In 2009/10, UK Research Councils spent £234 million on “Climate Change Research and Training”, according to figures sent to me by the EPSRC under the FOI Act. The analysis is below.

This money, naturally, does not grow on trees, particularly at a time of government cut backs.

The Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) is one of the seven UK Councils and is a major contributor to such funding. They have addressed this problem of conflicting and increasing demands on a limited budget by introducing what they call “Shaping Capability”. In essence, this is designed to “focus our investments, to remain internationally leading in areas that are of long-term strategic importance to the UK.”

They go on to explain “In addition the strategy for areas identified as grow, maintain or reduce may encourage a particular focus e.g. on research that meets particular industry needs, addresses a societal challenge or community identified grand challenge.”

Put simply, the EPSRC are making top down decisions about which areas should receive more funding and which ones less, rather than judging individual applications on their own intrinsic merit.

As a result certain areas of science are having all funding withdrawn, for, at the least, the next year. For instance PhD fellowships will no longer be available for Engineering graduates, and will be limited to only Statistics & Applied Probability for Mathematicians, as the EPSRC website makes clear.

Scientists are furious about this. In a letter to the Daily Telegraph last month, 78 leading UK scientists had this to say.

We support the ambition of David Willetts, the science minister, to make Britain “the best place in the world to do science”. However, this will remain beyond reach as long as the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), the principal source of funding for the physical sciences and mathematics, persists in making disastrous errors in its operations and in damaging scientific discovery in Britain.

The council’s pronouncements that research PhD students will no longer be funded through standard grants; that fellowships will only be open in areas chosen by unqualified EPSRC officials; that grant applicants must present an assessment of the “impact” of their work over 10 to 50 years, and that the EPSRC will decide without consulting researchers what level of support is available for every subject, are all seriously flawed. Taken together, they pose a serious threat to British science.

EPSRC has exceeded its remit so spectacularly that it has lost the confidence of a significant proportion of the scientific community. EPSRC must now be subject to scrutiny by Parliament and be held accountable. Appropriate action must be taken to ensure that such a situation cannot occur again. EPSRC should be restructured with an unfaltering focus on scientific excellence, or be replaced.

Twenty five eminent mathematicians wrote to the Prime Minister :-

 

We wish to approach you following recent developments at the Engineering and Physical Sciences Council which are likely to cause irreversible damage to the mathematical sciences in Britain.

The issue here is not cuts, but how to make the most effective use of limited science resources.

EPSRC’s model is one of central planning and micro-managing research. Civil servants in an unaccountable quango are picking winners, deciding which science to fund based on their perception of strategic priorities. They call it Shaping Capability.

In July 2011 they decided to stop funding research fellowships in all areas of the mathematical sciences other than statistics and applied probability. This will force many of our best PhD students to leave the country to get their first academic job, and will prevent us from attracting the best foreign postdoctoral researchers. Postdoctoral fellowships are an essential part of the pipeline that allows some PhDs to become leading scientists. If EPSRC continues this policy, British mathematics will face mediocrity in a decade.

And more than 100 Chemists also wrote to David Cameron, complaining :-

 

We believe that changes proposed by the EPSRC will undermine the work we do and very seriously injure an invaluable section of the UK economy.

We are profoundly disturbed by the EPSRC’s decision to reduce significantly funding for synthetic organic chemistry.

We believe that this action will damage chemistry departments and will encourage young academics to move abroad. Perhaps, most worryingly, this decision will significantly disadvantage biomedical research and innovation, resulting in fewer spin out companies and SME’s being created.

Jostling for funds between scientists, of course, is nothing new, but it is the EPSRC’s top down, bureaucratic approach that has really got so many leading scientists spitting feathers.

Research grants should be justified on the intrinsic merits of a project, and not because a bureaucrat can tick the right boxes.

Somehow we seem to have got our priorities drastically wrong when, instead, we get research grants like these three handed out:-

• Nottingham University – £306754 – “From Greenhouse Effect to Climategate: A Systematic Study of Climate Change as a Complex Social Issue”
• St Andrew’s University – £83252 – “Enhancing Local Authorities Community engagement: co-designing & prototyping strategies for carbon emission reductions”
• Glasgow University – £197935 – “News Media and Public Beliefs and Behaviours in Relation to the Transformation of the Energy System: Climate Change, Technology and Resources”

Perhaps I am just getting old!

I could not resist this one! It’s Malcolm and Cressida.

With thanks to Viz Magazine.

I wonder what advice the Met Office gave Caroline Spelman before she announced a state of drought in the South East of England last week?

As we know, the Met gave up publishing long range forecasts a couple of years ago, after one too many BBQ summer forecast. However, they do produce a “3 month outlook” each month for the government. So let’s have a look at what the latest one for February – April has to say :-

The probability that UK precipitation for February-March-April will fall into the driest of our five categories is about 20%, whilst the probability that it will fall into the wettest of our five categories is about 15% (the 1971-2000 climatological probability for each of these categories is 20%).

