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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“…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…”
————
David, perhaps you meant to say:
…this is that a lot of the science is so completely MISrepresented that it should not require a heavy duty researcher with 11 degrees to debunk…
“Nigel Brereton (11:52:28) :
DCC
Try this
http://hcl.harvard.edu/collections/ipcc/”
I’m looking for a text searchable version. The Harvard format is absurd. You have the choice of image or completely unformatted (and unreadable) text. I would like to see a series of Word. HTML, or text files that I can concatenate, then search.
Hey do you guys know (I’m sure by now) that Ads by Google is playing devil’s advocate on your blog?
What Is Global Warming?
Is It All A Hoax? Find Out At National Geographic
NationalGeographic.com
WHAT’S UP WITH THAT?
Has anyone counted how many reviewers have commented ?
Names like Vincent Grey appear many times as a voice of moderation (promptly rejected of course). Vincent Grey’s remarks seems to make up a large proportion of the comments.
Not surprising that Steve McIntire’s comment(s) (p153) are rejected.
I would like to formally nominate this guy to be the next head of the IPCC.
As I recall on that one [Bre-X], there was a sceptical geologist who was about to blow the whistle and accidently fell out of a helicopter to his death
No – the geologist in question was Micheal de Guzman, who had been involved in the project from the very beginning. although suspisions abound, there is no way to know whether he was involved in salting the core samples. The property had been transferred to a joint venture with Freeport McMoRan (after some arm-twisting an manouvering by the Suharto government), and they had been doing due diligence on the project when de Guzman went missing. They must’ve been reasonably far along, because within a week of his death McMoRan announced that the property contained no appreciable gold. Whether he fell, jumped, or was pushed out of the helicopter has never been established, but under the circumstances, any of the alternatives is plausible, but none of them require that he intended to expose the scam, and there is every evidence that if he became sceptical of the reported gold values, he did so only very late in the game.
@NickB
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.
In the header of the document page you can click on “view text” and you can “copy and paste” as usual….
So I copyied this comment by Andrey Lacis
It’s necessary to pay attention to the comment while copying !
Reviewgate.
“Hansen colleague rejected IPCC AR4 ES as having “no scientific merit”, but what does IPCC do?”
Points him to the actual chapter.
Take a look at Lasis’ publications. They all include an abstract & some a press release.
If you want the references & the logical connections, read the paper.
Another outrage that has nothing to do with the science.
OT
I ended up in AR5 nomination of reviewers, at
http://www.ipcc.ch/activities/activities.htm#1
AR5 NOMINATION PROCESS
The nomination period is open from: 15 January to 12 March 2010.
(for Governments and participating organizations)
How likely is that skeptics points of view are taken into account in this review?
Garry (10:40:34) :
“and was surprised to find several along the lines of “we are out to support the thesis of AGW.””
But Garry…that is why IPCC was created in the first place.
To support the thesis of AGW.
Richard Sharpe (10:03:32) :
Harry (09:10:46) says:
“Rejected. [Executive Summary] summarizes Ch 9, which is based on the peer reviewed literature.”
The earth was flat…that was based on peer reviewed literature as well.
Cold Fusion was based on peer reviewed literature.
Actually, you are wrong. Educated people have known since the Greeks that the world is not flat. Secondly, there seems to be good evidence for some sort of “cold fusion” effect that needs to be explained.
True. The US Naval Research Lab has spent some time and money confirming the presence of high energy particles in non-radiative reactions.
“rbateman (10:12:58) :
[…]
If cold fusion were true, nature would (again .. I suspect) be performing it all day long.”
Nature did perform fisson for quite a while.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reactor
(excuse me, but in this case it doesn’t matter how they botched it up)
But it doesn’t now at least as far as we know.
Nature also makes very regular cloud patterns:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morning_Glory_cloud
(this has a beautiful foto)
But it does that only under very special circumstances.
So as long as there is not a place where heavy water accidentally mixes with palladium crystals naturally it might just be that it’s not happening even though it might still be possible. Also consider what happens in a Farnsworth Fusor; fusion is not that hard to achieve. I wouldn’t be surprised if they can reliably demonstrate cold fusion. Having an energy surplus is the difficult part.
RockyRoad,
you are in fact correct, I mean MISrepresented. My fingers are not properly attached to my brain.
So what I am after is a few dozen high school students to proof read my posts, but I still need a few thousand engineers and physicists to stand up and say, yeah, I’m only in 3rd year, but I’m pretty certain perpetual motion doesn’t work.
As each day passes, more of the sham is exposed.
