By Nidad D. Sheth, Open Magazine
If I had a world of my own, everything would be nonsense. Nothing would be what it is, because everything would be what it isn’t. And contrarywise, what is, it wouldn’t be. And what it wouldn’t be, it would. You see? - Alice in Wonderland
The climate change fraud that is now unravelling is unprecedented in its deceit, unmatched in scope - and for the liberal elite, akin to 9 on the Richter scale. Never have so few fooled so many for so long, ever.
The entire world was being asked to change the way it lives on the basis of pure hyperbole. Propriety, probity and transparency were routinely sacrificed.
The truth is: the world is not heating up in any significant way. Neither are the Himalayan glaciers going to melt as claimed by 2035. Nor is there any link at all between natural disasters such as Hurricane Katrina and global warming. All that was pure nonsense, or if you like, ‘no-science’!
The climate change mafia, led by Dr Rajendra K Pachauri, chairperson of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), almost pulled off the heist of the century through fraudulent data and suppression of procedure. All the while, they were cornering millions of dollars in research grants that heaped one convenient untruth upon another. And as if the money wasn’t enough, the Nobel Committee decided they should have the coveted Peace Prize.
But let’s begin at the beginning. Mr Pachauri has no training whatsoever in climate science. This was known all the time, yet he heads the pontification panel which proliferates the new gospel of a hotter world. How come? Why did the United Nations not choose someone who was competent? After all, this man is presumably incapable of differentiating between ocean sediments and coral terrestrial deposits, nor can he go about analysing tree ring records and so on. That’s not jargon; these are essential elements of a syllabus in any basic course on climatology.
You cannot blame him. His degree and training is in railroad engineering. You read it right. This man was educated to make railroads from point A to point B.
There’s plenty more in this sordid tale. For one thing, there is no scientific consensus at all that man-made CO2 emissions cause global warming, as claimed by the IPCC. In a recent paper, Lord Monckton of Brenchley, who has worked extensively on climate change models, argues: ‘There is no scientific consensus on how much the world has warmed or will warm; how much of the warming is natural; how much impact greenhouse gases have had or will have on temperature; how sea level, storms, droughts, floods, flora, and fauna will respond to warmer temperature; what mitigative steps - if any - we should take; whether (if at all) such steps would have sufficient (or any) climatic effect; or even whether we should take any steps at all.’
An investigation by Dr Benny Peiser, director, Global Warming Policy Foundation, has revealed that only 13 of the 1,117, or a mere 1 per cent of the scientific papers crosschecked by him, explicitly endorse the consensus as defined by the IPCC. Thus the very basis of the claim of consensus on global warming is false. And so deeply entrenched is the global warming lobby, the prestigious journal Science did not publish a letter that Dr Peiser wrote pointing out the lack of consensus.
Speaking to Open, says Dr Peiser, “The IPCC process by which it arrives at its conclusions lacks balance, transparency and due diligence. It is controlled by a tightly knit group of individuals who are completely convinced that they are right. As a result, conflicting data and evidence, even if published in peer-reviewed journals, are regularly ignored, while exaggerated claims, even if contentious or not peer-reviewed, are often highlighted in IPCC reports. Not surprisingly, the IPCC has lost a lot of credibility in recent years. It is also losing the trust of more and more governments who are no longer following its advice. Until it agrees to undergo a root and branch reform, it will continue to haemorrhage credibility and trust. The time has come for a complete overhaul of its structure and workings.”
THE GATHERING STORM
There are many casualties in this sad story of greed and hubris. The big victim is the scientific method. This was pointed out in great detail by John P Costella of the Virginia-based Science and Public Policy Institute. Science is based on three fundamental pillars. The first is fallibility. The fact that you can be wrong, and if so proven by experimental input, any hypothesis can be -indeed, must be - corrected.
This was systematically stymied as early as 2004 by the scientific in-charge of the University of East Anglia’s Climate Change Unit. This university was at the epicentre of the ‘research’ on global warming. It is here that Professor Phil Jones kept inconvenient details that contradicted climate change claims out of reports.
The second pillar of science is that by its very nature, science is impersonal. There is no ‘us’, there is no ‘them’. There is only the quest. However, in the entire murky non-scientific global warming episode, if anyone was a sceptic he was labelled as one of ‘them’. At the very apex, before his humiliating retraction, Pachauri had dismissed a report by Indian scientists on glaciers as “voodoo science”.
