Climate change hurts us in the pocket today and threatens long term food security (First published in "Big Green Bang" October 2011)

“Climate change fatigue” is a growing problem – it's hard to stay concerned about about the possibility of a meter sea level rise in 80 years time – but the reality is that its impacts are hitting us right here and now - and are already hurting us in our pockets. This year's northern Europe wide drought has hit harvests hard. It's been an "extreme weather event", and while its  impossible to say that any one weather event is due to climate change, the predictions are that longer and stronger weather events will become increasingly common. 

In East Anglia, my home, there's a case study happing on my doorstep. The prolonged drought that has caused a disastrous harvest for many farmers in the area. UK wide yields of cereals was down 1.5% on it's 5 year average despite an almost 4% increase in planting this year. For farmers in Norfolk and Suffolk crop losses have been far worse, with some areas experiencing a 40% fall in yields, while the region as a whole experienced a 6% fall in wheat and a 22% fall in barley yields.

The extreme dry weather continues to be a major problem – with some farmers being forced to stop harvesting beet because harvesters are having problems extracting the beet cleanly from such dry ground. Now there's another problem caused by this years exceptionally dry weather. The ground is so hard conventional ploughs are struggling to “bite” the soil – and farmers are being forced to spend extra days with powerful subsoilers before ploughing. Yesterday my neighbour had to use three tractors instead of one to prepare a field for sowing – including a massive subsoiler cultivator appropriately named “Sumo”. Drought is a particularly serious issue for food security. Last year harvests in Russia were severely affected by drought – this year the whole of northern Europe has had similar problems. 

Falling yields, the extra work and fuel will drive up food costs – already identified as one of the key drivers of inflation in the UK. But this year's difficult harvest also exposes where the real and immediate dangers of climate change may lie.

If climate current climate predictions hold true this year's drought could be come a more regular feature of life for East Anglian farmers. Dry areas are likely to get dryer – and there's a fine line between a drought that causes yield reductions like those experienced in the worst affected areas this year, a drought that affects the whole of East Anglia and a drought that causes total crop failure.

Another dry winter in my area followed by a dry summer could do far more than affect harvests. If drought stress is severe enough it can cause a “tipping point” where part or all of the eco-system starts to die-off. This has happened twice in the Amazon rain forest over the last 5 years. It doesn't necessarily take a permanent change in the weather to trigger such an event – a couple of bad years could be enough to cause widespread damage from elevated fire risk and die back due to drought stress. It's these kinds of changes that cause a gradual incremental deterioration of our environment – and evidence is starting to emerge that global warming is starting to have an adverse effect on plant growth world wide.

So next time climate change feels like a big yawn, remember – its happening here, its hurting our pockets and it could hurt parts of our world we really value, our woodlands, heaths and river systems

Pressing Porkies

There is a worrying trend in the press - the increasing use of stories that are wrong or deeply flawed to create headlines that suit the editorial line - a case of  "never mind the facts - spread the rumour".

Claims by the Mail about the impact of changes to electricity prices on household energy bill in featured a little in  "Media and Manipulation", a piece focussing on Murdochs deliberate misrepresentation of climate change issues. The Mail splashed headlines predicting £1000 a year plus energy bills.

Today "Carbon Brief" published evidence to show the Mail's claims were unverifiable

"The £1000 claim was sourced to a report produced by Unicredit Bank.  When Carbon Brief investigated, we found that the report mentioned the figure just once and did not explain its underlying analysis. The £1000 figure – which is dramatically higher than other estimates – proved impossible to verify.

The report goes on to say:

"This is the second time in a few weeks that the Daily Mail has given significant prominence to figures on energy bills which have proved impossible to verify. In June the Mail’s warning that green measures are currently adding £200 to household energy bills proved to be based on unsourced claims by the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF). After we and others highlighted this, the Mail quietly stopped using the figure in favour of Ofgem's estimate of £100."
The main thrust of the GO article is that the right wing press have published misleading and untrue material that has seriously distorted public perceptions of climate issues - Carbon Brief give an example of just how damaging this can be.

"This week the Daily Telegraph also reported a poll carried out by the website Conservative Home, which asked 1,500 members of the Conservative party to identify the top three mistakes that David Cameron has made since he came into office in 2005.  Number two on the list was “Supporting climate change policies that will increase energy bills
Full report "The Carbon Brief

BBC under fire

The BBC has been criticised for giving equal coverage to denier propaganda in the interests of balance. An independent report commissioned by the BBC trust concluded that in an effort to appear impartial when reporting on science the BBC had to make a distinction between an opinion and a fact. At times, when reporting on climate issues, opinion has been given the same weight as established scientific fact, meaning that viewers might perceive an issue to be more controversial than it actually is.

