by Bob Carter (originally published on Quadrant Online)
Former German Chancellor demands IPCC inquiry
Helmut Schmidt, the respected former Chancellor of Germany, has told an audience at the Max-Plank-Gesellschaft that a full inquiry needs to be held into the credibility of advice on global warming that stems from the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
Set up in 1988 in order to deliver policy advice to governments regarding global warming, ever since 2005 the IPCC has been become mired in controversy over the integrity and accuracy of its procedures. Most recently, in early 2010, a number of scandals erupted over the selective use of published literature by the IPCC, and also its practice of relying upon documents from environmental lobby groups rather than refereed scientific papers.
In his speech, Helmut Schmidt said:
In addition to all the aforementioned problems caused by humans, we are also concerned, at the same time, by the phenomenon of global warming and its alleged consequences. We know that there have always been naturally occurring ice ages and warm periods; what we don’t know is how significant the human-induced contribution to present and future global warming is and will be.
The climate policy adopted by many governments is still in its infancy. The publications provided by an international group of scientists (the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC) have encountered skepticism, especially since some of their researchers have shown themselves to be fraudsters (Betrüger). In any case, some governments’ publicly stated targets are far less scientific, but rather politically endorsed.
It seems to me that the time has come that one of our top scientific organisations should scrutinise, under the microscope, the work of the IPCC, in a critical and realistic way, and then present the resulting conclusions to the German public in a comprehensible manner ….
The Max-Plank-Gesellschaft is Germany’s most eminent science organisation, and that Helmut Schmidt should deliver his lecture there is highly symbolic. But in calling for an investigation by one of Germany’s “top scientific organisations”, Schmidt shows that he only appreciates part of the problem, which is the integrity of the IPCC. An equal problem in nearly all western countries (Russia perhaps excluded) is the integrity of their national science academies and leading organisations, nearly all of whom, under the leadership of the Royal Society of London, have been acting as cheerleaders for the IPCC for the last ten years or more. Remember, too, that no fewer than three independent inquiries into last year’s Climategate (leaked email) scandal at the Climatic Research Unit, University of East Anglia, ended up as anodyne whitewashes, and this despite the undoubted “distinction” of the chairmen of the inquiries.
Helmut Schmidt is undoubtedly right to call for a searching inquiry into the IPCC, but any such inquiry will need to be conducted by a special, independent scientific audit group with full legal powers. For, to be effective, any review of the IPCC is going to need to also investigate the actions of other leading national and international science organisations.
Professor Bob Carter is a geologist, environmental scientist and Emeritus Fellow at the Institute of Public Affairs.
Translation courtesy of Dr Benny Peiser, Global Warming Policy Foundation, London. Further comment and access to the full lecture (in German) available through the GWPF website here…
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Schmidt, married to his high school sweetheart for 66 years, made his mark as a local crisis manager in 1962 Hamburg floods. That reputation he burnished as chancellor with his handling of economic crises and his mastery of a 1970s leftwing urban guerrilla campaign of bombing and assassination — a test of fire for a still relatively young German democracy..
“Schmidt is the star of German politics, its icon,“ Der Spiegel wrote. “No one is admired as much as he is.“
Last year, Schmidt was picked in one poll as Germany’s “best former chancellor“ and another named him “wisest German“.
“He’s Germany’s most popular politician,“ wrote TAZ daily.
Barry Bickmore says:
March 9, 2011 at 6:32 am
Theo said:
“This forum is for adults to discuss science and its corruption. You can state theses. You can criticize positions. But do not assign homework. If you cannot state the position in your own words, you do not understand it. If you do not understand it then do not attempt to address it.”
“So Syphax says that people “ought to read” something, and for you that constitutes “assigning homework”? You seem to be finding all kinds of excuses not to read a critique of the book you like.”
