble, the mask starts to slip...

UPDATE: Autonomous Mind has some further analysis...

"Warming rates are not statistically significantly different"—Phil Jones, CRU

There is a very interesting BBC Q&A; between Roger "the Dodger" Harrabin and Phil "deceitful bastard" Jones. It's worth reading the whole thing, but the most significant section is the first answer. [Emphasis mine (other than on the question).]

A - Do you agree that according to the global temperature record used by the IPCC, the rates of global warming from 1860-1880, 1910-1940 and 1975-1998 were identical?

An initial point to make is that in the responses to these questions I've assumed that when you talk about the global temperature record, you mean the record that combines the estimates from land regions with those from the marine regions of the world. CRU produces the land component, with the Met Office Hadley Centre producing the marine component.

Temperature data for the period 1860-1880 are more uncertain, because of sparser coverage, than for later periods in the 20th Century. The 1860-1880 period is also only 21 years in length. As for the two periods 1910-40 and 1975-1998 the warming rates are not statistically significantly different (see numbers below).

I have also included the trend over the period 1975 to 2009, which has a very similar trend to the period 1975-1998.

So, in answer to the question, the warming rates for all 4 periods are similar and not statistically significantly different from each other.

Here are the trends and significances for each period:

This is pretty significant because Jones is admitting that—over the timescale for which we have actual measurements (rather than proxies)—the current warming trend is not unprecedented—an aspect that the whole alarmist argument depends on.

Watt's Up With That summarises the relevant points from the interview in this way.

• Neither the rate nor magnitude of recent warming is exceptional.


• There was no significant warming from 1998-2009. According to the IPCC we should have seen a global temperature increase of at least 0.2°C per decade.


• The IPCC models may have overestimated the climate sensitivity for greenhouse gases, underestimated natural variability, or both.


• This also suggests that there is a systematic upward bias in the impacts estimates based on these models just from this factor alone.


• The logic behind attribution of current warming to well-mixed man-made greenhouse gases is faulty.


• The science is not settled, however unsettling that might be.


• There is a tendency in the IPCC reports to leave out inconvenient findings, especially in the part(s) most likely to be read by policy makers.

Now, some of these conclusions might be slight leaps, as Climate Skeptic opines.

I think some of these conclusions are a bit of a reach from the Q&A.; I don’t get the sense that Jones is abandoning the basic hypothesis that climate sensitivity to manmade CO₂ is high (e.g. 3+ degrees per doubling, rather than <=1 degrees as many skeptics would hypothesize). In particular, I think the writing has been on the wall for a while that alarmists were bailing on the hockey stick / MWP-related arguments as indicative of high sensitivities.

The new news for me was the admission that the warming rate from 1979-present is in no way unprecedented. This is important as the lead argument (beyond black box “the models say so” justifications) for blaming anthropogenic factors for recent warming is that the rate of warming was somehow unprecedented. However, Jones admits (as all rational skeptics have said for some time) that the warming rate from 1979 to today is really no different than we have measured in other periods decidedly unaffected by CO₂.

However, there was one of Phil Jones's answers that left me absolutely gob-smacked, and it is this one:

H - If you agree that there were similar periods of warming since 1850 to the current period, and that the MWP is under debate, what factors convince you that recent warming has been largely man-made?

The fact that we can't explain the warming from the 1950s by solar and volcanic forcing - see my answer to your question D [where he referenced Chapter 9 of the IPCC AR4].

You what? So, since you are unable to account for the warming in terms of volcanos or solar warming, then it must be human induced? What the hell?

What about this mysterious decadal Pacific oscillation that is now, apparently, "masking the warming"? What about cloud formation, or albedo or... or... so many other bloody things, many of which we may not be aware of? The climate is a pretty Chaotic system and we have, really, very little idea of all of the factors involved. Yes, it may be man-made forcings but, ultimately, it could be something else entirely. Or a mixture of both natural and human, of course.

Still, we are constantly told that the debate is over, aren't we, Phil?