Bob Ward, policy and communications director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment at the London School of Economics, said it was crucial for the BBC to

"challenge inaccurate and misleading claims made by bloggers, campaigners and politicians who 'reject and deny the findings of mainstream science for ideological reasons.'...

..."The BBC is required by law not to sacrifice accuracy for impartiality in the coverage of controversial scientific issues such as climate change. Yet it is well known that there are particular BBC presenters and editors who allow self-proclaimed climate change 'sceptics' to mislead the public with unsubstantiated and inaccurate statements,"

In response the BBC have published new guidelines highlighting the need to consider the weight of arguments and to account for the difference between fact and opinion in science reporting

It's worth noting that the review praised the overall quality of BBC science reporting it doesn't seem beyond the realms of possibility that BBC editors efforts to give equal weight to the opinion of deniers and overwhelming scientific consensus has been influenced by the Murdoch presses vitriolic anti BBC campaign

Not In My Backyard - Errr - oh go on then... 4/11/2011

In a year when NIMBY protests help reduce wind farm consents to a five year low, protesters in Leicester admit they were "wrong" to object to the counties first windfarm. Anti - windfarm protests help reduce consents to 5 year low Wind is one of the most reliable and mature sources of renewable energy in the UK - and also  one of the most divisive  At a time when UK wind and marine renewables industries are struggling to obtain consent for new wind projects with an average approval rate for wind farms of just of just 26% by capacity last year, there's some good news from one group of protesters. 

Frequently cited as one of the "worst rural eyesores" and the cause of vociferous protests campaigns nationwide, windfarms stand accused of killing birds, creating noise, flicker and visual pollution.

For anyone growing up in places like the Trent Valley, home to numerous massive coal fired power stations these may seem like minor problems - but the cat owning Nimbys of Britain (in case you are wondering - cats are reckoned to kill 50 million birds a year in the UK - windfarms - maybe 5000) are determined that windfarms are a major threat to property prices and amenity. 

"Wind farm - what wind farm? - we hardly know they are there"

 It must be some comfort to the wind industry to know that residents in rural Leicestershire  have found their fears about the county's first wind farm were unfounded. The Leicester Mercury report that a group of wind turbine protesters admit “we were wrong about turbine noise” Villagers in Leicestershire launched a vigorous campaign against a windfarm proposal sited between the villages of Gilmorton, Ashby Magna and Dunton Bassett. Concerns that the 410 foot turbines would create noise have proved to be wrong and residents say they “hardly notice the turbines.

 One resident – Mr John Phillips, who attended all the protest meetings and admitted to being against the project from the start said: “...now, I must say they really don't bother me. I can't hear them and I can barely see them. It's like the industrial revolution all over again – people don't like change until it actually happens – then they get used to it” Since they started running in early October the turbines have produced 2.5 gigawatts of electricity – while local Parish Councils will receive over £5000 pounds a year as part of the agreement with the developer.

climate change and food security 19-06-2011

Food prices surge 36% in a year

Peak oil and climate change  line are seen as two of the underlying causes of a huge leap in food prices and the number of people driven into extreme poverty.

The World Bank's “Food Price Watch” estimates that food is 36% more expensive than a year ago  and warns that, since June 2010, high prices have added 40 million people to the world's billion plus people living below the extreme poverty line of $1.25 a day.

High energy costs and last summers drought and fire stricken harvests have led to steeply rising food prices. In the west food is only a small element of our living cost. The rising prices of staple foods like wheat and maize mean meat, dairy and bread get a little more expensive but its not a disaster.

For the world's poorest food can be 100% of the budget, and that's a budget that will, at best, buy a few kilos of maize or flour. The April 2011 report links price rises to a combination of severe weather events in key grain exporting countries, high energy prices, which affect production costs directly (and also drive competition for land for biofuel production) and a range of other economic and political variables.

In 2008 when food prices reached similar levels food riots and protests hit over 30 of the world's poorest nations and were an underlying factor in the unrest in Tunisia, Algeria and Egypt. Ironically - the 2008 riots are one of the factors that have helped push energy prices to their current levels

The Energy Crisis - RAP NEWS

A summary of the energy crisis in Rap - more or less says it all!!






All RAP news clips can be found here

murdoch twists the truth across continents 26-07-2011

David Fiderer, a US Banker specialising in the energy industry blogs about the way cross Atlantic links in Murdoch press operate in tandem to distort climate issues.

