IPCC
stoat | February 11, 2010There is a good letter from some Dutch scientists at Open brief Nederlandse klimaatonderzoekers over IPCC en over fouten in Klimaatrapport 2007 (don't worry, its in English too). I think it does a good job of setting the recent "IPCC is utterly corrupt / mistaken / broken / infiltrated by space aliens / needs to be disbanded" thing in perspective.
tlambert | February 9, 2010Andrew Bolt has written a post where he pretends that comments made by Andrew Lacis about the first order draft of the summary of chapter 9 of AR4 WG1 are actually aboout the published report.
Andrew Revkin asked Lacis what he thought about the published report:
"The revised chapter was much improved," he said. "That's different than saying everything in there is nailed down, but I think it's a big improvement."
Overall, he said, "I commend the authors for doing as good a job as they did. That's the way the science process ought to work. You get inputs from everybody, find any bugs, crank…
sastyk | February 9, 2010I've often wondered what I should write after everyone is already living the Zombie attack and is bored with hearing about how to grow food and mend your socks. I figure at some point, the market will be saturated by such things, and people will want to escape - and I should start thinking now about escapist fiction. I was thinking detective novels, but I clearly should have been thinking "porn."
Apparently IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri has already begun preparing for his post-climate crisis second career, by writing what nearly every review suggests is an unbelievably bad smutty novel with…
stoat | February 8, 2010A couple of people have asked me this - I think it came up in Ask Stoat (I haven't forgotten, you know, just busy). Anyway, it seems like a great post - bound to be flamebait and get my comment count soaring!
You won't be too shocked to learn that I think it should be reformed, not dissolved. But how?
[Update: some of this gets quoted in http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/10/ipcc-reform -W]
First of all, I think the WG I, II and II should be separated more. The WG I report should be done first. Then WG II and III should have their own timescales - perhaps running about a year or…
stoat | February 5, 2010Anatomy of IPCC's Mistake on Himalayan Glaciers and Year 2035" is well worth a read. Especially interesting is their taking-apart of the revisions of 10.6.2 - in brief, these mistakes were spotted before tape-out but those revising that section couldn't be bothered to make any changes (and/or didn't want to quote some embarassingly good research which would have pointed up the pap elsewhere).
[Hat tip: Deltoid]
tlambert | February 5, 2010Bidisha Banerjee and George Collins have written the definitive account of the error in the WG2 report about Himalayan glaciers:
Dozens of articles and analyses of this situation, whether dashed-off blog posts or New York Times coverage, exhibit a curious consistency. Not a single article or analysis appears to include all relevant issues without introducing at least one substantial error. It's as though the original documents contained a curse which has spread to infect every commentator and reporter. The curse seems to stem from not reading sources carefully (or at all), which, ironically,…
stoat | February 4, 2010Well, he is this one. But not this one. In the news, he is Former IPCC Leader Says Climategate Scientists "Manipulated data." and the "head of the International Technical Review Panel for IPCC's first report".
The latter is what interests me. What is it? I am just about old enough to remember IPCC '90, and indeed I have a paper copy, WG I of course, provided free of charge by the nice Hadley folk. I should have got them to autograph it. In it I find no mention of the said panel. There was the WG I core team co-ordination, who were at the Hadley, but what is the panel? A search of www.ipcc.ch…
tlambert | February 4, 2010There have been new developments in Leakegate, the scandal swirling about reporter Jonathan Leake, who deliberately concealed facts that contradicted the story he wanted to spin. Deltoid can reveal that Leake was up to the same tricks in his story that claims that the IPCC "wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters". Bryan Walker has the detailed dissection, but the short version is that Leake took one part of the discussion of one paper in the IPCC WG2 report and pretended that this was all it said, entirely ignoring the WG1 report and the discussion of other papers in the WG2…
hrynyshyn | February 4, 2010It's not so much that the pseudoskeptics who dominate the climate change denial camp are particularly clever, but they have been rather fortunate, and the forces aligned on the side of science have turned out to be human after all. The result is the denial camp is winning, and those on the defensive have some thinking to do.
First, consider the timing of recent events.
As the year began, climatologists were able to launch what should have been a devastating counterattack to the nonsensical but appealing notion that global warming has been replacing by global cooling. The records show that the…
tlambert | February 3, 2010Jonathan Leake recently wrote a story alleging that the statement in the IPCC AR4 WG2 that up to 40% of the Amazon forest could vanish due to climate change was "bogus". Deltoid can now reveal that Leake deliberately concealed the fact that Dan Nepstad, the author of the 1999 Nature paper cited as evidence for the claim about the vulnerability of the Amazon had replied to Leake's query and informed him the claim was basically correct:
At the time of the IPCC [report], there was ample evidence that a large portion of the Amazon forest is very close to the lower limit of rainfall that is…
illconsidered | February 2, 2010As ridiculous as that headline is, it is the theme du jour in the denialosphere....
The chair of the UN's panel on climate change Dr Rajendra Pachauri was written a "racy" romance novel and therefore the IPCC AR4 is unreliable propaganda. Um...okay.
