Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Callanan on 6 October (HL8378), what reasons they have for assuming that the set of residuals is stationary.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The assumption of stationarity of the residuals is well established in the peer reviewed literature. Recent examples of this can be found in the following papers:
Kew, Sarah F., Sjoukje Y. Philip, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Gerard van der Schrier, Friederike EL Otto, and Robert Vautard. "The exceptional summer heat wave in southern Europe 2017." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 100, no. 1 (2019): S49-S53.
Yiou, Pascal, Julien Cattiaux, Davide Faranda, Nikolay Kadygrov, Aglae Jézéquel, Philippe Naveau, Aurelien Ribes et al. "Analyses of the Northern European summer heatwave of 2018." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101, no. 1 (2020): S35-S40.
Leach, Nicholas J., Sihan Li, Sarah Sparrow, Geert Jan van Oldenborgh, Fraser C. Lott, Antje Weisheimer, and Myles R. Allen. "Anthropogenic influence on the 2018 summer warm spell in Europe: the impact of different spatio-temporal scales." Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 101, no. 1 (2020): S41-S46.
Further to the written answer provided on 6 October (HL8377), the plot placed in the Library of the House shows that the GEV distribution is a good fit to the data, which supports the assumption that the distribution of residuals may be adequately modelled as stationary.
Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the Written Answer by Lord Callanan on 6 October (HL8377), whether they will place a copy of a quantile-quantile plot of a GEV distribution against the distribution of June maximum temperatures at Verkhoyansk during 1926–2020, that includes data from 2020 in particular, in the Library of the House.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
Further to the written answer provided on 6 October (HL8377), the plot placed in the Library of the House uses data over 1926 – 2019. The 2020 value is not included in the fit of the GEV itself, as is standard scientific practice to avoid biasing the fit by the extreme value of interest. It is well established that the selection of a series in which a very large extreme has occurred means that the return time of this value is likely to be much larger than the length of the dataset itself. This means the time series would give an artificially low view of the return time compared to reality. However, as requested, we have provided an additional quantile-quantile plot that does include the 2020 value in the fit – which we provide subject to these caveats.
Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the report Prolonged Siberian heat of 2020, published on 15 July, whether the Met Office's analysis assumes that all the months of June during 1926–2020 have the same statistical distribution for their daily temperature maxima at Verkhoyansk; and if so, why.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The analysis does not assume that all the months of June during 1926-2020 have the same statistical distribution for the highest of their daily temperature maxima at Verkhoyansk. Instead, the method involves modelling secular changes in the data by a covariance with smoothed Global Mean Surface Temperature (GMST) and first removing this to create a set of residuals that may be assumed to be stationary and to which a Generalized Extreme Value (GEV) fit is then made. This method, based on peer-reviewed literature, is set out in the linked methods document which accompanies the report.
Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the report Prolonged Siberian heat of 2020, published on 15 July, whether they will place a copy of a quantile-quantile plot of a GEV distribution against the distribution of June maximum temperatures at Verkhoyansk during 1926–2020 in the Library of the House.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
I have arranged for a copy to be placed in the Libraries of the House, along with explanatory text and supporting documents.
Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government, further to the report Prolonged Siberian heat of 2020, published on 15 July, what assessment they have made of whether the report's sample size is large enough to justify the use of a GEV asymptotic approximation when analysing the Verkhoyansk temperatures.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The report’s sample size is large enough to justify the fitting method used in the analysis as daily temperature data at approximately one-year intervals are not significantly correlated from year to year over continental regions. The maximum daily temperature in a particular month or season in a particular year in a continental region does not serve as a good predictor of the maximum daily temperature in the same month or season in the following year (over and above the long-term effect of climate change) due to natural variability of the climate system. The June-July daily maximum temperature data over timescales from 1 day upwards shows no significant autocorrelation (correlation with itself across a period of time) above 1 week timescales and confirms that the 94 data points used in the report are independent, a sufficiently large number to justify the fitting method used in the analysis. The analysis in the report is based on peer reviewed methodology as set out in a paper by Van der Wiel et al. referenced in the report, which applied this fitting method to a dataset of a comparable size.
Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government what estimate the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy has made of the domestic value added as a proportion of the total cost of capital investment in renewable energy capacity installed in the last five years, and in particular of the domestic value added as a proportion of the cost of (1) electric photo voltaic panels, (2) heat pumps, (3) batteries for electric cars, (4) wind turbines, generators and gear boxes, (5) wind turbine blades, and (6) platforms and legs for offshore wind turbines.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
The Government has not made an assessment on this basis. However, in 2019, the Department commissioned a consortium to provide analysis on future energy innovation needs and to produce the Energy Innovation Needs Assessments. These include information on potential Gross Value Add, domestic and export growth opportunities of different technologies in the UK’s future energy system.
The Energy Innovation Needs Assessments are available on the GOV.UK website.
Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask Her Majesty's Government whether any peer-reviewed scientific studies or reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change predict the extermination of the human race in the next century as a result of climate change.
Answered by Lord Callanan - Parliamentary Under Secretary of State (Department for Energy Security and Net Zero)
We are not aware of any peer-reviewed scientific studies that predict the end of the human race in the next century as a result of climate change. The scientific consensus, as represented by the assessments of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, projects that climate change over this century and beyond will have increasingly negative impacts on human and natural systems, with the potential for impacts that are severe and, in some cases, irreversible. The evidence does not point to humanity going extinct because of climate change.
Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, pursuant to the Answer of 15 March 2017 to Question 66793, whether the climate models referred to rely on computer simulations only rather than observational evidence.
Answered by Nick Hurd
The evidence that present rates of decline in the extent of Arctic sea ice are not consistent with reasonably expected natural variability does not rely on computer simulations alone. Detection of the decline is based on observations. Both observations and models are used to estimate natural variability in the climate system, and attribute the most likely cause for the detected decline.
Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, pursuant to the Answer of 29 March 2017 to Question 68956, whether the climate models referred to rely on computer simulations only rather than observational evidence.
Answered by Nick Hurd
The evidence that declines of snow and ice, other than of Arctic sea ice extent, are not consistent with reasonably expected natural variability does not rely on computer simulations alone. Detection of declining snow and ice is based on observations. Both observations and models are used to estimate natural variability in the climate system, and attribute the most likely cause for the detected declines.
Asked by: Lord Lilley (Conservative - Life peer)
Question to the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy:
To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy, pursuant to the Answer of 15 March 2017 to Question 66792, on climate change: snow and ice, whether there are declines of snow and ice, other than of Arctic Sea ice extent, that are inconsistent with reasonably expected national variability; and if he will make a statement.
Answered by Nick Hurd
The Department does not hold this information, but it can be found in the 5th assessment report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR5). This states that it is likely (greater than 66% probability) there has been human influence on: the observed retreat of glaciers since 1960s; reduction in northern hemisphere snow cover since 1970; and surface melting and mass loss of Greenland since 1993. These declines can be best explained by climate models that include human influences and not natural internal variability alone.