It would be supposition on my behalf to know whether all scientists who say the debate is over are saying that for the same reason. I don't believe the vast majority of climate scientists think this. This is not my view. There is still much that needs to be undertaken to reduce uncertainties, not just for the future, but for the instrumental (and especially the palaeoclimatic) past as well.

Ah. So the debate isn't over? And the "vast majority of climate scientists think this"? Right.

Well, thank you for indulging us poor climate "deniers"—or, in the words of the Prime Minister of Great Britain, we "anti-science, flat-earth climate sceptics"—and admitting that there is a debate to be had: that's tremendously kind of you, Phil.

This is very far from being a smoking gun interview and Jones is obviously still of the opinion that man is the cause of the world's warming but, nonetheless, this climate scientist obviously feels that there is still a debate to be had.

So, after many long years of vilifying sceptics and shutting down any comment, perhaps we can have a grown-up debate.

Could someone tell that renowned climate scientist, Sunny Hundal?

"No scientific merit"

Andrew Lacis: telling it like it is.

Meet Andrew Lacis, a physicist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) and colleague of James Hansen.

Education:

• B.A., Physics, 1963, University of Iowa


• M.S., Astronomy, 1964, University of Iowa


• Ph.D., Physics, 1970, University of Iowa

Publications

• Go to bibliography

Lacis's bibliography is pretty huge, so I haven't represented it here; suffice to say that Andrew Lacis is not only prolific and well-respected but also "mainstream"—he is not "a denier".

Bearing all of this in mind, I would like to call your attention to his comment on Chapter 9 of the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). Now, Chapter 9 is extremely important, as Bishop Hill explains...

Chapter 9 is possibly the most important one in the whole IPCC report - it's the one where they decide that global warming is manmade. This is the one where the headlines are made.

So, bearing all of these facts in mind, here is Andrew Lacis's comment on the Executive Summary of Chapter 9 of the IPCC's AR4. [Emphasis mine.]

There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn't the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community—instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.

This is pretty damning stuff and would, surely, have given even the most enthusiastic Warmist some pause for thought. So why did no one pick up on it?

Because, of course, Andrew Lacis's comment did not appear in the report. Like many other even mildly sceptical comments, it was rejected and left out of the report. And the reason why the editors rejected the comment?

Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.

Frankly, I am staggered. That is the complete explanation for the rejection.

Further, as we are now beginning to find out, vast swathes of the IPCC AR4 are based on non-peer-reviewed reports from Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund; even where those organisations have used scientific reports in their pieces of propaganda, they have cherry-picked and twisted data to suit their own agendas, e.g. Amazongate.

This is how the "consensus" has been constructed—by posting sceptical comments down the memory-hole; by disappearing all but the most alarmist of opinions.

Is there anyone who now thinks that the IPCC are to be trusted as a truly scientific organisation?

If there are any such people left, then I have a bridge that I'd like to sell them...

UPDATE: Unity takes me to task on this over at Liberal Conspiracy. The essence of Unity's complaint is that the comment was left on the first draft of the Executive Summary. mea culpa: I should have checked it out more closely.

Over at Deltoid, there is a quote from Lacis on the second draft of the Executive Summary.

"The revised chapter was much improved," he said. "That's different than saying everything in there is nailed down, but I think it's a big improvement."

Overall, he said, "I commend the authors for doing as good a job as they did. That's the way the science process ought to work. You get inputs from everybody, find any bugs, crank through and the science moves forward."

Deltoid actually gets this quote from Andy Revkin (who featured in the CRU emails as someone who could not be trusted), who has something more to add to this.

But after reviewing the chapter myself just now, I have to say that at least one passage — as far as I can tell — did not contain a single caveat and did not reflect the underlying body of evidence and analysis at the time (or even now):

Human-induced warming of the climate system is widespread. Anthropogenic warming of the climate system can be detected in temperature observations taken at the surface, in the troposphere and in the oceans.

I have yet to see anyone provide definitive evidence — with no error bars — that the fingerprint of human-generated greenhouse gases (or other emissions or actions) is unequivocal. The only thing described as “unequivocal” in the report was the warming, not the cause, unless I really haven’t been paying attention for the last two decades.

