Nothing says "malicious" quite as effectively as "reasoned and moderate positions."

However Lawson's inaccurate statements on climate change have not been restricted to economics. He made several wrong assertions about the science of global warming in 2010 during a head-to-head BBC Radio debate with Prof Kevin Anderson, the director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research.

Throughout the programme, Lawson disputed statements made by Prof Anderson about the scientific evidence for climate change. Yet, Lord Lawson did not cite any research to back up his claims, and when compared with the available scientific literature, it is clear that they were not supported by the facts.

For instance, Lord Lawson stated that the total amount of ice in Antarctica is "not going down". But this does not accord with the results of scientific research, such as a 2009 paper in Geophysical Research Letters and another in Nature Geoscience in 2009, both based on satellite measurements.

Lawson even repeated the statement during the BBC radio programme after its veracity was challenged by Prof Anderson.

Later on in the same programme, Lawson claimed:

"What is interesting is that in the second half of the 20th century, when there were huge increase [sic] in carbon emissions, so far from there being a greater increase in sea level, the official figures show that, if anything, there was a slightly smaller increase in sea level in the second half of the 20th century than in the first half."

This statement is also contrary to the most up-to-date results of scientific research. A group of leading researchers on sea level rise presented an overview of the state of knowledge in 2009, clearly showing that a bigger rise in sea level occurred after 1950 than before it. These results were also presented in a review paper on 'Contemporary sea level rise' by Anny Cazenave and William Llovel, published early in 2010 in the journal Annual Review of Marine Science . This work shows that Lord Lawson's statement was not consistent with the latest research.

Sassenach wrote:

Now, what about the rest of the post? (oh, ricky has wandered back in with his size 15s...)

The rest of the post focussed on DRAX power station. In truth I wasn't really clear on the point you were trying to make so I overlooked it. In my opinion we should be going with gas and nuclear as a stopgap measure while we research better clean technologies that can replace them, so we're not necessarily at odds here anyway. I just don't have faith in current renewables to provide for our energy needs at a price we can afford.

Sassenach wrote:

Now, what about the rest of the post? (oh, ricky has wandered back in with his size 15s...)

The rest of the post focussed on DRAX power station. In truth I wasn't really clear on the point you were trying to make so I overlooked it. In my opinion we should be going with gas and nuclear as a stopgap measure while we research better clean technologies that can replace them, so we're not necessarily at odds here anyway. I just don't have faith in current renewables to provide for our energy needs at a price we can afford.

danivon wrote:For example, much is made of the variability of renewables (in that hydro, wind and solar all rely on a non-constant energy source). However, a study in the US showed that going up to 33% of power from renewables would save money overall - the cost of the variability was outweighed by the savings. http://arstechnica.com/science/2013/09/ ... avings/#p3

You favor building a lot of nuclear power plants., DF? After what happened in Japan? No thank you

Some believe thorium is key to developing a new generation of cleaner, safer nuclear power.[2][3] According to an opinion piece (not peer-reviewed) by a group of scientists at the Georgia Institute of Technology, considering its overall potential, thorium-based power "can mean a 1000+ year solution or a quality low-carbon bridge to truly sustainable energy sources solving a huge portion of mankind’s negative environmental impact."[4]

freeman3 wrote:You favor building a lot of nuclear power plants., DF? After what happened in Japan? No thank you.

I did spend some time on DRAX, pointing out that it was the real target of most opprobrium by environmental activists, despite your suggestion that they only opposed gas and nuclear.

Basically, I posted a link that directly challenges the repeated assertions from you that the cost is too high and will be going forward if we increase the proportion we use.

I also think you are ignoring trends in prices for both fossil fuels and 'renewables'. The long term trend in oil and gas prices (in real terms) is not downwards, but upwards. Increasing demand by making a short-term dash for gas will hardly help. The initial costs of setting up wind and solar generation are not trivial, but are falling due to improving technology (and once in place, they are much cheaper per unit of energy).

Nuclear is heavily subsidised, and while it's fine and dandy as long as nothing goes wrong, when something does go wrong it causes a lot of damage. And then there's all the waste to get rid of somehow. Your concern for British jobs seems at odds with how we are doing nuclear power expansion - a French (government-owned) company building the new Hinckley Point, using Chinese constructed components, with price guarantees and subsidies set up by our government by contract.

freeman3 wrote:Well,. DF, the good news is that with climate change extreme weather should be getting rarer...

