Dr. Richard North, who does investigative journalism at the EU referendum blog, has a comprehensive analysis and backgrounder on the latest in a series of blunders by the IPCC that have been uncovered. It complements the just released story by Jonathan Leake of The Sunday Times that highlights a leading British scientist calling for IPPC to “tackle the blunders or lose all credibility”
Here is Dr. North’s introduction to the issue:
Following an investigation by this blog (and with the story also told in The Sunday Times), another major “mistake” in the IPCC’s benchmark Fourth Assessment Report has emerged.
Similar in effect to the erroneous “2035” claim – the year the IPCC claimed that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt – in this instance we find that the IPCC has wrongly claimed that in some African countries, yields from rain-fed agriculture could be reduced by up to 50 percent by 2020.
At best, this is a wild exaggeration, unsupported by any scientific research, referenced only to a report produced by a Canadian advocacy group, written by an obscure Moroccan academic who specialises in carbon trading, citing references which do not support his claims.
Unlike the glacier claim, which was confined to a section of the technical Working Group II report, this “50 percent by 2020” claim forms part of the key Synthesis Report, the production of which was the personal responsibility of the chair of the IPCC, Dr R K Pachauri. It has been repeated by him in many public fora. He, therefore, bears a personal responsibility for the error.
In this lengthy post, we examine the nature and background of this latest debacle, which is now under investigation by IPCC scientists and officials.
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What follows is a detailed investigation by Dr. North, I highly recommend reading it here:
EU Referendum: And now for Africagate
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There’s one more big gate to go. When will the fact that big oil has been in support of AGW for the last several years get highlighted?
1) Oil is a limited commodity and it won’t last forever. Whatever is not used today will be more valuable in the future.
2) By environmentalists calling for no drilling the supply part of supply/demand will start dropping. The oil companies are not fighting this because they know that once the economy gets going again the demand will return. Everyone knows what happens to prices when that occurs. Look for more gigantic profits for the oil companies in the near future.
3) Big oil has been investing in several green technologies. One of the biggies is ExxonMobil’s investment in genetically modified algae. From what I’ve read this will be competitive with oil in around 5 years and get better with time. That reduces the big costs of drilling and dealing with unstable foreign gov’ts. Not to mention that the algae eats CO2 like crazy and would also give them gov’t backing and, most likely, subsidies. It’s still oil and they would still be in position to make gigantic profits.
It’s win-win for big oil. Once the anti-capitalists understand they are doing exactly what the big oil companies want, I think that part of the AGW movement could collapse.
DirkH (15:09:31) :
“The European Union (EU) has offered to help the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) strengthen its quality control system”
This would be the EU that has failed to produce audited accounts for the last ten years. That’s like letting a Vampire help you run a blood bank.
mikelorrey (19:22:52) said:
Well obviously. The whole AGW scam was supported by governments and fellow travellers because it promised to provide an easy way to foist higher taxes on the populace. If a majority believed in such palpable nonsense, then it would be hard for the sceptics to argue that the taxes were unnecessary.
It’s all unravelling now.
Outwardly Awkward
Broken, Fragmented, Shattered, Hungry, Constipated and Disgusted all at the same time. The followers of blind and obscene revelations. The trees never lie, its just the air which is filling up wrong words in your ears. The latest composition of air as suggested by the scientists at the Biggest University(I Pee you See) of the Far Far town is 90% awkardness , 9.09% CO2 and the rest they are yet to figure out. These words settle in your ear with the awkwardness flying in the air. Ear buds are acting as drilling agents for your ears when you try to remove awkardness. So the next thing cool is being Deaf. Deaf to whats happening around you. No one else is responsible for it but You. The air got polluted () by your outw(o)ardly awkardness and now you’ve got to rectify it. Easier to ask others to do rather than doing yourself and publishing reports Greek to a normal human is the next level of easy. No debates, just disgust , disgust packed in plastic bags, disgust wrapped with sh*t in your car silencer. Who is gonna clean up the mess? The biggest fart of the centuries coming straight from your constipated self. Global Warming ?