Revkin has a reply from another of the AR4 lead authors, which is worth looking at. However, I do not see that Andy's main criticism has been addressed—indeed, the author essentially blames a semantic issue.

IPCC's dodgy citations

As we all remain thoroughly amused at the barrage of attacks on the IPCC's rapidly waning credibility, it's all too easy to miss a dodgy citation or two.

As such, and via Climate Sceptic, I am happy to point you towards a rapidly expanding compendium of all of the dodgy citations in the IPCC's AR3 and AR4 reports, hosted by the informative ClimateQuotes.com.

In other news—just in case you missed it—55% of the Netherlands is not below sea level, as claimed by IPCC AR4: the figure is more like 20%. This may sound like nit-picking, but it's annoyed the Dutch; apart from anything else, the report made outrageous claims about the effect on the Netherlands's productivity should the sea rise a couple of inches.

The worrying thing about the sudden outrage by the Dutch is worrying—as my peripatetic Greek friend pointed out...

Now, anyone can make a simple blooper like this, even if it's the sort of howler you would expect any Dutch schoolboy to spot. No, my question is this: did anyone in the Dutch government actually read the fucking report before signing the Netherlands up to slashing their carbon emissions?

More to the point, have any of our ministers read the IPCC report? I think we should be told. I think they should be asked.

I sincerely doubt that any of our moronic, lazy fucking politicos have read any of the reports—or even the bastard summaries. They are too busy helping themselves to our money and posturing like pricks on the world stage.

Oh, and just to throw yet more thrills at you all, ClimateQuotes.com thinks that they have found yet another dodgy citation.

In AR4, WGIII, section 8.4.5 Potential implications of mitigation options for sustainable development:

"Agriculture contributes 4% of global GDP (World Bank, 2003) and provides employment to 1.3 billion people (Dean, 2000)."

That is a fairly specific number, 1.3 billion. What census, survey, or study did they cite that came up with this number? Dean, 2000 is referenced as:

Dean, T., 2000: Development: agriculture workers too poor to buy food. UN IPS, New York, 36 pp.

The UN IPS is the United Nations Inter Press Service. They cited a news article.

Interestingly enough, the actual title of the article is different than the IPCC's reference. The title is "Agriculture Workers Too Poor to Buy Food, Say Unions". Here it is also referenced with the 'say unions' ending. But the IPCC's reference drops the 'say unions' from the end. If you search for this article on IPS' site, you get to see a link to the article with the title. It includes 'say unions'. Is this an intentional omission of a reference to unions, or just sloppy work? Here is the article, see for yourself...
...

The article only mentions the 1.3 billion number in passing:

Currently, 1.3 billion people (out of a world population of about 6 billion) work in agriculture-related jobs, 450 million of whom are waged agricultural workers.

The rest of the article is about how the workers are too poor to buy food. The magazine does not cite any source for its 1.3 billion number.

Well, what a fucking surprise, eh? This, my friends, is the UN's IPCC: the gold standard of scientific research. Actually, it's just a shoddy collection of half-truths and skewed bollocks of the sort written by some dishonest and thoroughly second-rate blogger.

It's a massive con—just like the UN itself.

As CACC collapses, the Tories continue to fuck up

Professor Philip Stott has an excellent piece questioning the wisdom in George Osborne's announcement that Nicholas Stern would be helping them to draft their environmental policy. Amongst other things, Professor Stott resurrects a particularly cutting quote about the Stern Review which I thought would be good to place here once again.

"If a student of mine were to hand in this report [the ‘Stern Review’] as a Masters thesis, perhaps if I were in a good mood I would give him a 'D' for diligence; but more likely I would give him an 'F' for fail. There is a whole range of very basic economics mistakes that somebody who claims to be a Professor of Economics simply should not make. [...] Stern consistently picks the most pessimistic for every choice that one can make. He overestimates through cherry-picking, he double counts particularly the risks and he underestimates what development and adaptation will do to impacts.”