The third pillar of science is peer group assessment. This allows for validation of your thesis by fellow scientists and is usually done in confidence. However, the entire process was set aside by the IPCC while preparing the report. Thus, it has zero scientific value.
The fact that there was dissent within the climate science teams, that some people objected to the very basis of the grand claims of global warming, did not come out through the due process. It came to light when emails at the Climate Research Centre at East Anglia were hacked in November 2009. It is from the hacked conversations that a pattern of conspiracy and deceit emerge. It is a peek into the world of global warming scaremongering - amplify the impact of CO2, stick to dramatic timelines on destruction of forests, and never ask for a referral or raise a contrary point. You were either a believer in a hotter world or not welcome in this ‘scientific fold’.
GLOBAL STORMING AHEAD
The world awaits answers, based not on writings of sundry freelance journalists and non-experts, but on actual verifiable data on whether the globe is warming at all, and if so by how much. Only then can policy options be calibrated. As things stand, there is little doubt that the IPCC will need to be reconstituted with a limited mandate. This mess needs investigation and questions need to be answered as to why absurd claims were taken as gospel truth. The future of everything we know as ‘normal’ depends on this. The real danger is that the general public is now weary of the whole thing, a little tired of the debate, and may not really care for the truth, convenient or otherwise. Read full story here.
By Anthony Watts, WattsUpWithThat
We’ve covered some of the travails of IPCC Chairman Dr. Rajenda Pachauri here at WUWT in the past couple of weeks. Besides the fact the National Hurricane Center chief scientist Christopher Landsea resigned from the IPCC over what he cited as lack of confidence in the science.
I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as both being motivated by pre-conceived agendas and being scientifically unsound.
Most notable recently was the bogus claim In the IPCC AR4 that Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035 that appeared to be based on nothing more than a journalist’s opinion piece, contrary to IPCC rules that reports be based on peer reviewed science. The Times of India has just run their first political cartoon on the subject.
Political satire from the Times of India - click for source
That in itself was a bombshell, since the IPCC had to withdraw the claim. Other errors in the report have been found also and it is looking like the IPCC didn’t do any checking of this section of their report, bring the entire report into question.
There’s also been quite a bit of first class investigative work done by Christopher Booker of the Telegraph and Dr. Richard North of the EU Referendum about Dr. Pachauri’s connections to TERI (The Energy Research Institute) and his IPCC position. As I pointed out about his email usage, it seems he has a difficult time delineating the two to ensure that there is no conflict of interest.
Now it appears that conflict of interest charges are about to go to a higher level.
The “IPCC 2035 glacier error” has been used to solicit funds for new projects, and guess where the money goes?
This PDF File is from the EU’s HighNoon website, and shows how the EU set up a project to research the ‘rapid retreat’ of glaciers in the Himalayas based on the bogus IPCC report. Some of the EU taxpayers’ money put into this project has gone to TERI, which is run by Dr. Rajendra Pachauri.
See slide number 5 for the IPCC citation.
Click for larger image.
It appears that the IPCC is using this single “...disappearing by the year 2035” statement as justification for an entire research project, funded by the EU, which is funded by taxpayers.
As we see in slide 7, they got a nice tidy 10 million Euros ($14.13 millon USD) to study a false statement based on nothing more than a passing opinion.
Click for larger image.
I have word through a backchannel that Jonathan Leake of the London Times is about to make know financial linkages to this and several more TERI/IPCC projects funded by taxpayer dollars.
Here’s his Times report from last week. His newest report is available here. See post and comments fly here.
See posts by Dr. Madhav Khandekar, IPCC reviewer, whose IPCC comments on glaciers and peer review were ignored here and here.
By Matthew J. Brouillette, Saturday, January 23, 2010
Climategate was born in late November 2009 with the release of more than a thousand e-mails and other documents from the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia in England. One of the prominent figures in these e-mails is Penn State’s Michael Mann, a professor in the university’s Department of Meteorology. Mr. Mann, a contributor to the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is known mostly for the now discredited “hockey stick” graph, which shows purported man-made global warming during the last century. But it is his role in Climategate that has him in the news lately.
The e-mails reveal that Mr. Mann might have committed a variety of acts that constitute significant and intentional scientific misconduct, including data manipulation, inappropriately shielding research methods and results from peers, and retaliating against those who publicly challenged his conclusions and political agenda.