In other words, they really don’t have much of a clue. The slight bias towards drier weather is mainly based on their forecast for February, where they say :-

Firstly, there is an elevated risk of easterly winds in February, which tend to be dry.

As the outlook was published on 1st Feb, when these conditions already existed and were forecast to last much longer, it did not take a genius or a £33 million computer to work that one out.

As for the summer months, poor old Caroline is in the dark.

Apparently, Parliament’s Science and Technology Committee believe that new more powerful computers are needed to provide more accurate long term forecasts, even though they only had their last one 3 years ago.

The Met Office, of course, is part of the Ministry of Defence, who at the moment are having to lay off service staff and deploy aircraft carriers without planes to save money.

But I am sure that the ability of the Met Office to produce more, meaningless forecasts is much more important.

The south east of England is now officially in a state of drought, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs admitted today. So has does the current situation compare to previous years?

Last year the South East, according to Met Office figures, received 637mm of rain. In the last 100 years there have been 7 years that were drier.

On average these sort of events are seen about every 10 years or so. Adding in the January 2012 numbers, it can be seen that 6 out of 7 of the previous years were still drier than now.

Meanwhile, the long term trend is slightly increasing.

It is just English weather. We had better get used to it.

Ben Fogle, the Eco-Adventurer, has been visiting Joplin, Missouri to see the devastation caused by last year’s F5 tornado. Writing in last week’s Sunday Telegraph, he says :-

Local storm experts have predicted that the high temperatures out in the Gulf of Mexico are a grim prelude to another bumper season of tornadoes.

We have already seen that, despite last year’s rash of storms, the trend in recent decades has been to less tornadoes in the USA, as the chart below shows. (See report here). This has happened despite warmer waters in the Gulf.

So what does cause tornadoes? NOAA themselves admit nobody really knows :-

The classic answer–"warm moist Gulf air meets cold Canadian air and dry air from the Rockies"–is a gross oversimplification. Many thunderstorms form under those conditions (near warm fronts, cold fronts and drylines respectively), which never even come close to producing tornadoes. Even when the large-scale environment is extremely favorable for tornadic thunderstorms, as in an SPC "High Risk" outlook, not every thunderstorm spawns a tornado. The truth is that we don’t fully understand.

Nevertheless the three conditions mentioned are all integral factors. A look at the temperature map last May, when Joplin was hit, shows the preponderance of cold air to the west and north of Missouri.

                      May 2011 Temperature

This GISS map also shows the temperature contrasts at that time.

Now contrast with this map of Spring temperatures for 2000-10, when tornado occurrences were at a minimum.

Gulf temperatures were as warm as they were in 2011, but it is quite noticeable that, last year, colder air penetrated much further south and east.

There were 79 F3+ tornadoes last year. Disastrous as this was, it was much worse in 1973, when, again, there was a mass of cold air to the west, as can be seen below.

Please, Ben, don’t make simplistic comments about events you don’t understand, particularly ones that can have such tragic consequences.

Footnote

I just saw Ben last night swimming with crocodiles in his new TV series. I wish I had a tenth of your courage. Well done, mate!

Scientists at the University of Texas have found that hydraulic fracturing of shale formations to extract natural gas has no direct connection to reports of groundwater contamination.

The study, released at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Vancouver, British Columbia, found that many problems ascribed to hydraulic fracturing are related to processes common to all oil and gas drilling operations, such as casing failures or poor cement jobs.

University researchers also concluded that many reports of contamination can be traced to above-ground spills or other mishandling of wastewater produced from shale gas drilling, rather than from hydraulic fracturing per se, said Charles "Chip" Groat, an Energy Institute associate director who led the project.

"These problems are not unique to hydraulic fracturing" he said.

The research team examined evidence contained in reports of groundwater contamination attributed to hydraulic fracturing in three prominent shale plays — the Barnett Shale in North Texas; the Marcellus Shale in Pennsylvania, New York and portions of Appalachia; and the Haynesville Shale in western Louisiana and northeast Texas.

Other findings from the Energy Institute study include:

• Natural gas found in water wells within some shale gas areas (e.g., Marcellus) can be traced to natural sources and probably was present before the onset of shale gas operations.
• Although some states have been proactive in overseeing shale gas development, most regulations were written before the widespread use of hydraulic fracturing.
• Media coverage of hydraulic fracturing is decidedly negative, and few news reports mention scientific research related to the practice.
• Overall, surface spills of fracturing fluids pose greater risks to groundwater sources than from hydraulic fracturing itself.

This study follows a recent report by the British Geological Survey, which concluded “Most geologists think this is a pretty safe activity”.

Even the UK’s Department of Energy and Climate Change say “In the light of the robust controls in place, outlined above, to protect the environment and ensure safe operation, DECC see no need for any moratorium on shale gas. “

So why is the UK not developing its own huge reserves? According to the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change , “it would jeopardise the UK’s international reputation on climate change”.

So that’s alright then.