[The environmental economist, Dr. Richard S. J. Tol, Research Professor at the Economic and Social Research Institute (ESRI), Dublin, Professor at the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, and Associate at Hamburg University.

James Delingpole headlined the news that the Tories were consulting Lord Stern in the following manner:

Cameron and his suicidal eco-rats clamber aboard sinking ship

Hardly a ringing endorsement, is it? Similarly disbelieving ejaculations came from EUReferendum, and Professor Stott opines...

Has Lord Snooty’s Sidekick Gone Stark Raving Bonkers, Readers?

So, what has happened to the Tories? Have they taken leave of their senses? Why on earth was Osborne even approaching Lord Stern in the first place?

Well, quite possibly they have.

But Osborne’s lack of political judgment and timing go even deeper. One cannot believe that the Shadow Chancellor has been so stupid as to make this now seemingly-unfounded pronouncement at the very moment when the Global Warming Narrative is collapsing on every front, political, economic, and scientific; when, in the US, even President Obama is retreating from from the cap-trade bill; when most of his own Tory party are highly critical of the whole ‘global warming’ scenario; when polls show that the public everywhere is increasing in its scepticism; and, when The Sun is once again flaring forth ...

On February 1, that Old Tory trooper, Lord Tebbit of Chingford, writing in the Conservative house rag, The Daily Telegraph, warned that “'Camp Cameron' should worry about the steady erosion of the Tory lead in the polls” - the latest YouGov product has the Conservatives on 38 per cent, down two points on last month. I am sure Tebbit is correct, and I can further warn Boy George that this latest nonsense over Lord Stern will not have helped one iota.

Indeed, Britain is now screaming out for a leading political party that will begin to talk real economic sense on climate change. That way, there might actually be some votes in the topic.

This is an argument echoed today by Burning Our Money; but as Wat Tyler also points out, there really isn't a credible alternative.

It's very difficult all this, isn't it. The horrible fact is, there isn't actually anyone we can vote for who will stop this happening. Sure, there are people we can vote for who will promise to stop it, but that's a different thing - under our grotesquely unfair first-past-the-post Westminster system of government, such people will never get the chance to actually implement their promises. Tyler's constitutional reform package includes separation of the powers and a directly elected President, but absent that, our real world choices are indeed very limited.

Which is why we will be out campaigning for the Tories again this time. They sure ain't perfect, and we share many of the Major's concerns, but in terms of forming a government to replace Brown's disaster, they're all we've got.

This is, of course, a damning indictment of our electoral system—but also of the people in this country. The simple fact is, in a weird fucking conundrum, that the only thing that keeps the major parties in power is the fact that people think that the major parties are the only ones capable of gaining power.

So, whilst Jackart may maintain that the Tories are simply the "shit that stinks least", do not be under any illusions that the Tories will, nevertheless, be utterly shit.

The climate hots up

The pressure continues to pile on the IPCC with a whole raft of MSM and blog stories seeping through today. His Ecclesiastical Eminence resurrects his Climate Cuttings series to try to round up the events.

In a story running in parallel in the Sunday Times and EU Referendum, Raj Pachauri is linked directly to a new set of erroneous statements in the IPCC reports. This time it's African rainfall they've been misleading us about. Since Pachauri is the author of the relevant part of the report and has repeated the claims elsewhere, he will find it harder to absolve himself of responsibility this time. Commenters noted a recent study that found that there has been a massive recent greening of the Sahel, with temperature rises leading to higher rainfall.

EU Referendum has picked up on this last story and expanded on it.

No sooner is the Africagate piece up then Bishop Hill comments on it. That brings up further comments which identify this article from the National Geographic News.

Confirming the observations of the Tunisian government in its "initial national communication" (where it suggested that rainfall might increase), the National Geographic article is headed: "Sahara Desert Greening Due to Climate Change?"

It states that, contrary to the picture painted of "desertification, drought, and despair" by the IPCC, emerging evidence is painting a very different scenario, one in which rising temperatures could benefit millions of Africans in the driest parts of the continent.

