“When the error was found it was handled in a totally and utterly atrocious manner.”
A former head of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) says that the organization should adopt a code of conduct and develop a mechanism to fix errors more quickly.
On 15 June, Robert Watson, who chaired the IPCC from 1997 until 2002, testified before an independent review committee tasked with improving the credibility of the United Nations’ group.
The 12-person panel of scientists and economists, chaired by Harold Shapiro, a former president of Princeton University in New Jersey, was asked by the UN to review the IPCC, which has faced numerous criticisms in recent months (see: IPCC flooded by criticism). In particular, the organization has admitted to making an error in its last comprehensive report, released in 2007, which said that the Himalayan glaciers could melt completely by 2035.
“To me the fundamental problem was that when the error was found it was handled in a totally and utterly atrocious manner,” Watson told the committee, gathered at McGill University in Montreal, Canada, by teleconference. “The IPCC needs to find a mechanism so that if something needs to be corrected there is a rapid way to get a correction made. That is something that needs to be looked at very carefully,” said Watson.
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Who’ll miss the IPCC?
Apart from the bottom-feeders,
Self-serving funding Seekers,
Parasitic Tax-hungry leeches.
You told us we would fry.
Turns out you told a lie.
IPCC, it’s time for you to, RIP!
Goodbye.
@Enduser et al.
I haven’t got the time or dedication to look up every paper that proves the link between man-made CO2 and Global Warming, but the fact that the US National Academy of Sciences (and many other leading scientific organisations) is convinced of AGW should be enough for starters. It also explains why the warming can’t be due to natural causes:
http://books.nap.edu/openbook.php?record_id=12782&page=29
This arcticle shows that the IPCC rather errs on the side of caution and how various governments interfere with the reports:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=conservative-climate
As to the Nature article and the troubles of the IPCC, perhaps I haven’t made myself clear enough. My idea is to keep politics out of the advisory council and let peer reviewed science (i.e. Working Group 1) speak for itself. The media have reported copiously on the couple of howlers found in WG2, but nobody could find fault with the hard science assembled by the first group.
By the way, it seems that Dr.Spencer has lost some of his data. I’m missing the graph for the record temperatures and the 20-year average on channel 5:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps
Sorry, my last link doesn’t work. This should do the job:
http://discover.itsc.uah.edu/amsutemps/execute.csh?amsutemps+002
Roald, highschool science class physics proves that CO2 is a “greenhouse gas” and that the amount we have released into the atmosphere will have some “warming effect”. OK nobody (even the sceptical scientists) would really dispute that.
What is in serious dispute is the extent of that warming and whether or not feedbacks are amplifying, or cancelling out such warming and whether the climate is anywhere near as sensitive to increases in CO2 as the IPCC assessment reports claim.
The MODELS show a high sensitivity. (they are programmed to do so.)
The Empirical evidence shows a very low degree of sensitivity.
To claim that the science is settled is a plain lie. There is massive disagreement about clouds for a start, let alone all the solar experts who were pretty unanimous back in 2006 about projecting that we would be highly into a massive cycle 24 by now. “4 has started but the solar activity is almost dead. Now all these solar scientists are pretty unanimously saying , “we haven’t a clue why this is like this!”
We do not know how clouds react to warming/cooling. We do not know how the sun works, we do not know how the oceans work, we do not know how sensitive the atmosphere is to increasing CO2. There is an enormous amount of “stuff” that is simply not known about how the climate actually works or why it does what it does. We CANNOT (I repeat) CANNOT predict the future direction of climate. END OF STORY!
Do not even begin to get me started on how atrocious and inaccurate global temperature measurements have been and how we cannot have any confidence whatsoever in the historical temperature record, for I would be writing all day!!! Suffice to say that the IPCC and many eminent scientists claim that the earth has warmed by about 0.6 Celsius degrees over the last century or so…
The way in which that is measured is abysmal and utterly flawed. The cruel fact is, we do not know for certain what the global average temperature should be, let alone if it is going up or down. The direction of temperature depends entirely on what date one starts measuring anyway.
