By Richard Black.
This is a fine opportunity for WUWT readers to make comments to the committee reviewing the IPCC. My suggestion: be polite; be constructive.
“Now that we’re in the kitchen, we have to take the heat,” said Rajendra Pachauri.
“And we have to recognize that the stakes are very high. So we have to prepare ourselves for criticism, and this is not something we have done in the past.”
Indeed not. The worlds of climate science and politics were very different in 1988 when the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the organization that Dr Pachauri now chairs, came into being.
Concern there was about the potential of humanity’s greenhouse gas emissions to produce a net warming of the planet’s biosphere, which was why the organization came into existence.
But computers on which scientists ran models were mere calculators beside today’s petaflop behemoths;
and many of the observation systems that now provide valued data, such as the global flotilla ofArgo floats, were barely at the stage of conception, never mind in their infancy.
As a result, the risk of warming might have been perceived as real, but it also went unquantified.
And as a result of that, there was barely a prospect of painful greenhouse gas emission cuts, never mind the wholesale decarbonisation of economies within a few decades that many now advocate.
Fossil fuel lobbyists had barely begun to organize, and a webless world did not facilitate the instant fractious exchanges of angry words and equations – the game, sometimes played on astroturf, that now makes the climate blogosphere as relentless as Shinjuku station in rush hour.
Read the rest of the story here
Comments to the IPCC review here
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899 says:
June 10, 2010 at 10:57 am
Who knows….perhaps they will be stalking someone up there…who likes endangered species with mashed potatoes.☺
Gail Combs says:
June 10, 2010 at 10:23 am
[–snip–]As a certified Quality Engineer, I agree wholeheartedly. As Dr Demming said, Quality starts at the top. If top management are a bunch of crooks then all quality control does is sort the material and make sure the off spec goes to the customers without incoming inspection. (And yes that is based on personnel experience – dishonesty or unemployment were often my choices)
Most “Quality Audits” by customers were a laugh since all they did was audit the already fudged paper work. I have never seen an auditor take part of the retain sample and double check the results of the analysis.
Demming’s first rule was: Design test/inspect report, and repeat the process until the product met spec., and then periodically inspect for quality purposes.
He also said: You simply cannot inspect quality into a product.
Quality —by its very nature— is designed into the product, not inspected into it.
Quality, therefore, is entirely an engineering aspect.
Quality assurance is just as its name implies.
Slightly off topic.
Is there any news about the hack/leak (other means) of the “Climategate eMails” ? Six months (at least) have passed us by without any solid information about the revelation of how the “stunning” leak of the information happened. We deniers/sceptics/doubters have had a field day without MainstreamMedia support for a long time now and the original story has gone lukewarm (unlike the Arctic). My main questions are: “Why did it happen just before CO2penhagen”? “Who was behind it”? – And where can I send donations to ensure something similar happens again “just before Cancun”.
@John Cooper says: June 10, 2010 at 8:49 am
“Is Rajendra Pachauri a Sikh, or just unkempt?”
I think he is a silly Fakir.
899 says:
June 10, 2010 at 11:05 am
That’s a rather cynical view of matters, but allow me this: A properly designed quality assurance system is meant to do just one thing: Report on conditions/findings.
It is something of a ludicrous thought to think that a QA system should ‘improve’ on anything, inasmuch as that isn’t what QA is designed for.
————————————————————————————–
“Continual Improvement” of a Quality Management System is something that should be a byproduct of an effective system through the analysis of data, corrective/preventive actions, audits, management reviews. It has to be verified by an external Quality auditor in relation to conformance of the standard and how it applies in the organization’s Quality documentation.
Taken straight from the current global benchmark for QMS:
“8.5.1 Continual improvement”
“(Organization Name) continually improves the effectiveness of the quality management system through the use of the quality policy, quality objectives, audit results, analysis of data, corrective and preventive actions and management reviews. Supporting Documentation QOP-85-01 Continual Improvement”.
That said, I don’t know any Quality auditor (and I know many) who would issue a major non-conformance (show-stopper) for failing to conform with clause 8.5.1.
The theoretical exception would be if each one of the supporting inputs (quality policy, quality objectives, audit results, analysis of data, corrective and preventive actions and management reviews) also failed to conform to both the standard and how the organization cites “they do it” in their own Quality documentation.
donald penman says:
June 10, 2010 at 10:37 am
” The IPCC was set up to provide evidence for human co2 caused global warming it has no other function.”
This is the same conclusion I came to after reading through the IPCC foundation charter documents, so I cannot but agree.
And herein lies the crux, IPCC and it´s staff have interpreted this as that they are obliged to provide evidence for the AGW conjecture , and exclude anything that could falsify the same. My opinion is that IPCC should be terminated and the charter dissolved. If the need is there ( and I suppose the general feeling is tht it is ) to investigate or assess the possible direction of how our future climate will behave, a new charter with a broader scope can be set up and include other possible causes of the temperature patterns and the like , and it´s main objective should be to determine if there is anything to be worried about or not, an if there is somthuing to worry about, to evaluate possible response and mitigation measures if they are deemed to be needed. And it should be a honest wide track public train assessment ride, not a one way closed and secretive monorail fun ride for some single view Cub of Rome type group.
Decarbonize the free world economies, they advocate.
Sounds like falling on their sword to me.
Another acronym comes to mind: Tired of living.
899 says:
June 10, 2010 at 5:53 am
“Comment for Richard Black: Rose colored glasses much?”
Always, constant, relentless, as per BBC AGW dogma. More like Big Green coloured glasses.
P.S. “coloured” is the British spelling
I wonder if the author of this definition had Dr. Pachauri in mind?
Vegetarian: Indian for inept hunter.
Come on guys, the IPCC has no intention of changing its views because of this review, they’ll simply use your collective brainpower against you by using the information from your comments to patch their argument and make it more convincing. Then they’ll go hard with a big new PR campaign trying to resell the whole thing to the public, using your ideas.
rbateman says:
June 10, 2010 at 3:16 pm
Decarbonize the free world economies, they advocate.
Sounds like falling on their sword to me.
Another acronym comes to mind: Tired of living.
More it is that they want to depopulate the world, and we —you and I— are summarily expected to commit hara-kiri as a favor to them.
Remember the British Monarch’s husband’s remarks in his autobiography: If he could come back (reincarnate), he like to be a deadly virus in order to eliminate humanity.
Take it from there.
I remembered that the good Dr Pachauri had come under unwanted scrutiny:
Climate Hustler
“… as a former railway engineer with a PhD in economics he has no qualifications in climate science at all.
… has established an astonishing worldwide portfolio of business interests with bodies which have been investing billions of dollars in organisations dependent on the IPCC’s policy recommendations. …”
Pachauri ‘got grants through bogus claims’
“The chairman of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.”