Interviewed by Nick Ferrari on LBC radio this morning, Natalie tells Nick she’s going to build 500,000 social homes. Nick asks how much it’ll cost. Natalie shuffles her feet, coughs, feigns a severe cold, and then says costings will be done, but won’t appear in the manifesto. 3 mins audio. Enjoy.
And from the archives, footage I shot as I went to meet Benny Peiser a couple of year ago:
UPDATE: This post mistook the upper curve for CO2 in the figure 4 from Callendar’s paper, cropped by the Guy Callendar twitter account. It is actually 5yr smoothed temperature, as pointed out by commenter ‘berniel’ in comments. So the apparent ~2.5yr lag between the upper and lower curve is due to the smoothing of the temperature data. This doesn’t change the fact that CO2 lags temperature at all timescales, but does invalidate the analysis in this article.
Back in 1938, Guy Callendar wrote a paper “The artificial production of CO2 & its influence on temperature”. In it is a figure showing how they both rose in the early C20th. MET office PR man Richard Betts retweeted the Guy Callendar twitter account this morning.
My 1938 paper demonstrated that the Earth had warmed over the previous 50 years & that CO2 was partly responsible pic.twitter.com/AaDoA2oJLD
— Guy Callendar (@GuyCallendar) February 16, 2015
Unlike more modern misrepresentations given by climate scientists, which spuriously splice the instrumental record from 1950 onto ice core records (with a large temporal mismatch), Callendar uses actual empirical measurements of airborne CO2. His data reveals something sceptics have frequently pointed up: Temperature changes lead CO2 changes. Check my annotation to Callendar’s plot below the break.
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The BBC is trumpeting a joint statement by David Cameron, Ed Milliband and Nick Clegg which spells economic doom for the UK. If ever there was a good reason to vote on May 7th for the only party committed to scrapping wind farm subsidy and nonsense ‘climate targets’, this is it.
The three stooges write Britains economic suicide note.
The battle lines are drawn for me now. Energy policy is an important element in my campaign platform. Let’s take apart the statement’s key bullet points and assertions below the break.
Image: Sparkle Motion under CC
“We have not seen such levels of gas in Iceland in recent times, not since the Laki eruption in 1783,” said Evgenia Ilyinskaya, a volcanologist with the British Geological Survey studying the Holuhraun emissions.
Wonder what instruments were used 200 years ago?
— AlJazeera article, raises fears.. volcanos, it’s what they do.
Reposted from the Climate Sceptic Party. H/T the Hockey Schtick
How did many usually sensible experts get “GLOBAL WARMING” so very wrong?
VERY SIMPLE…..
Oops! One wrong equation caused the climate scare!
RED FACES all around among the profiteers of doom. A wrong equation that falsely triples the tiny direct warming caused by doubling CO2 concentration has been discovered and exposed in a major peer-reviewed paper just published in the Science Bulletin of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (LINK – pdf), one of the world’s top peer review science journals.
No rogue equation means no climate crisis.
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Caught on video, the total collapse of yet another wind turbine. The original facebook video is here. I have saved a copy.
Guest post from Ed Hoskins
A comparison of both the Capital Cost and Energy Production Effectiveness of the Renewable Energy in Europe.
The diagrams and table below collate the cost and capacity factors of Renewable Energy power sources, Onshore and Off-shore Wind Farms and Large scale Photovoltaic Solar generation, compared to the cost and output capacity of conventional Gas Fired Electricity generation.
The associated base data is shown below:
From the Yorkshire Post, UKIP MP Doug Carswell on the reasons behind big fuel bike price hikes:
GOVERNMENT energy policy, put in place by Ministers of all three established parties, is pricing people out of being able to heat their own homes.
The cosy consensus over energy policy here in Westminster is squeezing living standards across the country. According to the index of domestic fuel and light prices, helpfully reproduced by the House of Commons Library, prices have changed fairly dramatically over the past 40 years.
From the early 1980s through to the early noughties, there was a slow, gradual fall in prices; it was a 20-year period of customers getting what they tend to get in a free market, capitalist economy – more for less.
Suddenly and dramatically, that picture changed in the early noughties. Since then we have seen a rapid rise in prices – sharper, indeed, than that experienced during either of the two oil shocks of the 1970s.
Dual-fuel household energy bills in 2014 for the average home are forecast to be almost £1,400. That represents a real-terms price increase of over 50 per cent in a decade during which average household incomes stagnated.
De Bilt reports on yet another serious turbine failure. This time the 100m structure folded at a weld line some 30m off the ground. This is of great concern. Whereas most catastrophic failures are due to installation errors at the base bolts, this is a problem with the specification or execution of the construction of the monocoque structure – the main tower.
There’s a fundamental problem here. When steel is welded, the structure of the material either side of the joint, and the weld itself is different to the rolled steel sheet. This inevitably creates a location where stress gets concentrated more as the structure ages.
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Guest post from Talkshop regular Doug Proctor
The Draft Decision coming out of the Lima, Conference of the Parties (COP20) meetings of 01-12 December 2014 is now available. The summary is only 4 pages long (the fifth is a blank Annex). It is short but an interesting read for what it doesn’t demonstrate: a commitment to create binding commitments with respect to either CO2 emissions or adaptation maneuvers for anyone on anything up to and, it would appear, including, the upcoming December 2015 meeting in Paris.