Scientists, we are told, are now seeing signals that the Sahara desert and surrounding regions are greening due to increasing rainfall. If sustained, these rains could revitalize drought-ravaged regions, reclaiming them for farming communities. Furthermore, it seems, this desert-shrinking trend is supported by climate models, which predict a return to conditions that turned the Sahara into a lush savanna some 12,000 years ago.

Of course, climatology is not an exact science—which is just one of the reasons that the phrase "the science is settled" always worked me up into an incandescent rage. Added irritation was introduced because we knew damn well that not even the climatologists thought the science was settled—something that was confirmed by the CRU email conversations.

Haarsma now says that satellite confirms that during the last decade, the Sahel is indeed becoming more green. Nevertheless, as one might expect, climate scientists don't agree on how future climate change will affect the Sahel: Some studies simulate a decrease in rainfall. "This issue is still rather uncertain," Haarsma says.

Max Planck's Claussen says North Africa is the area of greatest disagreement among climate change modellers. Forecasting how global warming will affect the region is complicated by its vast size and the unpredictable influence of high-altitude winds that disperse monsoon rains, Claussen adds. "Half the models follow a wetter trend, and half a drier trend."

There! How's that for settled science?

That precisely reflects the uncertainty projected by Professor Conway [PDF] and others, and completely contradicts the doom-laden certainty offered by Dr Pachauri and his IPCC colleagues. More to the point, since Haarsma was carrying out his studies in 2005, when the IPCC was in the throes of writing up the Fourth Assessment Report, it could or should have been aware of the work.

Instead, it relies on a secondary source written by an obscure Moroccan academic, and published by an advocacy group, which did not even accurately reflect its own primary sources.

Once again, the IPCC has been cherry-picking data in order to paint the blackest picture possible—in order, presumably, to scare the shit out of the politicians and to ensure that the great big Green money-go-round continues to drop manna into the lap of Pachauri and his corrupt cronnies.

But, to return to the science aspect, there is a wider point to be made here...

One of the most extraordinary claims of the CACC lobby is that warming will lead to disaster. In the Northern Hemisphere, all of the evidence points to warmer climes being a good thing: the Mediaeval Warm Period showed a massive increase of wealth and population supported, amongst other things, by far higher crop yields. It was only when the Little Ice Age hit that people started to starve by the thousand.

Mind you, we really need Ed Cook's words from one of the CRU emails illustrate the position. [Emphasis mine.]

Without trying to prejudice this work, but also because of what I almost think I know to be the case, the results of this study will show that we can probably say a fair bit about <100 year extra-tropical NH temperature variability (at least as far as we believe the proxy estimates), but honestly know fuck-all about what the >100 year variability was like with any certainty (i.e. we know with certainty that we know fuck-all).

Let me just parse that for you: for anything outside the tropical Northern Hemisphere, the climatologists know "fuck-all" for anything over one hundred years ago. There just isn't that much data for the Southern Hemisphere because—should you go and examine a globe rather than a Mercator projection map—there's remarkably little land.

In any case, even my A Level science tells me one basic thing: if you heat up water, you get greater evaporation and thus, eventually, greater precipitation. The problem is, given the wind system and other chaotic factors (such as mountain ranges), where that precipitation eventually occurs.

It is also the case, however, that deserts are not caused simply by a lack of rain, but also by a lack of plants to hold the top soil, etc. This lack of plant life often contributes to a fall in precipitation and so it goes in a vicious spiral.

Anyway, the Sahara seems to be getting substantially greener—for whatever reasons—and this can only be a good thing. Let's hope that the people living there take advantage of this fact and act to increase that trend.

And now, in a piece reminiscent of the televisual news, your humble Devil presents the amusing and quirky "and finally" piece...

THE scientist at the centre of the “climategate” email scandal has revealed that he was so traumatised by the global backlash against him that he contemplated suicide.

Professor Phil Jones said in an exclusive interview with The Sunday Times that he had thought about killing himself “several times”.

This is the same Phil Jones who wrote, when sceptic John Daly died, 'In an odd way, this is cheering news!' Further, of course, one might point out that millions have gone hungry, and starved, and died, because of measures taken under the auspices of the lies and fabrications peddled by Phil Jones—with the doubling of basic food prices because of the land being turned over to biofuels being just one of those.

