Steve McIntyre has uncovered a blunder on the part of Pachauri and the IPCC that is causing waves of doubt and calls for retooling on both sides of the debate. In a nutshell, the IPCC made yet another inflated claim that:
…80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century…
Unfortunately, it has been revealed that this claim is similar to the Himalayan glacier melt by 2035 fiasco, with nothing independent to back it up. Worse, it isn’t the opinion of the IPCC per se, but rather that of Greenpeace. It gets worse.
Steve McIntyre discovered the issue and writes this conclusion:
It is totally unacceptable that IPCC should have had a Greenpeace employee as a Lead Author of the critical Chapter 10, that the Greenpeace employee, as an IPCC Lead Author, should (like Michael Mann and Keith Briffa in comparable situations) have been responsible for assessing his own work and that, with such inadequate and non-independent ‘due diligence’, IPCC should have featured the Greenpeace scenario in its press release on renewables.
Everyone in IPCC WG3 should be terminated and, if the institution is to continue, it should be re-structured from scratch.
Those are strong words from Steve. Read his entire report here.
Elsewhere, the other side of the debate is getting ticked off about this breach of ethics and protocol too. Mark Lynas , author of a popular pro-AGW book, Six Degrees, has written some strong words also: (h/t to Bishop Hill)
New IPCC error: renewables report conclusion was dictated by Greenpeace
Here’s what happened. The 80% by 2050 figure was based on a scenario, so Chapter 10 of the full report reveals, called ER-2010, which does indeed project renewables supplying 77% of the globe’s primary energy by 2050. The lead author of the ER-2010 scenario, however, is a Sven Teske, who should have been identified (but is not) as a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace International. Even worse, Teske is a lead author of the IPCC report also – in effect meaning that this campaigner for Greenpeace was not only embedded in the IPCC itself, but was in effect allowed to review and promote his own campaigning work under the cover of the authoritative and trustworthy IPCC. A more scandalous conflict of interest can scarcely be imagined.
…
The IPCC must urgently review its policies for hiring lead authors – and I would have thought that not only should biased ‘grey literature’ be rejected, but campaigners from NGOs should not be allowed to join the lead author group and thereby review their own work. There is even a commercial conflict of interest here given that the renewables industry stands to be the main beneficiary of any change in government policies based on the IPCC report’s conclusions. Had it been an oil industry intervention which led the IPCC to a particular conclusion, Greenpeace et al would have course have been screaming blue murder.
And, Bishop Hill reports other rumblings in AGW land with a consensus that the IPCC is “dumb”.
What a mess. The IPCC and Pachauri may as well give it up. After a series of blunders, insults of “voodoo science” to people asking honest, germane, questions, Africagate, and now this, they have no place to go, they’ve hit rock bottom.
The credibility of the IPCC organization is shredded. Show these bozos the door.
Is there anything in the UN not corrupt?
Just wondering.
Hear, hear!
(but not “Here, here!” as John Tofflemire said earlier…)
So our politicians have been told by a Gold Standard scientific review that it’s feasible to convert nearly 80% of our energy supply to renewables in a certain (short) time frame and, at least in the UK, seem to be running with that idea. Only, the Gold Standard scientific review was produced by Greenpeace.
That’s actually quite frightening.
From reading other ‘grapevines’, it seems that the UK’s renewable energy plans have problems already.
It involves the so-called Renewable Heat Initiative = the tax man is going to pay people to heat their houses using either solar thermal, heat-pumps or bio-mass boilers.
The first two are doomed because..
1. Only 15% of the UK’s solar energy arrives during the 5 months of winter, when its needed most.
2. the national grid is overloaded already on cold winter days before adding 10’s of GW of extra demand
3. In SW Scotland, right now, folks are offering money to do tree surgery. That’s right, paying you money to chop trees when before you paid them
IOW, the RHI scheme has not even officially started yet and we’ve run out of biomass to feed it. 12 months ago, wood pellets were costing 50% more (in energy terms of pence per kilowatt hour) than electricity did and that was before you’d spent thousands on a suitable (approved) boiler.
There just aren’t the words sometimes, sigh.
The evidence that Pachauri is in fact a mole inserted into the IPCC by Lord Monckton in
order to destroy its (the IPCCs) credibility is starting to get overwhelming.
For sure we can supply 80% of the energy needs by renewables!
