Two scathing reviews by scholars working with the IPCC show why the organization is hopelessly corrupted by politics

Mmmmmm….heretic on a stick.

This statement by Tol pretty well sums up Tol…
‘– although we only need a carbon tax, and a carbon tax only, that applies to all emissions and gradually and predictably rises over time’

FT doesn’t elaborate.
http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/0e6722ec-cd46-11e3-99be-00144feabdc0.html

First, I think we can thank these two, and others not yet named, for the work they have done and their public statements such as reported here.
The final line of the post is “That’s systemic culture in the U.N. so it is no surprise to me.” seems to reference the UN and I agree it is a massive waste – for the most part. However, the 2 lines attributable to Richard Tol seem to be a comment on the manner in which many countries operate. Since Prince Henry the Navigator and the Age of Discoveries not much has changed for many “countries” from A to Z as they remain underdeveloped and mismanaged.

Neil.
Great quotation by J. Pournelle. Thanks.
We all should know that the first type is always squeezed out by the second. Mature bureaucracies exist for self-perpetuation and the serve the power and perquisites of the bureaucrat.

Latitude at 6:23 says –-
Richard Tol is a Professor of Economics and not a physical scientist. If we assume he missed the memos about Bristlecone Pines, a lack of climate sensitivity to CO2, YAD06, Harry_Read_Me, no Hot Spot, sea level not doing much, ocean not acidic, and many others, we can attribute that to the parochial and shallow nature of departments of economics. He needs enlightenment, not ridicule.
(Econ types … don’t bother.)

“The necessary funding could have easily been freed up if the Irish delegation to the international climate negotiations and the IPCC would trim its luxurious travel arrangements.”
The Irish delegation must be one of the lesser malefactors. These warmists live well.

blame the Teabaggers!!! that’s ugly, Frank.
nice to see some egg on Chris Hayes’ face too. Showtime, it’s past time to cancel this junk:
25 April: Examiner: Teabagger favorite and Showtime climate change convert facing federal indictment
by Frank Maccioli, Bakersfield Envronmental News Examiner
The people behind a new, much lauded climate change documentary may find themselves in a quandary following breaking news about a Republican Congressman. In a press release today for Showtime’s Years of Living Dangerously, the producers of the series announced that Michael Grimm, a controversial Republican Congressman from New York and long time global warming denier, will state that he now believes in anthropogenic climate change in the next episode.
???The series is a must see for Bakersfield and San Joaquin Valley residents who are concerned about climate change and its effects upon the area…
Grimm, who represents Staten Island and parts of Brooklyn, is a favorite of the Tea Party and has been involved in controversial actions before…
In the upcoming episode he will explain his change of heart in an interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes. His decision was reportedly influenced by the effects of Superstorm Sandy, which devastated much of the area he represents…
The problem now, however, is that several news agencies also reported today that federal authorities are about to indict the Congressman for violating campaign finance laws. A spokesperson for the series did not respond to this reporter’s request for comment on the development…
In light of this latest revelation, some have speculated as to whether Grimm’s “conversion” regarding climate change was a legitimate change or rather one done to gain the sympathy of the political left. By being one of the few Republicans to embrace what the majority of climate change scientists accept, one could argue that former opponents may be less likely to go into full attack mode…
http://www.examiner.com/article/teabagger-favorite-and-showtime-climate-change-convert-facing-federal-indictment
25 April: Politico: Darren Goode: Grimm’s woes cast doubt on climate turnabout
***Climate activists just can’t seem to catch a break on Capitol Hill.
Activists were spreading the good news Friday that New York Rep. Michael Grimm has become the first sitting House Republican to stop denying the science that humans cause climate change. But now the second-term lawmaker from Staten Island might be facing his own dangerous climate — inside a jail cell…
Shortly before that story broke, the pro-Obama group Organizing for Action had been celebrating Grimm’s about-face on climate change. Grimm made his change of heart known during the third episode of Showtime’s docu-series “Years of Living Dangerously,” which will be broadcast Sunday…
In a partial transcript of his interview with MSNBC’s Chris Hayes, Grimm said he changed his mind thanks to former Rep. Bob Inglis (R-S.C.), who is leading an effort to impose a tax on carbon emissions.
“After speaking with Bob Inglis, it made me do some of my own research, you know, I looked at some of the stuff that he sent over, my staff looked at,” Grimm said. “But the mass majority of respected scientists say that it’s conclusive, the evidence is clear. So I don’t think the jury is out.”…
http://www.politico.com/story/2014/04/michael-grimm-indictment-climate-change-106040.html?hp=l1_b1

