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What the government giveth, the government can take away. So it came to pass that the glory of green investments fell over its peak and started to slide — a slide we hope will continue forthwith with speed until such day that Renewables Actually Work.
 2013 Q1 is not marked here (except with a dodgy red star thingy). It s somewhere around 22% below Q1 2012. 🙂 [Graph: Bloomberg] The US leads the way. Europe is following. Australia is too irrelevant to mention.
Why the fall? … Capricious governments (It doesn’t help that Mother Nature is not making “free” energy easy-to-get)
If only those renewables had been competitive, it could have been so different.
The Economist headline today is “Carbon Trading Below Junk Status”. The EU carbon market once was around €22/tCO2 (that was 2008). Australia turned up five years late to the party, and is still trying to trade at similar rates. Today Point Carbon is listing the carbon price as “€2.80“. Obviously, subject to change, and possibly trending-to-zero. [BusinessTimes] “Campaigners and traders warn the carbon price could now fall below 2 euros or even to near zero in the coming weeks, and government sales could fail if they don’t meet minimum price requirements, as banks that act as liquidity providers pull out.”
The EU carbon market is not dead yet, but this could be a game changer[The Economist] The rejection [of the bill to rescue the carbon market] was a surprise. The parliament’s environment committee had looked at the plan in February and approved it by a surprisingly wide margin of 38 votes to 25. As expected, most members of the largest political alliance, the centre-right European People’s Party, voted against the proposal. This was needed, they argued, to protect consumers from higher energy bills. What came as a surprise is the fact that all but four British conservative members of the European Parliament also voted against the plan. In doing so they defied their own government, which has introduced a carbon floor price in Britain that could soon be higher than the European carbon price. And the European Socialists, which had been expected mostly to back the proposals, instead split, with 44 in favour of the plan and 31 against.” Go the Brits! The Economist speculates on whether the proposal might be resurrected (it’s been sent back to the environment committee). It could come back. Though ultimately, the MEP’s would have to change their minds. Since it was an important vote, and practically everyone turned up on the day, that’s a good sign. It might be hard to get any version through. Still, hold the champagne. The vote was 334 to 315. There goes the Australian budget
The next Australian Budget is delivered in May. It was never going to be in surplus anyway was it? [The Australian] LABOR will revise down its carbon tax revenue estimates following a crash in the European carbon market, at a likely multi-billion dollar cost to the federal budget. Five seconds after the price fell, Australian’s started asking why we are paying five times as much. Greg Combet said (effectively) but it’s only for two years. (We all feel so much better then.) [The Australian] Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry economics director Greg Evans described the Australian scheme as “economic recklessness” and said it should be scrapped. Minerals Council of Australia chief executive Mitch Hooke declared the scheme was now “untenable”. Climate Change Minister Greg Combet said the government would revise its forecasts for its carbon price revenue when it delivered the budget in May. Mr Combet said linking with the European scheme was still two years away. A lot could happen in that time, and the Europeans would try other measures to raise their carbon price. … The carbon price will be linked with the EU scheme from July 2015 and the price will float. [or sink — wonders Jo] Opposition Treasury spokesman Joe Hockey said it’s a “$7bn revenue hole”. Henry Ergas estimates $10 billion (and that’s just two financial years). Last year the Australia Treasury predicted by 2015 the carbon price would be $29 a tonne. Gillard can compensate some people, but whatever she does, she can’t compensate The Nation. ——————————– h/t Stefan, Jim Simpson, ces It’s difficult to say anything for sure about Antarctica because the weather is so variable. Bumper snow one year, not so much the next. (Noise and uncertainty is large). But 800 years of ice cores spread across Antarctica shows the Surface Mass Balance (SMB) is more likely to have been increasing over the last century. (Which fits with what Zwally et al found in 2012 with ICESAT satellite data). Note the correlation of the smoothed average of the SMB (orange line) with Total Solar Irradiance (green line).  Antarctic Ice has been increasing for the last half century, and over 800 years it correlates with solar radiation. TSI: Total Solar Irradiance (Click to enlarge) Fig. 5. (A) Mean normalised stacked SMB anomaly time series at the continental scale, calculated as described in the text (black line with positive and negative values filled in with red and blue contours, respectively) and the 40-yr central running average smoothing (orange line). The green line represents the normalised TSI anomalies, and the corresponding ±1 uncertainties are indicated by the green vertical bars. H/t: HockeySchtick and Jaymez
They used 67 firn/ice core records to reconstruct the last 800 years. From this paper we can see:
 Fig. 4. Mean normalised anomalies of the annually resolved SMB time series at continental and regional scales obtained from the time ice core dataset, as described in the text. (A) Number of records from each year in the period from 1200 to 2000 used to calculate the continental (black line, left y-axis), WILKES, DML, and WAIS stacked records (black, blue, green and red lines, respectively, right y-axis). (B) Mean normalised anomalies of the SMB time series at the continental scale. (C) The DML mean normalised anomalies stacked record. (D) The WAIS mean normalised anomalies stacked record. (E) The WAIS mean normalised anomalies stacked record along with the ±1 uncertainty standard deviation (grey-filled contour around each stacked record). The blue- and redfilled rectangles represent periods with negative and positive SMBs at the continental scale, respectively, as described in the text. Solar irradiance seems to matter to AntarcticaHow curious:
As far as we can tell, the Antarctic Ice Sheet (AIS) is growingThe Surface Mass Balance appears to be growing at 2100Gt/year (though this is much higher than the ICESAT satellite estimates of Zwally which estimate a net gain of 49Gt/year.) [UPDATE: ManicBeanCounter, pointed out that if 2100Gt was being shifted from the ocean to the land, it would reduce oceans by 5mm annually. An improbable figure! DumbScientist below helpfully points out that Zwally is using Total Mass Balance, which is different to Surface Mass Balance. The SMB figure involves “precipitation, evaporation and snowdrift physics” but not glacier run-off. Thanks to both readers.]