To Penn State’s credit, the university announced it would investigate Mr. Mann’s alleged misconduct. But the school has a serious conflict of interest that legitimately calls into question its ability to conduct a thorough and unbiased investigation.
There is good reason to believe that a Penn State-managed investigation would amount to a whitewash given Mr. Mann’s financial and reputational value to the university - and the embarrassment that would result from an adverse finding.
The only way to resolve the conflict of interest is for the Pennsylvania General Assembly to commission an external and independent investigation of Mr. Mann’s research and conduct.
The economy and social structure of our country stand to be significantly altered by climate-change legislation that has been, in part, driven by Mr. Mann’s erroneous research and his defense of it. Only with a credible and thorough inquiry can the general public know that its state and national policymakers are making important policy decisions based on sound science. Taxpayers have the right to know before legislation is enacted what role, if any, scientific misconduct played in its development.
Recently, the Commonwealth Foundation released a report entitled, Climategate & Penn State: The Case for an Independent Investigation, which explains why it’s critical for the Pennsylvania General Assembly to launch a thorough investigation of Mr. Mann’s actions.
This report notes: other paleoclimate research scientists questioned Mr. Mann’s conduct; Mr. Mann lashed out at anyone challenging his research data, methods, and techniques; Mr. Mann tried to hide errors and prevented the collegial pursuit of accuracy; and Mr. Mann attempted to subvert the scientific peer-review process and blacklist critics from key academic journals.
Whether people believe in global warming and the need for government action or not, they should care about the credibility of Mr. Mann’s research because it’s influencing state, federal, and international economic and environmental decisions, which affects their lives dramatically. Too much is at stake to simply allow Penn State to have the final word on Mr. Mann’s questionable academic behavior. Read more here.
Matthew J. Brouillette is president & CEO of the Commonwealth Foundation, a public policy education and research institute located in Harrisburg.
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James Hansen: Would you buy a used temperature data set from THIS man?
By James Delingpole
Before we get too worried about NASA’s latest stamping-its-little-feet claims that the world is getting hotter it is it is it IS, let us first remind ourselves why we should trust their temperature records slightly less far than we can spit.
Then let’s have a closer look at the character and motives of the man in charge of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), Dr James Hansen. Last year, he was described by his former course supervisor at NASA, Dr John Theon, as an “activist” and an embarrassment.
Or as the Great Booker puts it:
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Now reader Michael Potts has drawn my attention to yet further evidence of Dr Hansen’s radical, virulently anti-democratic instincts. He has lent his support to an eco-fascist book advising on ways to destroy western industrialisation through propaganda, guile and outright sabotage.
In a scary new book called Time’s Up - whose free online version titled A Matter Of Scale you can read here - author Keith Farnish claims: The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization. Like so many deep greens, Farnish looks forward to the End Times with pornographic relish (masquerading as mild reasonableness): I’m rarely afraid of stating the truth, but some truths are far harder to give than others; one of them is that people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses. Step outside of civilization and you stand a pretty good chance of surviving the inevitable; stay inside and when the crash happens there may be nothing at all you can do to save yourself. The speed and intensity of the crash will depend an awful lot on the number of people who are caught up in it: greater numbers of people have more structural needs -such as food production, power generation and healthcare - which need to be provided by the collapsing civilization; greater numbers of people create more social tension and more opportunity for extremism and violence; greater numbers of people create more sewage, more waste, more bodies - all of which cause further illness and death.
He believes - as the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt does - that mankind is a blot on the landscape and that breeding (or for that matter, existence) should be discouraged: In short, the greatest immediate risk to the population living in the conditions created by Industrial Civilization is the population itself. Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity. That is one reason for there to be fewer people, providing you are planning on staying within civilization - I really wouldn’t recommend it, though.
Among his proposed solutions to this problem are wanton destruction: Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage.
Needless to say, our friend Dr James Hansen thinks this book is the bees knees. Here is his puff on the Amazon website: Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the ‘system’ is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests - they will not look after our and the planet’s well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort.
Puzzled by this advocation of so extreme a book by a supposedly neutral and authoritative public figure, Michael Potts posted a question on Yahoo. And who should pop up but Keith Farnish himself. He revealed that Hansen had not even been approached for the puff quote. He had volunteered it.
