Le NIPCC ancien est deja arrive

I don't appear to have mocked the NIPCC recently, preferring to consign them to oblivion, but JoNova is somewhat implausibly singing their virtues, so I've noticed. If you read the report you'll see that its prefixed by recommendations from the Great and the Good; and they've been fortunate enough to squeeze in praise from that luminary Jeevananda Reddy, from which I think it is fair to deduce that they were not at all short of Great or Good to fill out their puff list. Google trends is still instructive:

Stoats are still wiping the floor with the NIPCC.

But if you do - like almost no-one else - actually read the report, you'll be struck by it having lots and lots of words in it. But really very few authors. And if you're of a reflective frame of mind, you'll think to yourself: "Really? Did they really bother to write so many words to so little purpose?" And then you'll think to yourself: I wonder if they cheated just a little bit and copied some of them?

So I scrolled down, the way you would with someone's homework where you think you'll get to the bit you'll hope no-one will ever even skim, to about 2/3 of the way down - to page 606. 606! Good grief, so many pages. To "5.1.2 Paleoecological Records".

* "Most of the world’s major species “body types” were laid down during the Cambrian period 600 million years ago (Levinton, 1992)..." This is in the previous NIPCC report, and in "Unstoppable GW every now and again" by S Fred.
* "During the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), some 56 million years ago, it is believed..." is from Surviving the warmth of the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum, as is a pile of the following text.
* "How were the bulk of Earth’s species able to survive a climatic change that many today believe is unsurvivable..." is from an Idso blog post commenting on Hof et al. (2011).
* "The two phenomena that come into play in these ecosystem transformations are acclimation and adaptation..." is lightly modified from the Idso's take on Vegas-Vilarrubia et al. (2011).

And so on. To be fair, they are mostly plagiarising themselves. But oddly, despite everyone's desire to bump up their own citation count, they don't include themselves in the list of references.

Refs

*THE DISHONESTY OF DE LANGE AND CARTER: ZOMBIE LIES UNDER GREENLAND ICE - Hot Topic.

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Section 3.13.1 (page 417 on) is almost entirely plagiarized (with very small changes) from here, which is entertaining because that site gives no author attribution so you can't really say it's even a case of self-plagiarism. It's straight out academic misconduct.

I suspect the vast majority of the report is plagiarized.

By Captain Flashheart (not verified) on 02 Apr 2014 #permalink

Given their lack of research on the subject the NIPCC authors write about, perhaps they feel embarrassed about citing their polemical books.

By Anthony David … (not verified) on 02 Apr 2014 #permalink

Pretty thin gruel. "Oooh, they're recycling stuff they've written before..."

I thought we were in favor of recycling.

By thomaswfuller2 (not verified) on 03 Apr 2014 #permalink

"Idsos all the way down"

Hello Tom

Haven't seen you around for a bit. Thought you might have died. Anyway, lovely to have you back.

Perhaps the point here is that the NIPCC report is egregious bollocks? And self-referential egregious bollocks at that. And that we should be critical of S-REB rather than apologists for the stuff?

The NIPVVIntroduction is equally gamy. Not content with badgering an ailing Roger Revelle into signing off on a vanity press article Singer penned in 1991, the NIPCC author descended on the literal deathbed of Frederick Seitz to get his unwitnessed assent to the fawning introduction Singer wrote for himself. The 96 year old physicist died the next day.

1,063 pages. I suppose when the quality is so stratospherically high, it's a great idea to go for quantity. My favourite part so far is the section on Ocean "Acidification". Very helpfully the NIPCC has put quote marks around the word "Acidification" so I am now re-assured that the so-called "decrease" in pH in the oceans caused by carbon dioxide emissions won't cause any harm to oceanic ecosystems.

By Rob Nicholls (not verified) on 03 Apr 2014 #permalink

"Le NIPCC ancien est deja arrive."

Hoo boy!! Where to begin with this one? One thing for sure, whenever the hive starts slinging the ol' Francais, you just know that you're dealing with big-time, dog-whistle, code-language, hive-solidarity, "caca boudin" taureau-merde up the ol' wazoo.

I mean, like, us coolie-trash, nobody, servant-class peons are so impressed when our "betters" run their mouths in French so that they can speak in front of us despised, useless-eater helots without us knowing what they're talkin' about and in a way that also puts us in our English-only peasant-place.

