The Working Group II IPCC report from the big shindig in Japan this week will be making headlines shortly, but take those headlines with a grain of salt.
Richard Tol Pulls Out, Says IPCC Draft Report Alarmist
One of the authors of a U.N. draft report on climate change pulled out of the writing team, saying his colleagues were issuing unfounded “alarmist” claims at the expense of real solutions.
“The drafts became too alarmist,” said Richard Tol, a Dutch professor of economics at Sussex University in England, to Reuters.
Mr. Tol was part of a team of 70 authors working on revisions to a U.N. report on climate change, to be issued in Japan on March 31. The final draft, which is the copy that Mr. Tol found objectionable, included findings that a warming global temperature will lead to disruption in food supplies and stagnating economies — and that coral reefs and lands in the Arctic may already have suffered irreversible damages, Reuters said.
“The report is a product of the scientific community and not of any individual author,” the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, said in a statement. “The report does not comprehensively represent the views of any individual.”
The U.N. agency also said Mr. Tol advised months ago of his reluctance to participate in the summary writing of the report. He had still been invited to Japan to help with its drafting, however, Reuters reported.
Mr. Tol said many of the other authors “strongly disagree with me,” but that he found the IPCC’s emphasis on climate change alarmism — and focus on risk — came at the expense of providing solutions for the world’s governments to adapt and overcome.
He said, for instance, farmers could grow new and different crops to offset any negative impacts from climate change that impacted food supplies.
“They will adapt,” Mr. Tol said, Reuters reported. “Farmers are not stupid.”
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One of the concepts sadly lacking in the politics of science funding is that of ‘conflict of interest’.
It is in the interests of all scientists to increase the levels of their funding. Their salaries go up, their institutions like them all the more and their ‘publication impact factors’ go up too.
We all live in a world where those that control the organs of thought shaping and manipulation are obsessed with extremes of any kind. The biggest, the smallest, the rarest, the most outrageous, the most precise etc etc.
The reality of the world is that most of the time, most things exist within a window of variance that is not all that great. Things go up and down, shift to the left or the right, expand and contract, increase and decrease efficiency.
Vigilance must of course be retained to recognise the signals which presage more significant changes, which are those which really do cause problems (since the rate of adaptation can then not match the rate of change).
However, it is time for the scaremongers to be held to account in all fields from climate alarmism to investment banking bubble creation to extreme accumulations of wealth linked to unacceptable levels of poverty etc etc.
Conflicts of interest require those who evaluate scientists’ claims to be independent of the process of acquiring future funding streams.
Only when that occurs can the claims truly be regarded as ‘validated’.
Mutual back-scratching is rarely the best form of rigorous due diligence, you know.
Just go ask any folks duped by Wall Street spivs, speculators and salesmen. I’m sure Warren Buffett would be happy to confirm that……….having ignored most of their exhortations for decades……
I enjoyed reading your comment, Ivor Ward.
the BSc Climate Science Course at Uni of East Anglia has 5 compulsory modules. 2 of which are
GLOBAL ENVIRONMENTAL CHALLENGES
What are the most pressing environmental challenges facing the world today? What are the possibilities for building sustainable solutions to address them in policy and society?
SUSTAINABILITY, SOCIETY AND BIODIVERSITY
This module consists of two parts. The first part of this module will consider sustainability in theory and practice. Striking a balance between societal development, economic growth and environmental protection has proven difficult and controversial. The second half of this module firmly rests on Ecology as a science and briefly introduces a wide range of concepts relevant to the structure and functioning of the biosphere, from biomes through ecosystems, communities, populations, and whole organisms, including topics ranging from landscape and population ecology, to behavioural, physiological, molecular, genetic and chemical ecology.
http://www.uea.ac.uk/study/undergraduate/degree/detail/bsc-climate-science#course-profile
time well spent for anyone trying to understand climate?
What would be a good course design for a climate scientist?
Ivor Ward: Well said!
The IPCC are a scientific irrelevance, their relationship with science is the same as the relationship between Astrology and Astronomy.
Ivor, I am totally p****d with the Met Orifice too; last week they were telling us that in 25- 30 years time there will be vineyards in England and Southern Europe will be a desert with climate refugees heading North. They told us the same thing 20 years ago, is it currently happening? No.
They cannot predict the weather from one hour to the next, I have lost count of the number of times I have foolishly cleaned two cars on the basis of the Met Office predicting 0% chance of precipitation later in the day, These clowns cannot produce a forecast a few hours ahead, so what chance have they got of accurate predictions decades ahead?
They are a national embarrassment!
Frame your comment Ivor Ward. In Well said. 100 years time or so you should get a Nobel prize for scientific, economic and humanitarian insight.
Ivor Ward, stick around for awhile.
The WG2 report deals with the impacts of a presumed-warmer globe. Economics is part of that.
Reckon we do need to hit them hard to turn the tide and get them back tracking. Even if they have to back track on the whole global warming gambit to avoid the whole jig being up(the UN was a fraud from day one to take control of humanity by deception) there are more people who are aware of the deception and humanity has a breather and opportunity to get more aware before the UN tries its next tactic. Still have the issue of massive international debt and destroyed manufacturing infrastructure hanging over the head of humanity.We live in interesting times.
Mods: Apologies for quoting the Archbishop and his use of the ‘D’ word. Will that release me from moderation? (I won’t do it again).
Ivor Ward: “…I don’t need to go on…”
I wish you would, Ivor. I was enjoying your post. Spot on in every way.
Since the dawn of recorded history we have reports of people predicting the end of the world or great catastrophes that will occur soon if mankind does not stop its sinful ways and reform. (and give a lot of money to the priests proclaiming the doom)
After nearly 20 years of no warming even according to the lying, cheating, mindless government drones who keep the official records in addition to skyrocketing levels of CO2 we hear that rising level of CO2 will kill all life on the planet! Fry us! Drown us! Make our willies limp! Give up restless leg syndrome! Make our brown rice taste bad!
