After
brazening it out for the past two years, we finally have capitulation
and vigorous sweeping of the material under the carpet. The bottom
line is that all past IPCC reports are fatally flawed and need to be
approached with caution. Individual papers will need to be
considered on their own merits and the general conclusions drawn need
to be simply set aside as unacceptable.
In
the meantime IPCC continues to pay all those nice folks who brought
all this to you and a couple of scholars struggle to retain whatever
prestige and position they have left. The only good that has come
forth is that those who challenged this phoney consensus have seen
their reputations burnished whatever their qualifications. A few
wrongs may even have been righted.
Most
important, the political types have all fled the field and science is
back to been science while having to combat increased skepticism
which I consider quite healthy.
IPCC Admits Its
Past Reports Were Junk
By Joseph L. Bast
July 16, 2012
On June 27, the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) issued
a statement saying it had "complete[d] the process of
implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by
the InterAcademy Council (IAC), the group created by the world's
science academies to provide advice to international bodies."
Hidden behind this
seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing
and entirely unreported story. The IPCC is the world's most
prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made
global warming. Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled
for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national
academies of science around the world as "proof" that the
global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and
evidence of a mounting crisis.
If
the IPCC's reports were flawed, as a many global warming "skeptics"
have long claimed, then the scientific footing of the man-made
global warming movement -- the environmental movement's "mother
of all environmental scares" -- is undermined. The Obama
administration's war on coal may be unnecessary. Billions of
dollars in subsidies to solar and wind may have been wasted.
Trillions of dollars of personal income may have been
squandered worldwide in campaigns to "fix" a problem that
didn't really exist.
The "recommendations"
issued by the IAC were not minor adjustments to a fundamentally sound
scientific procedure. Here are some of the findings of the
IAC's 2010 report.
The IAC reported that
IPCC lead authors fail to give "due consideration ... to
properly documented alternative views" (p. 20), fail to "provide
detailed written responses to the most significant review issues
identified by the Review Editors" (p. 21), and are not
"consider[ing] review comments carefully and document[ing] their
responses" (p. 22). In plain English: the IPCC reports are
not peer-reviewed.
The IAC found that
"the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting
authors" and "the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to
many respondents" (p. 18). Government officials appoint
scientists from their countries and "do not always nominate the
best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they
do not know who these scientists are or because political
considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications"
(p. 18). In other words: authors are selected from a "club"
of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist
perspective favored by politicians.
The
rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians
and environmental activists -- a problem called out by
global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent
notice by the media or policymakers -- was plainly admitted, perhaps
for the first time by an organization in the "mainstream"
of alarmist climate change thinking. "[M]any were
concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment's findings,
suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,"
the IAC auditors wrote. The scientists they interviewed
commonly found the Synthesis Report "too political" (p.
25).
Really? Too
political? We were told by everyone -- environmentalists,
reporters, politicians, even celebrities -- that the IPCC reports
were science, not politics. Now we are told that even the
scientists involved in writing the reports -- remember, they are all
true believers in man-made global warming themselves -- felt the
summaries were "too political."
Here is how the IAC
described how the IPCC arrives at the "consensus of scientists":
Plenary sessions to
approve a Summary for Policy Makers last for several days and
commonly end with an all-night meeting. Thus, the individuals
with the most endurance or the countries that have large delegations
can end up having the most influence on the report (p. 25).
How can such a process
possibly be said to capture or represent the "true consensus of
scientists"?
Another
problem documented by the IAC is the use of phony "confidence
intervals" and estimates of "certainty" in the Summary
for Policy Makers (pp. 27-34). Those of us who study
the IPCC reports knew this was make-believe when we first saw it in
2007. Work by J. Scott Armstrong on the science
of forecasting makes it clear that scientists cannot simply
gather around a table and vote on how confident they are about some
prediction, and then affix a number to it such as "80%
confident." Yet that is how the IPCC proceeds.
[they
must be joking – the phrase confidence interval has precise meaning
in statistics and is measured]
The IAC authors say it
is "not an appropriate way to characterize uncertainty" (p.
34), a huge understatement. Unfortunately, the IAC authors
recommend an equally fraudulent substitute, called "level of
understanding scale,[surely
they are kidding]" which is more mush-mouth for
"consensus."
The IAC authors warn,
also on page 34, that "conclusions will likely be stated so
vaguely as to make them impossible to refute, and therefore
statements of 'very high confidence' will have little substantive
value." Yes, but that doesn't keep the media and
environmental activists from citing them over and over again as
"proof" that global warming is man-made and a crisis...even
if that's not really what the reports' authors are saying.
Finally, the IAC
noted, "the lack of a conflict of interest and disclosure policy
for IPCC leaders and Lead Authors was a concern raised by a number of
individuals who were interviewed by the Committee or provided written
input" as well as "the practice of scientists responsible
for writing IPCC assessments reviewing their own work. The
Committee did not investigate the basis of these claims, which is
beyond the mandate of this review" (p. 46).
Too bad, because these
are both big issues in light of recent revelations that a majority of
the authors and contributors to some chapters of the IPCC reports are
environmental activists, not scientists at all. That's a
structural problem with the IPCC that could dwarf the big problems
already reported.
So on June 27, nearly
two years after these bombshells fell (without so much as a raised
eyebrow by the mainstream media in the U.S. -- go ahead and try
Googling it), the IPCC admits that it was all true and promises to
do better for its next report. Nothing to see here...keep on
moving.
Well I say, hold on,
there! The news release means that the IAC report was right.
That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact,
unreliable. Not just "possibly flawed" or "could
have been improved," but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.
It means that all of
the "endorsements" of the climate consensus made by the
world's national academies of science -- which invariably refer to
the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis -- were based on
false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or
revised. It means that the EPA's "endangerment finding"
-- its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human
health -- was wrong and should be overturned.
And what of the next
IPCC report, due out in 2013 and 2014? The near-final drafts of
that report have been circulating for months already. They were
written by scientists chosen by politicians rather than on the basis
of merit; many of them were reviewing their own work and were free to
ignore the questions and comments of people with whom they disagree.
Instead of "confidence," we will get "level of
understanding scales" that are just as meaningless.
And on this basis we
should transform the world's economy to run on breezes and sunbeams?
In
2010, we learned that much of what we thought we knew about global
warming was compromised and probably false. On June 27, the
culprits confessed and promised to do better. But where do we
go to get our money back?
Joseph L. Bast
(jbast@heartland.org) is president of The Heartland Institute and an
editor of Climate Change Reconsidered, a series of reports
published by The Heartland Institute for
the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change.
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2 comments:
Site the source at the top and save anyone reading this some time.
What a great post. I’m emailing this to my friends.
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