Sanity check: 2008 & 2009 Were The Coolest Years Since 1998 in the USA

Incidentally, here’s the latest on Kaser’s warning to the IPCC. It looks as though the IPCC’s staff (i.e., its “technical support unit”) DID (as I claimed in another thread) receive his e-mail and ignore it.

From Dot Earth:
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/25/explanation-offered-for-error-in-un-climate-report/
January 25, 2010, 6:02 pm
Explanation Offered for Error in U.N. Climate Report
By JAMES KANTER
BRUSSELS — Faulty communication allowed an unsubstantiated estimate of the melting rate of Himalayan glaciers to make it into the landmark 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a senior scientist and panel official said Monday.
…………..
The official, Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, a vice chairman of the climate change panel, said that a glaciologist, Georg Kaser at the University of Innsbruck, in Austria, had sought to correct the information about the glaciers before it was published by the panel but that the correction came too late and never reached the people who could fix the statement.
“It’s very unfortunate,” Dr. van Ypersele said, because Dr. Kaser “actually provided the correct information, but not to the correct person.”
The lead authors “didn’t, from my understanding, get the caveats that would have been useful,” Dr. van Ypersele said.
He added that he had examined records of e-mail messages and found that the authors had never received the pertinent message from Dr. Kaser. Furthermore, Dr. Kaser’s “most pointed criticism” of the findings on glacial melting came after the contents of the report had been completed, Dr. van Ypersele said.
Dr. Kaser, who has been a report author and has also studied the retreating snows around Mount Kilimanjaro, said Monday in a telephone interview that he had sent the information to a “technical support unit” at the climate change panel rather to the lead authors directly. Dr. Kaser said he chose not to go “straightforward, to the lead authors” because “it is always a delicate matter” when criticizing other colleagues’ findings.

My comment:
Dr. van Ypersele makes it sound as though the fault was Dr. Kaser’s for not approaching the lead authors directly, and implies that the “technical support unit” therefore bore no blame for not passing along his message.
But WERE they blameless? Weren’t they supposed to perform a “mailroom” function as part of their job? You’d think so, on the face of it. If so, shouldn’t they have sent Kaser a pro forma response that his feedback had been noted and would be passed along to the appropriate persons? And, if they made that pledge, then why didn’t they fulfill it?
Or, if they thought that forwarding e-mails to the appropriate destination wasn’t part of their job description, why didn’t they tell Kaser the names and e-mail addresses of the persons whom he should have contacted?
Finally, if they didn’t give Kaser any response at all, why not? Did they know or suspect that their superiors didn’t want to hear reasons to tone down AR4’s alarmism?
Incidentally, here’s one reader response on Dot Earth to this item:

Maurizio Morabito, January 25th, 2010
This explains very little and simply opens up a series of new questions…why didn’t Dr Kaser think it worthwhile to voice his concerns in any form (public, or private) after the publication of the IPCC report in 2007? What made Dr Kaser place more importance on his colleagues potentially ill feelings about being criticized, than on scientific truth?
And if a relatively well-known published scientist such as Dr Kaser finds himself forced into some kind of self-censorship and reluctance to speak out, how poisonous, impermeable to criticism and ultimately anti-scientific has the world of the IPCC become?