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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So because Lord Stern is inept enough not to have current security on his e-mail scanner, and daft enough to open active content he wasn’t expecting to receive. then he has been targeted by some sort of conspiracy? Have I got that right…?
The link takes you to page 17 of the comments. On pages 15-16, Lacis makes a more telling comment about the whole of Chapter 9 — not just the summary.
He says that the report, “would be substantially improved by simply deleting this chapter.”
Anyone bother to contact Lacis to see if he still holds the same opinion of the executive summary? An actual reporter, Revkin, appears to have gone where Watts fears to tread. That dreaded follow-up question which might undo a juicy “scandal”.
And the chorus of howler monkeys follows along. As always.
Eventually you folks will see how stupid Watts and his ilk are making you appear to be. Will you hold him accountable then?
REPLY: Can I buy insurance from you for that? Seriously, I corresponded with NYT’s Revkin today on this story, I made no claims of my own, simply repeating what Bishop Hill blog pointed out. I simply put it into a larger forum where it got the scrutiny and assisted the reporter in getting the story right, as Revkin notes.
Sorry if that bothers you, but I don’t have much respect for people that hurl insults from anonymity, no matter what side they are on. – Anthony
I’m glad this caught attention: It should. The response was summary in the extreme and revealing of the mind set.
mt (14:06:13) :
“..Geoengineering, a Timely Remedy for Global Warming?
Andrew Lacis NASA/Goddard Institute for Space Studies..”
Yep, I favour the white stuff (TiO2 pigment) over the black stuff myself:
http://tinyurl.com/ygp6lc8
Of course this is before I dug into the data and decided that we’re warming less that 1 C per century. More I look the lower the warming seems to be.
I particularly like the ‘adjustment’ made to Mackay sugar mill station which implies that northern Queensland was frozen solid around the time of Christ.
http://kenskingdom.files.wordpress.com/2010/02/tekowaiadjtplot1.jpg
Totally rejected. Even the science is a mis-application of reality.
IPCC says adding a GHG to the air results in warming (AR4 WG1 p116) However, Svante Arrhenius in his 1896 paper quantifying the GHE said that you MUST add an energy photon to a GHG to get GHE warming. Now since there is excess CO2 and Water vapor GHGs in the air, some put there whenever the temperature drops every night and the amount of the GHE reduces, thus adding more GHG to the air, then it stands to reason that if there were any more energy photons available they would be absorbed by the excess GHGs. But since that does not happen then we must assume that all the available photons are already in use by the existing GHE. In which case, if we add more CO2 to the air, it just sits there as excess. (see Excess CO2 Scenario at http://www.scribd.com) With no available energy there is no more warming. The IPCC and the computer models can’t do basic science. They mis apply the GHE.
The simple proof is thsat when the water vapor GHG rises to 100% humidity, when it rains, we do NOT see a rising of the water vapor GHE contribution.
And we are using this report to make billion dollar decisions?
@ur momisugly NickB. (14:01:36)
The problem I had too with usual Firefox, but looking to the remarks, I knew what to delete ;.)
Easier than to use a OCR soft, isn’t it ?
A3K (15:13:01) “Anyone bother to contact Lacis to see if he still holds the same opinion of the executive summary? An actual reporter, Revkin, appears to have gone where Watts fears to tread. That dreaded follow-up question which might undo a juicy ‘scandal’.”
Well, I can think of several resons not to believe Revkin’s story. First, Lacis still has his job and probably wants to keep it. Second, Revkin is one of those people who “shades” a story by leaving out any contrary details – and he is a known AGW supporter. Third, the comments were clearly rejected and now we are asked to believe that they were subsequently accepted to Lacis’ satisfaction! By what magic method did the IPCC have an undocumented change of heart? And finally, the points Lacis makes in his review comments are a perfect match to what appeared in the final copy of AR4. He described it perfectly. No amount of whitewash after the fact can alter the obvious.
A3K
Eventually you folks will see how stupid Watts and his ilk are making you appear to be. Will you hold him accountable then?>
When I first started doing my own research and educating myself, I jumped into a lot of “warmist” blogs. I soon learned that asking a tough question was how you get “snipped”, that a good argument got edited and then responded to out of context, or just a dismissive one word reply like “ridiculous”.
On this blog the dumb and the clever questions get answered, the science is debated openly and dissenting opinions are posted in whole. Watts and his ilk are proving that even a howler monkey can learn to think for himself.
Regards,
Howler Monkey #….
Hey, how DO I get assigned a number?
How come alot of the reviewers completely missed the mistakes lacis found?
A3K (15:13:01) :
Anyone bother to contact Lacis to see if he still holds the same opinion of the executive summary? An actual reporter, Revkin, appears to have gone where Watts fears to tread. That dreaded follow-up question which might undo a juicy “scandal”.
And the chorus of howler monkeys follows along. As always.
Eventually you folks will see how stupid Watts and his ilk are making you appear to be. Will you hold him accountable then?
