Another blunder...
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Latest IPCC scandal – by Josh
19 June, 2011 by
The IPCC just doesn't learn…
16 June, 2011 by
Quoting Greenpeace (again)
You would have thought the IPCC would have learned some lessons after the revelations that chunks of the last climate report were lifted straight from the work of advocacy groups like Greenpeace. But no. The latest report, on renewables, falls into the same trap, as Donna Laframboise reports:
Last month I blogged about a new Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report on renewable energy. At that time I pointed out that the IPCC was up to its old tricks. When it issued the press release, it made only the Summary available. The full report wasn’t scheduled to become public until later.
The problem with this is that journalists are placed in the position of simply taking the IPCC’s word for it that the summary is an accurate reflection of what the full report says. Although IPCC likes to boast about how transparent it is, this is a perfect demonstration of the wide gap between IPCC rhetoric and reality.
Well, the whole enchilada is now available and, as Steve McIntyre explains, there’s a good reason why the IPCC might not have wanted anyone to look too closely at the full report.
It turns out the information the IPCC chose to highlight in its press release comes from a Greenpeace report – and that the person who wrote the Greenpeace report was also a lead author of the IPCC document.
It could not be clearer that the IPCC still doesn’t understand some basic concepts. It is improper for the IPCC to base its conclusions on Greenpeace research. I mean, how hard is this? If the IPCC is a scientific organization, if it says it is conducting a scientific assessment it cannot rely on work that was in any way undertaken or funded by activist groups.
It is also improper for Greenpeace employees to be IPCC lead authors. Period.
Even warmists are embarrassed by this, as Donna reports later.
Read it all.
US House of Representatives kills IPCC funding
20 February, 2011 by
Hopelessly biased
A small victory for common sense. The US House of Representatives has voted to strip the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change of its funding for the remainder of 2011. As Science magazine reports, the climatologists aren’t happy:
Last night the U.S. House of Representatives agreed to cut off funding for the rest of 2011 for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. “My constituents should not have to continue to foot the bill for an organization to keep producing corrupt findings that can be used as justification to impose a massive new energy tax on every American,” said Representative Blaine Leutkemeyer (R-MO), the sponsor of the measure, in floor debate before the vote. Leutkemeyer said in a press release that his amendment, which passed 244 to 179 largely along partisan lines, represented “a victory for taxpayers.”
Asked about the vote, National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration head Jane Lubchenco said she disagreed with the House’s action. “Science should not be partisan. [Tell that to the consensus boys, Jane – Ed] It is highly unfortunate that in many cases it is,” she said. The spending measure, which would fund the government for the rest of 2011, now goes to the Senate, which disagrees with many portions of the bill.
“It’s a real tragedy that the issue is so poorly understood that it doesn’t have the support I think it deserves given how important it is,” says Stanford ecologist Chris Field, the lead author on one of three IPCC working groups [and an old friend of ACM – see here – despite $70 billion spent on brainwashing the public, it’s still “poorly understood”? – Ed]. The House doesn’t “like the message so they are killing the messenger,” says climate scientist Mike MacCracken, former director of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. (source)
Feel sorry for them yet? No, neither do I. And Dr Roy Spencer points out a few home truths about why this happened:
The climate change deniers have no one but themselves to blame for last night’s vote.
I’m talking about those who deny NATURAL climate change. Like Al Gore, John Holdren, and everyone else who thinks climate change was only invented since they were born.
Politicians formed the IPCC over 20 years ago with an endgame in mind: to regulate CO2 emissions. I know, because I witnessed some of the behind-the-scenes planning. It is not a scientific organization. It was organized to use the government-funded scientific research establishment to achieve policy goals.
Now, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. But when they are portrayed as representing unbiased science, that IS a bad thing. If anthropogenic global warming – and ocean ‘acidification’ (now there’s a biased and totally incorrect term) — ends up being largely a false alarm, those who have run the IPCC are out of a job. More on that later.
I don’t want to be misunderstood on this. IF we are destroying the planet with our fossil fuel burning, then something SHOULD be done about it.
But the climate science community has allowed itself to be used on this issue, and as a result, politicians, activists, and the media have successfully portrayed the biased science as settled.
They apparently do not realize that ‘settled science’ is an oxymoron.
The most vocal climate scientists defending the IPCC have lost their objectivity. Yes, they have what I consider to be a plausible theory. But they actively suppress evidence to the contrary, for instance attempts to study natural explanations for recent warming.
That’s one reason why the public was so outraged about the ClimateGate e-mails. ClimateGate doesn’t prove their science is wrong…but it does reveal their bias. Science progresses by investigating alternative explanations for things. Long ago, the IPCC all but abandoned that search.
IPCC: Pachauri stays, credibility goes
15 October, 2010 by
Subtracts credibility
As Shub Niggurath puts it:
“Here is an organization that cannot tackle its own internal issues, but yet expects the whole world to take advice from it for solving a supposed global problem.”