“But research increasingly indicates that there may be fundamental aspects of human psychology that make it difficult for many people to comprehend and accept the reality of climate change…”
No one, except the delusional, has ever doubted the reality of climate change. These people have so bastardized their own terminology that they can no longer put together a sentence that is coherent.

Streetcred says:
April 26, 2014 at 6:45 pm
“Can’t say much about Dr. Robert Stavins’ benign letter of protest … half of it at the least is butt covering and brown-nosing. The process competence of the managers amounts to nought if the meaning of the body of research is transformed into political claptrap.”
You are absolutely right. So much BS about 1.5 page document edited to 0.5 page document. I read both versions. Both are BS. What is Dr. Stavins complaining about?

Donna Laframboise has made it quite clear for years that the IPCC is first and foremost a political entity, charged with providing a pseudo-scientifically – biased smokescreen to promote a “progressive” political agenda. Why all the shock/horror that Ms Laframboise has been proved correct yet again?

That’s the trouble when you apply natural selection to social organisation, the more extreme you are, the more you and your views tend to get promoted, however in reality and science the more extreme you are the more wrong you tend to be. So there is a difference between how social organisations and dynamics work, and how nature and science actually is. Never been any different, the moderates tend to get filtered out.

12000 peer reviewed papers and they can’t predict anything? lol.
None of their predictions are been proved and co2 goes up while temp doesn’t well it did at first but now there is divergence but it isn’t really a divergence its a missing mechanism which will be found with more research sometime not sure when but hopefully soon cause its making me look stupid ……etc
if i had done a lot of work for free [ok maybe in the hope of a medal which would look good on the cv] then civil servants came along and rewrote it i would need some detox with plenty of chanting “i am not a useful idiot i am not a useful idiot”

I submitted a comment earlier which didn’t pass moderation. Just checking to make sure it’s not a problem on my end.

I really don’t understand people like Chad Wozniak (above, at 8:24 pm) who write off Richard Tol because of what he says about a carbon tax. Sure, I don’t think there should be such a tax either, but given Tol’s eminence and his inside knowledge of the IPCC and its processes, he is one of the anti-IPCC movement’s brightest hopes. It is people like Tol, AND ONLY people like Tol, who can act as the media-acceptable figureheads we need.
Carry on firing broadsides at everybody who disagrees with you on anything, Chad, and you’ll end up in a movement with exactly one member.

Anthony, I’m not sure providing better science and information will matter.
People don’t seem to want the science. They don’t understand it and you can’t make them listen. Just ask the alarmists because they’ve spent millions, lied using a models all the way down approach and fudged our data they collected for us trying to pretend the we were killing earth. What they keep finding is the people know it’s another money/power grab from the 1% and will only take so much blame. Looks like we’re the ones that need to occupy Wall Street.
The msm and ngos will continue to ignore skeptics and the past is proof enough of that. Where’s the Audubon Society. Do we have to organize ourselves to protect endangered raptures?
Between the models, Mann, Jones and the Team, Climategate 1 & 2 plus Gleick and Al Gore’s stupid movie they’ve had plenty of chances to question climate alarmist’s motives and demand they work above board but the msm rarely surprises one.
I rather like the idea of channeling our efforts to identify and remove bad laws and regulations.
Take them to court and make them follow the rules. Use the courts to repeal unjustified laws and regulations one at a time. Just keep chipping away. We need to find sympathetic judges, use the progressive rules, follow the law and piss them off. What’s not to like?
Second, I want transparency. My representative in Washington should represent me by ensuring all research paid for with US taxpayer money be given to us free of charge. We should demand access to all approved grant proposals, data, code, published papers, journals and diaries that explain all choices and decisions with everything on-line at their website at no charge. I’m pretty sure we pay enough already. I should not have to use Twitter or Facebook etc to track the research as it should be available through their website, real time, all the time.
Mostly, this will take money to start and run so we need an umbrella organization to protect the taxpayer’s investment … in the process and our data.
cn

