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energy and fields

Leaked diplomatic cables show ‘limited progress’ in Energy Charter Treaty reform talks

by K. Taylor, July 6, 2021 in Euractiv

Little progress has been made to modernise a controversial agreement on energy investments that activists warn could derail decarbonisation efforts in Europe and across the globe, according to leaked documents.

The fifth round of negotiations on reforming the Energy Charter Treaty – an international agreement that allows energy companies to sue governments for decisions impacting their investments – took place in early June.

But attempts by the European Commission to bring the treaty in line with international climate goals have so far fallen flat, according to two leaked diplomatic cables.

“The atmosphere was constructive, but progress was limited, especially on energy issues,” reads one of the leaked diplomatic cables, which was written after a meeting the EU Council’s Working Party on Energy, where the European Commission recently gave EU countries an overview of progress made in the negotiations.

“No substantial progress was made on the definition of economic activity in the energy sector,” the cable says, referring to a section listing which types of energy infrastructure are protected under the treaty.

At the moment, that definition includes almost all energy sources, from coal to renewables. The European Commission, which negotiates on behalf of the 27 EU member states, has proposed gradually reducing protection for fossil fuel investments but has seen little support from other treaty signatories.

Unanimity is required to modify the treaty, whose 54 members include countries like Azerbaijan and Kazakhstan, which are heavily reliant on fossil fuel export revenues and have little incentive to reform.

A sixth round of negotiations to reform the Energy Charter Treaty is opening on Tuesday (6 July) by which point the European Commission hopes to have rallied more support from non-EU states, like the UK and Balkan countries.

However, support for the EU’s reform plan was close to non-existent in the last negotiation round, where only six signatories even expressed views on the Commission’s proposal.

Kazakhstan was the only country to express an official position on the EU proposal and it “openly rejected” it, the documents show.

“After two hours of negotiations, it was clear that the EU proposal did not have enough support. None of the larger contracting parties was prepared to support the EU proposal in its current form. It would be necessary to examine where the EU’s flexibility could lie,” one of the leaked cables says.

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climate-debate

Climate Sensitivity to CO2, what do we know? Part 2.

by A. May, July 8, 2021 in WUWT

In Part 1, we introduced the concepts of climate sensitivity to CO2, often called ECS or TCR. The IPCC prefers a TCR of about 1.8°C/2xCO2 (IPCC, 2013, p. 818). TCR is the short-term, century scale, response of surface temperature to a doubling of CO2, we abbreviate the units as “°C/2xCO2.” In these posts we review lower estimates of climate sensitivity, estimates below 1°C/2xCO2. In parallel, we also review estimates of the surface air temperature sensitivity (SATS) to radiative forcing (RF, the units are °C per W/m2 or Watts per square meter). The IPCC estimates this value to be ~0.49°C per W/m2.

The previous post discussed two modern climate sensitivity estimates, by Richard Lindzen and Willie Soon, that range below 1°C/2xCO2. Next, we review climate sensitivity estimates by Sherwood Idso, Reginald Newell and their colleagues.

Many comments to part 1 tried to discredit the “ECS” or “TCR” estimates made by Lindzen and Soon, completely missing their point and my point. ECS and TCR are artificial climate model constructs, with little meaning outside the confines of computer modeling. TCR is a little more realistic since we might be able to observe or measure something close to it over the next century. But ECS, or the “Equilibrium Climate Sensitivity” is a totally abstract and unworldly number that could never be measured. It means if CO2 doubled suddenly, and nothing else changed for several hundred years while the oceans came into equilibrium with the new surface air temperature, what would the final surface temperature be? Air temperature would never be close to equilibrium for several hundred years, even 70 to 100 years (TCR) is a stretch.

Climate models are not the real world and the numbers that come out of them, like ECS or TCR, can be useful for showing the likely direction of temperature movement in response to changes in parameters or different model scenarios, but the numbers themselves are meaningless unless the models have previously been validated against the real world. With the possible exception of the Russian INM-CM4 model, no other IPCC model has successfully predicted future global surface temperatures. Ron Clutz discusses INM-CM4 here.

Model calculations are not observations. ECS and TCR are not real numbers, real numbers are based on observations. Thus, the model extracted values of ECS and TCR are not information, they can be used to detect the direction of change in climate forcing, if the climate model is an accurate reflection of that portion of the real world. The direction of movement of ECS and TCR, when model parameters or data tables change, is the information, not the computed value. I’m often amazed, as a former petrophysical modeler of 42 years, how often otherwise intelligent people confuse unvalidated model calculations with observations.

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better to know...?, climate-debate

Claim: Machine Learning can Detect Anthropogenic Climate Change

E. Worrall, July 8, 2021 in WUWT

According to the big computer we are doomed to suffer ever more damaging weather extremes. But researchers can’t tell us exactly why, because their black box neural net won’t explain its prediction.

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As an IT expert who has built commercial AI systems, I find it incredible that the researchers seem so naive as to think their AI machine output has value, without corroborating evidence. They admit they are going to try to understand how their AI works – but in my opinion they have jumped the gun, making big claims on the basis of a black box result.

Consider the following;

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