The ever sharp Bishop Hill blog writes:
While perusing some of the review comments to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report, I came across the contributions of Andrew Lacis, a colleague of James Hansen’s at GISS. Lacis’s is not a name I’ve come across before but some of what he has to say about Chapter 9 of the IPCC’s report is simply breathtaking.
Chapter 9 is possibly the most important one in the whole IPCC report – it’s the one where they decide that global warming is manmade. This is the one where the headlines are made.
Remember, this guy is mainstream, not a sceptic, and you may need to remind yourself of that fact several times as you read through his comment on the executive summary of the chapter:
There is no scientific merit to be found in the Executive Summary. The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. The points being made are made arbitrarily with legal sounding caveats without having established any foundation or basis in fact. The Executive Summary seems to be a political statement that is only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics. Wasn’t the IPCC Assessment Report intended to be a scientific document that would merit solid backing from the climate science community – instead of forcing many climate scientists into having to agree with greenhouse skeptic criticisms that this is indeed a report with a clear and obvious political agenda. Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated. Once the facts of climate change have been established and understood, attribution will become self-evident to all. The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted.
I’m speechless. The chapter authors, however weren’t. This was their reply (all of it):
Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.
Simply astonishing. This is a consensus?
(h/t to WUWT reader Tom Mills)
UPDATE: There’s an update to the story at Dot Earth.
http://dotearth.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/02/09/does-an-old-climate-critique-still-hold-up/
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oh, the response is
“Scope of report and chapter determined by AR4 scoping process”
And to whom are the scopers answerable?
And this surprises who?
To Bishop Hill and others:
Andy Lacis is a first-rate climatologist. His extensive work
http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/authors/alacis.html
is widely known and appreciated by other climatologists. His association with Jim Hansen goes back to their historic 1974 paper on the atmosphere of Venus.
Like all good scientists, he’s a skeptic, in the sense that he apparently deplored the presentation of even fairly well-supported scientific models/ideas/theories ‘as if’ they were settled fact “without having presented any foundation” in the Executive Summary itself. I believe his criticism should be interpreted in that light.
If you were to question him, you’d find that, although differing with Jim Hansen on some few particulars, he is no “denier”, as should be obvious from his use of “only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics” (which he certainly is NOT).
If you start reading through the review comments to the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report look out for all the rejected gems from Vincent Gray…
Vincent just keeps on plugging away…. from page 105 🙂
Delete “robustly” – REJECTED
Delete “robustly” – REJECTED [again 🙂 ]
Replace “robustly” with “convincingly” – REJECTED
Replace “detected” with “thought that this showed” – REJECTED
THANK YOU VINCENT delete robustly GRAY
The ever sharp Bishop Hill blog writes …
Every sharp? The comment was written more than four years ago.
Interesting, anyone else notice the “Confidential, Do Not Cite or Quote” at the bottom of the docs?
They take a real effort to make it a PITA to pull content out of here, the comments are actually in a image format instead of text if you export them to PDF so you’d need a text recognition program (like what comes with document scanners) to actually get at the content.
You can access the text of the document, but on my browser at least, it jumbles the comment and response all to heck.
It looks like Andrew made 36 – so far all interesting – comments, somewhere among the 186 pages of comments available
Off topic.
More lasting effects I hope. From the Guardian.
“If you’re going to do good science, release the computer code too
Programs do more and more scientific work – but you need to be able to check them as well as the original data, as the recent row over climate change documentation shows”
http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2010/feb/05/science-climate-emails-code-release
The AGW scam will only be defeated if it is cut off at it’s source, namely getting rid of the socialist democrats who funded this fraud from the beginning. We first boot their non american commies rear ends out of office, then start an investigation into the money trail, which may well lead to the fraud of the century when it is fully investigated.
We have every good scientist and researcher on our side. Everyone from Norman Borlaug to John Christy and from Freeman Dyson to Michael Crichton. Now add this guy to the list.
The alarmists only have Gordon Brown and several thieving elitist British politicos, crackpots at Greenpeace, Prince Charles, Osama Bin Ladin, the nutcase Hansen who isn’t a climatologist, Al Gore, Leonardo Di Caprio, Rajan Chootya Pachauri, etc
Travesty.
Dr. Lacis has guts. Someone pat this guy on the back. Let’s hope that history shows that this guy was way ahead of the curve and saw the IPCC 4AR as it was, political propaganda and not science.