What makes Tol think academics would do a better job?
The only scientists who really understand the intricacies of climate theory are those working in the labs – the ones making the measurements who understand the uncertainties, methodologies and statistics of the field. They are so compartmentalised that few from one field (say oceanography) understand what the others are doing or the limitations of others methods (e.g. solar terrestrial physics). And few of these real scientists want to leave the lab for the stage of international committee and policy work.
Its a conundrum – how to proceed. I came across this same problem when the London Dumping Convention set out to regulate dumping of toxic wastes. The UN/IMO body – the bureaucrats, set up a Group of Experts on Scientific Aspects of Marine Pollution (GESAMP). This pulled some scientists out of the labwork for the required number of days – and guess what? It drew a lot of modellers! They constructed a self-cleansing ocean and a monitoring system just in case they got things wrong and had to turn off the taps (discharges and dumping). The first models looked fine but after a decade, toxic substances were appearing further up the food-chain than the models predicted. Plus oceanographic research made new discoveries. The models needed revising. BUT…guess what? Massive investments had been made in 1) worldwide system of monitoring and toxicology labs based on the ‘dilute and disperse’ principle, 2) licensed industrial processes that discharged toxic material. Hence an investment in NOT revising the early models. Sound familiar?
Now you guys at WUWT may not like the rest of the story. A small group of scientist activists – led by German and Scandinavian fisheries labs – mainly government funded, began to criticise the models, the pathways and the toxicology assessments. Not enough to pull the supertanker around. Then they cooperated with environmental activists, trade unions and lawyers (that was my role) to bring political pressure and publicity to bear – chasing the dumpships, blacking the ports by the unions, writing press articles and even publishing scientific papers. It too ten years to turn around the ‘consensus’ of all the supporting science academies/colluding laboratories/recalcitrant governments – and it was done on the floor of the UN as well as by inflatables on the high seas.
Here’s the first bit you won’t like: Greenpeace International led that political and media effort. I represented them on the floor of the UN when we won the vote. The second bit is that a group of scientists and lawyers then proceeded to rewrite the rulebook – encouraged and paid for by a newly enlightened IMO bureaucrat ( he has always a good guy – name of Manfred Nauke) – and the Precautionary Principle – the one you love to hate – was borne. Contrary to the hate-mail, it does not say what most people think it says. It reversed the ‘burden of proof’ that allowed dumpers and polluters to carry on until there was absolute proof of ‘harm’…..very hard to prove in the marine environment, at least before the harm is so pervasive it is too late to turn off the taps (e.g. PCBs affected immune systems of marine mammals). Now the bad guys had to prove no harm or not get a license to dump – also very hard to do! Upshot….industry woke up to Clean Production Strategies and started to find replacement processes that meant it did not have to use toxic material or produce toxic waste. I helped set up the shift that resulted in a UN office of clean production. It took 10 years to turn the consensus, and another ten years to phase in the legislation without imposing too big a penalty on essential industries.
Actually, Greenpeace dropped off the pace in the second phase – it is not glamorous work and doesn’t play well to the supporters’ gallery. But their guys out there on the seas in the first decade were top notch – real warriors.
I have tried to tell them that something similar is operating with the IPCC. They will not even meet, let alone listen. I wrote a ‘green’ book on the theme (Chill: a reassessment of global warming theory) – including the best policies to tackle resilience to natural climate change (and the small anthropogenic component), but the greens refused to review it. This despite endorsement by the drafting author of the Kyoto Protocol (who was with us on the ocean campaigns before helping set up the Framework Climate Convention) – who now agrees my position. I get pilloried not for my supposedly contrarian science – but for my religious ‘beliefs’ (shamanic), medical preferences (homeopathic), and cosmologies involving the evolution of consciousness (astrological) – whereas John Houghton (first IPCC chair) believes in the Virgin Birth and gets no flak at all. God knows what medicines he uses. Some green even criticised my enjoyment of suits (I only had the one) and business class flying during UN work – whilst completely ignoring the Gorite leader who has his own jumbo-jet (and God knows again, how many suits!).
I digress. One thing I learned from the interplay of science and policy should have been a model for the UN (and I did write a paper to help them): there is nothing wrong with a properly constituted science group of advisors – but it has to be broadly drawn and inclusive of critics (sceptics in today’s lingo). The drafting authors need to then spell out the consequences for policy makers – including if the majority are wrong and the minority are right, and some honest assessment of the uncertainty such that the critics can agree it is honest. They then hand that to a SEPARATE group of policy-makers.
Policy makers hate uncertainty because politicians tend to use it to promote inaction. And of course, policy makers like to make actual policy – i.e. something that involves action. But that is the nature of politics. In that environment, something quite useful evolves – as with the Clean Production Strategies…..it is called a no-regrets option. It involves spending money and taking action that would be beneficial whichever way the science cookie crumbles. The modern word would be RESILIENCE to climate change or ‘adaptation’. And guess what – it gets about 1% of the budget that ‘mitigation’ gets.
And here is why. I recently received a tender for consultancy with the Global Environment Fund/World Bank and the Asian Development Bank (its okay – I live in the woods, am semi-retired and although the money would be tempting, they’d never employ me after writing Chill!) – who are looking for someone to help them spend $1 billion of the GEF (taxpayers money) on ….you have guessed it, carbon dioxide mitigation strategies (that’s jobs for the big boys at tech-giants Siemens, AMEC, GEC, China Photovoltaics and the like). What the world’s poor need is not green electricity, dams, turbines, biofuel plantations and solar panels…..two billion people need clean water, stable soil and good sanitation. Ecological agriculture, community forestry, and water – constitute less than 5% of the global development aid budget.
The pain of all this is that there is NO single effective environmental lobby for resilience and sense on climate change. All we have is the sceptic-embrace of the neo-liberal freemarketeers and those who see reds under the beds of a new world government. It is not enough – yet!