If I wanted the denialists to win the PR battle, I would quietly but urgently try to warn them about going a bit too far in the mud slinging ad hominems.
(see ClimateAudit and WUWT piling on this Telegraph "news" item.)
I mean, really, isn't that a truly laughable thing to get worked up about? Can't just about anyone with the minimal…
tlambert | January 29, 2010You can add the George Kaser to the list that includes Pielke Jr, Latif and Lal. It's like he can't help himself.
Rose claimed that he was told by Kaser that he wrote to Lal:
I'm not the only person in disagreement with Dr Lal. Georg Kaser, the Austrian glaciologist, insists (indeed, he told me last week) he wrote to Lal, warning him not to include the 2035 glacier melting date in AR4. Lal says he got no such letter.
But Kaser says that he didn't write to Lal:
Dr. Kaser, who has been a report author and has also studied the retreating snows around Mount Kilimanjaro, said Monday in a…
tlambert | January 27, 2010There have been new developments in the Rosegate, the scandal about the way David Rose sexed up his story about the IPCC and the Himalayan glaciers. Andrew Revkin has posted an email from Murari Lal, the scientist that Rose verballed:
I am not a Glaciologist but a Climatologist and the statement attributed to me in "Glacier scientist: I knew data hadn't been verified" By David Rose in UK Daily Mail on 24th January 2010 has been wrongly placed. I never said this story at any time and strongly condemn the writer for attributing this to me.
More specifically, I never said during my conversation…
tlambert | January 26, 2010Imagine, if you will, that the emails stolen from CRU had included fawning comments from an MSM journalist to a climate scientist like this:
As a veteran member of the MSM (Vanity Fair and the UK's Mail on Sunday) may I state for the record: Sir, I salute you. Bravo!
or this:
without Steve's brilliant work and this magnificent website, it could not have been written.
What do you think the denialists would have said? Since a perfectly innocuous query from Seth Borenstein in the stolen emails lead to Anthony Watts calling for "AP to remove Seth Borenstein as 'science reporter'", you can bet…
stoat | January 25, 2010Reader enragedparrot asks the rather sensible question, which appears to have been somewhat neglected in the vast war of words of 2035, 2350, and quite what is the source for what: if 2035 is badly wrong, what is the right date?
The answer, of course, is that I don't know. But I may be able to tell you something useful along the way. If you've seen a better answer, please point me at it.
[Dragged from the comments: http://web.hwr.arizona.edu/~gleonard/2009Dec-FallAGU-Soot-PressConference-Backgrounder-Kargel.pdf is excellent -W]
So (forgive me, to clear more wrong stuff out of the way) 2035 is…
stoat | January 21, 2010This is my first contribution for "Ask Stoat", and I'm doing it because it is low hanging fruit :-). I was going to do the even lower-hanging "airbourne fraction" but that will come. This is for Brian.
So, the issue is in the news because of the 2350 / 2035 kerfuffle, and links to Brian's other question, "What do you think of WG II?" I'll answer that one first, because I can think of a cutting answer, which is "I don't". Oh, cruel. But true: when I was in the game, I was interested in WG I stuff, which is to say, the physical basis. Someone has to be interested in impacts and adaption, of…
sastyk | January 21, 2010There's yet another kerfuffle about climatology going on. First, of course, there was climategate, whose total revealed knowledge is "if you hack into people's private emails you might find out that some people, even climate scientists, are jerks sometimes." Now there's another one - in the IPCC report, there's an error. That is, scientists took a non-peer reviewed source and transposed it into the report, and didn't back check that source. This was stupid, of course, and should be criticized and corrected.
That said, since the material in the IPCC is overwhelmingly peer-reviewed science…
tlambert | January 19, 2010Newspapers such as the London Times are reporting that the IPCC is about to retract something from the AR4 WG2 report:
A central claim was the world's glaciers were melting so fast that those in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035.
The claim was indeed wrong. John Nielsen-Gammon has written a detailed analysis of the error with an update here. I've discovered a bit more about it, which I will get to presently, but first I want to look at the Times statement that it was a "central claim" and the New York Times statement that it was a "much-publicized estimate".
Actually, the estimate does…
tlambert | January 11, 2010Christopher Monckton will trouser $20,000 for an Australian Tour with Ian Plimer on backing vocals. To celebrate both The Australian and The Daily Telegraph printed extracts from Monckton's letter to Prime Minister Kevin Rudd generously offering to brief Rudd about climate science. Monckton always makes lots of errors when he writes about science, but this letter may have broken his previous record for quickest mistake with one in the very first word:
His Excellency Mr Kevin Rudd
Rudd's correct title is
The Hon. Kevin Rudd, MP
The editor at The Daily Telegraph didn't notice the mistake…
tlambert | June 16, 2009
Hey, remember how Monckton got published in a UFO magazine? Well, now he's in a Larouche publication, Executive Intelligence Review (see cover to right), being interviewed about the IPCC plan to RULE THE WORLD.
However, they are not concerned
with whether there is a problem or not. They
merely wish to pretend that there is a problem, and try
to do so with a straight face, for long enough to persuade,
not the population, because we have no say in
this, but the governing class in the various memberstates
of the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change: That they should hand over…