Why do feel it necessary to stoop so low with your words? Has it not sunk in yet that it was precisely
A3K (15:13:01) :
Anyone bother to contact Lacis to see if he still holds the same opinion of the executive summary? An actual reporter, Revkin, appears to have gone where Watts fears to tread. That dreaded follow-up question which might undo a juicy “scandal”.
And the chorus of howler monkeys follows along. As always.
Eventually you folks will see how stupid Watts and his ilk are making you appear to be. Will you hold him accountable then?
Why do feel it necessary to stoop so low with your words? Has it not sunk in yet that it was, precisely, this type of frothing abuse that fuelled the “‘sceptical'” revolution?
@Krishna Gans (15:31:27) :
For 186 pages… if we were to make this into a fully searchable format, I’m not so sure
To pull comments from Lacis’ 36 search results (http://fts.lib.harvard.edu/fts/search?Q=andrew+lacis&G=7798293&T=pds-results.xsl&F=H&R=/pds/search/7798293&O=R)… maybe : )
But still pretty darn painful 😉
@ur momisugly DirkH (15:04:44) :
The label warmist has a slightly insulting tone, but it’s too descriptive to avoid.
I wish there was a better term to use too. For me it’s definitely not meant to be pejorative, like when we’re called “deniers”, but a better and more respectful term would be nice to find.
Just curious, but is AGWer any better(?)
davidmhoffer (15:37:32) :
Hey, how DO I get assigned a number?
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Are you sure that’s what you want?
Oops apologies for the embedding… will have to research what part of the link does that.
Bulldust,
Being a number depends on context.
Sports – we’re number one! (cheer) good thing
Star Trek – Number 1 (2nd in command) not as good as commander, but way up from ensign
Life – your number is up , not such a good thing
Business – that’s a good number (good thing!) here’s your PO number (more good thing!)
Business – this number you sold at is less than our cost (bad thing)
I’m OK with having a Howler Monkey number. Is 12 taken?
I think it might have sparked a bit more of an interesting discussion if the substance of the “update” was posted in the original article. It fairly significantly changes your story that Dr. Lacis went from “The Executive Summary as it stands is beyond redemption and should simply be deleted” in 2005 to “I commend the authors for doing as good a job as they did” today. Don’t you think that’s worth at least a line in the original post, rather than just a blind link?
The answer to “what does IPCC do?” was answered by Dr. Lacis today. “You get inputs from everybody, find any bugs, crank through and the science moves forward,” he said.
I think that you’re right to insist on seeing evidence and understanding how decisions are made. That should apply when the conclusions agree with one’s preconceptions and when they don’t.
Interesting page from the late, great John Daly, who mentions the CRU-IPCC link. Mr Daly was quite a guy, no wonder Jones was thrilled about his demise: click
A blink gif that Daly got from “adjusted” CRU data: click
ot
wsbriggs
I think last year a SPAWAR lab group announced they had detected actual neutrons in one of the table top fusion experiements by using plastic nuke badge material to detect it. Earlier, it seems that sensors which were thermally sensitive had been used show what was being thought to now be a false positive. There’s no question the badge material picked up neutrons rather than temperature and perhaps it’s related enough to the experiment to indicate neutrons from the experiment rather than perhaps neutrons from cosmic ray activity and/or natural radiation activities.
It may turn interesting to see someday. then again, it might turn out like our Sun with sub milli-watt nuclear power generation per kilogram which is great for an extremely long lasting huge source of power but it fails a bit in the portability and size categories.
I posted this:
Mike (12:48:26) :
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]
What was snipped? I used the word “denier-gate” to describe the original post.
Smokey: “Mr Daly was quite a guy, no wonder Jones was thrilled about his demise.”
Agreed.
And contemplations of suicide of the latter is evidence of either borderline or narcissistic personality disorder.
Reading Jone’s emo replies to Daly’s incessant logic [thanks for the link, Smokey]…then well, the evidence is clear.
Beyond Jones….above the sickening noise of the IPCC, Lacis’ commitment to the SM and logic is refreshing. Sort of reminds me of the many cogent people on this site.
May the truth win out. That’s what its all about, right?
Chris
Norfolk, VA, USA
davidmhoffer (15:37:32) :
A3K
Eventually you folks will see how stupid Watts and his ilk are making you appear to be. Will you hold him accountable then?>
When I first started doing my own research and educating myself, I jumped into a lot of “warmist” blogs. I soon learned that asking a tough question was how you get “snipped”, that a good argument got edited and then responded to out of context, or just a dismissive one word reply like “ridiculous”.
>>>
Could not have said it better david – I had the same experience and I must say to the AGW (like A3K) ilk that it was your arrogance and unwillingness to debate which was your undoing. That drives good people with common curiosities to question what your selling.
NASA should stick to space flight. It’s global warming alarmism is politicizing the agency, stifling debate and intefering with legitimate scientific research as is documented in this Examiner.com story published late Tuesday.
http://bit.ly/cHYVdc
A3K (15:13:01) :
I have a suggestion for you. But it would be snipped.