Just to bring a giggle.
http://twawki.com/2010/02/06/warning-this-is-what-happens-when-it-snows/
http://twawki.com/2010/02/07/now-the-ipcc-cowgate-blunder/
So, IPCC is losing credibility?
At this point in time they have nothing to lose. All the credibility is already gone
So I just scanned RC’s take on “Glaciergate”. Came across many posts that talk about the lunatics at WUWT and ClimateAudit, then I came across this little jewel that made it through moderation…
“I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, all this fixation on get-it-right, got-it-wrong is obscuring the real issue: the truth is what we define it to be, and the truth is that mankind is a scourge on the planet. The sooner we can limit the right to breed, the sooner the planet will recover. If glacier data is a little incorrect but helps that effort, then the data is true in all but a very narrow and clinical scientific sense.
Common people don’t really understand science. But they understand not having enough to eat and not being able to sit down on a too-crowded subway. if we can educate people not to reproduce there will be many seats and the fewer people will be happier. Indeed, as the capitalist economies of scale are reduced, the atisfaction from making your own clothes and embracing a low-carbon vegan diet will be so intense, reproduction will come to be seen in the same category as child abuse.
I yearn for the day when i might not have been born!”
Or crimatology.
Next up: Gate-gate?
This turning of a blind eye (i.e., deliberate obliviousness to attempts to correct alarmist errors) supports my suspicion that Lal and his Asia group deliberately ignored the attempts by Kaser (and others, as I hope will emerge) to get the 2035 error corrected or retracted. A cover-up is far more damning than an error, because it is deliberate and contemplated, so investigative journalists should look for informants within the IPCC for the really explosive material. Errors can be explained away; not so, coverups. (That’s why Lal would have had to deny receiving Kaser’s letter, had he actually got it.) A dozen more arrows are still needed to slay this elephant.
A marketing guy could have told them to avoid a name with such a vulnerable-to-ridicule acronym.
Correct. Most of these “thousand” studies just take AGW as a given, or accept GW as occurring (which it is, but which says nothing about the “A” component). Thus, they don’t “support” AGW any more than a drunk supports a lamppost.
But who cares for Africans or Indians and what they think? This IPCC is about crocodile tears and forcing brown skinned, apart from the likes of Pachauri, to live under a carbon caste system in which the lower down the chain you are the less carbon emissions you are allowed to have.
Recently I found an interesting tract about the leftwing view of third world people’s. I found it in no less than an essay on Rudyard Kipling by George Orwell. Here’s the passage:
“All left-wing parties in the highly industrialized countries are at bottom a sham, because they make it their business to fight against something which they do not really wish to destroy. They have internationalist aims, and at the same time they struggle to keep up a standard of life with which those aims are incompatible. We all live by robbing Asiatic coolies, and those of us who are ‘enlightened’ all maintain that those coolies ought to be set free; but our standard of living, and hence our ‘enlightenment’, demands that the robbery shall continue. A humanitarian is always a hypocrite, and Kipling’s understanding of this is perhaps the central secret of his power to create telling phrases. It would be difficult to hit off the one-eyed pacifism of the English in fewer words than in the phrase, ‘making mock of uniforms that guard you while you sleep’. It is true that Kipling does not understand the economic aspect of the relationship between the highbrow and the blimp. He does not see that the map is painted red chiefly in order that the coolie may be exploited.”
Nothing has changed since 1942 when Orwell wrote that.
”””Marlene Anderson (19:32:40) : I thought the IPCC would go down one brick at a time but this is an avalanche of self-destruction . . . . Remember the Wizard of Oz when Dorothy finds there’s only a timid little man pulling levers behind a curtain? I see a 2010 sequel called the Wizard of the IPCC with Pachauri as the Chief of Humbug.”””
