I reported yesterday on Dr. Richard Norths findings on what he coined “amazongate” related to yet another WWF reference in the IPCC AR4.
Yesterday I sent him a comment from WUWT reader “Icarus” that made a very valid point. However that point drew back the curtain for an even larger problem now uncovered by Dr. North as he writes in:
“We are trying to do the best job we can in assessing the quality information about climate change issues in all its dimensions and some do not like the conclusions of our work. Now it is true we made a mistake around the glacier issue, it is one mistake on one issue in a 3,000 page report. We are going to reinforce the procedures to try this does not happen again.”
So says Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC – as retailed by the famous Louise Gray, purveyor extraordinare of WWF press releases – in The Daily Telegraph today. It was simply a “human mistake”, he adds. “Aren’t mistakes human? Even the IPCC is a human institution and I do not know of any human institution that does not make mistakes, so of course it is a regrettable incident that we published that wrong description of the Himalayan glacier,” he says.
So far though, the IPCC is sticking to its legend that this is only “one mistake”, burying its head firmly in the sand and ignoring the growing evidence that the IPCC report is riddled with “mistakes” – to apply that extremely charitable definition.
Another of those “mistakes” is the false claim highlighted in my earlier post on “Amazongate“, where the IPCC has grossly exaggerated the effect of climate change on Amazonian forests, stating “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” – on the basis of a non peer-reviewed WWF report whose lead author, Andy Rowell, is a free-lance journalist.
However, being “human” myself – although some would hotly dispute that assertion – I appear to have made a mistake in my analysis, charging that in the document referenced by the IPCC, there is no evidence of a statement to support the IPCC’s claim that “40 per cent” of the Amazon is threatened by climate change.”
Actually, that is the charge retailed by James Delingpole and by Watts up with that, whereas what I actually wrote was that the assertion attributed to the author of the WWF report, that “up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation” is nowhere to be found in the report.
The WUWT post, however, evoked a response from a commentator, “Icarus”, who noted that there was a reference to a 40% figure references in the WWF report, as follows:
Up to 40% of the Brazilian forest is extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall. In the 1998 dry season, some 270,000 sq. km of forest became vulnerable to fire, due to completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil. A further 360,000 sq. km of forest had only 250 mm of plant-available soil water left.
That is very much my mistake, having completely missed that passage, thus charging that the IPCC passage was “a fabrication, unsupported even by the reference it gives”.
With that, though, the story gets even more interesting, as the assertion made by Rowell and his co-author Peter Moore, is referenced to an article in the Nature magazine, viz:
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Thats the second ref to 3000 pages I have seen, first was in the Today program this morning by a Green activist. All previous refs were that the IPCC report is 1600 pages long. The bigger it gets the lower the error rate I suppose.
Hey, what’s the link to Dr. North’s site? It’d be helpful to have a direct link. 🙂
How pathetic. It looks like Prof Andy Pitman is going out of control in australia.
http://joannenova.com.au/2010/01/monckton-replies-to-prof-andy-pitman/
Even Joe Romm is lying about the world record storm in LA last week.
http://climateprogress.org/2010/01/26/preparing-for-frankenstorms-the-most-powerful-low-pressure-system-in-140-years-of-record-keeping-slams-the-southwest/
I think the collective of all the ‘gates’ recently should now be known as FloodGate!
Link is up at the top of the article… The text reading “The corruption of science”
Thank you Dr. North. The IPCC and others love to twist words into new meanings.
If I were an MD and made the kind of “honest mistakes” that these guys have made #1 I better pray that my malpractice insurance is up to date and I have lots of coverage and #2 I would get my license to practice medicine revoked.
Prof. North is revisiting the same territory that Bjorn Lomborg opened up almost 10 years ago. He is highlighting the fact that environmental activists are driven to misrepresent and misstate facts. That the IPCC would reference anything that the WWF produced is amazing. The equivalent would be the WHO citing research funded by BAT. As the saying goes, Fish rot from the head down Pachauri has some more explaining to do.
Aaaaaargh
I just watched the plonker prince greeting Dr Jones at UEA saying he fully supported his work and then he was shown in front of the hockey stick being told how it shows A. climate change.
JohnH (09:49:19) :
Thats the second ref to 3000 pages I have seen, first was in the Today program this morning by a Green activist. All previous refs were that the IPCC report is 1600 pages long. The bigger it gets the lower the error rate I suppose.
That’s okay. So far I’ve seen the IPCC numbers go from 2500 scientists up to 3000, who of course are completely representative of the absolute consensus of all (real) scientists about the truth of AGW.
Still, going by how many of those IPCC “scientists” were really political appointees and activists, assuming an equivalent situation and working backwards, I suspect IPCC AR4 is really only 1000 pages long. With the “intentionally blank” filler sheets. Actually by the way things are looking, by the time you go through it and remove the non-peer reviewed stuff, identify the real tested-and-verified science, and cut away the meaningless political fluff, AR4 v2.0 could make a nice pamphlet. Although a larger-print booklet-sized version should also be available.