---

This is a re-post from Op-Ed a US online news and opinion web site- Recently the Murdoch press have featured heavily in the news for obvious reasons and we have tried to highlight its role in distorting climate issues

David Fiderer has been a banker covering the energy industry for several global banks in New York for over 20 years. Currently, he is working on several journalism projects dealing with corporate and political corruption that, so far, have escaped serious scrutiny by mainstream media. He is trained as a lawyer.

In this piece he traces the links between Murdoch's UK and US operations and traces the way the "climategate affair" was misreported and distorted to present minor reporting errors as a major scientific scandal.

How Murdoch's Times of London and Fox News Coordinate Their Deceitful Reporting on Climate Change

by David Fiderer

If you wondered whether Murdoch's various news outlets operate in sync when they misrepresent the facts about climate change, consider the deceitful reporting done by Ben Webster, the Environmental Editor for The Times  of London .   His smears  against the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change were immediately amplified and embellished  by Fox News  in New York. Both Webster's story and its Fox News incarnation were used to defame the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and to lend an air of legitimacy to the phony  "Climate-gate" scandal that had already been debunked by scientific journals and  scientific inquiries .

Today we know that one of the Murdoch employees arrested in Britain, Neil Wallis, was deeply implicated in two hacking scandals, the first pertaining to the News of the World,  and the second pertaining to the invasion of computers at the University of East Anglia, the victim of the phony "Climate-gate" scandal touted by Fox News.  So it may be worthwhile to take another look at how deceitful reporting within the Murdoch empire can spread like a virus. Look at the opening paragraphs in The Times of London story:

Climate scientists at the centre of the row over stolen e-mails acted with integrity and made no attempt to manipulate their research on global temperatures, an external inquiry has found.

Their research was, however, misrepresented by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which failed to reflect uncertainties the scientists had reported concerning the raw temperature data.

An inquiry panel of leading scientists, nominated by the Royal Society, said that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit may not have used the best methods for analyzing temperature records.

Webster's second and third paragraphs distort the panel's findings beyond all recognition. The IPCC misrepresented nothing. The inquiry panel merely pointed out that the IPCC neglected to highlight a truism, which is obvious to all climate scientists and to anyone else who gave 10 seconds of thought to the subject.  How can scientists gather data to measure changes in global temperatures going back in history?  Recent data may be gleaned from meteorological instruments. Older data may be gleaned from tree rings, which can be found on land but not on the ocean. So scientists rely on well-established statistical methods to develop certain inferences about global temperatures at earlier times in history. All science is based on mathematics.

Here's what the scientific panel actually said:

"Recent public discussion of climate change and summaries and popularizations of the work of CRU and others often contain oversimplifications that omit serious discussion of uncertainties emphasized by the original authors. For example, CRU publications repeatedly emphasize the discrepancy between instrumental and tree-based proxy reconstructions of temperature during the late 20th century, but presentations of this work by the IPCC and others have sometimes neglected to highlight this issue. While we find this regrettable, we could find no such fault with the peer-reviewed papers we examined."

The CRU research was "misrepresented" by the IPCC? Only to the extent that the IPCC  failed to belabor the obvious.  Nor did the inquiry panel say anything like, "the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit may not have used the best methods for analyzing temperature records." That was an extreme embellishment by Webster.  The only thing the scientific panel said that remotely similar to Webster's allegation pertained to the data analyses of tree rings:

After reading publications and interviewing the senior staff of CRU in depth, we are satisfied that the CRU tree-ring work has been carried out with integrity, and that allegations of deliberate misrepresentation and unjustified selection of data are not valid. In the event CRU scientists were able to give convincing answers to our detailed questions about data choice, data handling and statistical methodology. The Unit freely admits that many data analyses they made in the past are superseded and they would not do things that way today.

But also:

It is not clear, however, that better methods would have produced significantly different results. The published work also contains many cautions about the limitations of the data and their interpretation.

And the panel was also very clear that the CRU's critics, to put it charitably, did not know what they were talking about:

We have not exhaustively reviewed the external criticism of the dendroclimatological work, but it seems that some of these criticisms show a rather selective and uncharitable approach to information made available by CRU. They seem also to reflect a lack of awareness of the ongoing and dynamic nature of chronologies, and of the difficult circumstances under which university research is sometimes conducted.

Remember, this is The Times' Environmental Editor reporting the story, which, on this side of the Atlantic, became:

"Climate Scientists Cleared, U.N. Blamed for Misinterpreting Data"

British climate scientists at the center of the scandal over stolen e-mails acted with integrity and made no attempt to manipulate their research on global temperatures, an external inquiry has found. But the U.N.? That's another story.

The scientific research into historical temperature records was misrepresented by the United Nation's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which failed to consider uncertainties the scientists had reported concerning the raw temperature data.