“Hello.. It’s very interesting to be the subject of a question, and I don’t want to intrude on the discussion because there seems to be some interesting debate going on here - but just to put the quote into context, it was indeed spontaneous from James and surprised me a little at first. I now suspect, though, that he is only tolerated by the US government because he is such a good scientist; and believe me, some really good scientists have been ousted before - think of Bob Watson, who was thrown out of the IPCC by George Bush, under pressure from the oil industry, for being stark in his warnings..
James Hansen is certainly a radical in the climate science community, but stays within the system because that’s where he is most effective. Just like me using a computer - it’s the best way of getting information across in a globalised society; I genuinely wish it was just a local problem that could be dealt with by word of mouth and community action
Feel free to take on, and challenge my ideas in as forceful a way as you wish; change can happen in the most surprising ways”.
It’s an important thing to remember when we talk about AGW: many of the activist-scientists pushing it passionately want the earth to be getting hotter and it for it to be largely man’s fault. These watermelons certainly don’t want the opposite to be true, because then they wouldn’t have the excuse they so desperately need to destroy the capitalist system and take us all back to the agrarian age. Read story here.
UPDATE: For a very powerful example of NASA’s incompetence and data tomfoolery see this powerful post by Steve McIntyre on the Y2K NASA debacle as seen from the inside thanks to the FOIA released emails here.
By Juliet Eilperin and David A. Fahrenthold
This winter’s extreme weather—with heavy snowfall in some places and unusually low temperatures—is in fact a sign of how climate change disrupts long-standing patterns, according to a new report by the National Wildlife Federation.
It comes at a time when, despite a wealth of scientific evidence, the American public is increasingly skeptical that climate change is happening at all. That disconnect is particularly important this year as the Obama administration and its allies in Congress seek to enact legislation to curb greenhouse gas emissions and revamp the nation’s energy supply.
“It’s very hard for any of us to grasp how this larger warming trend is happening when we’re still having wintry weather,” said National Wildlife Federation climate scientist Amanda Staudt, the new report’s lead writer.
The study charts how climate change is linked to more heavy precipitation, including intense snowstorms like the one that blanketed the D.C. area last month. The Great Lakes region is also experiencing more snow, the report says, because during warmer winters, “the lakes are less likely to freeze over or are freezing later [and] surface water evaporation is recharging the atmosphere with moisture.”
Richard Somerville, who was a lead writer of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s 2007 report, said the public needs to grasp that it is important to reduce carbon dioxide quickly because it stays in the atmosphere for centuries. Icecap Note: Nonsense. Dr. Tom Segalstad has shown a very large number of studies that show the lifetime of CO2 is just 5 to 7 years.
“That’s where the scientific urgency comes from, not a particular weather event,” Somerville said. “There’s a scientific case for rapidly reducing emissions.”
While the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration reported last week that 2009 tied as the second-warmest year on record, this week two new public opinion polls have confirmed a trend reported last fall: As Washington has focused more on climate change, the American public has come to believe in it less.
On Wednesday, Yale and George Mason universities released a survey showing that just 57 percent of people said global warming “is happening.” That was down 14 percentage points, from 71 percent, in October 2008. Fifty percent of people said they were “very” or “somewhat” worried about global warming, down 13 points from 2008.
Icecap Note: This survey is out of line with other surverys which show much lower public support for global warming
Edward Maibach, a George Mason professor, said two outside events may have played a role in the change: First came the recession; then Congress took up legislation to limit greenhouse gases, spurring industry groups and politicians to warn that tackling climate change would kick the economy while it was down.
“Global warming is not necessarily a conversation that most Americans want to actively participate in,” Maibach said.
A poll released Monday by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press made a similar point: Respondents were asked to rank 21 issues in terms of their priority. Global warming came in last.
That was not a surprise, as it has been last before.
But this time it was worse than usual: Just 28 percent of respondents listed global warming as a top priority, down from 35 percent in 2008. Read more here.
By James Delingpole
Before we get too worried about NASA’s latest stamping-its-little-feet claims that the world is getting hotter it is it is it IS, let us first remind ourselves why we should trust their temperature records slightly less far than we can spit.
Then let’s have a closer look at the character and motives of the man in charge of NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS), Dr James Hansen. Last year, he was described by his former course supervisor at NASA, Dr John Theon, as an “activist” and an embarrassment.
