The Tax Payers Alliance (TPA) is a huge success in terms of how frequently it is quoted and the range of publications it is quoted in.

The basic premise is that people don’t like having ‘their’ money taken away from them, in the form of taxes, and wasted. The TPA then extends this basic premise to show the inadequacies and inefficiency of the government.   

But how does the TPA do this?

The Reports

The website produces 4-5 reports a month. This is a lot less than I thought relative to the amount of coverage it gets. But each report fits the public mood and is well written. You can see them all here:

http://tpa.typepad.com/home/research-by-the-.html#April2009

It seems that a common theme in these reports is to 1) find the amount of UK tax paid for a particular service, ideally one that is inefficient or doesn’t have strong public backing, and 2) divide that cost into the number of households and then 3) report that the government is taking this amount of pounds from your family and wasting it.

The reports do range in detail. Some are simple freedom of information requests with a short introduction:

http://tpa.typepad.com/waste/files/TheGlobalWarmingIndustryinLocalGovernment.pdf

Others are more detailed reports about government departments that are described and recommendations made, like in this fisheries policy analysis:

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/cfp.pdf

The Blogs

The rest of the site is made up of blog posts which fit into the categories of:

-         Media Coverage summaries of articles where the TPA has been quoted. This makes up most of the blogging on the site.  

-         Economics 101 includes a time line of tax, and other blog entries under headings such as; Corporate Tax, Dynamic Modelling, Fairness, Flat Tax, Green Taxes, Income Tax, Regulation.

-         Better Government contains a document outlining how the government should be run by successful business people: http://tpa.typepad.com/bettergovernment/files/BetterGovernment.pdf . Then breaks down the criticism into the government departments of health, defense, education, energy, law and order, international aid, EU and then has some categories concerning quality and structure and trust of government.

-         Burning Our Money is the most humorous part of the site, this contains the ‘non-job of the week’. Then there is the ‘rewards for failure’ section which includes bonuses at the BBC, just quoted from the telegraph and Sun, no original research here. There is also reporting on public sector pensions and Taxpayer-funded politics.

-         European Union this is a campaign to stop the EU rip-off.

-         Blogs By Location in West Midlands and TaxPayers’ association of Europe.

The Book

This is where it all began for the TPA in 2005, with volunteers writing the ‘Bumper Book of Government Waste’. The book shows how £101 billion is wasted by the government.

http://tpa.typepad.com/waste/2007/10/the-bumper-book.html

The Campaigns and Lobbying

There seems to be only one campaign on the whole site. It was launch in January and is to ‘stop the EU rip-off’:

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/eu/

There are campaign materials to download and links to reports.

Aside from this the TPA will report on other people campaigning or lobbying and they also show public support for campaign groups like the NoToID

http://www.taxpayersalliance.com/campaign/2009/05/what-on-earth-is-the-point.html

In the End

So what can we learn from this?

-         A well thought out book or large report is enough to get media attention initially.

-         Then don’t underestimate the value of regular, well placed reports combined with killer PR.

-         Back up with regular blogging, doesn’t have to original, just on topic.

A TPA interview and office visit is reported at:

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk_politics/7241315.stm

Here is my three sentence summary of David MacKay’s book

Sustainable Energy - without the hot air

The UK can’t live off its own renewable energy with current technology.

If we make efficiency savings by electrifying transport and use different heating technology and add in some of: nuclear power, clean coal or other countries renewables, we could make many energy plans that add up to demand, without reducing our quality of life, for 2050.

This will require serious change to our current lives, and this change will be rewarding in every aspect.

Guest commentary by Ron Miller, NASA GISS

Several studies have shown that hurricane activity is generally reduced during years when there is a thick aerosol haze over the subtropical Atlantic. The haze is comprised mainly of soil particles, stripped by wind erosion from the barren ground over the Sahara and Sahel. These particles are lifted into the atmosphere and carried by the Trade winds as far as the Caribbean and Amazon basin. Plumes of dust streaming off the African coast are easily recognized in satellite imagery, and were even described by Charles Darwin during his voyage on the Beagle.