Let’s start with the often repeated claim that we can project a sea level rise of at least 3 feet by the end of the century — 86 years from now. It is easy to calculate the volume of ice that would have to melt to produce that increased level and then compare it to the allegedly observed melt to determine how plausible the alarmism is.

To say that sea level will rise by 3 feet is to say that the nominal radius of the Earth would increase. But because of the “piling up” of water against the 30% of the Earth’s surface that is land, the average increase in radius (if there were no land against which the sea water would “pile up”) would be less than 3 feet, to a first approximation 3 * .7 = 2.1 feet. How much volume would the sphere of the Earth increase if its radius increased by 2.1 feet from ice melt? The volume of a sphere is 4/3*pi*radius(3). If we take the pre-melt radius as 4000 miles and the post melt radius as 4000 miles plus 2.1 feet, the volume increase is approximately 80,000 cubic miles. All of this, by assumption, is in the 70% of the Earth’s surface which is water to effect a three foot rise in the sea level.

So over a period of 86 years remaining until the end of the century, 80,000 cubic miles of water from ice melt would be required for a three foot rise in sea level, or about 930 cubic miles per year. Is this a lot? Or a little? Well, compared to the amounts of ice melt actually being observed from Antarctica and Greenland — and now being hyped by alarmists — it is huge.

Today’s report in the New York Times, “The Big Melt Accelerates,” [Ed.: This is the story that Steve commented on earlier today.] is revealing — if you do the math, which, of course, they don’t. The Times report claims that 310 billion tons of water melted into the oceans from Antarctic and Greenland glaciers and another 260 billion tons, amazingly, from the 1% of the Earth’s land-based ice that is in mountain glaciers. Is the total of 570 billion tons of water from ice melt a little or a lot?

Since they are measuring metric tons, that amounts to 1.25 x 10(15) pounds of water, which at 8.35 pounds per gallon is 1.5 x 10(14) gallons which, in turn, at 7.5 gallons per cubic foot is 2 x 10(13) cubic feet. At 5,280(3) cubic feet to a cubic mile we have 136 cubic miles of water or about 148 cubic miles of ice when adjusted for the expansion of water as it freezes. That’s about 12 miles square of glacier assuming on average the glaciation is 1 mile thick.

This compares to the required 930 cubic miles of water per year for 86 years to get to a sea level rise of 3 feet at the end of the century — a factor of almost 7 times what is said to be observed. Stated differently, at the new alarmingly increased level of ice melt it would take about 600 years for the purported 3 foot rise in sea level to obtain; the implied rise is 6 one-hundreds of an inch per year, or about 5.25 inches by the year 2100.

Sassenach wrote:I didn't say they only opposed gas and nuclear, I said they were unwilling to entertain the idea of using gas and nuclear despite gas being half as polluting as coal and nuclear being totally clean. Not all environmentalists are like this of course, but the noisiest tend to be.

I've read the article and didn't see any hard figures in it which compared the cost of a megawatt hour of electricity produced by renewables as compared with fossil fuels. What it seemsto be saying, if I've read it correctly, is that there are economies of scale which mean that of renewables are scaled up the relative difference in cost effectiveness between renewables and fossil fuels starts to narrow. That's a different point to the one that you've been making.

The wholesale price of natural gas has halved in the States over the last few years. Yes, it's a finite resource and so inevitably the price will rise eventually, but we can't necessarily predict what the medium term trends will be. In the long term we can't rely on fossil fuels forever, but we may not need to worry about that if we can develop a better technology in the interim.

I don't think the deal for the new nuclear is a good one, so no objections there from me. The reason I do favour nuclear as a short term fix is that it's the only 100% carbon free technology we know of that is capable of baseload power generation. If you look at what's happening in Germany, the decision to close all their nuclear stations in the wake of Fukashima (a terrible accident in which nobody died), has resulted in them having to build a load more coal power stations to replace the lost baseload capacity. Their emissions are now going up despite having a much more advanced renewables program than most countries.

(Reuters) - The amount of climate-warming carbon dioxide in the atmosphere topped 400 parts per million at a key observing station in Hawaii for the first time since measurement began in 1958, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration said on Friday.

To many scientists, crossing the 400 ppm threshold, which means that there are 400 molecules of carbon dioxide for every million molecules in the air, is a bit like the Dow Jones Industrial Average rising above 15,000 points.

"It's important mainly as a milestone that marks a steady progress of increasing carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," said James Butler of NOAA's Earth System Research Laboratory.

The threshold has become an important marker in U.N. climate change negotiations, tagged as a dangerous level by most climate scientists.