No, I have simply adopted the policy of calling all Warmista on the fact that none of them will actually address what are known to be the crucial and defining issues of the debate at this time. Issue number one is whether there are physical hypotheses that can be used to explain and predict the forcings, especially changes in cloud behavior, that can cause a dangerous rise in temperatures. The MAIN THESIS of Spencer’s book is that there are no such hypotheses. You claim to have reviewed the book and to have found it wanting. That could only mean that you have the needed physical hypotheses. So why do you not present them? Because you do not have them. And that proves beyond the shadow of a doubt that you did not understand the main thesis of the book that you reviewed. So why should I read the review? Can I be any clearer?
Barry Bickmore writes:
“If someone SUGGESTS that you read something, and you don’t feel you have the time or inclination, all you have to do is not respond, or say you have too much else to read, right now.”
No, sir, you are not getting away with that trick. When you cite papers, you count that as a response. It is not. If you cannot state the matter in your own words then you do not understand it. I am not asking for a summary. I am asking you to state a thesis and defend.
One reason why many serious but uninvolved scientists accept the warmist “consensus” is that in their own fields peer review is stringent and academic dishonesty unacceptable. They take this as a given, and thus accept at face value the assertions of “experts” in fields of which they are not personally knowledgeable. It is unthinkable to them that in “climate science” peer review could be corrupt and academic dishonesty rife.
A G Foster says:
March 8, 2011 at 9:24 am
When the letter c is sandwiched between s and e, it is always silent and superfluous…
I would guess from the rest of your post you might be suffering from scelerophobia.
@ur momisugly Barry Bickmore:
I suggest that you approach one of the Lukewarmer sites in the sidebar, or Kevin Kloor’s site under the warmist heading, so you will have a fairly neutral environment in which to present and debate your rebuttal of Spencer’s theory. But you’ll have to boil it down so it focuses on the scientific critique, not the peripheral stuff.
Here’s a WUWT thread on Monckton vs. Abraham:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/07/12/a-detailed-rebuttal-to-abraham-from-monckton/
Here’s the first video in a series of videos titled “Monckton Refutes Abraham.” It’s much calmer and more effective than his initial written response in the link above. Unfortunately, it takes a lot longer to process (because it’s spoken, therefore more spread out):
http://www.youtube.com/user/cfact#p/u/26/Z00L2uNAFw8
Roger,
I’ve seen all that, and looked up many of the references. In fact, I’ve found other instances where Monckton did even worse things. E.g., he fabricated false data to discredit the IPCC. See here:
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/08/monckton-makes-it-up/
Monckton responded to this, and I countered here:
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2010/08/17/the-monckton-files-a-bold-monckton-prediction/
(You’ll find Monckton’s response linked there, too.)
This one isn’t some hyper-technical issue. He copied some data incorrectly, applied the wrong model to the incorrect data, and so got the wrong numbers, which he could have easily checked. When others (like me) pointed it out to him, he ducked and weaved, saying things like, “Some have said that the IPCC projection zone on our graphs should show exactly the values that the IPCC actually projects for the A2 scenario.” Really? What kind of buffoon would suggest that, when you are reporting the IPCC’s projections, you would report the values they actually projected? Insane as it sounds, that’s the sort of thing I insist on.
Instead of just listening to Abraham, then listening to Monckton, and trying to decide who sounds more convincing, look up the references.
Theo says,
“No, sir, you are not getting away with that trick. When you cite papers, you count that as a response. It is not. If you cannot state the matter in your own words then you do not understand it. I am not asking for a summary. I am asking you to state a thesis and defend.”
Umm… I’m the one who wrote the review, so obviously I can state it in my own words. Very well, I will copy and paste the summaries from all three parts of the review.