Climate models predict that snow and ice ought to accumulate over Antarctica and that this will help slow down sea-level rise. Maybe the models are right on this, but there’s no evidence in this data that the current accumulation is different to natural cycles. The summer melt might be faster at the moment, but the accumulation rate is also seemingly at the higher end. If climate scientists want to blame increased CO2 emissions in the last 150 years for the increased ice mass (snow accumulation) and faster summer melt, then how do they explain all the other rises and falls over the last 800 years? Look at the graph below and ponder that all the bumps and falls were natural apparently but that last bump — we’re 90% sure it’s caused by coal power stations. Keep reading → Stephan Lewandowsky’s work is a case study in government funded inanity. Some Australians are sure that burning coal will make storms stronger. Others are not convinced. In November 2012 Lewandowsky’s intellectual contribution to science in Australia was to call the unconvinced “stupid”. If that’s not inane enough, at the same time he claimed that he didn’t recieve funding from any organisation that would benefit from his article. How many taxpayer dollars went towards funding that? No conflict of interest?  Are Australian Research Council funds used as a form of third party advertising for Labor Government policy? Writing in “A storm of Stupidity, Sandy, Evidence and Climate Change” on The Conversation, his reasoning is like this: some scientists reckon that a very bad storm called “Sandy” has “links” to man-made emissions of a trace gas. Lewandowsky reasons that because those scientists are called “experts”, anyone who questions them should be called stupid. (He thinks this article and that tweet were overdue). Though, in a twist, apparently he doesn’t actually think the unconvinced are actually stupid, he thinks they are ethically “disembodied” people who “mislead”. (As an aside, notice how he approves of news articles that call them stupid even though he doesn’t really think they are. Is that a commitment to accuracy, science, and evidence, or a commitment to marketing and PR?) In the end, a government appointed group of “experts” like the Climate Commission, declared that humans made a storm worse, and a government funded psychologist says they’re right and everyone else is dumb (or as good as liars) because they are not convinced we are changing the weather. Note the “Disclosure Statement” next to the “Stupid” headline. “Stephan Lewandowsky
Stephan Lewandowsky does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.”