So—with all due respect, i.e. none—why don't you just fuck off, Phil?

Yet more IPCC bollocks

This has been a good year so far, certainly in the opinion of your humble Devil. The decision to prosecute even some of the thieving MPs is a small victory for those of us who have long maintained that those fuckers were stealing our money.

But far greater vindication, as far as I am concerned, has come in the slow but steady collapse of the climate change alarmist camp; as someone who has been calling "bullshit" on this scam—in writing at least—for five years, watching the destruction started by the leak of the CRU documents has been a joy to behold.

Whilst some of us swarmed over the emails and the data—delighting at the revelations about dirty tricks and shoddy statistical analysis that revealed the truth of our suspicions—EUReferendum was leading the charge against the High Priest of the IPCC. As Richard North showed, Dr Rajendra K Pachauri has redefined the word "compromised"—his nexus of power and money inextricably bound up with his position as IPCC Chairman and entirely dependent on the alarmist AGW position.

It is really the kind of investigative journalism that Private Eye used to do so well: on this topic, however, the Eye has dropped the ball. Or, rather, as The Englishman points out, they never even picked it up.

If you will allow me to digress for a second, the Eye's refusal to acknowledge the existence of blogs—a blindness born of a hatred and contempt that borders on the pathological—has combined with its pathetic online presence (such as the lack of an online archive) and its fortnightly release to render the magazine increasingly irrelevent. It is rare, now, to find a story in Private Eye that has not already been substantially covered—often in a rather better and more interesting way—by blogs. Private Eye will continue to be bought by many, but it is becoming more and more of a luxury for political anoraks, rather than the necessity that it once was.

To return to the general subject of this post, EUReferendum's most valuable contribution has been in the revelations of "mistakes" in the IPCC reports themselves.

Because, whilst Pachauri himself might be hopelessly compromised, true believers of the climate change faith could still point out that the genial Indian did not actually, personally write the reports and that the "scientists" who did so nevertheless knew what they were talking about.

Or, to put it in terms that an idiot could understand because it was an idiot who wrote it, here's Sunny Hundal on why the IPCC is good.

The IPCC [sic] contains hundreds if not thousands of graphs and claims — and yet one or two slips were used as an excuse to rubbish the whole thing.

Wow! The "IPCC" has hundreds of graphs. Well, fuck me: they must be right, eh?

What Sunny hasn't grasped—or, rather, wilfully refuses to grasp—is that if one or more claims are suspect, then they are all suspect. As I pointed out in a longish post entitled A Credibility Gap, if the IPCC has been cooking the books, then the entire catastrophic anthropogenic climate change (CACC) argument falls apart.

This kind of revelation strikes at the very heart of the CACC foundations because without the IPCC there is no catastrophic anthropogenic climate change.
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The trouble is that whilst climatologists might have a rather better overview of these studies than myself or Bishop Hill (who are, after all, merely amateurs with a day job to hold down), it is very unlikely that they have actually read all of these studies.

And the politicians certainly haven't.

All of these people rely on those at the IPCC whose day job is to study and collate these reports to draw the evidence together.
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Think of the process as a massive inverted pyramid with the downward-facing point as the raw data and the ever-increasing mass on top as the multiplicity of reports based on said data. Obviously, if the data are wrong, so are all of the models, reports and prognostications based on them.

Similarly, the faith in CACC is based on the credibility of the IPCC simply because people do not have the time to do what the IPCC does, i.e. to collate and assess the many hundreds of reports on climate. And the IPCC is increasingly compromised.

It is not only that the IPCC has made "mistakes": as far as Glaciergate is concerned, it goes rather further than that.

Evidence is building that IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt by 2035 was not only a deliberate fraud, but efforts were made to cover it up when the figure was challenged.

Some of the pieces of the jigsaw are already there in the public domain, starting with Ben Webster's piece in The Times on Saturday – which we analysed in this post. This made it clear that Rajendra Pachauri was appraised of what he now claims was a "mistake" by an Indian science journalist, last November.