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2011/02/25/roy-spencers-great-blunder-part-1/
Summary of Part 1: In his latest book, The Great Global Warming Blunder, Roy Spencer lashes out at the rest of the climate science community for either ignoring or suppressing publication of his research. This research, he claims, virtually proves that the climate models used by the IPCC respond much too sensitively to external “forcing” due to changes in greenhouse gas concentrations, variations in solar radiation, and so on. Instead, Spencer believes most climate change is caused by chaotic, natural variations in cloud cover. He and a colleague published a peer-reviewed paper in which they used a simple climate model to show that these chaotic variations could cause patterns in satellite data that would lead climatologists to believe the climate is significantly more sensitive to external forcing than it really is. Spencer admits, however, that his results may only apply to very short timescales. Since the publication of his book, furthermore, other scientists (including one that initially gave Spencer’s paper a favorable review) have shown that Spencer was only able to obtain this result by assuming unrealistic values for various model parameters.
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2011/02/28/roy-spencers-great-blunder-part-2/
Summary of Part 2: Roy Spencer repeatedly claims that most of the rest of the climate science community deliberately ignores natural sources of climate variation, but then contradicts himself by launching an inept attack on the standard explanation for climate change during the glacial-interglacial cycles of the last million years (i.e., they are initiated by Milankovitch cycles). The problems Spencer identifies are either red herrings or have been resolved, however, and he proposes no other explanation to take the place of the standard one. In fact, climate scientists have used paleoclimate data such as that for the ice ages to show that climate sensitivity is likely to be close to the range the IPCC favors. Therefore, it appears Roy Spencer is the one who wants to sweep established sources of natural climate variation under the rug.
http://bbickmore.wordpress.com/2011/03/01/roy-spencers-great-blunder-part-3/
Summary of Part 3: Roy Spencer posits that the Pacific Decadal Oscillation (PDO) is linked to chaotic variations in global cloud cover over multi-decadal timescales, and thus has been the major driver of climate change over the 20th century. To test this hypothesis, he fit the output of a simple climate model, driven by the PDO, to temperature anomaly data for the 20th century. He found he could obtain a reasonable fit, but to do so he had to use five (he says four) adjustable parameters. The values he obtained for these parameters fit well with his overall hypothesis, but in fact, other values that are both more physically plausible and go against his hypothesis would give equally good results. Spencer only reported the values that agreed with his hypothesis, however. Roy Spencer has established a clear track record of throwing out acutely insufficient evidence for his ideas, and then complaining that his colleagues are intellectually lazy and biased when they are not immediately convinced.
Theo says,
“Issue number one is whether there are physical hypotheses that can be used to explain and predict the forcings, especially changes in cloud behavior, that can cause a dangerous rise in temperatures. The MAIN THESIS of Spencer’s book is that there are no such hypotheses.”
If Spencer’s main thesis is that there are no such hypotheses, then what is there to argue about? He doesn’t have such a hypothesis, and neither does anyone else. The typical response of the scientific community in such a situation would be to let the crackpots worry about it.
If you had thought a little harder about what Spencer was saying, however, you would have realized that his main thesis was that, whether or not there is a specific physical hypothesis that would explain WHY cloud cover chaotically fluctuates, he can virtually prove that 1) these fluctuations cause a STRONGLY negative feedback (at least in the short term), and 2) the PDO is one natural mode of climate variation that seems to be driving the fluctuations over multi-decadal time scales.
In my review, I showed that neither claim is well supported. It all depends on Spencer’s willingness to plug wildly unrealistic values into a simple climate model, and employ nonsensical statistical techniques.
Barry Bickmore,
It must torture you that none of the wild-eyed runaway globaloney predictions have come true. The real “crackpots” are running realclimate.
The voice of Helmut Schmidt reminds us how the politics has changed even within the leftwing over the last 30 years. Pay attention to the upcoming election in Baden-Württemberg, and the SDP and Green Party might well harvest the votes from the recent earthquake in Japan.
http://www.foreignpolicy.com/articles/2011/03/01/green_is_the_new_black
Recommended Reading: Green is the NEW Black!
There is a little tiny problem with the qoute “especially since some of their researchers have shown themselves to be fraudsters (Betrüger).” by Helmut Schmidt:
Schmidt never said this words.
See Fake scandal again