 The Conversation November 5th, 2012 Stephan Lewandowsky is funded by Australian Research Council Grants (ARC). The ARC is headed by a Labor Party Minister (though you’d have trouble figuring out which one, after Julia Gillard’s emergency reshuffle). The ARC site has a link to a “Minister” which now points at eight ministers. The top dog, probably, is The Hon Craig Emerson. Let the money flowStephan Lewandowsky is a Winthrop Professor according to his CV. UWA tells us that is the highest level of researcher, earning $ 162,396. And that says a lot about standards at UWA, in the School of Psychology, and at the mostly government funded “Conversation” (which got $6 million in grants to get started). Lewandowsky’s name is listed on ARC grants totalling $2 million since 2007. (See here and here). More often, his “Disclosures” simply say he gets money from the ARC and has no commercial interest. No Conflict of Interest?The Australian Labor Party is an organization which has hinged everything on a belief that man-made climate change is a problem worth spending billions on. Their future and status are arguably “improved” if seemingly independent experts write about how smart they are, and how stupid the voters are who disagree with their climate policy. The Labor Party is not funding Lewandowsky directly, but Labor party members are in Government now, and decide what the Australian Government funds. The ARC is “an independent body” whatever “independent” means when the panel appointments, and the size of their funding is determined by the Government (and amount to about $880 million per annum). The ARC mission is to deliver policy and programs that advance Australian research and innovation globally and benefit the community. Note the word “policy”. Fundamentally, Lewandowsky and most academics are reliant on big-government handouts. He scorns the small-government crowd, and thinks they are the blindly driven free-market-people who can’t make rational decisions:
Which only goes to show how little he knows about the free market, and how divided on tribal lines this is. The free market ultimately is what provides the funds for big-government to feed its fans. It’s not perfect, but irrational decisions don’t last long in a competitive market. Yet, here is a Prof of Psychology, apparently unable to see even the potential for a “conflict of interest” in this chain. His entire career depends on big-government, and he thinks he can write quasi-science-opinions that slur opponents of big-government policies and pretend there is no conflict? Blinded by his own ideology perhaps? It’s not a conspiracyI may be called a “Conspiracy Theorist” for pointing out the conflict. But there’s no conspiracy necessary here. I’m suggesting a systematic failure and incompetence on every level. Craig Emerson probably has no idea how badly ARC funds are spent. The ARC may not know either. I seriously don’t think anyone higher up has ever phoned Lewandowsky to ask him to write this kind of fallacious and barren prose. As far as I can tell, he is pursuing his own personal belief rather than being “hired” to do so. The editors of The Conversation didn’t see the inanity, possibly because it’s their personal pet topic too, they are a product of big-government, and they were never trained in logic and reason either. And all of the lack of rigour is funded by the taxpayers of Australia. Layers and layers of sloppy thinking that would never survive in the free market. The real problem here is that someone is responsible for handing hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars to incompetent people, and no one has demanded that Professors of science follow the tenets of science or the laws of reason. Lewandowsky, of course, is welcome to call us stupid deniers if he feels that way, but why is the taxpayer funding this kind of unscientific namecalling? Keep reading → April 15th, 2013 | Tags: Conversation (The), Lewandowsky (Stephan), Storms, The Conversation, Tisdale (Bob) | Category: Global Warming |  Print This Post | | In astrological terms, Jupiter must be passing through my technology zone. Yesterday the web-host was down for 15 hours. Today, my computer collapsed randomly into the blue screen of death. It can be revived, sort of, but the five-year-old-overworked-disc only springs to life for short bursts in between intermittent freezes. It’s been kind, letting me back up. But it doesn’t last — we are now stuck in an infinite degrading loop where it crashes, logs off and restarts, thoroughly error checking the full disc, and an hour later I can do another two minutes work, before the Goto-loop-from-hell starts over. 😐 Sorry to all the people who emailed me today, Robert, Horst, Jennifer and Jim I was about to reply… Tony, Mods, I’m working from a lap top… my brain has shrunk from 2 x 30 inch, to 1 x 15. Please be patient. I don’t think I’ve lost emails, but I can’t see them right now. Five years! The blog-war-horse is gone. 🙁 Donations gratefully received. A newer monster with more memory has been ordered… Right now these self funding academic researcher-analyst-commentators could do with support. Those billion dollar government departments don’t seem be in a hurry to fund people who want sensible policies that reduce your tax-burden. We’ve got our nest-egg packed away with a long term view in a moderately ambitious arrangement — we never want to work for anyone — but until that boat comes in (and it may not) we sure do appreciate your support, so we can keep saying things you want someone to be saying…
**TIP JAR – a number of readers have asked about the tip jar. It is in the top right hand side of the page. Click on that and it will take you to a place you can make a Pay Pal contribution or below that a non Pay Pal or Non Credit Card contribution. Jo is too modest to put this up here, but as one of the moderators I can attest to the incredible amount of work Jo puts in and I can also attest to her lack of big oil or government funding. Any assistance would be greatly appreciated. Thanks to the contributors on behalf of Jo- Mod
UPDATE: Wow! I’ve been out most of the day but what an amazing response! This is all so extremely helpful. I’m humbled. Really. Contributions are still coming in from all over the world. Speechless… this is so useful! A very grateful Jo PS: I want to thank everyone… please be patient. I can’t email easily at the moment… Tic, tic, tic. The sleeping MSM is stirring. Headlines no one could imagine seeing a few years ago are popping up on a regular basis. The backdown is beginning. For those who have not gone-over-the-falls and chained their reputation to a big-Green-rock, there is time to backtrack. This is a good moment to start mentioning that “things have changed.” It’s five years too late, but that’s better than being ten-years-too-late, and it still has a tiny bit of kudos for being ahead of stampede that is coming. The term du jour is “new evidence”. It’s the ticket back to reality, even though strong evidence has been there for a decade, and the lack of warming is just one more clue that the models are wrong. As far as I can tell, Geoffrey Lean is one of the commentators who’s been very much on the side of the global warming drive, but not a zealot. He allowed the odd caveat, he spoke of skeptics, but not of deniers. When the ClimateGate II emails were released, mostly he wrote about how they didn’t matter, were misrepresented, and the science was settled. Even then, there was a small caveat that “disturbing questions” remain, but largely he defended Phil Jones. Right now, he is still saying we need to reduce CO2, but it’s not as urgent as we thought. This is not a U-turn, but a fork in a better direction (with a nice headline). What caused the shift? Lean noted in late December that the UK Met Bureau reduced its forecasts, that there has been a long pause in warming, and he points out here that there are now, increasingly, new lower estimates of climate sensitivity. I would argue that there have been plenty of lower estimates in the past, and that environmental journalists ought to have looked at the skeptical position years ago and interviewed a few key players, or looked at the data directly themselves. The other thing that has changed is that this is the fifth cold winter for the UK, and a few authoritative groups have finally succumbed, acknowledged the “pause” and trimmed their hyperbole. An investigative journalist would have been hunting for the signs this was coming long before it did, rather than waiting for official announcements. But don’t be too hard on Lean, he’s doing a better job than many compatriots. The meme that skeptics do have a point has made it through to a new circle of journalists. Presumably this will only make the religious followers more apoplectic.