The amount of dust crossing the Atlantic has been measured at Barbados since the mid 1960s (aptly by Prospero and colleagues). These measurements show a threefold increase in dust between the original part of the record and the mid 1980s at the peak of the Sahel drought, when the region was unusually vulnerable to wind erosion. African dust crosses the tropical Atlantic within the Saharan Air Layer (SAL), an elevated duct of air between about 2 and 5 km in altitude. Because of its continental origin, this air is not only dusty but extremely dry.

Figure 2: Monthly mean dust concentration measured at Barbados. Arrows mark years with large El Niño events, which are irrelevant here (Prospero and Lamb, 2003).

There is an observed anti-correlation between dustiness and tropical cyclone days in the Atlantic (Evan et al, 2006). This anti-correlation might indicate the a direct influence of dust on hurricanes, or a connection between the dry air the dust resides in and hurricanes, or might even be related to a much larger scale pattern which controls both hurricanes and dustiness. If there is a connection, one hypothesis is that entrainment of dry SAL air rapidly strangles a developing cyclone because of the low humidity that accompanies the dusty air, while the dust itself has no direct effect. An alternative hypothesis is that the reduction in sunlight beneath the dust layer cools the ocean surface, whose temperature is a well-known predictor of hurricane activity (at least at the basin scale). Thus it is plausible that decadal variations in dustiness could contribute to decadal variations in hurricane activity, but how big might such an effect be?

A recent article in Science by Evan et al. (2009) is one of the few attempts to quantify the contribution of both dust and volcanic aerosols to the observed warming within the tropical Atlantic. The authors infer the amount of total aerosol using the Advanced Very High-Resolution Radiometer (AVHRR) satellite instrument and screen for locations where dust is present (they note that other aerosols might be mixed with the dust, but neglect this overlap). They also assume that dust has no effect where there are clouds. However, where the SAL extends over low marine clouds, the dust (since it is darker than cloud) might have an opposing effect to that seen in clear sky regions, although this is hard to quantify. They then calculate the contribution by dust and volcanic aerosols to observed changes in sea surface temperature (SST) during the satellite record between 1982 and 2007. During this period, the aerosol amount varied with dust export from Africa, but also from major eruptions by two volcanoes (El Chichon in 1982 and Pinatubo in 1991), each of which left a reflective layer of sulfate droplets in the lower stratosphere for a couple of years.

Evan et al. calculate that between 1982 and 2007 the ocean surface warmed by 0.25°C/decade in the main region of Atlantic hurricane genesis (15-­65°W and 0­-30°N). For comparison, they calculate a warming trend of 0.18°C/decade due to a reduction of dust and volcanic aerosols. That decreasing aerosols account for two-thirds of the observed warming might suggest that other factors like the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations (combined with anthropogenic aerosol changes) made a relatively modest net contribution to the warming (and by implication to observed trends in hurricane activity). For the natural aerosols, they calculate that stratospheric aerosols made roughly twice the contribution of dust over this period.

So how did they do this calculation? Firstly, they use a relatively simple model to relate SST to the reduction in net radiation into the ocean surface, prior to any climatic response. This forcing is calculated using the total aerosol amount inferred from the AVHRR data. Variations in SST due to variations in heat transport by ocean currents or diffusion into the thermocline are neglected while contributions by changes in evaporation, turbulent transfer, and surface radiation are estimated as being proportional to the anomalous air-sea temperature difference. Cooling of the ocean by aerosols must therefore be offset by a reduction in heat lost from the ocean to the atmosphere.

They note a key simplification is their neglect of any change to the surface air temperature when calculating anomalous air-sea temperature difference. This would require an atmospheric model along with a consideration of aerosol forcing at the top of the atmosphere (TOA). There is a strong relationship between surface air temperature and TOA forcing (at least at large spatial scales). As a consequence, the ocean-atmosphere flux depends upon not only forcing at the surface but the forcing at the TOA. By neglecting the effect of the changes in surface air temperature upon SST, Evan et al. may be underestimating the impact of the aerosols on their calculated trend. This is especially important for volcanic aerosols, whose TOA forcing is large and comparable to the surface forcing, as opposed to absorbing aerosols like dust where the surface forcing is larger than at TOA. However, balancing this effect is the neglect of heat diffusion into the thermocline which would reduce the ocean cooling. It is not a priori obvious which effect is more important, especially since the atmosphere can balance the forcing by adjusting lateral heat transport, which would also influence the anomalous surface air temperature.