Obviously AL wasn’t too upset with Chapter 9, because he also contributed to the SECOND ORDER DRAFT. http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/7787808?n=73
Leonard Ornstein (10:53:22) :
If you were to question him, you’d find that, although differing with Jim Hansen on some few particulars, he is no “denier”, as should be obvious from his use of “only designed to annoy greenhouse skeptics” (which he certainly is NOT).
Many of the comments I have seen by them seem to warn of not overreaching with what is being put into the report. Seems to me that he, unlike others, is very concerned about the line between science and advocacy.
I think you’ll find that most here have respect and appreciation for good science, and good scientists even when there is disagreement. That said, when it comes to the behind the scenes behavior at CRU, the advocacy of the RC crew (a.k.a. Hockey Team), and the constant flood of bad sourcing and overreach by the IPCC… that courtesy is not extended, and I believe this is for good reason.
By all means lets have the debate, let it be “robust”… but lets have it in the open and where the science is clear say so… where it’s not don’t cover it up. We need good scientists – even “warmists” like Lacis and Pielke Jr. to bring some sanity back to it.
DR. Lacis said ” And, there is a global temperature record that verifies that that is indeed what is happening.”
I would be interested in seeing an updated comment from Dr. Lacis considering the “adjusted” temperature records found to date.
Looks a lot like the responses I read to Vincent Gray’s comments……however….can anyone point me to a reference to this comment by Andrew Lacis? I would like to read it for myself so it isn’t just “heresay” when I pass it on to a few of my die-hard AGW supporting friends and family.
Cheers,
Travis
[It’s in the article.]
I agree with many of the comments here but I have more on the IPCC review process, with some focus on chapter 9, at http://mclean.ch/climate/docs/IPCC_review_updated_analysis.pdf.
Also on the authorship of chapter 9, “Prejudiced Authors, Prejudiced Findings” at http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org/images/stories/papers/originals/McLean_IPCC_bias.pdf
The most important line in Dr. Lacis’s comment:
“Attribution can not happen until understanding has been clearly demonstrated.”
Connect that dot with Trenberth’s “and it’s a travesty” remark, and we have a consensus!
Anthony, something you may like here.
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/7798293?n=45&imagesize=1200&jp2Res=.25
The global temperature record is also well
established, but there are some legitimate questions of sampling and “heat island” effects
that need to be addressed. -Andrew Lacis
@ur momisugly Harry (09:10:46)
I believe more in “Cold Fusion” than in IPCC words
;.)
Reply:
A good analogy would be Bre-X, a major gold mining scandal that involved salting (fudging) samples taken from a gold deposit. They basically worked from the same hypothesis–that the “real” grade was much higher. You can imagine the outcome; it was a disaster. The reasoning behind the two are equivalent, as will be the consequences>
As I recall on that one, there was a sceptical geologist who was about to blow the whistle and accidently fell out of a helicopter to his death. Now I’m not certain that the two events were even in fact related, but awful suspiscious. When big money is involved, bad things happen to good people, even if it is just their grant application being denied by someone who has the power to do so and disagrees with them. That said, what is bothersome about this is that a lot of the science is so completely represented that it should not require a heavy duty researcher with 11 degrees to debunk it. A lot of what I see presented as science ought to be able to be debunked by a 2nd year engineering student. There ought to be tens of thousands of people at that level who have nothing to lose by standing up and calling bull.
I read through same pages of comments and realized that 100% of sceptical comments were rejected, while opposite comments often lead to modifications.
A statistical analysis of the comments and responses would easily demonstrate this bias.
It may be still argumented about the quality of comments, however, the main point of such a statisitc would be to demonstrate that IPCC reports are essentially the product of a very low number of lead authors and the basic chapter 9 the work of possibly a low single digit number of individuals.
Hooray for Andrew Lacis. Vincent Gray is becoming one of my heros, too. His comments on pages 3 and 4 of the review are priceless. Rejected, of course.
Anyone know where a searchable text (Word or PDF) version of this report is located?
DCC
Try this
http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/ipcc/
Lacis and Hansen have coauthored about 50 papers together by my count at http://pubs.giss.nasa.gov/authors/alacis.html
And here is the link to the second order draft of chapter 9, printed seven months after the one with Lacis’s comments. I looked at many pages, but didn’t find any comments from Lacis this time around.
http://pds.lib.harvard.edu/pds/view/7787808