Let’s just go back to the bronze age. At this time humanity lived 100% by renewables…
Or let’s commit mass suicide, with 10% left of the current population “we” (or the ones left) can live with 80% renewables.
The only thing the UN will take notice of, is a move to defund it, or at least the IPCC – An opportunity here for a new squeaky clean clean out before the pimple bursts into an ugly mess, though can’t get much worse or more ugly than this mess is right now…IMHO!
Scrap the UN. What good has it actually done since its inception? Without it we would have had wars so no difference there then. Malaria would be almost non existent, food would be more plentiful, fewer wind farms/solar/biofuel systems and we would be avoiding any AGW/Climate Indulgences because people like Pachauri would be oiling railway engines or trying to get their porno books published [and hopefully failing miserably] and the likes of Hansen, Mann, Jones on the dole queue……..
If you include fossil fuels as renewable, which they are over the tens of million year timescale, then they are correct. We can get over 80% of our energy from renewables, including FF’s.
Apart from this what planet does Pachauri inhabit? Not Earth!
Has much coverage of Donna Laframboise’s work at nofrakkingconcensus on this social network effect been discussed at WUWT? Her site is a great read and rings so true. I see these same problems with the critics of biofuels and industrial agriculture. Grey literature, sloganeering, fake experts, hiding the decline, cherry-picking data, insider clubs all show up in the anti-agriculture Green color revolution-types at CARB and the psuedo-agriculture schools like Cornell.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/
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Bulls-eye, Tallbloke:
‘“Everyone in IPCC WG3 should be terminated and, if the institution is to continue, it should be re-structured from scratch.”
On the contrary, this kind of shark jumping and squirrel fishing from the IPCC is to be encouraged and publicised.
Nothing could make the entire edifice more untenable and more likely to collapse spectacularly.’
Hoisted by their own petard — in slo-mo…..
How much direct evidence will it take for our political leaders to notice the stink of the global warming deceit? Or have they noticed it but find it difficult to extract themselves? We should remind them of the best political inducement of all for changing their opinion: they will not be re-elected unless they extract themselves, for it’s our money they commit on the basis of these extraordinary, fraudulent, self-seeking, public dissimulations. As Mark Lynas indicates, no oil company could have got away with this level of blatant conflict of interest even for a day.
Big Green makes Big Oil look as inoffensive as a kitten.
A couple of comments that may particulalry interest WUWT from Mark Lynas’ blog. He hasn’t read a copy of the Hockey Stick Illusion, Yet!
But Professor Jonathon Jones is going to lend him his copy… (Jonathon in these links)
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/03/02/scientists-speak-out/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/02/25/currys-2000-comment-question-can-anyone-defend-%e2%80%9chide-the-decline%e2%80%9d/
Mark Lynas says:
15 June 2011 at 2:11 pm
Thanks Andy – I guess what we can all share is an interest in the scientific method being applied as rigorously as possible. And some ‘sceptics’ are doing great work in holding the IPCC and others to higher standards. Here’s another sceptic site, for instance, raising some equally valid issues:
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/03/14/peer-into-the-heart-of-the-ipcc-find-greenpeace/
Reply
■ Barry Woods says:
15 June 2011 at 2:35 pm
Donna has done a lot of good work, you are aware that many of the usual suspects consider her a ‘climate change denier’ and smear her at every opportunity?
Reply
■ Mark Lynas says:
15 June 2011 at 2:37 pm
No, I didn’t know that. Skimming through her site it looks very much like fair comment to me. I haven’t come across it before. But she’s unfortunately right that too many Greenpeace people wear the ‘scientist’ hat when it suits them.
■ Barry Woods says:
15 June 2011 at 2:51 pm
No offense, IF donna is new to you, may be you should step outside of the green bubble a bit more….. Take some time to read her blog, and Bishop Hill
May I ask
Have you read ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion’
Professor Judith Curry (climate heretic now) challenged some other climate scientists to read this book (Gavin of Realclimate, etc) their reasons and excuses not to read a book recommended by a fellow profesional were both amusing and profoundly depressing. She said that it seemed fair comment and at the very least explained where sceptics like Steve Mcintyre were coming from. They would not read it… if interested I find the link..
PLEASE tell me you are aware of Judith’s blog Climate Etc, if not you must consider yourself part of the green bubble.. go there read her views.