Another way to test the importance of atmospheric changes would be to calculate both the TOA and surface forcing using the satellite measurements, and then impose this transient forcing in a general circulation model that calculates both the atmosphere and ocean response. That too would have problems, given that the models are not perfect, but it would be a useful check on the order of magnitude of the inferred effects. Indeed, assessments of the causes of tropical Atlantic trends using the IPCC AR4 models (Santer et al, 2006) come up with a much larger component due to anthropogenic effects, though those models did not include dust forcing changes.

Using their methodology, Evan et al. find that a decline in total aerosols contributed around two-thirds of the observed warming in NH tropical Atlantic SST between 1982 and 2007. Most of this is due to the two major volcanic eruptions (El Chichon and Pinatubo) that cooled the ocean early on in this period (and so lead to a warming once they were no longer present). However, the attributed aerosol trend would have been smaller had the satellite record extended a decade earlier. The estimated contribution of dust changes to the observed trend is small, roughly one-quarter of the total trend.

Whatever its impact upon SST, dust might impact other factors contributing to cyclone intensity (Emanuel, 1995), in particular, the reduction of the air-sea heat flux and temperatures in the upper troposphere. Unfortunately, global models don't quite have the resolution to explicitly calculate all these effects.

Ultimately, the effect of dust upon hurricanes is important because, like ocean temperatures, African dust export is expected to change during the 21st century in response to global warming and changes in African rainfall. One study shows that dust production is expected to decrease (Mahowald and Luo, 2003), though given the diversity of Sahel rainfall projections and the preliminary state of vegetation models, this is not necessarily going to be a universal response.

The calculation by Evan et al. is an interesting first step to quantifying the effect of dust changes on SST, but there plenty of issues left to investigate.

Footnote: For some presumably poetic reason, the Bard neglected to note that the Main Development Region is more like 25,000 furlongs across and the Sahara is about 2 billion acres.

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Imagine a group of 100 fisherman faced with declining stocks and worried about the sustainability of their resource and their livelihoods. One of them works out that the total sustainable catch is about 20% of what everyone is catching now (with some uncertainty of course) but that if current trends of increasing catches (about 2% a year) continue the resource would be depleted in short order. Faced with that prospect, the fishermen gather to decide what to do. The problem is made more complicated because some groups of fishermen are much more efficient than the others. The top 5 catchers, catch 20% of the fish, and the top 20 catch almost 75% of the fish. Meanwhile the least efficient 50 catch only 10% of the fish and barely subsist. Clearly, fairness demands that the top catchers lead the way in moving towards a more sustainable future.

The top 5 do start discussing how to manage the transition. They realise that the continued growth in catches - driven by improved technology and increasing effort - is not sustainable, and make a plan to reduce their catch by 80% over a number of years. But there is opposition - manufacturers of fishing boats, tackle and fish processing plants are worried that this would imply less sales for them in the short term. Strangely, they don't seem worried that a complete collapse of the fishery would mean no sales at all - preferring to think that the science can't possibly be correct and that everything will be fine. These manufacturers set up a number of organisations to advocate against any decreases in catch sizes - with catchy names like the Fisherfolk for Sound Science, and Friends of Fish. They then hire people who own an Excel spreadsheet program do "science" for them - and why not? They live after all in a free society.

After spending much energy and money on trying to undermine the science - with claims that the pond is much deeper than it looks, that the fish are just hiding, that the records of fish catches were contaminated by being done near a supermarket - the continued declining stocks and smaller and smaller fish make it harder and harder to sound convincing. So, in a switch of tactics so fast it would impress Najinsky, the manufacturers lobby suddenly decides to accept all that science and declares that the 'fish are hiding' crowd are just fringe elements. No, they said, we want to help with this transition, but …. we need to be sure that the plans will make sense. So they ask their spreadsheet-wielding "advocacy scientists" to calculate exactly what would happen if the top 5 (and only the top 5) did cut their catches by 80%, but meanwhile everyone else kept increasing their catch at the current (unsustainable rate). Well, the answers were shocking - the total catch would be initially still be 84% of what it is now and would soon catch up with current levels. In fact, the exact same techniques that were used to project the fishery collapse imply that this would only delay the collapse by a few years! and what would be the point of that?