Reader Mostly Harmless commented

Just a few minutes ago, I had displayed the GHCN temperature chart for Rochester, Minnesota, among others. With a dozen browser tabs open, I didn’t realise that the chart was still displayed, so I reselected it from the GISS station selector, and displayed it again. Unbelievably, the data had changed by a few tenths of a degree (both for early and late years) within ten minutes! Some kind of official investigation is needed of this unjustifiable shenanigans.

The above graph was the original one he was looking at. It then changed to this :-

When I checked the datasets here and here, it was clear that the the small increase for 2011 was the result of November and December data being added in, which had been provisional before. However, much more intriguing was the fact that 1948 and 1949 had been wiped from the record. As the graphs show, these two years were comparatively warm, certainly much warmer than the following years.

Maybe errors had crept into the readings for these years to make them unreliable or a station move was responsible for a step change? Well, not according to the NCDC. The Climatological Summary for Rochester in 1950 shows the 1948 mean temperature was 44.9F (7.17C) and 1949’s was 46.0F (7.78C), in line with GISS’s original figures. The NCDC summary also shows that 1950 was much colder, again as GISS showed.

The summary also confirms that there had been no station moves or any other changes which would have affected the reliability of the record. So once again we see GISS/GHCN rewriting history to create an artificial warming trend.

Whether this corruption of the data is intentional or not, it is apparent that the temperature records of both GISS and GHCN are rapidly running out of credibility. At the very least GHCN’s Version 3.1, the current one introduced last November following major system rewrites by a Google Summer Student, needs to be withdrawn pending a full and independent enquiry.

IT GETS WORSE!

It is amazing what you find when you are not looking! NCDC’s Climatological Summary, mentioned above, conveniently lists all annual temperatures back to 1909 (except for a gap from 1921-28). This naturally raises the question why GISS don’t use them. Could they be a bit inconvenient?

The report confirms that the station has been at the same site since 1932, at Rochester Airport. Prior to that it was no more than two miles away.

So, splicing the NCDC temperatures up to 1949 onto the GISS ones, what do we find?

Surprise, surprise! The warming trend, that the cut off GISS data produces, suddenly disappears and temperatures in the last decade are pretty much what they were in the 1940’s and 1950’s. (And remember this is an airport site, so there ought to be UHI effect here).

Ah, but you say, after stirring and homogenising, the true picture will mysteriously appear! Well, the NCDC trends for Minnesota seem to show rising temperatures.

I wonder which one is more reliable?

It seems we are having a bit of a dry winter in England and the warnings are already starting about water shortages this summer! No doubt this will be blamed on global warming (despite that the fact that DEFRA have already forecast this will bring wetter winters!). But is there any evidence droughts are getting worse?

In 2011, as the above map shows, the Midlands were most affected by lack of rain, but how did the year compare to previous years?

http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/climate/uk/datasets/Rainfall/date/Midlands.txt

There was less rainfall in both 1964 and 1975 and the long term trend is actually rising slightly.

It seems the English climate is as unpredictable as ever.

DEFRA have recently issued their Climate Change Risk Assessment Report , which warns us about all the nasty things which will come our way if we don’t mend our ways and agree to pay more taxes. Amongst its key messages is an astonishing  paragraph about health risks :-

Potentially, there are health benefits as well as threats related to climate change, affecting the most vulnerable groups in our society. These are likely to place different burdens on National Health Service (NHS), public health and social care services. For example, premature deaths due to cold winters are projected to decrease significantly (e.g. by between 3900 and 24,000 by the 2050s) and premature deaths due to hotter summers are projected to increase (e.g. by between 580 and 5900 by the 2050s).

So at the top end of their projections, climate change could result in 18100 less premature deaths.  (These figures, incidentally, do not take account of deaths due to traffic and other accidents – milder weather in winter would be expected to lead to many less traffic related fatalities).

And they are trying to stop this happening?

                                    Before                                                                                    After

GHCN made a tranche of temperature adjustments in Iceland and Greenland in their latest Version 3.1, which was introduced in November 2011. As a result nearly every station in the two countries saw either temperatures in the 1940’s and 1950’s reduced, or temperatures since then increased, or both. The effect of these adjustments is quite stark, as can be seen by the two GISS graphs for Reykjavik shown above. The original temperature record (which has been verified by the Icelandic Met Office) shows that temperatures in the last decade are at a similar level to the previous warm spell around 1940. Under the new version, that warm spell has disappeared with the result that current temperatures appear to be abnormally warm.

On 17th January, GHCN were asked to comment on these adjustments. I have had replies from Bryant Korzeniewski of NOAA telling me that the matter is under investigation, but no further information. The only conclusions I can draw are :-

1) GHCN simply don’t understand how their latest algorithms work and therefore cannot explain how these adjustments have arisen.

2) They are reluctant to admit their mistakes.

(Or both!)

It is worth noting that, according to GHCN’s Technical Report , some of the GHCN software was rewritten last July by a summer student, Daniel Rothenberg and these changes were implemented in Version 3.1. Although, on a global level, the effect of these adjustments is very small, it is clear that the Quality Control procedures at GHCN have not worked properly in this case.

How much longer do GHCN need to explain their adjustments or correct them?