May 20, 2008
Category: climate economics
Ha. Now you know I really have gone over to the Dark Side. Prompted by British funds back Rockefellers' green rebellion to bring in new ExxonMobil chairman. The complaint appears to be that The firm has refused to follow rival oil companies in committing large-scale capital investment to environmentally friendly technology... Exxon maintains that present green technologies are not financially viable. But critics fear that the company's reluctance to explore alternative energy will prove to be bad business judgment in the long run as rivals such as BP seek to capture public affection by re-branding themselves as environmentally sensitive enterprises... The Rockefellers point out that Exxon has $25bn (£13bn) of capital investment planned in carbon-based fuel but its environmental commitment is centred on $100m to fund a Stanford University project on climate change.
So: take for a moment the position that Exxon is the Dark Side and has been obstructive over climate change. I still don't see why it should be expected to invest in renewables (the quote above suggests that it should do so for PR purposes; well, I imagine they have considered that. Its hardly the moral high grounds, though). Exxon an oil company. It knows f*ck all about wind turbines. A company that specialised in renewable energy could spend research money more effectively than Exxon could. If the market decides that renewables will offer a better return than Exxon shares, people will sell said shares and invest them in renewables. At the moment thats not happening, for obvious reasons.
[Update: I've had various interesting replies, see the comments. To pick out a few:
Given that oil isn't going to last a whole heck of a lot longer, would not a good business strategy be to start investing in some form of renewable energy? Possibly. But now you're framing this as a pure business question. They understand their business better than you or I do.
For the same reason that Ford and GM should have looked in at ?environmental? cars earlier to cling on to the top of the market I don't think this is a fair comparison. Green cars are just different types of cars; car makers already have the expertise. Switching from oil to windmills or solar is utterly different. Even biofuels is a stretch (and is anyway a disaster area; I bet if Exxon were doing biofuels they'd be being slammed for it).
Nobody right now is the Exxon/General Motors of solar and wind. Exxon isn't at a disadvantage in investing in those fields True, but nor is it at an *advantage*.
-W]
Posted by William M. Connolley at 4:30 PM • 20 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate fuels
Originally this was going to be about politics, and the answer was going to be "not as much as his poll ratings suggest". But then I found a speech on Opec/Oil and the answer has to be, "yes he's crap". On so many levels.
He sez: Gordon Brown yesterday signalled a new determination to defend Britain's hard-pressed consumers and motorists when he denounced the oil cartel Opec as a scandal and called for the EU and the G8 to break down its control, saying it was holding back the development of the world economy. This is just stupid playing to the gallery. No-one believes that Broon is going to do anything about Opec, because he can't. It is, as people will recognise, a scandal that 40% of the oil is controlled by Opec. So what are we going to do? Wrest control of it from them - by invading them? No, that doesn't sound like a good idea. By installing our own pet dictators? Hmm, maybe not. By making speeches? Umm.
But, returning to climate, Broon seems to have forgotten that we are supposed to be cutting our carbon emissions. He is, in theory, all signed up to that. Of course, as soon as that starts to cost money all that gets blown to the winds, which is one reason why he is crap. The reason that the oil price is high is that the world is using a lot of it. Increasing the supply would mean that we would use more. We're supposed to be using less. Increasing the price sends a strong signal to use less, and from that point of view is good.
The other reason this is all stupid is that oil is at $127 a barrel. Anyone who can pump more out probably is.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 4:18 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 17, 2008
Category: misc
Cycling back from town yesterday, I saw: in a chestnut tree of moderate height in the middle of an open field miles from the river, a heron. And three crows flying at it, "dive bombing" it is tempting to say although their flight was mostly level. They were trying to drive it away, I suppose, and the heron kept turning to face them, but as far as I could see they never touched it. After perhaps 5 minutes they gave up. And a minute later the heron flew off.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 4:51 AM • 13 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 15, 2008
Category: misc
I love the language and thought in Leviathan:
Feare of power invisible, feigned by the mind, or imagined from tales publicly allowed, RELIGION; not allowed, SUPERSTITION. And when the power imagined is truly such as we imagine, TRUE RELIGION.
Concision acheived by cogitation; so different to the ill-thought out ramblings on blogs.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 6:37 PM • 3 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate communication
Grauniad again, of course:. Its obvious b*ll*cks, at least as measured by my own experience: most of the damage is caused by roads, buildings, farming practices, and so on. Can it really be true that 90% of env damage is due to T change?
Probably not. The source appears to be Attributing physical and biological impacts to anthropogenic climate change in Nature. To quote the abstract:
Significant changes in physical and biological systems are occurring on all continents and in most oceans, with a concentration of available data in Europe and North America. Most of these changes are in the direction expected with warming temperature. Here we show that these changes in natural systems since at least 1970 are occurring in regions of observed temperature increases, and that these temperature increases at continental scales cannot be explained by natural climate variations alone. Given the conclusions from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Fourth Assessment Report that most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-twentieth century is very likely to be due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations, and furthermore that it is likely that there has been significant anthropogenic warming over the past 50 years averaged over each continent except Antarctica, we conclude that anthropogenic climate change is having a significant impact on physical and biological systems globally and in some continents.