But the story is taken further by Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times today, under the heading: "Panel ignored warnings on glacier error". There, he reports that the leaders of the IPCC had known for weeks and probably months about the "error" and had even convened private conferences to discuss it.

There is a lot more: your humble Devil has not been able to keep up with the pace of stories released by EUReferendum, but it appears that the IPCC knew that the claim was false, but it was kept in the reports in order to drive increasing levels of funding to Rajendra Pachauri's TERI Institute.

Further embarrassment for the IPCC has come in the form of Amazongate, again exposed by EUReferendum and enthusiastically taken up by the MSM.

From Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times we get an article headed: "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim," - one of several on climate change in today's edition

It tells us that a "startling report" in the IPCC report claiming that that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest "was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise."

This is "Amazongate" writ large, where the IPCC launched the scare story that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland – and the source turns out to be a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists.

They had based their "research" (Leake's quotations) on a study published in Nature which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

The detail is familiar to readers of this blog, and some might note a small addition at the end of the piece which says: "Research by Richard North", in what has been a fruitful partnership.

Indeed it has—and the revelations have come thick and fast. Essentially, vast swathes of the IPCC ARA4 seem to have been based not on properly researched, peer-reviewed scientific papers, but from deeply biased, unscientific and poorly presented reports by such notable organsiations as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF), an article in Climbing magazine and, in one case, from a Geography Student's degree thesis.

In other words, far from being the last word in science, the IPCC ARA4 is a collection of third-hand anecdotes and poorly researched reports from organisations with an axe to grind.

And tonight Richard has released another long report into another aspect of the IPCC ARA4 which has already been dubbed—with wearying inevitability—Africagate.

Following an investigation by this blog (and with the story also told in The Sunday Times), another major "mistake" in the IPCC's benchmark Fourth Assessment Report has emerged.

Similar in effect to the erroneous "2035" claim – the year the IPCC claimed that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt – in this instance we find that the IPCC has wrongly claimed that in some African countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.

At best, this is a wild exaggeration, unsupported by any scientific research, referenced only to a report produced by a Canadian advocacy group, written by an obscure Moroccan academic who specialises in carbon trading, citing references which do not support his claims.

Unlike the glacier claim, which was confined to a section of the technical Working Group II report, this "50 percent by 2020" claim forms part of the key Synthesis Report, the production of which was the personal responsibility of the chair of the IPCC, Dr R K Pachauri. It has been repeated by him in many public fora. He, therefore, bears a personal responsibility for the error.

In this lengthy post, we examine the nature and background of this latest debacle, which is now under investigation by IPCC scientists and officials.

It is a lengthy post—even by Richard's standards—but is well worth reading in full. Essentially, the IPCC and Pachauri have been cherry-picking data from various reports that are themselves not peer-reviewed—or in any way independently verified. Or, in some circumstances, unsubstantiated data from unreviewed reports have been used in the IPCC reports, which are then cited in similar reports and substantiated figures and then the IPCC uses those same successor reports to bolster the credibility of its own baseless "findings".

In short, the entire system is corrupt; evidence is being, effectively, fabricated; far from being the last work on the science of climate change, the UN's IPCC has been sticking to what that body knows best—corruption in the service of vested interests.

Still, in what seems to be a bit of a departure for UN staff, as least the bastards aren't pimping kids.

The process started with the confirmation of data corruption at the UEA, and the somewhat unorthodox practices of the CRU team; with The Club being so intimately involved with the IPCC, it was only a matter of time before interested parties followed the trail to Pachauri and the UN's climate body.

Now, the credibility of the IPCC, and its reports, is shot to pieces. Whilst true believers like Sunny Hundal continue to screech and wail, the evidence of corruption is swiftly overwhelming the anyway flimsy evidence for CACC.

You may take it from your humble Devil that vindication combined with Schadenfreude is one of the sweetest feelings in the world. Now, maybe, we can persuade our foolish politicians to get a grip and stop killing people with their environmental madness.

Although it might be quicker to hang them all and start again...