Energy bills, skeptic papers, Arctic sea ice
More on ‘green energy costs’ – Daily Mail prints correction following PCC complaint
The Daily Mail printed a correction to the headline that launched their campaign against green energy measures following a Press Complaints Commission complaint made by Carbon Brief.
The Mail had claimed in their original story that £200 of household energy bills are made up of “green stealth taxes”, a figure sourced to the climate skeptic think-tank the Global Warming Policy Foundation.
Ofgem indicates that environmental measures account for no more than 9% (c.£90) of energy bills, a point which the Mail recognised in their correction. No evidence to back up the GWPF’s estimate has yet been produced, despite direct requests.
Earlier in the week, the Daily Telegraph had a front-page headline which claimed that “environment policy reforms” will add £300 to energy bills. The £300 figure was based on a leaked briefing from Cameron’s energy advisor Ben Moxham.
However, as detailed in a blog post we wrote, the £300 figure was an overestimate due to a simple mistake. It may have also been inflated by an overly-pessimistic assessment of likely trends in energy use. Business Green also had an interesting analysis of the politics of the leak.
Journal editor resigns following publication of skeptic paper; that paper refuted
On Friday last week a major story kicked off in the climate blogosphere after the Editor-in-Chief of the scientific journal Remote Sensing unexpectedly resigned following the publication of a paper ( Spencer and Braswell 2011) by his journal that argued that clouds cause climate change.
Spencer and Braswell’s paper had prompted some fairly spectacular claims in the media, including:
“Climate change far less serious than ‘alarmists’ predict says NASA scientist” ( Daily Mail)
But in a blistering editorial (well worth reading) the editor wrote that he would like to “personally protest” against the media coverage the paper had received and that
“I perceive this paper to be fundamentally flawed and therefore wrongly accepted by the journal.”
A rebuttal was subsequently released by another journal on Tuesday of this week, as covered on our blog. For more detail, there are good blogs on the paper itself by Skeptical Science and the scientific context by Real Climate. For the skeptic viewpoint, there are blogs by James Delingpole and Bishop Hill.
Also on our blog
Everything you ever wanted to know about Arctic sea ice, but weren’t enough of a geek to ask
With the summer Arctic ice minimum expected within a week or so, and with what looks like a record low in ice volume as well as an ice area which is around the record low of 2007, it’s a good time to get up to speed on what’s going on in the Arctic, with our handy summary.
Poll: the Tea Party and climate change
Tea Party supporters in the US are significantly more skeptical about climate change than other voters. That is the perhaps unsurprising conclusion of a new survey of American voters’ published this week by the Yale Project on Climate Change Communication. We took a look.