Hey Russell! "Bourbons"? "ancien regime"? "Couperin"? "Rameau"?--you pretentious, dorked-up, little francophile-phony fuck! As if a two-bit, music-snob Royalist- wannabe, like you, has the slightest idea what you're talkin' about! And how so privileged-white-dork cool of you, Russell, to link the "frog"-business to "Beijing Opera". So do any of you hive-bozos have a real life?

It's tough, WMC, but at a certain point you've gotta give up being "one of the hive-guys", if you're to preserve your fundamental integrity--"bourgeois integrity", I'm talkin' about, of course. Stop temporizing, will yah? You've got a pair--just quit letting the hive-creeps squeeze 'em!

The authors obviously can't use Google scholar, because if they did they wouldn't have based a large section on the work of Prof. Essenhigh's obviously incorrect residence time argument without mentioning that it had been refuted by my comment paper in the same journal.

http://scholar.google.co.uk/scholar?cites=480663711414541018

They would also have noticed that it has only recieved 14 citations, of which one (the second most cited) is my comment, two are the EPA finidings, which also refute Essenhigh's argument. One is the paper by Humlum et al. which also recieved a number of critical commentaries.

So the NIPCC authors either didn't perform the basic scholarship of checking to see what sort of reception the paper on which they base an arguemtent recieved, or they did and chose not to mention the refutation.

By Dikran Marsupial (not verified) on 04 Apr 2014 #permalink

"1,063 pages. I suppose when the quality is so stratospherically high, it’s a great idea to go for quantity."

i'm sure the authors' busy research schedules simply prevented them from devoting the time necessary to properly condense the incredible amount of blog science they needed to cover.

or something.

The twitter versions are pithier, and a lot less polite. Tol has posted something on his blog in reply and has an article at the Conversation. Popcorn please.

One of the interesting things is that no one is defending Tol.

By Eli Rabett (not verified) on 04 Apr 2014 #permalink

Eli, see my link in #14 about that article at the Conversation.

Marco,

So when Professor Tol ends his article by alleging that the Stern Review uses “accounting tricks and dubious assumptions”, he is merely highlighting how different his own personal approach is to that of the rest of the research community.

They really needed to word that better, particularly as the concluding sentence. I suspect we'll see it quote-mined by those who like to engage in such practices.

Paul S, you are right, it can definitely be quote-mined. For some reason I even expect Tol to do so...

11

C'est un vieux con.

The linked Grantham posts are strikingly similar to the typical climate audit or WUWT post. Like a mirror image, they create a false controversy..There's even an attack on models and outrage that his work is included in the latest IPCC.

By Paul Kelly (not verified) on 05 Apr 2014 #permalink

Paul Kelly:

"Like a mirror image, they create a false controversy..There’s even an attack on models"

Are you arguing that because some models are useful, all models are useful, and therefore any criticism of any model is inappropriate?

dhogaza,

No.

By Paul Kelly (not verified) on 06 Apr 2014 #permalink

I looked at the stuff they had about Arctic sea ice. Most of it was a rehash of the previous report, ie mostly citing papers before 2005.

Quite shameless really.

[They're certainly shameless. But they're also pretty safe: almost no-one reads this stuff, and they're at such a low level that any publicity - even people pointing out their rehashing - is good -W]

<a href="http://scienceblogs.com/stoat/2014/04/02/le-nipcc-ancien-est-deja-arriv…

I mean, like, us coolie-trash, nobody, servant-class peons are so impressed when our “betters” run their mouths in French so that they can speak in front of us despised, useless-eater helots without us knowing what they’re talkin’ about and in a way that also puts us in our English-only peasant-place.

Aw, don't be so hard on yourself, Mike. Not everone who speaks French is better than you.

By Mal Adapted (not verified) on 07 Apr 2014 #permalink

Me at #27: HTML fail, but you know who I was talking about.

By Mal Adapted (not verified) on 07 Apr 2014 #permalink

@ no. 27

Hey Mal Adapted!

I just know, MA, that there's gotta be a "mot juste" that describes your #27. So since you're supposed to be one of the ace smarty-pants on the Stoat-scene here, be a pal and help me out, will yah?

[The rest is best omitted -W]

Mike: "So since you’re supposed to be one of the ace smarty-pants on the Stoat-scene here"

I am? Says who?

By Mal Adapted (not verified) on 07 Apr 2014 #permalink

He wears his sans culottes proudly, this one.

[This isn't going anywhere really, is it? Lets just call it quits at this point, no-one is coming out of it well -W]