Only the purple is below sea level
Clog-gate? Windmill-gate? Edam-gate? Yet another error in IPCC AR4, this time relating to sea levels in Holland:
A United Nations report wrongly claimed that more than half of the Netherlands is currently below sea level.
In fact, just 20 percent of the country consists of polders that are pumped dry, and which are at risk of flooding if global warming causes rising sea levels. Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer has ordered a thorough investigation into the quality of the climate reports which she uses to base her policies on.
Climate-sceptic MPs were quick to react. Conservative MP Helma Neppérus and Richard de Mos from the right-wing Freedom Party want the minister to explain to parliament how these figures were used to decide on national climate policy. “This may invalidate all claims that the last decades were the hottest ever,” Mr De Mos said.
The incorrect figures which date back to 2007 were revealed on Wednesday by the weekly Vrij Nederland. The Dutch Environmental Assessment Agency told reporters that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) added together two figures supplied by the agency: the area of the Netherlands which is below sea-level and the area which is susceptible to flooding. In fact, these areas overlap, so the figures should not have been combined to produce the 55 percent quoted by the IPCC.
The discovery comes just a week after a prediction about glaciers in the Himalayas proved wrong. Rather than disappearing by 2035, as IPCC reports claim, the original research underlying the report predicted the mountain ice would last until 2350. (source)
The Dutch environment minister isn’t impressed:
Dutch Environment Minister Jacqueline Cramer says she will no longer tolerate errors by climate researchers. She expressed her anger to Dutch researchers who presented their annual report on the state of the climate on Wednesday. (source)
Can you imagine Penny Wong having the guts to say the same? No, me neither, because she, like Rudd and Co, is blinded by dogma.
Australian Climate Madness 
Dogma? That, I suspect, gives them too much of the benefit of the doubt. It is far more likely that they are blinded by the carbon dollars they want to rip out of the productive economy to keep themselves and ever more bloated bureaucracies in the manner they have become accustomed to.
It will be interesting to learn what the findings of the inquiry for the Environment Minister of the Dutch Govt will be. Not wishing to preempt these, I would say that we should study these sort of national governmental responses to simple errors of fact perpetrated by the IPCC carefully and make certain that Marian Wikinson and Ben Cubby of SMH present their own interpretations of these unequivocally, yet considering a range of perspectives in the proper manner of truth seekers, not polemicists.
A deeper consideration of Chinese and Indian positions concerning the IPCC would also be warranted, especially considering that Himalayan glaciers have such extraordinary implications for food security and migration in populous Asia. If the glaciers were to melt in 30 years ( 2035, as cited in the Nobel Prize recipient document) this would be catastrophic risk: clear, present, likely and imminent dangers. If not for 300 years, we can afford the time to discover the salient facts at some leisure, a logical conclusion that shakes the very logic of Sir Nicolas Stern’s UK Treasury report.