By Clive Crook, Financial Times
“...to put it bluntly the IPCC ...is a seriously flawed enterprise and unworthy of the slavish respect accorded to it by most governments and the media. In the decisions which have already been made on climate-change mitigation, to say nothing of future decisions, the stakes are enormous. In guiding these momentous judgments, the flawed IPCC process has been granted, in effect, a monopoly of official wisdom. That needs to change and the IPCC itself must be reformed.
For a fully documented indictment, read the article by David Henderson in the current issue of World Economics. Mr Henderson, a distinguished academic economist and former head of economics at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has been tangling with the IPCC for some time. Five years ago, he and Ian Castles (a former chief of the Australian Bureau of Statistics) first drew attention to a straightforward error in the way emissions scenarios were being calculated...This mistake yielded projections for individual countries that were in some cases patently absurd.”
“...if governments are to get the best advice, they need information and analysis from an open and disinterested source - or else from multiple dissenting sources. With the environmental risks calmly laid out, framing the right policies demands proper political accountability and a much wider range of opinion and expertise than the IPCC currently provides. One incompetent institution, committed to its own agenda, should never have been granted this degree of actual and moral authority over the science, over public presentation of the science and over calls for “more serious action” that go well beyond the science.”
Read full story here.
By Marc Marano, EPW Blog
Newsweek Magazine’s cover story of August 13, 2007 entitled, “The Truth About Denial” contains very little that could actually be considered balanced, objective or fair by journalistic standards. The one-sided editorial, masquerading as a “news article,” was written by Sharon Begley with Eve Conant, Sam Stein and Eleanor Clift and Matthew Philips and purports to examine the “well-coordinated, well-funded campaign by contrarian scientists, free-market think tanks and industry has created a paralyzing fog of doubt around climate change.”
The only problem is—Newsweek knew better. Reporter Eve Conant, who interviewed Senator James Inhofe (R-Okla.), the Ranking Member of the Environment & Public Works Committee, was given all the latest data proving conclusively that it is the proponents of man-made global warming fears that enjoy a monumental funding advantage over the skeptics. (A whopping $50 BILLION to a paltry $19 MILLION for skeptics – Yes, that is BILLION to MILLION).
See full EPW blog and critique here.
Note: The Newsweek story contained blatant errors including “The frequency of Atlantic hurricanes has already doubled in the last century.” This has been shown clearly by Dr. Bill Gray and Chris Landsea in stories and papers on this site to be very wrong.
Much work has been done in recent months in an attempt to clarify the siting issues among the climate stations in the various government data sets on sites like Climate Science, Climate Audit and Anthony Watts Surface Stations. Numerous blog entries have discusssed papers on the issue of siting, the urban heat island and provided photographic evidence of some of the serious problems with the station sitings and some battles along the way to get access to the data needed from the government centers.
In addition Anthony Watts maintains an interesting blog on the issue, Watts Up With That?. In his latest entry he shows how even a clearly rural location can have issues with siting, in this case not less than 22 air conditioning units spewing heat within 100 feet of the instrument shelter. It is just one of many examples you will find on this site and the other links.