The IPCC is a political machine with the sole objective of PROVING that MAN IS WARMING THE PLANET! They are NOT tasked with establishing how the climate actually works. They are not tasked with deducing what the climate is doing or is likely to do next. They are paid an enormous sum of money to convince the world of a pre-defined, non falsifiable hypothesis.
After over 30 years of CO2 alarmism and billions and billions of dollars of research, they have failed to PROVE their claim that man is solely responsible for warming the planet to dangerous levels through our emissions of CO2.
They have managed to bastardise science, threaten and demonise publishers, create a tiny “in-group” of incestuous scientists who rubber stamp each other’s work, ignore, omit, manipulate data to fit the hypothesis, and worse, but they have not scientifically proven that mankind’s small addition of CO2 somehow stops the logarithmic nature of the absorption of radiative heat by the CO2 molecules and turns it into a linear absorption thus increasing the “greenhouse” warming of the planet from a tiny increase in a trace-gas.
@ur momisugly Ken Hall
“To claim that the science is settled is a plain lie.”
I have never claimed that, and nor have most of the climate experts. All I said was that the link between CO2 and temperature was rock solid and you seem to agree to some extent.
“OK nobody (even the sceptical scientists) would really dispute that. ”
You just have to read some the comments on this site.
The IPCC was created to compile a catalouge of all the relevant papers on this topic and advise political leaders. By the way, temperature records are just one piece of the entire picture and solar cycles, which are included in the climate models, are only a small driver of climate anyway. True, science will never be settled. We may not know everything and we never will, but for some time now we know enough to act on. In 100 years we can say with certainty which of the models was right but it might be to late.
“The 12-person panel of scientists and economists,”
“Economists?”
Roald says:
June 18, 2010 at 3:34 am
@ur momisugly Ken Hall
“To claim that the science is settled is a plain lie.”
I have never claimed that, and nor have most of the climate experts. All I said was that the link between CO2 and temperature was rock solid and you seem to agree to some extent.
“OK nobody (even the sceptical scientists) would really dispute that. ”
You just have to read some the comments on this site.
____________________________________________________________________
Yes there is a link and here are the one no one disputes:
1) The temperature of water rises, its ability to hold CO2 diminishes and it outgases.
2) In the Vostok ice cores, the temperature rises and about 800-1000 years later the CO2 rises. (Warmist site explanation)
3) The effect of CO2 on temperature is href=”http://knowledgedrift.wordpress.com/2010/05/11/co2-is-logarithmic-explained/”>LOGARITHMIC In other words you get the most change at low levels of CO2 and the least change at higher levels until you reach a point where the change in CO2 has do measurable effect. Therefore there is no “tipping point” only a “saturation point”
4) And last WATER is a much stronger, much more abundant and much more variable “greenhouse gas”
“This plot shows the percent difference in water vapor between a warm El Nino and a cold La Nina, as a function of latitude (x-axis) and altitude (y-axis). This shows large increases in water vapor over the equator and in the upper troposphere. Image credit: Texas A&M” Variablity in Water Vapor
If water was used as the “boogy man” everyone would know it was a con job so CO2 was picked as the “boogy man” instead. Remember when you burn you release CO2 and H2O as products of combustion. Water is a much better choice as the climate driver but no one could figure out how to vilify water without looking like a fool. That is why water is left out of the list of IPCC “greenhouse gases”
TEMPERATURE
Here is an analysis by a NASA scientist using IPCC own data of the actual error in the global temperature data.
Take a good look at the Vostok ice core temperature data for the Holocene(last 10,000 yrs) It is showing a gradual cooling over time as we descend into the next Ice Age.
Finally, here is a short list of the IPCC errors
Most honest environmentalist can see that the proposed laws are money making schemes that do nothing except transfer wealth from the poor to the rich, just as designed.
OOPS the link got croggled for #3.