The fact that the other top fishermen are discussing very similar cuts and that the fisherfolk council was trying to coordinate these actions to minimise the problems that might emerge, are of course ignored and the cry goes out that nothing can be done. In reality of course, the correct lesson to draw is that everything must be done.

In case you think that no-one would be so stupid as to think this kind of analysis has any validity, I would ask that you look up the history of the Newfoundland cod fishery. It is indeed a tragedy.

And the connection to climate? Here.

I'll finish with a quotation attributed to Edmund Burke, one the founders of the original conservative movement:

"Nobody made a greater mistake than he who did nothing because he could do only a little."

See here for a much better picture of what coordinated action could achieve.

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I like the Daily Mail. It doesn’t represent my views but I have to admire how powerfully it conveys its messages. It is angry, argumentative and fantastically critical.  

 Here are two stories that I think, having read the Daily Mail for the last few months, are representative of its attitude to UK energy. Then I talk about what we can learn from them.

So, I was delighted when I read this about wind farms with quotes from David MacKay. It has conclusion of  “And, yes, we need to invest in more renewable energy. “ and “The answer is messy, expensive and fraught with controversy and debate. But it is not blowing in the wind.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-1172230/Are-wind-farms-lot-hot-air–windy.html?ITO=1490

The next day was budget day and there was: “Tough new targets on tackling climate change will cost every household in Britain at least £600 a year, push more than a million people into poverty and send fuel bills soaring, experts warned today.”

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1172626/BUDGET-2009-Government-spend-1billion-green-initiatives.html?ITO=1490

This article goes on to say that “Critics said the targets, which include a drive to build more windfarms, would cost the economy £14billion a year by 2020 and would have only a negligible impact on climate change.”

So it is quite possible to have, in the same paper, using the same stock photos, science stories very positive about renewable energy but political and editorial stories that are totally negative about the way it is happening and its effects.

And it’s the criticism that is the headline grabbing stuff. It is more emotive to think of the government taking money from your family and wasting it, than it is to think about how cool it would be if we had a load of windmills.  

But actually criticizing the government is a useful activity. The current situation is that we have a set of targets for reducing carbon emissions; it is 80% reduction from 1990 levels, by 2050. There are no complete plans yet for how to reach that target.

I would like to see groups getting together to intelligently criticize the government for missing opportunity with renewable technology and not having good enough policy or any policy at all and present these arguments in journalist sized pieces.      

How would you do this?

The Daily Mail gets lots of its source material from The Tax Payers Alliance and Migration Watch. Again these two bodies don’t reflect my views, but they do an excellent job of communicating what they are about.

So, what about setting up a news source like this but for constructive criticism of UK energy policy?

This radio program gives some insight into how Obama catered the ‘green’ part
of his election campaign to different levels of environmental skepticism. For example he emphasised the gains to the car industry and being competitive with Japan and China in the ‘automobile state’ of Michigan .
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00jrpvs/b00jrpsq/Costing_the_Earth_Obamas_Green_Dream/

It also reinforces the ideas that Anthony Giddens puts forward in his book The Politics  Of Climate Change.  Anthony Giddens (Labour life peer and sociologist) had to say in this interview about the book (http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/factual/thinkingallowed/thinkingallowed_20090325.shtml):

• The strategy of trying to scare people about the future catastrophe of global warming doesn’t work because it is an abstract notion of what might happen in the future.
• We need to show people there are many positive innovations that will reduce the risk of climate change.
• With innovations we need to talk about opportunity not risk, benefit not just costs.
• He sees the difference between himself and the Green party as he has more interest in the sharp edged technological innovations than the protection of nature.
• He expresses the opinion that nuclear is the technology that can scale in the short term.
• We need incentives rather than taxes.
•  He says that Obama is an inspiration, as he sees the new economy converges with climate change investment.
• Energy markets should be under some government control as markets won’t do the job on their own.
• He wants to see a group of business leaders who publicly put forward the idea that it should be only those companies that are ‘environmentally progressive’ that will be competitive in the future. And they will lead by example.
• He puts forward the idea that we need a wider set of measures of growth/welfare for the future, as he believes that the economic growth measures we have do not reflect the total sum of human welfare.