Or as the Great Booker puts it:
If there is one scientist more responsible than any other for the alarm over global warming it is Dr Hansen, who set the whole scare in train back in 1988 with his testimony to a US Senate committee chaired by Al Gore. Again and again, Dr Hansen has been to the fore in making extreme claims over the dangers of climate change. (He was recently in the news here for supporting the Greenpeace activists acquitted of criminally damaging a coal-fired power station in Kent, on the grounds that the harm done to the planet by a new power station would far outweigh any damage they had done themselves.)
Now reader Michael Potts has drawn my attention to yet further evidence of Dr Hansen’s radical, virulently anti-democratic instincts. He has lent his support to an eco-fascist book advising on ways to destroy western industrialisation through propaganda, guile and outright sabotage.
In a scary new book called Time’s Up - whose free online version titled A Matter Of Scale you can read here - author Keith Farnish claims: The only way to prevent global ecological collapse and thus ensure the survival of humanity is to rid the world of Industrial Civilization. Like so many deep greens, Farnish looks forward to the End Times with pornographic relish (masquerading as mild reasonableness): I’m rarely afraid of stating the truth, but some truths are far harder to give than others; one of them is that people will die in huge numbers when civilization collapses. Step outside of civilization and you stand a pretty good chance of surviving the inevitable; stay inside and when the crash happens there may be nothing at all you can do to save yourself. The speed and intensity of the crash will depend an awful lot on the number of people who are caught up in it: greater numbers of people have more structural needs -such as food production, power generation and healthcare - which need to be provided by the collapsing civilization; greater numbers of people create more social tension and more opportunity for extremism and violence; greater numbers of people create more sewage, more waste, more bodies - all of which cause further illness and death.
He believes - as the Hon Sir Jonathon Porritt does - that mankind is a blot on the landscape and that breeding (or for that matter, existence) should be discouraged: In short, the greatest immediate risk to the population living in the conditions created by Industrial Civilization is the population itself. Civilization has created the perfect conditions for a terrible tragedy on the kind of scale never seen before in the history of humanity. That is one reason for there to be fewer people, providing you are planning on staying within civilization - I really wouldn’t recommend it, though.
Among his proposed solutions to this problem are wanton destruction: Unloading essentially means the removal of an existing burden: for instance, removing grazing domesticated animals, razing cities to the ground, blowing up dams and switching off the greenhouse gas emissions machine. The process of ecological unloading is an accumulation of many of the things I have already explained in this chapter, along with an (almost certainly necessary) element of sabotage.
Needless to say, our friend Dr James Hansen thinks this book is the bees knees. Here is his puff on the Amazon website: Keith Farnish has it right: time has practically run out, and the ‘system’ is the problem. Governments are under the thumb of fossil fuel special interests - they will not look after our and the planet’s well-being until we force them to do so, and that is going to require enormous effort.
Puzzled by this advocation of so extreme a book by a supposedly neutral and authoritative public figure, Michael Potts posted a question on Yahoo. And who should pop up but Keith Farnish himself. He revealed that Hansen had not even been approached for the puff quote. He had volunteered it.
“Hello.. It’s very interesting to be the subject of a question, and I don’t want to intrude on the discussion because there seems to be some interesting debate going on here - but just to put the quote into context, it was indeed spontaneous from James and surprised me a little at first. I now suspect, though, that he is only tolerated by the US government because he is such a good scientist; and believe me, some really good scientists have been ousted before - think of Bob Watson, who was thrown out of the IPCC by George Bush, under pressure from the oil industry, for being stark in his warnings..
James Hansen is certainly a radical in the climate science community, but stays within the system because that’s where he is most effective. Just like me using a computer - it’s the best way of getting information across in a globalised society; I genuinely wish it was just a local problem that could be dealt with by word of mouth and community action
Feel free to take on, and challenge my ideas in as forceful a way as you wish; change can happen in the most surprising ways”.
It’s an important thing to remember when we talk about AGW: many of the activist-scientists pushing it passionately want the earth to be getting hotter and it for it to be largely man’s fault. These watermelons certainly don’t want the opposite to be true, because then they wouldn’t have the excuse they so desperately need to destroy the capitalist system and take us all back to the agrarian age. Read story here.