So one mistake in 3000 pages has become 2 mistakes in as many days. What makes me angry though, is that by taking this research out of context, they are making the very real problems of deforestation morph into a ficticious CO2 issue. Although the alarmists will deny this is what they are doing, it is a fact that by making bogus claims, they have eclipsed real environmental issues. For in this example, forest destruction is made out to be a problem that will be solved by burning less fossil fuels, and has nothing to do with forestry management.
When will enviromentalists wake up and see the monster that has been created in their name?
John H,
I think the point of referencing the size of the report is that an argument is being made that these types of mistakes are representative of the entire report both here and by Dr. North. By Ms. Laframboise’s count, there are about 20 citations of WWF papers. That’s likely fewer than 5% of the report’s cited sources. So these sources are not representative. If they are not, the mistakes they involved are not representative either.
That said, the report should not contain any such non peer-reviewed papers. The fact that it does contain a very small proportion, however, does not by any standard of reference call its other observations and conclusions into question. There is an entirely different debate for that.
This 40% figure never made sense to me. Now it all makes sense. I consider myself an environmentalist. I find all this very disconcerting how the IPCC and WWF hijacked the science process. Heads need to roll and it should first start with the heads of the IPCC and WWF.
What would be the reaction if a skeptic wrote a paper that used, for example, the book “The Hockey Stick Illusion” as a reference source for materials originally in MBH papers?
Do you think the AGW crowd would quietly sit back and allow the author to get away with it?
If not, then why should the IPCC be allowed to use a WWF report as a reference source for materials originally (supposedly) in a paper by Nepstad et al 1999
http://wonkroom.thinkprogress.org/2010/01/25/global-boiling-frankenstorms/
Here is a sample from the wonk room. It is an article that comingles fact and fantasy. 8 feet of rain in 23 days.
It is very deceptive. It is intentionally deceptive.
What “is” to come. If you don’t have facts, you can alqways make something up. The IPCC would print it as did Climateprogress because they are both dishonest and desparate.
Thank you. I hope Bjørn Lomborg will weigh in on this somewhere. He’s had a lonely path for his integrity on WWF-Greenpeace-type statistics, and deserves proper recognition.
Thank you, Dr. North. From your article “Firstly, these combined areas relate to a total forest area of between 4-6 million square kilometres, and thus represent perhaps as little as ten percent of the total area.”
So what we’re really looking at is 40% of 10%, or 4% of the area, from logging. To translate that into 40% of the forest at risk due to climate change is buffoonery, apparently good enough for the IPCC.
“JohnH (09:49:19) :
Thats the second ref to 3000 pages I have seen, first was in the Today program this morning by a Green activist. All previous refs were that the IPCC report is 1600 pages long. The bigger it gets the lower the error rate I suppose.”
No, that’s not the reason. In fact they switched the IPCC switched their printer setting to one-sided. It doubles the amount of carbon sequestered.
Hard times call for drastic measures.
“Gate de Jour” doesn’t sound right. It doesn’t sing.
More apt (but possibly no more musical) is “Daily Climate Scandal”
Note the comment from IPCC:
“In the 1998 dry season, some 270,000 sq. km of forest became vulnerable to fire, due to completely depleted plant-available water stored in the upper five metres of soil.”
So what is plant available water?
According to the latest research in Nature Geoscience we just don’t know. This study challenges everything we thought we knew about soil water storage and tree root utpake. A short synopsis can be found on Science Daily http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2010/01/100121173452.htm. Paper would seem to also challenge the assumption of negative impacts from short term or small precipitation events.
Bernie (10:02:32) : “Prof. North is revisiting the same territory that Bjorn Lomborg opened up almost 10 years ago. He is highlighting the fact that environmental activists are driven to misrepresent and misstate facts.”
And “our” Willis Eschenbach has already highlighted another of Dr. Lomborg’s points, i.e. that species aren’t disappearing at the “alarming” rate activists claim:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/04/where-are-the-corpses/
Wolf! Famine! Tipping point! Doom! The sky is fall– Wait! Come back! This time I’m really telling the truth!
Vincent (10:15:15) : When will enviromentalists wake up and see the monster that has been created in their name?
Bjørn Lomborg is one. Lawrence Solomon is another. Peter Taylor is another. I’m one too. Click my name here; google the others if you don’t already know their work. Probably there are many more, unable to speak out. And yes, there are still many fools of the worst kind in the greenie camp.
Let me see, and what exactly was the charter of the UN’s IPCC? Wasn’t it something like the very best peer reviewed science available was to be assembled, or something …
The floodgates have opened on the UN’s man caused scam.
“It was simply a ‘human mistake'”
…which should have been picked up by the rigorous peer review process employed by the IPCC!
It was more like a mistake, compounded by an error and missed by an oversight.
With all these numbers being tossed around it stuck me that there seems to be about one page per scientist involved. How much money did all these scientists spend on research, then travel to IPPC meetings, reviews, more travel, a report for VIPs, and so on.
We’ve learned that actual scientists had less input to the reports than advertised and frequently their input was ignored.
Their (the real scientists) insights were thrown on the cutting room floor and replaced by WWF propaganda.
What say you, scientists? Do you enjoy being treated this way?