Last night I pointed out how NASA had quietly purged IPCC AR4 referenced glacier melting claims from its climate.nasa.gov website, especially since they upped the year from 2035 to 2030 on their own. Now Roger Pielke Jr. points out that another curious purge has been spotted:
Excerpts:
There is another important story in involving the Muir-Wood et al. 2006 paper that was misrepresented by the IPCC as showing a linkage between increasing temperatures and rising damages from extreme weather events. The Stern Review Report of the UK government also relied on that paper as the sole basis for its projections of increasing damage from extreme events. In fact as much as 40% of the Stern Reivew projections for the global costs of unmitigated climate change derive from its misuse of the Muir-Wood et al. paper.
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As I was preparing this post, I accessed the Stern Review Report on the archive site of the UK government to capture an image of Table 5.2. Much to my surprise I learned that since the publication of my paper, Table 5.2 has mysteriously changed! Have a look at the figures below.
The figure immediately below shows Table 5.2 as it was originally published in the Stern Review (from a web archive in PDF), and I have circled in red the order-of-magnitude error in hurricane damage that I document in my paper (the values should instead by 10 times less).
Now, have a look at the figure below which shows Table 5.2 from the Stern Review Report as it now appears on the UK government archive (PDF), look carefully at the numbers circled in red:
There is no note, no acknowledgment, nothing indicating that the estimated damage for hurricanes was modified after publication by an order of magnitude. The report was quietly changed to make the error go away. Of course, even with the Table corrected, now the Stern Review math does not add up, as the total GDP impact from USA, UK and Europe does not come anywhere close to the 1% global total for developed country impacts (based on Muir-Wood), much less the higher values suggested as possible in the report’s text, underscoring a key point of my 2007 paper.
I’m betting that instituions around the world are working fast to distance themselves from some of the IPCC claims. We’ll likely see more of this.
If you say something loud enough everyone will hear it. If you say something soft enough (99.9%) no one will hear it.
Glad to be of service. The odds have risen overnight to 1 in 3, and volume has picked up sharply, thanks presumably to betting by some warmists. I hope they’ll keep pushing up the odds and a real battle gets going. When the odds rise above 1 in 2 I’ll bet against them. BTW, here is one warmist prediction that’s on the record:
OT, but the science blogs have been featuring the weather stations debacle. It seems that the stations in the Unites States actually have a cooling bias. This means that your main raison d’etre for the last five years or so has been proven to be based on nothing.
I’ve heard that you are “preparing a response”. Based on the switch to the isolated statement about Himalayan glacier melt (and not the overall quality of the data in IPCC 4), it appears that what you and Roger really want to do is change the subject.
REPLY: Ah well the IPCC4 issue you write of is satire. And actually the surfacestations project has been running since June 2007, so “last five years or so” is also incorrect. Menne et al rushed to judgment at 43%, even risking non quality controlled data. We’ll see how it looks at nearly 90% in out paper. – Anthony