UPDATE: For a very powerful example of NASA’s incompetence and data tomfoolery see this powerful post by Steve McIntyre on the Y2K NASA debacle as seen from the inside thanks to the FOIA released emails here.
By Rosslyn Beeby, Science and Environment Reporter, Canberra Times
Australia’s peak science agency, the CSIRO, has backed away from attributing a decade of drought in Tasmania to climate change, claiming ‘’the jury is still out’’ on the science.
The comments follow the issuing of a CSIRO report yesterday, revealing drought has cut water availability in northern Tasmania’s premier wine growing region by 24 per cent, with riverflows reaching record lows. One of the report’s co-authors, hydrologist David Post, told The Canberra Times there was ‘’no evidence’’ linking drought to climate change in eastern Australia, including the Murray-Darling Basin.
‘’At this stage, we’d prefer to say we’re talking about natural variability. The science is not sufficiently advanced to say it’s climate change, one way or the other. The jury is still out on that,’’ Dr Post said.
Australian Greens leader, Bob Brown has accused CSIRO of ‘’caving in to political pressure’’ to soften its stance on climate change in the lead-up to this year’s federal election.
‘’We should ask why CSIRO is prepared to turn an unaccountable blind eye to recent climate trends in Tasmania. This undercurrent of scepticism would seem to suggest the report has been politicised,’’ Senator Brown said.
According to the report, rainfall in northern Tasmania’s Pipers River region famed for its award-winning rieslings and pinot noir has dropped by 12 per cent in the past decade, with recent climate conditions ‘’drier than those of the last 84 years.’’
More than 80 per cent of Tasmania’s river catchments have been affected by drought, with the South Esk the island’s longest river and source of water for beer production most at risk.
For more on this story, see today’s Canberra Times.
By Eli Kintisch
Scientists at the helm of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have spent weeks on the defensive after e-mails uncovered by hackers revealed private messages in which they criticized papers relevant to their 2007 report. That behavior has led to accusations of bias, or worse, and undermined the credibility of the climate research community. Now the IPCC leadership is preparing its response, with steps that may include additional training for the authors of the next report, due out in 2013, and a review of the incident by an outside organization. At least one key scientist is unhappy with those options.
In December, the head of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, said that the discussions in the e-mails raised “a serious issue and we will look into it in detail.” Atmospheric chemist Pauline Midgley, a support scientist on staff for the 2013 IPCC report, says that officials asked themselves three questions: Were there problems with the IPCC’s procedures for 2007? Were those procedures sufficient? Are changes needed in preparing the 2013 version?
IPCC never conducted a formal investigation of the issue, but the scientists who run the organization and their support staff members have looked over the messages, and found no evidence that the authors were lax in their review of the papers. Still, says Christopher Field of the Carnegie Institution for Science, a co-chair of one of the 2013 IPCC reports’\’ three working groups, it hasn’t been “a particularly good period.”
Still, he says: “So far in our exploration of this, and it is far from complete, this has been a stress test of IPCC procedures, but the IPCC procedures have held up extremely well.” In December, 28 Republican members of Congress wrote to the United Nations, questioning whether IPCC could conduct a truly “independent investigation” of its authors’ behavior.
The panel’s 10-member executive team, led by Pachauri, is now considering a series of steps to further address the issue. One concept is new training for chapter authors. Field says that training would help them deal with what he expects will be “intense pressure” by outside critics. Midgley says that training could also help authors “to deal with papers contrary to the consensus view” on particular issues.
Changes in the review process for each chapter are also in the works, aimed at having an outside senior reviewer make sure that expert comments are properly considered. (Field said he was not aware of this option.) Finally, Midgley said that there is talk of asking an outside expert body to review issues raised by the e-mails.
Field emphasized that there were “no plans to change IPCC procedures,” which include multi-author teams assembling each chapter, layers of review by experts and governments, and an international meeting to create a summary for the reports.
Kevin Trenberth, a climate scientist with the U.S. National Center for Atmospheric Research in Boulder, Colorado, was among the scientists whose e-mails were exposed. One 2004 note that has drawn heavy flak comes from Phil Jones of the University of East Anglia in the United Kingdom. Speaking of two papers whose conclusions he found wanting, Jones wrote:
I can’t see either...being in the next [IPCC] report. Kevin [Trenberth] and I will keep them out somehow - even if we have to redefine what the peer-review literature is!
Both papers ended up being cited in the report, however.