But I for one am not complaining that Pachauri is staying on – as I have said before, every day he remains in charge subtracts credibility from the IPCC, and that can only be a good thing. The recent meeting in Busan has deferred a number of key issues for later discussion:
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has adopted new guidelines on dealing with scientific uncertainties following criticism of its 2007 report.
But the panel’s meeting in South Korea closed with many other reforms proposed in a recent review being passed to committees for further consideration.
Chairman Rajendra Pachauri confirmed his intention to stay in post until the next assessment is published in 2014.
…
In its recent review of the IPCC, the InterAcademy Council (IAC) – an umbrella group for the world’s science academies – highlighted a case in the 2007 assessment where studies projecting rapidly declining crop yields in Africa were given more weight than they merited, in the absence of supporting evidence.
The revised guidance emphasises that in future, authors must assess both the quality of research available and uncertainties within that research.
It urges authors to be careful of “group-think”, but maintains that it “may be appropriate to describe findings for which the evidence and understanding are overwhelming as statements of fact without using uncertainty qualifiers”.
Enhanced guidance on the use of “grey literature” – material not published in peer-reviewed scientific journals – has also been drawn up, and will be finalised by chairs of the IPCC’s working groups in the coming months
I can bet you that all the grey literature they use will plug the alarmist cause. There won’t be any that challenges the consensus, will there?
Read the rest here.
UPDATE: Must read – Donna Laframboise’s summary of the madness here.
Christopher Booker on the IPCC
6 September, 2010 by
Christopher Booker
For those of you who don’t know, Christopher Booker is a columnist in the UK Telegraph and with an irresistible combination of wit, clarity and a razor-sharp intellect, invariably talks nothing but absolute common sense. He is healthily sceptical of the AGW scaremongers (and has written books on the subject) and this week takes apart the crumbling edifice that is the IPCC:
When, some years ago, I began the research for my book The Real Global Warming Disaster, nothing surprised me more than discovering how widely the nature of the IPCC is misunderstood. It is invariably portrayed as a body representing the top scientists in the world, objectively weighing the complex forces that shape Earth’s climate. In reality, it’s nothing of the kind.
The men who set up the panel – led by its first chairman Bert Bolin, a Swedish meteorologist, and John Houghton, then head of the UK Met Office and first chairman of the IPCC’s scientific working group – were already believers in what they called “human-induced climate change”. The IPCC was, from the start, essentially a political pressure group, producing evidence to support the view that global warming was the most serious crisis facing the planet. This guided the selection of all the key scientists chosen to compile the IPCC’s findings (such as those involved in the Climategate affair). And this explains all the searching questions that have built up around its hugely influential reports ever since.
Read it here.
P.S. John McLean has written a superb exposé of the inherent bias of the IPCC: Climate Science Corrupted. Download the PDF (600KB) here – it is an eye-opening read.
Matt Ridley: climate panel must be purged
4 September, 2010 by
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.
Idiotic Comment of the Day: Achim Steiner
30 August, 2010 by
Fully duped by the alarmists
The executive director of the UN Environment Programme shows he is about as f-witted as they come. As for the actual idiotic comment of the day, you can take your pick from this lot (all gleefully reported by the ever-impartial ABC):
Achim Steiner also said extreme weather in 2010, such as floods in Pakistan or Russia’s heatwave, were a “stark warning” of the need to act to slow global warming, as outlined by the UN panel.
He said he would be surprised if the review, spurred by mistakes in a 2007 report such as an exaggeration of the thaw of Himalayan glaciers, called for any radical overhaul of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). [No, of course not. Business as usual.]
The InterAcademy Council, comprising science academies around the world, is due to hand its review and recommendations for the future of the IPCC to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon in New York.
Mr Steiner, head of the Nairobi-based UN Environment Program (UNEP), said the report follows others in 2010 that have backed the core findings by the IPCC that it is at least 90 per cent certain that mankind is driving global warming. [shurely “climate change”?]
“Hopefully the release will be a moment where the public can reflect and say that all these reviews have not pointed to any fundamental flaw in the work,” Mr Steiner said.
Nah, course not mate. There’s the carpet over there – just sweep it all underneath.
Read it here.
UN climate report "one-sided"
7 July, 2010 by
Biased from the start
Prize to The Australian for the most blindingly obvious headline of 2010 (so far). But what did anybody expect from the IPCC? It was founded in the late 1980s solely for the purpose of finding evidence to bolster a conclusion already reached by its founders – namely that human activity was dangerously warming the planet – and everyone is shocked when that’s exactly what they find! Its terms of reference refer to “human-caused warming” – not any other cause should even be considered, according to the IPCC. So the whole process was completely biased from the start:
THE UN body that advises governments on climate change failed to make clear how its landmark report on the impact of global warming often presented a worst-case scenario, an investigation has concluded.
A summary report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change on regional impacts focused on the negative consequences of climate change and failed to make clear that there would also be some benefits of rising temperatures.
The report adopted a “one-sided” approach that risked being interpreted as an “alarmist view”.