Paul Coppin says:
April 27, 2014 at 5:51 am
Dr. Tol’s comments, accurate as they may be from an institutional and politico-scientific complex perspective in terms of the operation of the IPCC, still don’t provide any convincing argument as why the IPCC and any of its derivatives should be regarded at all.
—————————————————-
Paul, you and I (and maybe even Dr Tol) may agree the science doesn’t support extreme action by citizens or their governments but, Dr Tol is an economist and if he said anything to debunk the science side of the argument the msm would be authorized to keep firing shots at him until he shut up. He spoke in the area where he is a Subject Matter Expert (SME) and his voice has been heard.

hopelessly corrupted by politics or in other words a normal UN body , and organisation that has never been knowingly be found to be competent.

Peter Taylor
Really appreciated your frank discussion. The WB is a large organisation and holds a number of opinions on the subject of climate. A staffer told me today that they have learned not to question decisions too much – just deal with what is the current flavour, tomorrow things may be different. Don’t be surprised when ‘differing opinions’ emerge. To a greater extent than most of the individual governments that make up the body, the WB requires due diligence and a measure of accountability for everything spent. Each examination offers an opportunity to put facts instead of theories before management. This is no trivial thing. It has proven much harder, for example, to put facts before the readers of the Guardian or the NY Times, both of which claim to be informing the intelligent reader, a species they insult daily with their selection bias.
Any process, as described in the article above, that requires 100% agreement will necessarily be manipulated by small cohorts for narrow purposes. Democracy was developed to deal with exactly that. “Consensus” is admirable, but when it is not an option, the majority opinion receives ascent to prevent paralysis. Paralysis is no better than deleting 75% of the distilled wisdom of a group of expert scientists to hide facts. A concomitant right of the ‘ruled’ is to be able to “vote the bums out”. Wherever there is taxation without representation, expect trouble. That being the case, a national CO2 tax is going to be difficult to implement. The public is informed enough to deal indirectly with those they cannot remove by dealing directly with those they can.

Dr. Robert Stavins says in his letter, ‘Is the IPCC Government Approval Process Broken?’,
” [ . . .] I want to emphasize that the IPCC’s Working Group III “Technical Summary” and the underlying Working Group III report of 15 chapters were completely untouched by the government approval process of the Summary for Policymakers. So, the crucial IPCC products – the Technical Summary and the 15 chapters of WG 3 – retain their full scientific integrity, and they merit serious public attention. Now, back to the SPM process and outcome [. . .]”

