Matt Ridley: climate panel must be purged

Matt Ridley (from rationaloptimist.com)

An excellent article from Matt Ridley in the Times, reproduced in The Australian:

THIS month, after a three-year investigation, Harvard University suspended a prominent professor of psychology for scandalously overinterpreting videos of monkey behaviour.

The incident has sent shock waves through science because it suggests a body of data is unreliable. The professor, Marc Hauser, is now a pariah in his field and his papers have been withdrawn. But the implications for society are not great; no policy had been based on his research.

This week, after a four-month review, a committee of scientists concluded that the Nobel prizewinning UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has “assigned high confidence to statements for which there is very little evidence, has failed to enforce its own guidelines, has been guilty of too little transparency, has ignored critical review comments and has had no policies on conflict of interest”.

Enormous and expensive policy changes have been based on the flawed work of these scientists. Yet there is apparently to be no investigation, blame, suspension or withdrawal of papers, just a gentle bureaucratic fattening of the organisation with new full-time posts.

IPCC reports are supposed to be the gold standard account of what is – and is not – known about global warming. The panel boasts that it uses only peer-reviewed scientific literature.

But its claims about mountain ice turned out to be anecdotes from a climbing magazine, its claims on the Amazon’s vulnerability to drought from a Brazilian pressure group’s website and 42 per cent of the references in one chapter proved to be to reports by Greenpeace, World Wildlife Fund and other “grey” literature.

Read the rest here.