Marlene,
Maybe Pachauri is just the fierce face of the Wizard of OZ, but many think the person(s)/group(s) behind the curtain are . . . . . well . . . ahhh
John
Nobody should kill themselves over global warming!
I think the skeptical world should extend its fullest support to Phil Jones – if his admissions are to be believed. Jones never expressed himself through the media or any outlets. All the stuff that was written about him, and not a peep from the man.
The man should vent his rage (or whatever he is feeling). Present his side of the story.
Imagine contemplating suicide over global warming!
Kendra (16:25:53) : “asking a naïve question”
No. Your question was a very good one and I don’t think it got the sorts of answers it deserved. Unfortunately this is a long story and it takes a lot of reading and searching to begin to pull it together. I will suggest two papers for you to read that I found added a lot to my understanding of what was going on with the AWG agenda. Perhaps 5 or 6 others could also suggest 2 of their favorite reads and we could save you a lot of time. Here are my two suggestions:
1: http://www.climateaudit.org/pdf/ohio.pdf
This is a conference presentation by Stephen McIntyre given on May 16, 2008. In it he explains who he is and how he became involved. He maintains the site called Climate Audit (CA) on which this paper is found.
2: UN Infects Science with Cancer of Global Warming
http://icecap.us/images/uploads/EDBLICKRANT.pdf
Also go to Jo Nova’s site and read her story and the 2 handbooks she has written. http://joannenova.com.au/
The Skeptic’s Hanbook is on the left side of her main page near the top.
Who else will help out with this list?
Just think of all the food that’s been wasted on producing ethanol, a less efficient and more costly fuel than gas. And, further, all the billions of dollars wasted on phony “science” which could have gone to helping poor people around the world.
The IPCC, and the entity that spawned it, the UN, are worse than worthless, they are highly toxic.
A minor improvement: I should have written, “A cover-up is far more damning than an error, because it is deliberate and
contemplateddeliberated …”Or what indeed.
Unfortunately, unlike the 2035 error, it’s not a “howler,” or glaring error that should have raised a red flag.
Coralgate? (I think this exaggeration of the threat to the world’s reefs should be added to the list of gates that others are compiling.)
Not “just.” He was a bigshot administrator, head of the CRU, wasn’t he?
Kate (19:52:52) :
New website for me. Looks good. Thanks.
Let’s just call this one “FarmGate’ 😉
Great lists of “gates.”
After Pachauri’s new book, we might add Tail-gate ☺
Not yet, not in the public eye. A dozen more arrows are needed, one of them a hit to a vital organ, or the thick-skinned pachyderm will survive this onslaught. Its claim about the rate of glacial melt in the Himalayas was an important element in alarmism, but not in “the underlying science.”
A really solid, incontrovertible “hit” to a vital organ of the science, such as the hockey stick, would do lasting damage. If the e-mails of the Met Office’s lobbying of the IPCC to include the hockey stick in AR4 can be obtained via an FOI (or by a Chinese hacker team), as described by at above as Met-gate, and it can be shown that the other side had the better argument, that would do the trick.
Despite all the faults being found in their data our governments are still going crazy trying to implement as many UN based policies as possible in the quickest time as possible. Until this stops and these policies are made null and void the pain will not only continue but get worse!
Oops — change “at above” to “pat above”.
Revealing the IPCC’s Synthesis Report to be less than a “gold standard”:
Golden-gate
Roger Knights (20:39:03), Indiana Bones (16:45:32) :
Yes, “errors” were flagged by reviewers and some of those have reported what happened next. Frequently they were ignored. I think I’ve read statements by McIntyre, Christy, and Pielke about their concerns. I haven’t kept a list. Sorry.
How come we haven’t heard anything from Al Baby or Flim Flam Flannery
The acronym “IPCC” should probably now stand for the “International Propagandists for Climate Change.”
Good grief!!! The IPCC and AGW is all Gate and no fence!