Rupert Wyndham is an eloquent treasure. For those who have not already seen this (and I’ve received many emails about it) — Enjoy! — His turn of phrase is something to behold: the damning indictments carefully understated, yet laid bare. That the Royal Society President has been reduced to ad hominem attacks “… demonstrates more clearly than anything else the loss of dignity it has endured and depths of corruption to which it has been reduced under your stewardship and those of your two predecessors. “ — Jo  The Royal Society in better days: Boyle, Newton, Franklin, Jenner, Babbage, Wallace, Lister, Rutherford, Hodgkin, Shackleton. (From The stamp collection). —————————————————————————————————————- 31 March 2013 Sir Paul Nurse, President, The Royal Society 6-9 Carlton House Terrace London SW1Y 5AG
Dear Sir Paul Nurse, Your reply to Lord Lawson dated 8 March has come to hand. It goes without saying that I make no claim to be responding on his behalf; he is more than capable of doing that for himself. Your letter, however, is such a singular juxtaposition of barely suppressed personal antipathy (malice even), blatant mendacity and shameless evasion, especially coming from a person in your position, that comment seems warranted. Nigel Lawson’s letter never “implied that you should not be commenting on climate science” sic. Only a wilfully distorted reading of the words written could possibly have placed such a construction on them. The point of emphasis very plainly was and is that there is no excuse for wanton misrepresentation, either generally or personally. You are then provided with a specific example, which the writer unequivocally and in terms describes as “a lie”. He is, of course, quite right, is he not? And, if he is, what then are you? You write that you ‘understand very well the importance of reliable observation, experiment and consistent rational argument’ sic. Good, and so you should! After all, to borrow Prof. Lindzen’s elegant and succinct definition, “Science is the continuing and opposing dialectic between theory and observation”. In principle, nothing in science is ever “settled”, so long the contra-scientific contention of anthropogenic global warming consensus proselytisers, conspicuously amongst them The Royal Society. Against this backdrop and of your assurance in particular, perhaps you would care then to explain why such propagandists:
April 6th, 2013 | Tags: Ad Hominem, Royal Society (UK), Wyndham (Rupert) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | |  Tim Flannery No wonder Flannery and co. are playing double or nothing. While headlines have shouted for years that vested interests of the fossil fuel players dominate this debate, few journalists point out that the renewables industry, carbon trading markets, and the climate-scary-science-campaign have an all-or-nothing interest in propagating alarm. As I keep saying, those in private business who provide real goods to real voluntary customers will suffer from a carbon tax, but they still have a market. For them it’s a “dent” in profits. We’ll still be buying coal, oil and gas for decades to come. In contrast, those who make a living from government funds could lose everything in an instant. Their wealth and status depends on a forced payment and a decision from one Minister. It is far more ephemeral and subject to whim. The state-dependents are far more desperate. The stakes are higher. Gillard calls the “climate commission” an independent body, which is only true in the same sense that any parasite can be described as “independent” of the host while being completely dependent on it. This shows just how independent and apolitical the Climate Commission reality is:
Bravo Abbott. Without a logical position and empirical evidence, the Climate Commission is an advertising-scheme for a bad ALP policy. I’m sure Flannery sincerely believes he helps, but does the net benefit to the nation exceed the cost? How are those predictions panning out — Anyone want an unused desal. plant? Speaking of Desalination, Flannery sat on the sustainability advisory board of Siemens in 2011, which helps make desal plants (like Perth’s). It also makes wind farms. He is also the Panasonic professor, and a few years ago they held a whopping 40% of the market for rechargeable electric car batteries, and were moving into electric car making. For Panasonic, spending $690,000 on Flannery’s research was much cheaper and more effective than buying prime time advertising to tell Australians how much they need electric cars. After all, the ABC don’t even sell ads, but Flannery speaks unchallenged there. In the end, vested interests are everywhere. Only evidence from our atmosphere tells us which side is right. I’m still asking for that Mystery Paper. Flannery can’t find it. If he stuck to arguing the evidence and providing a service to the Australian people instead of to government gatekeepers, he wouldn’t have so much to fear. Half of Australia pays his salary, but they aren’t convinced humans can change the weather. How does Flannery serve them? He calls them names. Flannery 2011:
A hypocrite on so many levels. Flannery recognizes the power of the fossil fuel lobby (see below), but not the “government grants and junkets lobby”. If people are going to reason-by-vested-interests (which is unscientific) then let them at least be honest about the vested interests on all sides. What is magically pure about government money? Since when was $1 from oil more influential than a $1 from a whimsical government program? Keep reading → Real markets have real customers, who notice when things don’t add up. Fake markets are an invitation to criminals. The state forced payments from citizens for the wrong reasons, to solve a non-problem with the wrong method. In this case, state organized crime meets independent organized crime.