Why are the various authorities in the Western world not pursuing any of this to uphold the law and commonly-accepted ethics? Our governments have treated us citizens as idiots for long enough. It is no surprise that various governments whose ministers are former hard-line Socialists have been ‘dumbing down’ school curricula, especially in the hard sciences – the notion that governments desire a steady supply of pliable voters who can be bent to the will of their ‘elected representatives’ with little effort doesn’t seem so far-fetched any more. Most of those in their early twenties and younger have already been brainwashed by bad ‘science’ in schools and there is a lot of ground to make up in encouraging people to think for themselves from an understanding of first principles in any subject whatever.
You are reporting on a disagreement about how to summarize the conclusions of the IPCC report, but are trying to infer a disagreement about the science.
Lacis’ original comment was poorly worded. He did not give examples or say how Chapter 9 might be worded differently. To his credit he came back and clarified his concerns, as Lucy Skywalker stated above.
[snip]
I trust that some are making a catalogue of influential scientists and their positions on AGW for posterity with a special roll of the brave who didn’t bow to the established faith and risked blacklisting and cut-off of funds. Andrew Lacis may be in the AGW camp, but he deserves full respect for insisting that the science be clean of advocacy and politics. His stating that we don’t have absolute proof of anthropogenic induced warming means that he has left the door open for falsifying the hypothesis or for growing evidence of its truth. As a geologist, I see a few hundred years sample of the 4billion years plus as subatomic and meaningless in terms of identifying the warmest period or the range of variability possible. Coincidence for a few tens of years of rising CO2 and temp is not a correlation and indeed, the relation appears to be already falsifying itself since at least 2000. A commodity specialist years ago noted that the price of copper rose with skirt lengths in fashion cycles and this was over 75 years apparently. I wouldn’t trust it as a trading scheme over the next century though!
davidmhoffer (11:34:02) :
Re the fall from the helicopter of a BreX geologist – this was a Philippino geologist on site who was very much inside the scam- he may have committed suicide.
Just a heads-up on a bizarre “breaking news” story in the UK:
Climate economist’s email security breach
http://www.channel4.com/news/articles/science_technology/climate+economistaposs+email+security+breach/3532642
Reply: 1. We have a tips area. 2. It looks like Stern opened an ordinary piece of malicious spam. ~ ctm
Lucy Skywalker (10:49:17) :
oh, the response is
“Scope of report and chapter determined by AR4 scoping process”
And to whom are the scopers answerable?
The million monkey theory of eventually creating something of great value by piling on more random attempts.
Instead of fixing a leaking roof by removing the tin and replacing the aged tarpaper and rotted wood that won’t hold nails, simply place more tin over the affected area, nailing tin to tin. The process never changes: just make up more stories to bury the inconsistencies.
Eventually, the place ends up looking like a dump and the roof caves in.
Which is about where the IPCC is currently at.
It is interesting how the disclosures are continuing to shift opinion. The Canadian national newspaper – The Globe and Mail – has, and largely continues to be, supportive of AGW views. There have been some cracks appearing however.
On today’s (Feb 9, 2010) front page there was a mild article on Pachuri’s troubles. The best of all was the daily cartoon (http://v1.theglobeandmail.com/cartoon/) showing two polar bears looking at a global warming research station while holding a newspaper with the headline “Climategate”, one bear asks the other “Endangered Species?”.
Also, Margaret Wente – a columnist for the Globe who was one of the first writers to break the Climategate story in Canadian MSM, recently hosted an online discussion about the recent climate change revelations (http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/opinions/online-discussion-margaret-wente-on-climate-change/article1460602/) .
I don’t think that this represents a change of editorial position at the Globe, merely a broadening of views that nonetheless is heartening.
Sam (09:39:05) :
I suggest everyone posts the link for this to their Facebook profile…
My what?
Really, I have too much to do with too many “crisis of the moment” things happening to have the time to generate enough proper disinformation for such a public profile. As it is, it takes a lot of effort to keep my listing as “harmless crackpot” for just my FBI profile.
Forwarded to one of our more vocal newspapers, linked from here.
Just staggering that all this nonsense has been allowed to fester along to this point.
How perceptive….
“The presentation sounds like something put together by Greenpeace activists and their legal department. ”
Because it was!!! He knew this long before it finally started coming to light in the last few months. But said nothing beside a review comment….
I saw this review comment and many others over a year ago. There’s a lot worse, including scientists being included in the list of reviewers of the document when in fact they made similar comments that the IPCC findings were wrong. The IPCC AR4 report is a sham and it must be debunked officially. The only way to do it is to take it to court and prove it’s a sham. It wouldn’t be that hard. Just need someone with money.
Manfred (11:36:46) :
“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.”
I have no experience of the IPCC, but I have been a reviewer of another – more recent – ‘global’ scientific report and this is exactly what happened in this case. The report is the product of the chapter lead author(s) who have been hand-picked by the central players. Conflicting points – even with full references – are simply ignored. I even followed up some of the other references and pointed out that they did not support what was claimed – this too was rejected/ignored.
I believe this is an exercise in social engineering as opposed to any kind of scientific review.