The inquiry panel of leading scientists, nominated by the Royal Society, said that the University of East Anglia's Climatic Research Unit may not have used the best methods for analyzing temperature records.

For a sense of deja vu all over again, check out this 18-month old piece:  "Fox News Embraces Cyber-Terrorism to Subvert the Copenhagen Summit."

Panorama publish damning story on wind - 11-10-2011

Panorama has incurred the wrath of the renewable energy industry, making misleading claims about the costs of wind on the basis of an unpublished and unfinished report.

---

Unknown Knowns and Known Unknowns? 

Panorama and ST can't be questioned because no one has seen the evidence.  

Panorama incurred the wrath of the renewable energy industry with program they claim made biased claims about offshore wind costs based on an as yet unpublished and unfinished report.

It's yet another media report made on the basis of irrefutable data - that's to say data that's either made up or data that no one has actually seen. Even the company producing the "basis" of the latest story hasn't as yet finished processing the information. Unfortunately its the headlines that stick - no the fact that all the evidence says "this story is plain wrong".

In the wake of teasers like “Abandoning wind will save taxpayer £34 billion”, last Monday's BBC Panorama program could have left supporters of wind power wondering if they hadn't been making a huge mistake.   Thankfully, they can stop questioning their sanity. The Panorama program was taking its figures from a leaked draught press release about an, as yet, unpublished KPMG report for the government.

 Carbon Brief, investigating a Sunday Times story about the same report asked KPMG to clarify the figures. They said:   

“...the Sunday Times story was based on "preliminary findings" and "...the full report itself is still being written"...

..."They added cheerily that they would let us know when they had a clearer idea of timing, and "hopefully we're not too far off!"    

It's not the first time the media have responding to an unpublished report on energy costs this year – but this time, no one seems to know what data has been used to generate the headline figures – not even KPMG!.    

Known Knowns

This is what we do know.

• The Panorama program made no mention of the rising prices of wholesale energy costs. According to Ofgem wholesale gas price is 40% higher this year than 2010/11 and wholesale fuel costs account for 56% of electricity bills. The same report continues 

 “Our snapshot estimate of the net margin on supplying a typical, standard tariff, dual fuel customer is approximately £125 per customer for the year from October 2011” 

• The average cost of “subsidising” renewables is around £20 a year – more than 6 times less than the profit margins of the energy companies. What's more, fossil fuels get massive hidden subsidies in the form of tax breaks and the socialisation of the costs of damage caused by pollution and by some measures are already far more expensive than wind.
• The UK has suffered systematic underinvestment in new plant and infrastructure for 20 years . No matter how we produce power we will have to pay the price for the historic failings of our liberalised energy market. 
•  Fossil energy prices will continue to rise. Demand is rising rapidly worldwide. There are serious questions surrounding the new “golden age of gas”, driven by the ability to “frack” shale gas and even the International Energy Authority (IEA) warn that gas is not a solution to climate change.  
• No mention was made of climate change - one of the main reasons for investing in renewables (Climate Progress summarises the IEA's shocking predictions on climate change). The KPMG report is apparently about costs. The IEA 2011 World Energy Outlook is very clear about the cost of not  investing in low carbon energy:

“Delaying action is a false economy: for every $1 of investment in cleaner technology that is avoided in the power sector before 2020, an additional $4.30 would need to be spent after 2020 to compensate for the increased emissions.”  

Clues about the clueless?

 When the KPMG report finally emerges it may be possible to set their figures into some sort of context. It's difficult to really know how such a damming summary of wind can be produced at a time when investment in renewables is set to hit an all time high and costs are dropping rapidly.   There are a few clues about the Panorama report. 

Presenter Tom Heap's own web site says - "Tom is The Eco-Sceptic’ questioning the accepted environmental dogma. He has recently written on the perils of relying on nature for your energy, the self-righteous green movement”. BGB would be the last site to complain about questioning “self righteous greens” - but it appears Mr Heap has a bit of a record for less than accurate reporting.

Jo Abbess, blogging about his coverage of “Climategate" in June 2010 cited inaccuracies and said “some of the mistakes made by the reporter, Tom Heap, were laughable”. Since she blogged last year, criticising Heap's analysis of offshore costs, there's stronger data supporting the price competitiveness of renewables.  EU climate chief Connie Hedegaa saying “offshore wind is competitive with nuclear power”.

Desmond Carrington's Guardian critique of Heap's reporting on Monday identifies a similar tendency towards one sided and inaccurate journalism.  Jo Abbess concludes her blog by saying "Tom Heap is, in my humble opinion, entirely unqualified to broadcast on climate change" - perhaps he's entirely unqualified to broadcast on energy costs as well!