This was not a free market, but a free-for-all.
As far as Italy’s environment and emissions go, we know that it probably makes no difference whether the renewables were actually running or not. But it does matter if a system feeds criminals. They get empowered at the expense of honest people.  The classic hot spot prediction (A) compared to 28 million weatherballoons (B). Click to enlarge. You won’t see this in the new report. It was a major PR failure in 2007. The IPCC won’t make the same mistake again. They’ve dumped the hot-spot graphs. In AR4 they put in two graphs that show how badly their models really do. In the next report they plan to bury the spectacular missing-hot-spot images through “graph-trickery” and selective blindness. Each round of IPCC reports takes the spin-factor up another notch. It’s carefully crafted. See the draft of AR5: Chapter 9: Evaluation of Climate Models It’s hot-spot hidey games and PR tricks In the new extra-tricky AR5 version, the IPCC “quote the critics” and ignore them at the same time. That way they can say they include the McIntyre’s, McKitrick’s, Douglass’, and Christy’s: the words are on the page, but that doesn’t mean the information is used in the conclusions. The models have failed and they bury that undeniable result under the clutter. (You’ll need to read the fine print). There is no acknowledgement that this issue of the “hot spot” drives more amplification of predicted warming in their models than any other point (though that is obvious and implicit in Fig 9.44, and you can see that below). Which policymaker exactly is going to notice that? The IPCC are an abject lesson in how to hide a message in plain sightIn the new report they have dumped their former fingerprint predictions which looked so definitively and technical, but proved to be so wrong. However they will not join-the-dots. They won’t admit this is a major point their models have failed on, instead they flat out deny the results from 28 million weather balloons are conclusive. In a sense, in AR5, the IPCC just throws up its hands and says “yes ok, the models don’t align with the data, but the data might be wrong, and rather than fix those models, we’ll quietly dump that test and the awkward results and pick a different set of inconclusive tests instead. It’s known as shifting the goal-posts. ” It’s what any rational weasel-grade bureaucrat would do if their job and their junkets depended on it. You can hardly blame them… 😐 The art of tricky-graphs: The All New Hot Spot is turned sideways, extended up, and “smallified”The graphs up the top have been split into four bands, screwed sideways, and extended to far higher in the atmosphere. The net effect visually is to minimize the disparity at the point that matters. Only by reading the caption and text, and reams of information, would you figure out that the action occurs in the bulge of the red line in the second graph (that’s the models best shot at the tropics). Compare that to the black line which is what the weather balloons found. I’ve blown it up further below, and removed the clutter. The green line is irrelevant (that’s model predictions without CO2 — which is argument from ignorance with unverified models). The results in the stratosphere are not that important. The water vapor changes at the upper edge of the troposphere are what matters (about 200hpa or 10 km up).  Official caption: Figure 10.7: Observed and simulated zonal mean temperatures trends from 1961 to 2010 for CMIP5 simulations containing both anthropogenic and natural forcings (red), natural forcings only (green) and greenhouse gas forcing only (blue) where the 5 to 95 percentile ranges of the ensembles are shown. Three radiosonde observations are shown (thick black line: HadAT2, thin black line: RAOBCORE 1.5, dark grey band : RICH-obs 1.5 ensemble and light grey: RICH- τ 1.5 ensemble. After (Lott et al., 2012). See the second graph on the left up, expanded close on the right below.  Close up of the second graph of Fig 10.7 (see caption above). How do you say “we have no evidence” without saying it — like this: “In many cases, the lack of long term observations, observations suitable for the evaluation of important processes, or observations in particular regions (e.g., polar areas, the upper troposphere / lower stratosphere (UTLS), and the deep ocean) remains an impediment.” Blame the equipment. They have fifty years of data and millions of results. This is the money statement: In summary, there is high confidence (robust evidence although only medium agreement) that most, though not all, CMIP3 and CMIP5 models overestimate the warming trend in the tropical troposphere during the satellite period 1979–2011. The cause of this bias remains elusive. What they don’t say is that this point on its own is responsible for half the warming projected in the models, and hence that after twenty years of trying to reconcile the models and observations it’s past time they turfed the models and trashed the assumption