Trenberth says that the steps the IPCC leadership is considering are “completely unnecessary.” He said he was frustrated that the IPCC has “failed to defend its processes and explain them. The process worked, and I think the IPCC should be more active in supporting its authors who followed that process.”
“We’re trying to find a right balance between supporting our authors and offering blanket support on every statement that is made,” says Field. Midgley says that offering guidance to authors for the next report is particularly important because the organization will soon put out a call for volunteers. “If the IPCC isn’t going to support its authors, why should anyone want to be a lead author?” asks Trenberth. Read more here.
See also this post in India today on Pachauri in a spot here.
uncoverage.net
It’s been reported that House Speaker Nancy Pelosi hosted a large entourage of Congress members and staff to the Copenhagen climate summit last month (you know, the global warming group-grope that ended with no emissions standards, no international treaty, no “reparations” from rich countries to the Third World) President Obama and Secretary of State Clinton were also there with THEIR people.
Nancy Pelosi left Copenhagen conference early when caviar ran out
But we haven’t learned until now how much U.S. taxpayers paid for this trip to the North Pole for nothing. In fact, we may never get the full story because Madame Pelosi will not comment except to say her office will “comply with disclosure requirements.”
CBS News reports on what it has found:
Our investigation found that the congressional delegation was so large, it needed three military jets: two 737s and a Gulfstream Five - up to 64 passengers - traveling in luxurious comfort. Add senators and staff, most of whom flew commercial, and we counted at least 101 Congress-related attendees. All for a summit that failed to deliver a global climate deal.
And all those attendees who went to the summit rather than hooking up by teleconference? They produced enough climate-stunting carbon dioxide to fill 10,000 Olympic swimming pools.
Which means even if Congress didn’t get a global agreement - they left an indelible footprint all the same.
CNN’s Jack Cafferty opines on Nancy Pelosi’s “Awesome Copenhagen Adventure”
While Madame Pelosi plays on her Gulfstream jet or her military transports, her home state of California has a $21 billion deficit and has one of the highest unemployment rates in the country...12.5%.
While Nancy Pelosi was choosing between the scallops or the caviar canapes in Copenhagen, senior citizens on Medicaid in California no longer get dentures due to state budget cuts. If the national health care bill that Nancy Pelosi supports is approved, another $500 billion may be cut from Medicare, which will either be picked up by individual states or will cause more cuts in benefits to senior citizens.
So those old people in California who can’t afford false teeth, Nancy....let them eat… JELLO?????
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Sea-level theory cuts no ice
By Jonathan Leake, Australian
CLIMATE science faces a major new controversy after Britain’s Met Office denounced research from the Copenhagen summit that suggested global warming could raise sea levels by more than 1.8m by 2100.
The studies, led by Stefan Rahmstorf, professor of ocean physics at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research in Germany, have caused growing concern among other experts. They say his methods are flawed and that the real increase in sea levels by 2100 is likely to be far lower than he predicts.
Jason Lowe, a leading Met Office climate researcher, said: “We think such a big rise by 2100 is actually incredibly unlikely. The mathematical approach used to calculate the rise is completely unsatisfactory.”
The new controversy dates back to January 2007 when Science magazine published a research paper by Professor Rahmstorf linking the 17cm rise in sea levels from 1881 to 2001 with a 0.6C rise in global temperature over the same period.
Professor Rahmstorf then parted company from colleagues by extrapolating the findings to 2100. Based on the 17cm increase that occurred from 1881 to 2001, Professor Rahmstorf calculated that a predicted 5C increase in global temperature would raise sea levels by up to 188cm.
Critic Simon Holgate, a sea-level expert at the Proudman Oceanographic Laboratory, Merseyside, has written to Science magazine, attacking Professor Rahmstorf’s work as “simplistic”.
“Rahmstorf’s real skill seems to be in publishing extreme papers just before big conferences like Copenhagen, when they are guaranteed attention,” Dr Holgate said.
Most of the 1881-2001 sea-level rise came from melting glaciers that will be gone by 2050, leaving the Antarctic and Greenland ice sheets as contributors. But contributions of these sheets to date has been negligible and researchers say there is no evidence to show that will change in the way Professor Rahmstorf suggests.
Professor Rahmstorf said he accepted many of the criticisms. “I hope my critics are right because a rise of the kind my work predicts would be catastrophic,” he said.
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