The draft was created as a series of semi-bullet points, though instead of “bullets” it uses action words to signify decisions made by the 195 Parties to the conference. But we should not be deceived that the action words mean “action” in the common sense of “doing something”. These are more intellectual action words, like “affirming”, “noting”, “confirming” etc. In effect, “We agree to keep talking about the subject, even perhaps around the subject, but we do not agree to step up and start doing anything related to the subject of CO2 emissions”. This can be construed as a cynical interpretation, but I argue (below) that a close read says it is not.
Nice Freudian slip from Suzanne Goldenberg, or Grauniad typo? You decide.
Repost from Roger Pielke Sr’s weblog. Important this isn’t lost, because it shows a fatal error in Schmidt and Benestad’s paper. A paper still relied on by the IPCC in AR5 to dismiss solar forcing as an important climate variable, five years after Nicola demolished it. Benestad and Schmidt claim they successfully rebutted Scafetta’s exposure of their fatal error, something Scafetta vigorously disproved. We’ll take a look at that part of the controversy later.
Roger Pielke Sr’s original intro:
On July 22 2009 I posted on the new paper on solar forcing by Lean and Rind 2009. In that post, I also referred to the Benestad and Schmidt 2009 paper on solar forcing which has a conclusion at variance to that in the Lean and Rind paper.
After the publication of my post, Nicola Scafetta asked if he could present a comment (as a guest weblog) on the Benestad and Schmidt paper on my website, since it will take several months for his comment to make it through the review process. In the interests of presenting the perspectives on the issue of solar climate forcing, Nicola’s post appears below. I also invite Benestad and Schmidt to write responses to the Scaftta contribution which I would be glad to post on my website.
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Poor old Michael Mann is trying to offload copies of his fantasy novel about how he beat Steve McIntyre. I suspect our readers might have other ideas about where it should be stuffed rather than in a Christmas stocking. Only one retweet in the last 2 hours… I thought we should help him along a bit.
Ed Miliband has set out his stall at last. Now we know what his priorities are if he is elected as prime minister.
From the Standard
The environment may not be as fashionable an issue now as it was when David Cameron attached a wind turbine to his house. But I believe tackling climate change is the most important thing I can do in politics for the long-term future of my kids and their generation.
I will not leave those principles behind at the door to Downing Street. That is the choice the country will face at the next election: a Conservative government that … makes Britain a laggard on climate change, or a Labour government that leads.
So there you have it. By conflating ‘the environment’ with ‘global warming’, Ed Miliband hopes to hoodwink the British public into supporting his rich mates in their quest to rob us into poverty and ruin the country’s economy with the international wealth redistribution scheme which masquerades as ‘climate action’.
Drinking water airlifted to Maldives’ capital India and Sri Lanka have airlifted drinking water to the Maldives after a fire at a desalination plant led to severe shortages and stirred unrest on the streets of the islands’ capital, Male. India said on Friday it had sent 200 tonnes of drinking water while Sri Lanka also reported to have airlifted 100,000 bottles of water. … — http://www.aljazeera.com/news/southasia/2014/12/drinking-water-airlifted-maldives-capital-2014125171141926496.html
This beggars belief, no contingency, no storage, no strategic competence. Reliant on a single source, single point failure and kerbam. (more…)
In 2006 the Cameron led Conservative party turned over a new leaf and redesigned its logo to reflect a new emphasis
In 2010 Cameron declared that his would be “The greenest government ever”. By 2013 he was muttering about needing to “get rid of this green crap”.
Image collages have been doing the rounds on social media of empty green benches where MPs are debating serious issues like child abuse or low pay, juxtaposed with a packed house of commons where MPs are allegedly debating MPs pay or expenses. Telegraph journo Isabel Hardman who also edits the coffeehouse blog at the Spectator has been taking the facebook and twitter denizens to task for gullibly believing these memes, which she ascribed to ‘two anarchist sites’ while on on Radio 4 ‘today’, where she discussed her coffeehouse article this morning. She told us that it was odd but true that people didn’t believe what they were told by the BBC or other MSM, but believed uncritically what they saw on facebook or twitter. One of the meme images as seen below has been shared 65,000 times or more.
But has Isabel done her due diligence here? Lets take a look.
The BBC’s Roger Harrabin reports on a Royal Society report into the Somerset flooding (with a straight face). We covered this extensively as it happened last winter
The authors of a Royal Society report on resilience to extreme weather have told BBC News that they believe the campaign to protect the Levels prompted politics to override science.
They say those resident on the Levels may have to get used to living with floods, and they question whether investment to protect farmland is the best use of public money.
James WinsladeSomerset farmer
Reposted from Reform.co.uk
Energy policy and the return of the State
Rupert Darwall
Energy policy represents the biggest expansion of state power since the nationalisations of the 1940s and 1950s and is on course to becoming the most costly domestic policy disaster in modern British history. By committing the nation to high cost, unreliable renewable energy, its consequences will be felt for decades to come. Energy is an iceberg policy: its implications for the demise of a competitive market in electricity – the final achievement of the Thatcher years – are poorly understood and tend to be consigned to footnotes and annexes of policy documents.
Like its predecessor, the Coalition Government has three policy objectives:
Keeping the lights on;
Keeping energy bills affordable; and
Decarbonising energy generation.
These do not require the policies the Government is implementing. Indeed, energy policy militates against having cheap, reliable energy. Worries about the lights going out have intensified as the country becomes more dependent on the weather for its electricity. The market is the best way of providing reliable and affordable electricity. Converting the electricity system to wind and solar power does neither. Even on favourable assumptions, these are inefficient ways of reducing carbon dioxide emissions.