that humidity will cause monster positive feedback. Forget the projections of 6 degrees of hell, the best estimate would be half the current one (or less) and we can all go home. Is water vapor feedback critical?Is your skeptical brain wondering if I’ve got that point right about the positive feedback being so large? Remember it’s the IPCC that says without feedbacks CO2 will only cause 1.2C of warming.1,2 It’s the feedbacks that drive all the scary projections above that. Then gaze upon the graph below, 9.44. Spot the largest single feedback, one so big, it’s almost as large as “total feedbacks”. That would be “WV” or water vapor. This is almost the same graph as it was in AR4 – see Fig 8.14, on page 631.2 This is central to maintaining the scare.  Figure 9.44: a) Feedback parameters for CMIP3 and CMIP5 models (left and right columns of symbols) for water vapour (WV), clouds (C), albedo (A), lapse rate (LR), combination of water vapour and lapse rate (WV+LR), and sum of all feedbacks (ALL) updated from Soden and Held (2006). CMIP5 feedbacks are derived from CMIP5 simulations for abrupt four-fold increases in CO2 concentrations (4 × CO2). For the die-hard IPCC interpreters, here is the full “Fifth Assessment Report” section where they discuss the pesky discrepancy that the whole crisis hinges upon. Keep reading → April 2nd, 2013 | Tags: 5AR (Fifth Assessment Rep), Hot Spot, IPCC, Missing Hot Spot, Predictions (that went wrong), Water Vapor | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | This is the Easter Spirit! Gotta love it. The MoonLanding paper is finally here. Eight months after Lewandowsky was so sure he had a “peer reviewed” conclusion that he announced his results in The Guardian and The Telegraph , the paper has finally been published. Lewandowsky et al claimed to show skeptics are nutters who believe any rabid conspiracy like the “moon-landing was faked”. Their novel method for discovering the views of skeptics involved surveying sites frequented by those who hate skeptics. The survey questions included conspiracies likely to appeal to a small percentage of conservative or free market thinkers, and largely left out conspiracies that would appeal more to supporters of bigger government (like the idea that the rise of “climate denial” was a big-oil funded conspiracy). It studied big-government conspiracies and ignored big-corporate ones. There are gullible conspiracists who also believe in global warming, but there was no danger this survey would find them. The survey bias was so obvious, even alarmist commenters said they feared few “denialists” would take it. The results that were headlined in newspapers were based on a tiny sample of ten respondents to an anonymous online survey. Not surprisingly Lewandowsky’s university (UWA) received many complaints about ethics, methods, and the dismal quality of the data, and bloggers had a field day shredding the paper. In response, the Australian Research Council awarded Lewandowsky et al another $338,000. Just where do their priorities lie? The paper was delayed. The typesetting oddly took 8 months, and includes a new key point. To answer the rabid critics, Lewandowsky needed to show that that many real skeptics did fill out the survey. The evidence for that apparently relies on Cook’s site (the ambush-labelled “Skepticalscience”). Lewandowky et al now effectively claims skeptics really were reading Cook’s site and lots of them did the survey there. How 78,000 equals zeroLewandowsky et al go out on a limb to say skeptics may have made 78,000 visits that month and could have seen that survey link (if only there had been one there):
But, as Barry Woods and DHG both discovered and Geoff Chambers pursued relentlessly, it appears no link was ever posted on SkepticalScience. Steve McIntyre points out the total number of skeptics doing the survey on Cook’s site can thus be ascertained — and it is exactly zero. It’s hard to believe any scientist would think they would get away with this. The paper will surely have to be withdrawn. (But will the government funding be withdrawn? The Australian Research Council (ARC) needs to answer some very awkward questions.) Here’s a study in dishonestyFOI documents obtained by Simon Turnill show that Cook didn’t post the link at all, he tweeted it (how many people were on his twitter list in 2010?). You might think this is a minor change, but not at all. Cook’s tweet probably didn’t get the “390,000 visits” his site might have got that month. Instead the records show he got five retweets. More importantly, above all else, Cook has been untruthful with his readers and with skeptics all along. Like a five year old explaining where the cookies went, his story keeps changing as Woods and especially Chambers pin him down. Back in September last year, Lewandowsky said eight sites hosted the survey and Cook’s site was one, but strangely no one could find a link on SkepticalScience. Cook then said he hosted it in 2011. But it wasn’t there either. Cook