■ Mark Lynas says:
15 June 2011 at 2:53 pm
I haven’t read the Hockey Stick Illusion, but I will if you send me a free copy! ◦
Same with Judith Curry – I have seen her being vilified, but I haven’t gone deeply into it.
■ Jonathan Jones says:
15 June 2011 at 3:12 pm
Mark, where would you like your free copy of the Hockey Stick Illusion sent to? I work near OUCE so could easily leave you a copy there.
————————————————
Be nice and polite to Mark he appears genuine and has never deleted or blocked any comments of mine on his blog. I have been reading and commenting there since he started it.
He is also the Maldives Climate Change Advisor, and on the board of The Campaign Against Climate Chanhe, which has sceptic alerts and even a Deniers – Hall of Shame. I would hope to persuade him rationally and POLITELT that this is not really condusive to a debate. BE NICE, don’t live up to any pre-conceptions of nasty sceptics.
The problem is NOT the IPCC, this “organization” is doing precisely what the real problem wants them to do. For more on the real problem, click the internet link of none other than one each UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon –
http://www.un.org/sg/
One place that cannot be counted on to fix it is UNEP
UNEP, a $450 million U.N. organization, is also an administrative mess, which ignores its own financial rules, and sometimes doesn’t even reveal who is authorized to sign its checks, the study says.
UNEP apparently agrees. It has accepted all 17 recommendations contained in the internal study, and is currently attempting to enact them.
According to the study, that process is supposed to be completed by the end of this month.
In response to questions from Fox News, a UNEP spokesman declared that “The recommendations of the auditors are now being implemented by UNEP under a practical and agreed time-scale and via a Task Force and, as is standard practice, we report back to the [U.N. auditors] every six months”.
There are quite a few important things to fix. Among other failings, the study says that UNEP:
— doesn’t adequately check out the credentials of its partners, especially in the private sector;
— doesn’t even keep adequate records of who it is partnering with, or how well they do at the projects they promise to accomplish;
–has failed to keep track of millions of dollars raised by some partners, and passed on by UNEP to others outside the normal U.N. financial accounting system;
–frequently fails to include “essential” information on financial documents;
–lets officials who don’t have the proper authorization sign off on payouts;
–and has sometimes used high-minded partnership arrangements to cover purely commercial ventures.
Moreover, the global organization has sometimes failed to enforce its own rules for staff disclosure, leading to cases of apparent conflict of interest and potential self-dealing. And sometimes, UNEP departed from its normal legal paperwork entirely, as in the case of a licensing deal with the Thomson Reuters Foundation to use UNEP-generated news stories on a humanitarian website, AlertNet, apparently without going through proper channels.
The 25-page report by the U.N.’s internal watchdog Office of Internal Oversight Services (OIOS) was published on Dec. 30 last year under the dry title “UNEP Project Delivery by Partnerships.””
http://www.foxnews.com/world/2011/06/10/un-internal-study-reveals-its-environment-program-is-administrative-mess/#ixzz1OtwojUR7
My self and a colleague tackled this very question of the economics and practicality of switching to renewables in this article, in which we also asked what temperature reduction coulfd be achieved through a severe carbon diet.
http://judithcurry.com/2011/05/26/the-futility-of-carbon-reduction/
As a follow up I asked a dozen of the worlds leading climate scientists for their confirmation that collectively our impact on reducing temperature would be very small. It is apparent that most have never done the calculations, and those few that had didn’t like the answer. When actually set beside those few indvidual countries willing to bankrupt themselves to achieve a significant reduction in carbon emissions the temperature reduction achieved was absurdly trivial. In the UK”s case it is 30 thousands of a degree after spending £30 billion a year for forty years.
tonyb
Mark Lynas responds to me in his comments and says:
“I did side with Mike Mann on the Hockey Stick thing, without personally having the expertise to really go in and check the argument about statistical methodology.
But I have to admit that McIntyre is right about this, and that I and others should have spotted the problem earlier.
There should be no campaigners or anyone else with a vested interest on the ‘lead author’ team for any IPCC publication – ever.”
Interesting times ahead…
I hope his fellow greens are not too nasty to him..
Senior environmentalists were calling Mark Lynas (and George Monbiot) Chernobyl Death Deniers recently… for being pro-nuclear BECAUSE of the Japanes tsunami and reactor problems….