The Grauniad continues In 90% of cases the shifts in wildlife behaviour and populations could only be explained by global warming, while 95% of environmental changes, such as melting permafrost, retreating glaciers and changes in river flows were consistent with rising temperatures. So (and here I'm guessing) that the studies authors are only looking changes not already explained by, say, building. And that the study is looking at "changes" and the Grauniad has assumed that they are all "damage". Ho hum.
And now, back to your scheduled train wreck, in which we cheer on John V's bold attempt to pin RP down to something - or indeed, anything. Or just skip straight to JA.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 5:46 PM • 12 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 14, 2008
Category: climate snarking
Lucia lost the plot some time ago, mostly by cherry-picking her time period, using a weird data-fitting method and failing to understand what she was looking at. Now RP Jr follows her down the rabbett hole and bizarrely describes her post as "clear". Well, when people are telling you what you want to hear you're apt to approve.
As usual, you're better off avin a larf with James . Though if you're tired of slapstick, maybe reading the truth at RC would be more useful. I prefer bluetooth myself nowadays :-)
[Update: it gets worse. Roger is losing his temper, and unfortunately hasn't found somone to ask about stats. Although in fact its not really a stats question, its a climate modelling question.You can't compare the trends from different model realisations with 5 different estimates of the same observational period. To try to understand this, suppose all 5 obs estimates were really really close together - they could be, if all the methods were near equivalent. Then the SD would be very small. But the models, because they aren't simulating the same real years, will maintain a large spread. Their statistics will be different, and unknowing black boxes will declare them different -W]
Posted by William M. Connolley at 6:05 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 8, 2008
Category: climate betting
The summary of betting on sea ice refers. If you look in my comments, you'll find any number of well intentioned people advising me that its time to close up the bets before I take a bath. But I haven't. Anyone wanting to pile in is still welcome (if you can't be bothered to look up the previous post the bet is simple: will this years Arctic sea ice extent minimum, as measured by the satellites, be less than last year? I say no).
The May 5th version of "Arctic sea ice news and analysis" provides some more fodder. I've ripped off a pic from them which I like. To me, it rather suggests no record this year. They somehow convince themselves that it does suggest a min. Hey ho, we'll find out in a few months. Their section on "Estimating September extent based on past conditions" is cute. I like it; its a nice idea. Totally lacking, of course, is how would this idae have fared if applied last year, or the year before, or...
My personal opinion remains that we simply can't forecast year-to-year variations with any degree of reliability. The long-term trend is clearly downwards, and there will be a new record sometime. But based purely on the behaviour of the sea-ice extent timeseries I still consider that new record this year is less than 50% likely. I also wonder if people aren't in some danger of getting a teensy bit carried away publishing these "forecasts" which they don't really believe. They are speculative prognosticaions, no more.
Andy Revkin (its him again!) covers this. In the comments, Bill Chapman is reported to say "I say the odds favor a new NH record minimum - put my money there." I've replied (#40) but haven't heard from him... I must give him an email.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 6:03 PM • 14 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
Category: climate betting
As I said before, I don't think much of the latest prediction of cooling. But apparently , the authors take it seriously, and believe it as a prediction (pers comm). So RC has decided to see if they are serious. My expectation is that they will find some spurious excuse for wimping out (I've offered to put up $100 on the bet not being taken, with me paying out if it is taken; any offers?).
Andy Revkin covers this. The only complaint I have is that JA is being airbrushed out of the picture. Such is life.
Coming soon: betting on sea ice.
[Update: I *can* spell climate -W]
Posted by William M. Connolley at 5:17 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 3, 2008
Category: fun
"Next to Al Gore, William Connolley may be the world's most influential person in the global warming debate...". It would be nice; sadly its only the opinion of Lawrence Solomon, who is, errrrm, not very well informed.
LS's attempts to make sense of the innards of wikipedia are quite funny, for an insider - his confusion of KDP with Tabletop, for example. But I suspect thats rather in humour. If you'd like some more, then the list of cabals is good, as is WP:GIANTDICK, which for bonus points seems to be subject to a minor edit war: Replacing Nixon with a nuclear missile is a fine edit comment. And for weirdness, WP:SPIDER is worth a look.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 4:35 PM • 17 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
May 1, 2008
Category: climate science
All the blogosphere is abuzz with Advancing decadal-scale climate prediction in the North Atlantic sector. I don't have much to say that JA hasn't already said. But that isn't going to stop me saying it.
Firstly they've done something very odd with the reference model data in fig 4. The std IPCC projections would be right on their obs verification (which stops in 1998 for some bizarre reason) and their "forecast" would be even more obviously an outlier. I assume that the black line on fig 4 must be their own model. Looking again, I'm really rather baffled how this can possibly be anything useful, because their model so obviously goes wrong after 1995.