apologized, and said it was 2010. When Chambers pressed on for evidence, Cook and the moderators stopped the questions and insisted it go private. Cook emailed Chambers, saying he couldn’t add much more. Chambers wanted the comments from the discussion of the survey at Cook’s site because the comments on other sites where the survey were hosted revealed the thoughts of the people most likely to have done the survey. Strangely the post and all the comments had been deleted. [Read the whole exchange at Climate Audit]. It’s odd for a whole post to disappear, but even odder when the post is then quoted in a peer reviewed study. Cook repeated that he had provided a link to the survey, but Chambers could find no record of it in the Wayback Machine either. Cook then suggested that he had “forensic evidence” — an email from Lewandowsky asking Cook to post the link, and Cook’s reply that he posted it the same day. What Cook wasn’t saying but must have known (since he checked his email records), was that his emails forensically showed that Cook tweeted the link. The tweet by Cook, that Barry Woods and DHG both found, is online here on August 27, 2010. The Wayback Machine recorded Skepticalscience on August 30, 2010 — and there was no post. Nor was there a post about a survey in the following week either. So it appears unequivocal, as much as anyone bar John Cook can tell, that SkepticalScience did not host the survey. McIntyre asked Cook to explain:
Cook did not respond. If Cook did post that survey long enough for anyone to comment on it, he would probably have a record of the comments made even after deleting the post. Where are they? The “smart” thing for Cook to have done at this point was to make sure the published paper was corrected to “seven sites” and not eight, and did not rely on the link at his site which no one can find. He and Lewandowsky both must have been aware that skeptics knew. It speaks volumes that Lewandowsky and Cook cited a post on Climate Audit (Steve McIntryre’s site) about this point in their second “conspiracy paper” called Recursive Fury, so they knew that they were wrong, and that skeptics knew that too. Despite this, they still went ahead and published the revamped edition of the Moon Landing paper with the misleading information in it. To the skeptics who suggest that Lewandowsky or Cook planned the first paper to fish for comments to use in a second paper, I say not a chance. They just aren’t that competent. They struggle from one gaffe to the next. As Skiphil notes, Lewandowsky expects skeptics to keep two year old emails from unknown assistants at a university they may never have heard of, but he doesn’t expect his own co-authors to keep posts up displaying supposedly “scientific” surveys with results that are used in his papers. Their incompetence will hurt the reputation of Psychological Science and Frontiers, if they do not take quick action, as well as the University of Western Australia, the School of Psychology, the University of Queensland and the ARC. The strategy here appears to be double or nothing. March 29th, 2013 | Tags: Conspiracy Theorist, Cook (John), Lewandowsky (Stephan), SkepticalScience (debunking) | Category: Global Warming | Print This Post | | The Risk Monger (David Zaruk) was astonished to receive an advertisement from the Dutch government looking for 60 young PhD students to help with the next Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report. They salary is “none”. But they are not just looking for any old student. You don’t need experience, but to qualify you need “an affinity with climate change”. I guess they are not looking for skeptical students who feel an affinity with logic, reason, and empirical evidence? The reasons for asking the unpaid students is actually described as an “ambitious plan” to do a “thorough review” because there were “errors in the fourth assessment report…”. O.K. The Risk Monger:
Now don’t get me wrong, I’m the one who says there are no Gods in Science, and scientific truth lies in evidence and reasoning, not in qualifications — perhaps an unpaid student will straighten out the IPCC and stop them from making more embarrassing mistakes? But note the contradiction that hiring unpaid students provides compared with the IPCC promotion that they only use expert peer review. No doubt the students work will be checked and overseen with a leading top climate expert with decades of experience (but then a government appointee will re-write their conclusions anyway). This expedition appears to be more about fishing and training up-and-coming PhD’s rather than the IPCC running out of money. We all know that newly graduated PhD’s are sometimes the best at rewriting history and producing hockeysticks to fit the policy. The PDF of the letter to students Richard Betts (the IPCC Lead Author that Lewandowsky mistakenly thought suffered from “conspiracist ideation”) points out that technically anyone can review an IPCC report, which is true. You can apply too.