– – – – – – – – – – –
Robert Stavins blames the non-scientists. He essentially says that it’s those politicians not any scientists.
To restore trust in ‘full scientific integrity’ he should have just strongly stated that all of the AR5 WG’s technical portions (written only by scientists) should be independently audited by a private multi-profession body outside of the UN / IPCC / governments with complete access to all the AR5 assessment process’ records and communications. That is a trust invoking position.
For him to say in his letter that we can trust any WG’s technical summary (because it is produced only by scientists) naively begs the very question at issue. The issue is the how to trust when there appears to be reasonable evidence of significant activism influencing the entire IPCC which includes influencing both the team of scientists working on the technical WGs as well as political member working on SPMs. The lack of trust in the IPCC is held by the broader community interested in science integrity free from activism.
Again, it is an issue about trust of scientists involved in the technical WG portion of the assessment process as well as for the politicians involved. I think we should verify by the above suggested audit then trust.
John

Here was my reply to Robert which is still awaiting moderation on his site.
Robert All of the efforts of the WG3 group are based on the temperature forecasts made by the WG1 climate modelers. It is now abundantly clear that these models are inherently useless for climate forecasting and that the work of the WG3 group as a whole has no empirical scientific basis in addition to the particular problems with the SPM which you have outlined .
Similar discrepancies exist between the WG1 science and WG1 SPM sections. For example in the AR5 Summary for Policymakers the IPCC glossed over the developing pause and indeed cooling trend in global temperatures suggesting several ad hoc epicycle like reasons for the lack of warming over the last 16 years.
In spite of this , while forecasting about the same amount of future warming as the 2007 AR4 report , the AR5 SPM report irresponsibly raised the certainty of the IPCC forecasts and attributions from 90 – 95% in order to give the impression of more certainty after another 6 years of new data and work.
Again – the key factor in making CO2 emission control policy and the basis for the WG2 and 3 sections of AR5 is the climate sensitivity to CO2 . By AR5 – WG1 the IPCC itself is saying: (Section 9.7.3.3)
“The assessed literature suggests that the range of climate sensitivities and transient responses covered by CMIP3/5 cannot be narrowed significantly by constraining the models with observations of the mean climate and variability, consistent with the difficulty of constraining the cloud feedbacks from observations ”
In plain English this means that the IPCC contributors have no idea what the climate sensitivity is and that therefore that there is no credible basis for the WG 2 and 3 reports and that the Government policy makers have no empirical scientific basis for the UNFCCC process and for the politicians economically destructive climate and energy policies.
The entire UNFCCC – IPCC circus is a political exercise with no connection to the real climate.
Other forecasting methods are required in order to provide a basis for policy discussion. For forecasts of the probable coming cooling based on the natural 60 year and 1000 year quasi-periodicities in the temperature data and the use of the neutron count and 10Be record as the best proxy for solar “activity” see several posts over the last couple 0f years at
http://climatesense-norpag.blogspot.com
It is really amazing that the WG2 and WG3 authors have been all working earnestly away on the basis of a future warming when it is more likely that the world will cool for the next 20 years and perhaps for hundreds of years beyond that. If we want to worry about extreme events the record of the Dansgaard – Oeschger events in the last glacial period and the 8200 year cooling event and the LIA in the Holocene should provide enough concern to keep the doom-lovers busy.

“In my view, with the current structure and norms, it will be exceptionally difficult, if not impossible, to produce a scientifically sound and complete version of text for the SPM on international cooperation that can survive the country approval process.”
Indeed, since the SPM is supposed to be the raw material for policymakers to use to form their opinions and policies, allowing delegates to force conformity with their pre-existing positions utterly defeats the purpose.

“The IPCC does not guard itself against selection bias and group think”
Which makes the IPCC useless as a ‘consensus authority’. In an argument from expert opinion, experts are supposed to be /unbiased/.

There’s a little nest of alarmists over at HotWhopper who don’t like what Tol is saying, so they declare him to be an “idiot”, “intellectually dishonest” and that he has (shock, horror) “personality traits that are not conducive to blogs, and definitely incompatible with Twitter.” It appears the level of debate over there has sunk to new lows.