Secondly, the Torygraph quotes them as saying Noel Keenlyside of the Leibniz Institute of Marine Sciences, Kiel, Germany, said: "The IPCC would predict a 0.3°C warming over the next decade. Our prediction is that there will be no warming until 2015 but it will pick up after that." No, thats not what the IPCC "predicts", and no, no-warming is not what your own model predicts. Just look at your own figure 4, you dolt. It quite clearly shows warming from 2005 to 2015.
Maybe we should read their own press release, entitled "Improved climate predictions suggest a reduced warming trend during the next 10 years" to which the obvious rejoinder is "in what sense, improved?" - in the sense that it got them into Nature? They say To date climate change projections, as published in the last IPCC report, only considered changes in future atmospheric composition. This strategy is appropriate for long-term changes in climate such as predictions for the end of the century. However, in order to predict short-term developments over the next decade, models need additional information on natural climate variations, in particular associated with ocean currents
Whats weird here is there total lack of reference to Smith et al. Or maybe it isn't so surprising. Smith et al have already done what they've done, except better. Mind you, it was published in Science, and the me-too effect may account for why this has got into Nature. Presumably the passing reference to assimilating ocean currents justifies their novelty; otherwsie they would have mentioned SSTs.
They go on The improved predictions suggest that global warming will weaken slightly during the following 10 years but their own figure 4 shows no such thing! (but its better than the no-warming-till-2015 junk that the lead author is quoted as saying). Connect the dots from 2005-2015 and you end up with 0.2 oC/decade, which is fairly standard. Maybe the annual data shows different, but they don't show that. Why are people lapping this stuff up without even comparing the words to the figures?
Conclusion: this appears to be a mildly interesting study, which may have some slight novelty although not much. But it looks to me like the obvious model flaws mean that it doesn't tell you anything useful about the real world, and it shouldn't be getting the publicity that it is.
[Update: well, it made R4 at 10 o'clock. They had that David King on. Sigh. Fairly clear that he'd read the press release but not the paper, and fell into the obvious holes -W]
Posted by William M. Connolley at 3:33 PM • 21 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 28, 2008
Category: climate economics
"Tesco to put carbon scores on goods" says The Torygraph. Sounds like a good idea in principle. Do go on ...The labels - which will be put on 30 products, including tomatoes, potatoes, orange juice, light bulbs and washing detergent - will detail how many grams of CO2 were created in their production, packaging, distribution and disposal. Well, that still sounds good. Whats the downside?
However, the scheme has come under fire from rival retailers, consumer groups and academics, who say shoppers - already bombarded by complex information on packaging - will be further confused. Hmmm. Sounds like typical whinging. Paul Monaghan, the head of ethics at the Co-operative group, said: "It is unfair to put the burden on to the consumer. "It should be up to retailers to use the information to lower their emissions." Sounds barking. If people will avoid higher-carbon stuff, then good. They need the information to do so, though. Hopefully the info will be reliable, though I'm not sure how that will be established. Hopefully also Waitrose will start doing this.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 5:08 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 22, 2008
Category: misc
Monday: to The Junction, that singularly unappealing Cambridge venue, for Bellowhead who were superb. You can find them on Youtube but its not the same as watching them live. They're on UK tour now...
If you're in Cambridge and that way inclined, on wednesday you can hear John Otway and Wild Willy Barrett. I've heard Wild Willy at the folk fest and he was superb and bizarre. Strongly recommended, I'd go but I have an outing. Read this.
Posted by William M. Connolley at 6:14 PM • 4 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 19, 2008
Category: climate snarking
Says the FT, via DSB. Since I've already argued that Stern is over-bleak, Im surprised he has got more pessimistic. Whats up?
Read on »
Posted by William M. Connolley at 5:04 PM • 9 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 16, 2008
Category: climate snarking
Just a provocative title, to point you towards I accept Bill Gray's climate bet offer - will he seal the deal? by Brian Schmidt. My feeling is that Gray will wimp out - I'll even put money on it if anyone is interested :-)
Posted by William M. Connolley at 5:42 PM • 7 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 15, 2008
Category: climate snarking
1.5 m sea level rise this century, that is. Nature sez the "estimate released today says that it could be as as much as 1.5 metres (4.9 feet) by the end of this century". Their source seems to be Reuters, and we'll pause briefly to condemn the oh-so-typical inflation of the worst case from the range into the only number mentioned in the headline. Sigh.
Read on »
Posted by William M. Connolley at 4:45 PM • 18 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
April 13, 2008
Category: fun
Do you realise that bufapopo doesn't get a single google hit? Its outrageous. Badger would be appalled.
[Seems pretty clear that youre not going to get it, so I'll have to tell you. Read on...]
Read on »
Posted by William M. Connolley at 5:40 PM • 5 Comments • 0 TrackBacks
I am a Dragon. I emerge from my Egg. 
