For the IPCC AR4, "weather events are climate" – looks like another retraction is needed

We’ve been admonished by others in the blogosphere when we report on record cold weather or record snow stories of interest by hurling the maxim: “weather is not climate“. Yet when the IPCC does that, linking specific weather events in the IPCC AR4 report, such as a single heatwave, the same people have no complaints. As Davis Rose on the Times reports, the IPCC, under Pachauri’s leadership, botched that too. Now it looks like the IPCC will have to withdraw yet another part of the report.

Rose writes:

The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s”.

The problem is that the IPCC cited a study on severe weather event frequency that wasn’t complete yet. When it was complete in 2008, it came to an entirely different conclusion about linkage to global warming:

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses.”

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.

Read the complete Times article here: UN wrongly linked global warming to natural disasters

As an example of citing a single weather event as being connected to “climate change”, we can look to the IPCC AR4 report online and find this citation about the 2003 heat wave in Europe:

click for a larger image

And here is where the IPCC tries to link a single weather event to climate change aka global warming:

As such, the 2003 heatwave resembles simulations by regional climate models of summer temperatures in the latter part of the 21st century under the A2 scenario (Beniston, 2004). Anthropogenic warming may therefore already have increased the risk of heatwaves such as the one experienced in 2003 (Stott et al., 2004).

But, it’s apparently OK when peer reviewed scientists do it.

h/t to WUWT reader Dirk H for the IPCC reference.

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Hilary Ostrov (aka hro001)
January 24, 2010 4:34 pm

Steve in SC (11:11:54) wrote:
“If this keeps up, the MSM will be dragged kicking and screaming into reality”
I’m not sure if the U.K.’s “Mail Online” can be considered as MSM, but certainly a Jan 23 article by one of its reporters is sufficiently error-riddled that it might warrant inclusion in the next IPCC Assessment Report!
For details:
http://hro001.wordpress.com/2010/01/24/announcing-the-birth-of-an-olympian-msm-warmist-meme/

rbateman
January 24, 2010 5:17 pm

latitude (16:17:44) :
How about backing up and learning how to predict next weeks weather?
Maybe just get one hurricane right?
These bozos are so far out of their league it’s not even funny.
And yes climate is weather.
If it isn’t, why are they using the same computer programs?

Requires that they junk thier Climate Panic Models.
You can lead a warmist to weather, but you can’t make him model it.

Dodgy Geezer
January 24, 2010 5:42 pm

It is instructive to look at how the Guardian is handling the crisis in their belief system.
The paper started by reporting the ‘errors’ in the IPCC report as a big fuss over minor typos. The comments section under these reports quickly attracted a host of people saying ‘Oh, no, it’s not….’.
In short time these comments sections were closed to further update. And, with a hint of hurried desperation Monbiot suddenly decided to award his ‘prize for the worst denier’ in an effort to rally the troops. This didn’t stop the ‘deniers’, they simply moved to the ‘prizegiving’ article and continued their tirade about IPCC inaccuracy. The comments section now looks as if it is out of control, with wholesale comment deletions for ‘off-topic’…

JRR Canada
January 24, 2010 8:16 pm

Just got a reply from Environment Canada,no answers, just assurance that “The production of IPCC assessment reports is a scientific undertaking,with contributions from qualified scientists from arround the world,including many in Canada from both govt and the universities.”This is the reply to my query,did EC verify the science of IPCC?If so,where is documentation?And the request,”please provide me with proof(or even valid emperical evidence) that an increase in atmospheric CO2 causes an increase in global temperature”I find the response enlightening,our govt has built it all on the IPCC,so IPCC goes down so does Environment Canada’s case for carbon control.From the nonanswer no one in our govt checked anything before they leapt on board and some of the response implies the govt is complicit in the ineptitude demonstrated by the IPCC.Its almost religion by committee.JRR

Ric Locke
January 24, 2010 9:24 pm

Quick minor correction:
“…the Supreme Court 5-4 decision that CO2 is a dangerous pollutant…” never happened.
What the Court ruled was that the EPA’s enabling legislation entitled the agency to declare carbon dioxide a pollutant and regulate it, if it cared to do so. By the same ruling, the EPA could declare dihidrogen monoxide or oxygen a “pollutant” and regulate that. The Court is undoubtedly correct. It’s the legislation that’s at fault, and the Court is bound to determine whether a law is Constitutional or not, and whether or not a regulation is valid according to the relevant law, not whether the law is asinine or not.
Regards,
Ric

January 24, 2010 9:32 pm

Though predicting changes in these types of events under a changing climate is difficult, understanding vulnerabilities to such changes is a critical part of estimating vulnerabilities and future climate change impacts on human health, society and the environment.

Edmund Burke
January 24, 2010 11:39 pm

Soon they’ll be reduced to claiming the sun rising in the east is irrefutable proof of AGW. It’s about the only thing they can’t goof on at this stage.
They would be incorrect about that also. Only rises in the East twice a year.
Quite correct Tom, and even then only if you live in the Tropics. See what I mean, it’s the underprivileged Third World what’s going to get screwed. Pay up immediately.

Optimist
January 24, 2010 11:55 pm

it’s not David Rose’s article, it’s Jonathan Leake’s. Rose is a reporter on the Mail, not the Times.

Luís
January 25, 2010 1:47 am

Anyone that has ever seen a synoptic chart from western Europe during that July of 2003, knows that it did had nothing to do with Global Warming. Naturally, such charts have never been published by the MSM, and can only be found in the occasional shaddy, non-peer-reviewed weblog.

marc
January 25, 2010 2:12 am

I tipped the Telegraaf (Holland’s biggest newspaper) about this. Hopefully they’ll pick this up also.
I did the same thing yesterday about the glacier nonsense the IPCC was using to influence politicians, and it featured on their website today!! (84 comments sofar, and not very positive about the IPCC 😉
For those who can read Dutch: http://www.telegraaf.nl/buitenland/5871336/__IPCC_wilde_politici_benvloeden__.html?p=13,2

Tamara
January 25, 2010 6:37 am

Well, Hillary already pledged $100 billion a year from the U.S. for climate change remuneration. I wonder when we’ll be hearing her retraction. (I’m not holding my breath.)