Frakking good stuff
Kevin Rudd used to prattle on about the “4000 guys in white coats who run around and don’t have a sense of humour” who kept telling him that man-made emissions were to blame for dangerous global warming. You’d be lucky to get to 4000 even if you included all the rent-seeking hangers-on – and there were plenty of those.
John McLean analysed chapter 9 of Working Group 1 (Understanding and Attributing Climate Change) and concluded:
“More than two-thirds of all authors of chapter 9 of the IPCC’s 2007 climate-science assessment are part of a clique whose members have co-authored papers with each other and, we can surmise, very possibly at times acted as peer-reviewers for each other’s work. Of the 44 contributing authors, more than half have co-authored papers with the lead authors or coordinating lead authors of chapter 9.
The IPCC appointed as review editor for chapter 9 a person who was not only a coordinating lead author for the corresponding chapter of the previous assessment report but had also authored 13 of the papers cited in chapter 9 and had co-authored papers with 10 authors of chapter 9 including both coordinating lead authors and three of the seven lead authors.” (source, PDF at p18)
I have called the IPCC a “coterie of warmists” on several occasions in the past, dismissively excluding criticisms from highly respected scientists that don’t fit the pre-conceived agenda, whilst welcoming with open arms sheaves of suspect grey literature from environmental advocacy groups – because they do fit the agenda. Now the redoubtable Donna Laframboise of No Frakking Consensus exposes more of the seedy mutual backscratching that passes for normal scientific practice down at IPCC Mansions, and the name of an ACM favourite pops up:
Cynthia Rosenzweig is a research scientist who works at James Hansen’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies. Once I might have described her as a senior Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) author. But she’s actually more than that.
It turns out Rosenzweig is a member of a small clique of people who wore multiple hats during the writing of the 2007 climate bible. When I hear that thousands of the world’s best scientists participate in the IPCC I envision each of them making a focused contribution in the narrow field in which they possess exceptional research expertise. But that’s not how it works.
Rosenzweig, for example, served in six distinct capacities. She was:
- one of the two most senior authors for a chapter titled Assessment of Observed Changes and Responses in Natural and Managed Systems
- a contributing author for a chapter titled Assessment of Adaptation Practices, Options, Constraints and Capacity
- a lead author of the Working Group 2 Technical Summary document
- a drafting author of the Working Group 2 Summary for Policymakers document
- a member of the core writing team for the Synthesis report
- and an expert reviewer for Working Group 2
In other words, certain names pop up again and again in IPCC reports. If shadowy interests were trying to “control the message” in these documents, entrusting key tasks to a small group of people might be an effective strategy.
Like Rosenzweig, Australian meteorologist David Karoly filled six separate IPCC roles. He served as a lead author and as a review editor. Along with Rosenzweig he was a lead author of a Technical Summary, a drafting author of a Summary for Policymakers, a member of the core writing team for the Synthesis Report, and was also an expert reviewer.
How anyone can take this politicised and integrity-challenged organisation seriously any more is beyond comprehension… And we can expect more of the same (only worse) with AR5 in 2013/14.
There’s much more. Read it all.
Australian Climate Madness 
Given the different fields assocciated with climate science (which is a generic term), no one can really claim to be an expert on the climate and few can claim expertise in too many of these fields. Rozenweig and Karoly seem awfully versatile.
Despite the line spun by our Prime Meretrix and her conga-line of rileyers, one does not need to be a specialist scientist to understand basic principles or to spot flaws in fallacious arguments or to identify basic errors in statistical presentations.
Compare today’s “climate scientists” and their “you can’t understand our arcane mysteries; just trust us” with scientists of the past. Did William Harvey, or Galileo Galilei, or Isaac Newton, or John Snow or Albert Einstein or Robin Warren and Barry J. Marshall need to lie about their proofs? Did they claim that only their own specialist clique were able to comprehend their wonderful advances? No, they were able to articulate their proofs so that any intelligent layman could understand them.
Anyway, when a railway engineer, a palæontologist and and an economist (taking time out of putting real pollution into tropical environments) are lauded by our PM as best able to present the science, we can work out for ourselves that long training in a relevant field is not essential for understanding “climate science”.
The IPCC’s 2007 report has failed to live up to expectations. Where are the catastrophic weather events that will decimate man-kind? Where is the prediction of climate change refugees? Where are the sinking islands in the Pacific? Where are the raised temperatures?
Nostradamus, the 16th century astronomer and astrologer, could have done a better job at predicting future weather events than these guys. The IPCC scientists are simply charlatan’s running around in white coats wringing their hands at the mere mention of carbon dioxide.