Two recent papers (Lockwood & Fröhlich, 2008 - 'LF08′; Scafetta & Willson, 2009 - 'SW09′) compare the analysis of total solar irradiance (TSI) and the way the TSI measurements are combined to form a long series consisting of data from several satellite missions. The two papers come to completely opposite conclusions regarding the long term trend. So which one (if either) is right, then? And does it really matter?

This issue is a very familiar one when it comes to long-time series from satellite data. Each individual satellite only lasts a few years, and so a 30 year time series needs to be stitched together from a series of satellites. Each of those instruments might have a different calibration, and may have non-climatic drifts associated with instrument degradation, or orbital effects. Thus it can often be the case that there is a degree of ambiguity in putting together the series. This issue is at least part of the difference between the RSS and UAH tropospheric temperature trends, and in the CERES/ERBE analyses discussed recently.

The differences between PMOD and ACRIM have already been discussed by the SkepticalScientist and Tamino, so here is just an update in the light of the two recent papers. The important issue here is the so-called 'ACRIM-gap', the time between the ACRIM-I instrument ceased and when the ACRIM-II observations started (mid-1989 to late 1991), and how the data from these two instruments are combined using other overlapping observations. Note that the 'ACRIM' name for the Willson et al time-series simply implies that it was put together by some people on the ACRIM science team, not that they use different satellite data.

The focus on these papers is what the 'ACRIM gap' implies for TSI levels during the solar minimum at solar cycles 21 and 22. Whereas PMOD suggests that the TSI levels during these minima are similar, ACRIM suggests that the TSI level is higher during the minimum of cycle 22. SW08 even claim that there has been a positive 'minima trend'.

LF08 conclude that the PMOD is more realistic, since the change in the TSI levels during the solar minima, suggested by ACRIM, is inconsistent with the known relationship between TSI and galactic cosmic rays (GCR). It is well-known that the GCR flux is generally low when the level of solar activity is high, because the solar magnetic fields are more extensive and these shield the solar system against GCR (charged particles). However the two effects don't always go in lockstep, so this is suggestive rather than conclusive.

It is also clear from the instrumental data that the TSI tends to increase with the solar activity level - at least over the solar cycle. LF08 argue that if the ACRIM 'minimum trend' is correct, this will mean that past reconstruction of TSI based on e.g. sunspots are incorrect, and a lot of studies on the past climate variations would be wrong. This does not mean that the ACRIM data are useless, but that there are uncertainties regarding the relationship TSI-levels, solar activity for different time scales.

I found insufficient detailed description in SW09 of the methodology used in their analysis to be able to judge the real merit of their work. The paper provides a link to auxiliary material that does not work. However, the figures in the paper don't really convince when I don't know how they were made.

Furthermore, I found the SW09 a bit confusing, as it gives the impression that the PMOD composite relies on ERBS/ERBE data during the ACRIM-gap (“The PMOD team uses the sparse ERBS/ERBE data base to 'bridge' the ACRIM gap, conforming the higher cadence Nimbus 7/ERB to it by making adjustments due to …”). However the information in LF08 says PMOD used HF from Nimbus 7 (ERB).

The PMOD analysis involves an adjustment to correct for a glitch in the ERB data (orientation changes and/or switching off), but SW09 claims - without providing convincing arguments - that this correction cannot be justified.

The ACRIM composite does not account for a jump in the 'ACRIM-gap' due to instrumental changes. SW09 show a comparison between different analyses and Krivova et al. (2007) modeled TSI, but later acknowledge that the latter modeled TSI disagrees with measurements on decadal time scales. Furthermore, when the TSI is not adjusted over the 'ACRIM-gap', there is the apparent inconsistency between TSI and GCR.

Update: My conclusion is that the LF08 paper is far more convincing than the SW09 in terms of whether the TSI data should be adjusted over the 'ACRIM-gap'. But the this is probably not the final word on the matter.

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If you want to get a picture of what energy consumption is like in the UK at present, you can do worse than look at this Energy trends: March 2009:

http://www.berr.gov.uk/files/file50354.pdf

It is quite useful to have these figures in mind when reading things like David MacKay’s Without The Hot Air. It shows you how much we will have to change to get to a low carbon energy system, like the energy plans MacKay suggests. It is detailed plans for a new energy system that will be taken seriously by DECC, so we have to understand in as much detail where we are and how we can change.