As Mark Lynas writes here:
http://www.marklynas.org/2011/04/time-for-the-green-party-and-guardian-ditch-nuclear-quackery/
“Yesterday I was an environmentalist. Today, according to tweets from prominent greens, and an op-ed response piece in the Guardian, I’m a “Chernobyl death denier”. My crime has been to stick to the peer-reviewed consensus scientific reports on the health impacts of the Chernobyl disaster, rather than – as is apparently necessary to remain politically correct as a ‘green’ – cleaving instead to self-published reports from pseudo scientists who have spent a lifetime hyping the purported dangers of radiation…….. ”
Unfortuanetly Mark carries on to speak about Climate Change deniers, (do read the comments in that article) but in his latest article he happily recommended Donna Lafranboise, considered by many to be a Climate Change denier. He thought her words were fair comment, and that she was a new sceptical site to him..
Lost in the green media/NGO/political social netowrk is my explanation for Mark’s thinking….(narrow)
Sven Teske’s affiliation is not exactly hidden. Steve should’ve used Google, as it seems to produce lots of results that show the link. The blunder is that a leading expert says something about his expertise AND mentions his affiliation on an original report. Now, I have a lot of time for Steve, I think he is a great statistician, BUT I found out through extensive investigation that he used to be a mining consultant. Don’t fossil fuel companies use mining consultants a lot? Now, I’m not trying to say anything, BUT…
OK, but seriously, the best experts should be used by IPCC, but any conflict of interests should be investigated openly.
By the way, as for MY affiliation, so you don’t think I’m an anonymous troll…
http://mitigatingapathy.blogspot.com/
Heads should also roll over at the Nobel Peace Prize committee.
Rudolf Vyborny said: “IPCC has very little credibility but this scandal is simply corruption. All members of UN should demand dismantling IPCC. Unfortunately this is not likely to happen.”
Actually, the UN itself is the culprit for creating the no-oversight IPCC in the first place. But what can we expect from an organization filled with small-country functionaries whose job is no more than a political plum bestowed by a corrupt government?
What Sven Teske wrote in the Greenpeace report cited in AR4 (Greenpeace, 2006: Solar generation. K. McDonald (ed.), Greenpeace International, Amsterdam) is just plain daft:
“Solar power is a prime choice in developing an affordable and feasible global power source that can substitute fossil fuels in all the world’s climate zones…PV solar electricity can provide decentralised energy supply at the very place it is consumed.”
Bear in mind that this was a report jointly written by the European Photovoltaic Industry Association to promote their members’ interests. But it is plain wrong. There are many climate zones for which PV is neither affordable nor feasible, and which it is no proper substitute for electricity generation. Even the report itself has a coloured figure, fig 4.4, showing the electricity generation cost of PV in northern Europe to be in the range 30 cents/kWh, with some parts of Europe being around 40 cents/kWh. And that’s just generation cost: add in amortization of investment, distribution and profit and we’re talking 7 -10 times the cost of electricity from nuclear and fossil fuel plants.
Well, there are some hundreds of millions of people living in northern Europe, and don’t they live in one of ‘all the world’s climate zones’ ? And, there are tens of millions of people in Europe that don’t see the sun for weeks on end in winter, or at best for a few only a few hours a day, and then weakly. So PV isn’t going to be able to provide ‘decentralised energy supply at the very place it is consumed’ in northern Europe. Perhaps Greenpeace think we should close down all industry in northern Europe, and exterminate ourselves so that we don’t need lighting, heating or transportation.
If Teske had written “Solar power is a power source that can operate in all the world’s climate zones”, we would say, yes, technically, but by no means practically or economically. But to write that “Solar power is a prime choice in developing an affordable and feasible global power source that can substitute fossil fuels in all the world’s climate zones” is nothing but an atrocious lie. This shows that the document cited in AR4, which is self-serving for an industry body and an ‘environmentalist’ group, and for Teske as board member of a ‘renewables’ power generation company turning over tens of millions of dollars, is nothing but crude advocacy, ‘spin’ and propaganda. It is shameful that the IPCC are quoting such a biased report, and that Teske, the Greenpeace activist and employee, was appointed an IPCC Lead Author.
I thought it was common knowledge that IPCC (wrongfully) validates Greenpeace. Nice to know there’s an unavoidable proof of it now.
[snip]