3) The effect of CO2 on temperature is LOGARITHMIC In other words you get the most change at low levels of CO2 and the least change at higher levels until you reach a point where the change in CO2 has do measurable effect. Therefore there is no “tipping point” only a “saturation point”
What the IPCC needs, or what someone can do as a 3rd party, is to set up a wiki, very much like wikipedia that contains the text of the IPCC reports with citations. Then on the discussion pages, each point or claim can be discussed. As verifications happen, there can be a “credibility” rating applied to each claim or section. As skeptics dispute things the IPCC authors (and those who wrote the cited source papers) can comment on those disputes, what their papers actually say, etc.
It would be the goal of the IPCC to get a high rating 90%+, and it would be the goal of skeptics to lower the rating. Who determines the rating is somewhat unclear. But we could start with a coarse system: acceptable, plausible, unknown/not evaluated, unacceptable.
If climate scientists want credibility, they will have to earn it. Let the science stand in the open.
How to improve the IPCC
As with all fecal material – total elimination.
Roald says:
June 18, 2010 at 12:30 am
I haven’t got the time or dedication to look up every paper that proves the link between man-made CO2 and Global Warming, but the fact that the US National Academy of Sciences (and many other leading scientific organisations) is convinced of AGW should be enough for starters. It also explains why the warming can’t be due to natural causes
Of course you don’t. They never do. If you find any, do let us know. And you can skip your appeals to authority, which are illogical. They won’t work here. Good luck!
Roald says: June 18, 2010 at 3:34 am
I have never claimed that, and nor have most of the climate experts. All I said was that the link between CO2 and temperature was rock solid and you seem to agree to some extent.
Yes, we agree to that. However, data shows the link to be temperature increase comes first.
The IPCC was created to compile a catalouge of all the relevant papers on this topic and advise political leaders.
A task at which they have failed miserably. Witness the intentional omission of 700 + papers and counting.
http://www.populartechnology.net/2009/10/peer-reviewed-papers-supporting.html
We may not know everything and we never will
Now there’s some logic. So do we or don’t we?
…….but for some time now we know enough to act on.
If by action you mean inaction, then I agree.
In 100 years we can say with certainty which of the models was right but it might be to late.
I concur. It will be too late if we commit economic hara-kari based on a correlation taken to be causation.
@Roald
‘All I said was that the link between CO2 and temperature was rock solid’
So is the link between nitrogen in atmosphere and temperatures too, but nobody is crazy enough to say nitrogen is a driving factor, even though, and lets face it, there’s a tad bit more of nitrogen.
What I don’t get is why nobody scream about the horrors of oxygen, and let’s face that too, a little too much oxygen and we all burn. :p
Roald,
Control question for you;
What is the temperature on the sunny side of the moon?
What do you think the temperature would be on earth without an athmosphere?
So, what is it that has an overall cooling-effect on earth?
hmmmm?
Here is some reading for you;
http://www.scribd.com/doc/33181109/Rescue-from-the-Climate-Saviors-1-1
hmm what could we do to clean up the IPCC.
Oust Pachauri and put in someone with a real science degree who didn’t use to play with trains and was “given” a science degree.
Get rid of scientists who have obviously lied, cheated, and circumvented honest science for greed and arrogance.
Force them to abide by the rules and have people that aren’t part of the inner circle do the reviewing.
Well
Well
Well that would mean getting rid of the IPCC all together then.
And your point is?
I second the motion. “Let it all hang out.”
The “SECRET” to getting the IPCC on track is to classify everything produced for and by this organization as TIPPY TIPPY TOP SECRET. Anyone caught disclosing IPCC documents or working papers to the public should be executed in Utah –especially anyone claiming to be a of the AGW sect of the Order of Chicken Little. Members of the UN itself, who leak IPCC documents or working papers to the public, should be fined $1billion for each occurance. The only way to get everything back on track is to put it all behind closed doors.
PS: The fiction writer from India should also be fired!