After Holiday Round-up

When I am watching the day-to-day unfolding of the AGW controversy it often seems that things are moving slowly and not much is happening. All that changes if I come back after three weeks away and try to catch up.

Here are a few things that have caught my eye.

At Climate Audit, Steve McIntyre’s remarkable blog, a whole new scandal over the failure of climate scientists to make data available for review has blown up. In this case it concerns the Yamal tree-ring series that has played an important role in reconstructions of past climate as it imparts a fashionable hockey stick configuration to scary graphs.

You can unravel just what has happened at Climate Audit if you are at home with heavy-duty statistical analysis, or for an excellent summary for the layman see Bishop Hill’s post here.

This is an important story, as much for what it says about professional standards in climate research as for the doubts that it casts on the integrity of the data. Palaeoclimatology is never likely to be quite the same again; without those hockey sticks it has nothing to contribute to AGW alarmism.

The Tyndall Centre has a bright idea for winning the war on climate change:

Britain will have to stop building airports, switch to electric cars and shut down coal-fired power stations as part of a ‘planned recession’ to avoid dangerous climate change. A new report from the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research says the only way to avoid going beyond the dangerous tipping point is to double the target to 70 per cent by 2020. This would mean reducing the size of the economy through a “planned recession”.
Louise Gray, The Daily Telegraph, 30 September 2009

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6248257/Planned-recession-could-avoid-catastrophic-climate-change.html

In the days when Mike Hulme ruled at the Tyndall Centre I doubt whether such a suggestion would have seen the light of day. But now Prof Robert Watson is the director of strategic development, as well as being Defra’s chief scientific adviser. He’s best remembered for being Dr Ravendra Pachauri’s predecessor as IPCC chairman until he resigned amid controversy over exaggeration in the Second Assessment Report.

Perhaps Clive Hamilton, Professor of public ethics at the Australian National University would be able to help the Tyndall Centre sell the idea of a ‘planned recession’ – on top of an unplanned one – to the British public. In a paper delivered to an Oxford University conference he suggests that,

“There is a view we should not scare people because it makes them go down their burrows and close the door but I think the situation is so serious that although people are afraid they are not fearful enough given the science,” he said. “Personally I cannot see any alternative to ramping up the fear factor.”

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/earthnews/6253912/Most-people-in-denial-
over-climate-change-according-to-psychologists.html

Apparently he considers that there are only three reactions to risk: denial, apathy and action. He seems to have missed out on what is actually happening; the public can smell political manipulation and scare tactics even if they do not have a very firm grasp of the scientific arguments.

It will be interesting to see how this strategy will play out. There is evidence that the warmist lobby is ramping up the fear factor ahead of the Copenhagen Summit in December, and I suspect that it is likely to have precisely the opposite effect to that which is intended.

A now famous report on the BBC website has acknowledged, at last, that the global temperature trend over the last decade is flat or even downwards. What really startled those of us who have marvelled at the BBC’s reporting of AGW over the last five years is that the report ends with these words:

One thing is for sure. It seems the debate about what is causing global
warming is far from over. Indeed some would say its hotting up.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/8299079.stm

The author is a certain Paul Hudson using the job title Climate Correspondent; a new name to me. Here is a thumb nail portrait sent to me by a friend:

He was previously – for many years – the weather forecaster for Yorkshire Television.

The good news is that he does have a relevant science background, a first in geophysics and planetary physics from Newcastle.

The bad news is that he is a firm warmist. He has written a book That’s The Forecast, published by Great Northern, which the blurb states:

“At the other extreme the book ends on a serious note, Paul explaining in succinct and readable way the likely consequences of the present climate change. He makes a personal plea: ” We will reach a point in the not to distant future when we have no control over our ever warming climate with its enormous implications for mankind. I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to take that sort of risk with our future. This is why we must try and curb carbon dioxide emissions as a matter of urgency”.

His book was published four years ago, just when AGW was beginning to play a part in UK government policy and such sententious warnings were becoming common. It sounds as though Hudson may be between a rock and a hard place. Will his scientific background triumph, or will he be the victim of pressure to follow a more politically correct line in future? If the BBC ever let him near their website again that is.

Just after I got back, the Energy Regulator dropped a bombshell.

Domestic UK energy bills could rise by 60% by 2016 in a worst-case scenario identified by the energy regulator.

However, most other estimates outlined in the Ofgem report would see prices rise between 14% and 25% above inflation by 2020.

The review also said that up to £200bn of investment was needed to secure supplies and to meet carbon targets. [my emphais]

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/8297882.stm

A chart on the BBC web page, provided by Ofgem, portrays conversion to a low carbon economy as the best way to minimise price increases, but even a cursory look at the small print below it suggests that this has only been achieved by some very nimble manipulation of economic scenarios. Their chief executive, Alistair Buchanan, made it very clear in interviews that moving to less carbon intensive forms of generation will be a very significant component in both rising prices and the massive investment that is needed if power cuts are to be avoided.

With the Institute of Fiscal Studies warning that we face at least one decade of austerity – and possibly as much as two decades – just to clear up the economic mess that we are in at the moment, will consumers accept such a burden if they are not genuinely convinced that by doing so they will be saving the planet?

Looking at all this, and much, much more that I have had to read-up after a very pleasant break in the Pyrenees, I get the impression that the tempo of the AGW debate is changing rapidly now. No longer is there a lethargic drift towards acceptance of whatever we are told about global catastrophe. Both sides seem to realise that the Copenhagen summit will be a pivotal moment and are making a special effort to capture the political and media high ground.

If a successor to Kyoto is agreed in December, then the momentum of the warmist cause is likely to become unstoppable, but nowhere can I find any objective commentator who is expecting this to happen now. Only the form of words that can be devised to try and conceal failure seems to be at issue. Even the UN and the eNGO’s seem to have accepted that a deal is impossible.

If the summit is a failure, then the new year is likely to bring new reality to the debate. Sceptics will seize on the standstill in global warming to force both politicians and the general public to listen to their arguments, and if this happens there can be little doubt that the media will fall into line. Gone will be the days when anyone one who attaches ‘environment’ or ‘climate’ to their job descriptiom can expect an easy time when they are invited to do an interview.

Even The Independent, frequently accused of publishing ‘climate porn’ on its front page, carried a sceptical article by Dominic Lawson recently. Apparently they have been haemorrhaging readers recently, with financial losses mounting.