If the Greens cared about CO2 they’d be very interested in ways to reduce emissions. But their selective interest speaks volumes about their real priorities. Anton Lang shows how newer coal fired powers stations run hotter and at higher pressures, and use 15% less coal to produce the same amount of electricity. We could upgrade our power stations and cut a whopping 15% of their emissions — which is huge compared to the piddling small, often unmeasureable savings thanks to renewables. Even massive floods that stop industry don’t reduce our emissions as much as this would. Do the Greens hate the coal industry more than “carbon pollution”? — Jo ———————————————————– Ultra Super Critical Coal Fired Power gives a 15% CO2 Emissions ReductionGuest Post: Anton Lang (aka TonyfromOz) It all comes down to steam. Assume (for a moment) that we have to reduce the emissions of CO2 by something like 20% between now and 2020. Previously I showed we could achieve a reduction of 13% in CO2 emissions from the electrical power generating sector just by converting from the current 70’s technology coal fired power to the newest technology USC (UltraSuperCritical) coal fired technology. That 13% I quoted at the time was theoretical, but in China over the last three years the emissions reduction of new USC plants is even better, around 15% to 17%. This is off-the-shelf technology that handles base-load, produces cheap electricity, and reduces emissions.  USC 1000MW unit at Shanghai Waigaoqiao III Power Plant
The data comes from this link to Shanghai Electric, about a number of plants now in operation for more than three years. Smaller plants of 100MW and less from the 70’s show emissions at 339 grams per KWH delivered. For large scale older plants, emissions are 330 grams per KWH delivered (similar to all (black) coal fired plants in Australia). For this new USC technology, emissions are down to 282 grams per KWH delivered. Based on the large scale 70’s units, these new USC type plants consume 15% less coal, hence emitting 15% less CO2 per unit of delivered energy. For a typical large scale 2000MW+ coal fired plant, that means a savings of 2.6 Million tons of CO2 per year. How does USC make coal burning more efficient?The most efficient rotors in a power station are enormous. The rotor in 660MW generator could weigh anything up to 600 tons or more, and that huge weight has to be driven at 3000RPM (for 50Hz power — in the U.S. it is 3600RPM, for 60Hz power). That’s rotating that huge weight at 50 times a second. A typical large scale coal fired plant will have up to four generators, each capable of generating between 500 and 660MW. For a typical 70’s technology generator, that 660MW is the largest power rating currently in use. It takes a lot of energy to turn something so incredibly heavy at such an extraordinary speed. It’s all depends on steam. The rotor is the critical part, and more wire loops means more electricity. If you pass a wire capable of carrying an electric current through a magnetic field then a current will be induced to flow along that wire. You will get a larger electromotive force, and thus a larger current flow, if you scale everything up. More wire will give us more current and more power, but then the rotor is harder to push through the magnetic field. Likewise, stronger magnetic fields or higher speeds of rotation also give more power. So in a sense, the heavier the better. Place a number of magnetic poles around a shaft, cool the area so the magnetic field is stronger, and wrap those poles in current carrying wire to further intensify the magnetic field. Then add series of these poles along the shaft, and rotate all that at high speed. This is the rotor of a typical generator (in actual fact, a turbo alternator). This high speed rotor then induces power into the stator, huge amounts of wire wrapped in a shell around, but not touching the spinning rotor. To turn the rotor we need a very large multi stage turbine. To drive that turbine, we need a huge amount of high temperature, high pressure steam. Coal is what boils the water to make that steam. What makes USC different is the huge amount of high temperature and high pressure steam it can produce. UltraSuperCritical. What does that mean?The critical point of water occurs at 374C at a pressure of 22.1 MPa (3,208 psi), where liquid water and steam become indistinguishable. Above that point (Super Critical and USC), the water does not need to boil to produce steam. So, not only do you need less coal to make that steam, you now also have a saving in water use as well, as it does not need to boil. The USC units currently in use in China are operating at 600C and 27MPa. In fact China is actively working towards advanced USC, with temperatures above 700C in the range of 760C. Like the U.S., Japan, South Korea and Germany, China have now all but perfected the technology. Originally it was imported, and in cooperation with non Chinese companies, but they are now proceeding on their own. China has already got to the stage where they have a number of plants with units driving 1000MW generators, the first to do so. They are further working towards generators with a capacities of 1200MW and even 1350MW, levels previously thought unattainable even with large scale nuclear power. This graph shows the steady improvement in electrical power generation. Note the top black line (the MegaWatts size of the plant) is not linear. People were building plants in the 1950’s of 5 – 10 MW. Now we’re building 1000MW plants.  Development of Thermal Power Generation Technology in China – from USC Technology In China shown on Page 18 (pdf document) Source: USC Technology In China (pdf) Australian power is mostly coal, and mostly old and inefficient
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The EU is a basket-case, teetering, so when the European Parliament had the chance to “fix” the carbon market yesterday, they surprised everyone and chose not to. Being unfixed, it’s free to collapse, which it did and by 40%.
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