For example, the IPCC had stated that 60 per cent of the Great Barrier Reef was projected to suffer regular bleaching by 2020 but had failed to make clear that this was the worst projected outcome and the impact might be far smaller.
The wording of a statement on between 3000 and 5000 more heat-related deaths a year in Australian cities had suggested that all of the projected increase would be the result of climate change, whereas most of it would be caused by the rising population and an increase in the number of elderly people.
The report, which underpinned the Copenhagen summit last December, wrongly suggested that climate change was the main reason communities faced severe water shortages and neglected to make clear that population growth was a much bigger factor. (source)
And with impeccable timing, and having clearly learnt nothing about the perception of climate science, The Guardian and AAP publish yet more alarmism, helpfully reprinted by the moonbat Age:
THE world is heading for an average temperature rise of nearly 4 degrees, according to a global analysis of national pledges. Such a rise would bring a high risk of major extinctions, threats to food supplies and the near-total collapse of the huge Greenland ice sheet.
More than 100 heads of state agreed in Copenhagen last December to limit the rise in global temperatures to 1.5 to 2 degrees above the long-term average before the industrial revolution, which started a huge global rise in greenhouse gases.
But after a concerted international effort to monitor the emission reduction targets of more than 60 countries, including all the major economies, the Climate Interactive Scoreboard now calculates that the world is on course for a rise of nearly double the stated goal by 2100. (source)
Where do you start? The stupidity of such comments beggars belief. Not only does it blindly assume that the planet’s climate has a single dial, marked “CO2”, which can be twiddled like a thermostat to determine the temperature in 90 years, but also it is based solely on incomplete, flaky computer models, which, even the IPCC admits, cannot predict anything. No wonder climate science has so little credibility, especially when journalists and politicians spin it so appallingly.
Brace yourselves for even more alarmism
2 July, 2010 by
Where's the acceleration?
No matter what happens to the climate between now and the publication of the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report, we can be sure that the alarmism will be ratcheted up to ever more preposterous heights to keep the research funds flooding in. Everything will be bigger, faster, badder, worse than we thought, quicker than we thought etc, etc. The IPCC, and thousands of climate scientists, are too dependent on the “global warming” scare to let it go without a fight. And it’s started already. The IPCC’s AR4 predictions for sea level rise were exaggerated enough, but AR5 will be worse:
THE world’s peak scientific body on climate change [I think not] will ”almost inevitably” make an increase in its predictions of sea-level rises due to global warming in its next landmark report in 2014, the vice-chair of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change says.
Jean-Pascal van Ypersele told The Age recent satellite observations showed extensive melting in the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets.
That new data will be considered in the IPCC’s next assessment report – regarded by governments and scientific groups as the world’s pre-eminent scientific document on climate change – and should lead to an increase in predictions of sea-level rises, Professor van Ypersele said.
The sea-level rises estimated in the IPCC’s last assessment report, released in 2007, were now on the low side. [See, what did I just say? It’s all bigger, badder, faster]
That report put sea-level rises at 18 to 59 centimetres above 1990 levels by 2100.
Members of the IPCC met in Kuala Lumpur last week to discuss the consideration of the Greenland and Antarctic data for the IPCC’s next report – its fifth. Analysis of the extent of reduction in mass of the two major ice sheets will be the report’s main focus.
”The reason there was a workshop in KL is that the IPCC knows very well this is an area that needs particular attention and where a lot of progress has been made,” Professor van Ypersele said.
New satellite data ”are starting to show – but are quite convincing, I must say – that both the Greenland ice sheet and the Antarctic ice sheet are losing net mass, not on the margins but as an ice sheet”, he said.
Funny that the sea level record shows no acceleration of sea level rise, despite attempts to show otherwise.
Strap yourselves in, folks, it’s gonna be one hell of a ride.
Read it here.
Scientist agrees with herself – creates "consensus"
26 June, 2010 by
Consensus of one
An easy way to make a consensus if ever I’ve heard one – just agree with yourself! Not that consensus has anything to do with science anyway, but since the warmists insist consensus is important, we have to deal with it. Here we have a single scientist and a single paper (co-authored by said scientist) being relied upon by the IPCC to ignore solar effects on the climate:
Klimaskeptik.cz, a Czech climate skeptic blog, has posted today an interesting article “Judithgate: The IPCC was only one Solar Physicist” (google rough translation). Her name is Judith Lean (photo at right). On the basis of this “consensus of one” solar physicist, the IPCC proclaimed solar influences upon the climate to be minimal. Objection to this was raised by the Norwegian government as shown in the AR4 second draft comments below (and essentially dismissed by the IPCC):
“I would encourage the IPCC to [re-]consider having only one solar physicist on the lead author team of such an important chapter. In particular since the conclusion of this section about solar forcing hangs on one single paper in which J. Lean is a coauthor. I find that this paper, which certainly can be correct, is given too much weight”
What a ridiculous concept even to think that the sun, the only significant source of energy for the entire climate system, could possibly have anything to do with the climate! </sarc>
Read it here.
Australian Climate Madness 
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