Folks, I have never seen a convincing argument that CO2 has much of anything to do with climate. I certainly have never seen any evidence that it is the main driver of climate and yet year after year we hear the same old predictions of doom and gloom. When will it end? I predict that if the entire northeast U.S. were to be covered by 5km of ice we would still hear some “scientists” claim that we are going to die by fire real soon now! It is enough to believe that mankind’s stupidity exceeds the size of the universe just as that famous quote points out.
Ivor Ward, your post should appear in the Opinion section of every newspaper. It’s 100%, spot on.
No wonder he decided this was a con job. Of course there are benefits and they outweigh any of the claimed negative impacts. The benefits
are not just for the future but have been happening over the last few decades.
• Fewer cold winter deaths
• Extended growing seasons
• Farming at higher latitudes etc.
The Medieval Warm Period was a bountiful time according to Michael Mann (reference to follow).
Oh but what about all the extreme weather and property losses?!!!! But there are more properties today and people building on flood plains etc. What about extreme weather of the last century as well as during the Holocene when co2 was below 350ppm?
“Mr. Tol was part of a team of 70 authors working on revisions to a U.N. report on climate change, to be issued in Japan on March 31.”
Only 70? Usually there is at least one author from each country. Why not even half this time? Either way the politicians don’t have the habit of relinquishing their power to scientists in these types of fora.
We have been told about the negative aspects of global warming. It’s have to get pretty damned hot this century for it to be net negative. There was more farming in Greenland than today, wine growing further north in the UK, did people complain? Did they complain during the Little Ice Age. Not really they just killed witches and died of increased hunger and nasty diseases.
What happened in the south east?
What did the Polynesians do during the Roman Warm Period?
Tol is right to dismiss this alarmist clap trap and get out of this sham.
Some encouraging signs from the UK (besides the “badly timed” nice weather), Judith Curry will be on the BBC tomorrow morning, see her Climate Etc blog for details, not sure if Radio 4 or World Service, though we’ve also had “seawater being turned to acid”, and a lot of “extreme weather = climate change” recently.
The UN (with C4s Jon Snow in tow) has also managed to find some people who want more ice, a village in Greenland. Stand by for more interviews with children being fed scare stories by the media.
Ivor Ward says:
March 30, 2014 at 2:20 am
Ivor, you are a thousand times the man you thought you were.
I’ve always had the same problem. Temperature data cannot be averaged to yield a more accurate value like other measurements. It is constantly changing, by day, month and year. Temperatures can vary by a few degrees over a few tens of kilometers. To collect a thousand buckets of water from all across the ocean does not give a single value of great accuracy.
The 70’s of the IPPC, does public its results and conclusions as a team to avoid personal legal responsibility in the future. The proposals they made could bring them in front of the court very easily due to the crime to humanity that one conclussion reached with not pure scientific method but other subjected to political influence.
I’m astonished UK commentariats does not seems this cristal clear.
He is to be congratulated, I suppose, for taking a step in the right direction. But, it’s a little like a member of a gang of thieves and murderers saying “maybe we shouldn’t steal and murder quite as much.” He needs to wake up and smell reality, which is that we aren’t in control of our climate in any way, nor can we even say what our climate is doing now, much less what it will be doing. Cooling, in fact could very well have already begun, and could be in the cards in the coming decades. If we need to prepare for and fear anything it should be cooling, which is far more dangerous.
Thanks Ivor Ward for summing it all up!
charles nelson says: March 29, 2014 at 11:30 pm
Perhaps you’re correct, but I’m not so sure. If there is any value left in scientific “credibility”, the “go along to get along”s who currently suck at the CAGW teat will become increasingly circumspect in their survival calculus and will want to remain viable in a post-lunacy scientific afterlife. That handwriting is on the wall, and the increase in “survivalism” is, I suspect, exponential.
In Spain, energy demand increases 5% for Earth Hour compared to same hour the week before.
http://www.abc.es/sociedad/20140329/rc-consumo-energetico-espana-sube-201403292142.html?utm_source=abc&utm_medium=rss&utm_content=uh-rss&utm_campaign=traffic-rss
Global sea ice anomaly has already turned positive and will remain so for the rest of the year. Record cold events outnumber record warm events by the tens of thousands. The biosphere is increasing and life is flourishing. Every pronouncement of the statist/warmists is found to be false, yet their agenda is advanced by greed and lust for power. The men and women of courage who stand against the ultimate totalitarian thrust of the warmists are thwarted in their efforts at every turn, but the truth is still making inroads into the madness. The world would be a darker place without WUWT.
Just to prepare people for what is likely to happen:
The IPCC report will be like climate data, very few will actually look at it, they will go to their favourite news sources for a summary, so there will be cherry-picking and endless arguments about whether a particular summary is accurate and balanced.
The report may move a bit towards climate realism, but don’t expect that to be well reflected in the media. Sorry to be so cynical.
The BS is already flying over at the Guardian , courtesy of their chief climate propagandist, expert mis-reporter of fact Goldberg.
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2014/mar/28/ipcc-report-climate-change-report-human-natural-systems
To get off to good start she chooses a classic “smoke stack” against setting sun visual LIE and captions it with a written LIE.” Smoke billowing from a plant in Tokyo Bay, ”
Note the way the “smoke” is transparent where it comes out of the chimney, then turns into a fluffy white cloud. You know it’s almost like it could be water vapour that’s coming out and then condensing. But , hell, who am I to argue with an expert like Goldberg.
It would be cool if the guardian could find someone who knew shit . At least they could make their lies more convincing.