

Refutation of current media storm against IPCC - chrisb
http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/02/ipcc-errors-facts-and-spin/

======
patrickgzill
Realclimate got caught with their hand in the cookie jar when the original
"CRU" emails got out, IIRC.

They were offering carte-blanche moderation power on the site to one side only
in the debate.

~~~
Zarkonnen
Surely the question to ask here is whether the analysis in the linked article
stands up. What they are saying is that there were indeed errors in the
report, but these were minor errors of the kind you can find in any report
hundreds of pages long, compiled by many people: misunderstood statistics and
some mismatch between sections prepared by different people.

~~~
patio11
I think, major irony alert, they're using the weakest claims against them
("the exact percentage of the Netherlands under sea level matters" --
seriously, who cares) to sweep the most damning claims against them under the
rug.

 _This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was
discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked
out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then
hyped into “Climategate”._

That is a lovely two-step there: this keruffle about a footnote is largely
meaningless _so_ it is essentially meaningless that the head of one of the
most prestigious research institutions in the world successfully destroyed
evidence rather than handing it over to opposed investigators.

~~~
nice1
Exactly right: the behaviour of the CRU is anti-scientific to the core. To
deny access to data and the analysis on which their claims are made is the
antithesis of science, it is more like religious zealotry in the worst sense
of the phrase. This is the reason why climategate is a lot more than a media
storm.

~~~
lutorm
You can't blame the _IPCC_ for the behavior of the CRU group, though.

------
lionhearted
> The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In
> fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World
> Meteorological Organization in Geneva

> The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of
> scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who
> contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports.

There's your consensus - 10 full time staff and many volunteers. Doesn't it
seem like you'd have obvious selection bias with who would volunteer for the
IPCC? We're talking about the most passionately pro-environmentalism people in
the world. People that would make the argument, "Even if global warming
doesn't exist, we still need to do something."

Yet when an untrained amateur tries his hand at it and finds the numbers don't
work, he's a "denier". I've seen enough decent analysis that goes against the
general IPCC position by engineers, programmers, and other people with general
science backgrounds who aren't specifically climate scientists. The most
damning was that the algorithms that produced the hockey stick curve created
the same scary graph with red noise in over 90% of simulations. So, random
temperature data showed in 90% of cases that imminent global warming
catastrophe was coming.

Despite presenting things sensibly and respectfully, these amateurs often get
compared to Fox News or other such ad hominem. Sure, there's knuckleheads on
both sides, but you've got severe selection bias in favor of who is working at
the IPCC, and intelligent amateurs who respectfully produce data or show that
the numbers don't work are shouted down, compared to Fox, or compared to
fundamentalist religious people.

~~~
lutorm
"Doesn't it seem like you'd have obvious selection bias with who would
volunteer for the IPCC?"

Yes it does: Those who care about its conclusion. I don't understand why you
think someone who thinks climate change is not happening should be less likely
to volunteer, given the impact of the report.

As the article said: the IPCC is only assessing and compiling results of
climate research. Those "untrained amateurs" that you talk about, are they
"assessing and compiling", or are they doing their own research? If they are
doing research, then they should not be compared to the IPCC but to one of the
thousands of references that constitute the sources of the assessment report.
And if their results are really believable, then hopefully they will be
published and be one of the sources used for AR5.

~~~
lutorm
Can those who downmodded me explain which part of my statement they disagree
with?

~~~
lutorm
Downmod me all you want, I'm just interested since to me my statement was sort
of obvious.

------
chrisb
What action is it possible to take over some of the (deliberatly?)
incorrect/inaccurate journalism?

Can a legal challenge be made? Or is there any other effective way to stop the
lies?

I'm not trying to suggest that honest debate be stifled; but the continual use
of 'facts' that are wrong, and people being mis-quoted or quoted out of
context, is not helpful.

~~~
jerf
You are advocating that the government, in the form of the judicial system, be
given complete power over what the press prints. This is a cure worse than the
disease. Even putting aside the question of the ability of the legal system to
actually determine truth.

I'm not even sure which side you're referring to. At this point assuming
"realclimate.com" has clean hands when it comes to "lies" requires a rather
large helping of blind trust, IMHO.

------
lionhearted
Oh wow, this is even worse:

> The IPCC does not carry out primary research, and hence any mistakes in the
> IPCC reports do not imply that any climate research itself is wrong. A
> reference to a poor report or an editorial lapse by IPCC authors obviously
> does not undermine climate science.

Any mistakes in the IPCC reports does not imply that any climate research
itself is wrong? Doesn't that mean that anything presented in IPCC reports
does not imply that any climate research is right either? You can't have it
both ways...

~~~
patio11
At the bottom it is a marketing problem. See, if you describe global warming
as a robust ongoing academic debate, then when you start proposing seriously
expensive regulations to take it on, the opposing party will say "Whoa, whoa
-- all of these impressive PhDs think it isn't really happening, so how about
we wait a while to see how things shake out and save the money?"

So the decision was made that the robust academic debate couldn't be allowed
to exist, because that would provide cover to The Bad Guys (TM). Thus there
needed to be a Consensus on climate, something which could be referred to as
the authoritative Voice of Science. It needed to be international, both
because science is international and because a major portion of the intended
office of the argument keeps offices in Europe as opposed to America. (Global
warming is pretty much a dead letter elsewhere else: Africa is too poor to
care, China and India are getting too rich on high-polluting industries to
care about the issue except to the extent it allows them to wring concessions
out of the First World, etc) Hence, the IPCC.

Now, the IPCC doesn't matter two hills of beans for science. The papers say
what they say. But the IPCC, as the official Voice of Science, has quite a bit
of sway in corridors of power, such as European governments and your local
newspaper's editorial board. The ready made The Science Is Settled narrative
worked at what it was supposed to do: marginalized as "deniers" and deviants
anyone who questioned The Science, and paved the way for expensive
interventions against climate change.

The problem with marketing, though, is that eventually you have to deliver on
what you're selling... and delivering on infallibility is pretty hard. Perhaps
recognizing this, some scientists (like the illustrious Phil Jones,
climatology heavyweight and editor of a section in the last IPCC report) have
gone to some lengths to avoid being seen as losing on issues of fairly minor
import.

And, as so often happens, it turns out the coverup did more damage than the
original lapse. I mean, paleoclimatology: hard to understand. Statistics
behind hockey sticks: hard to understand. Impropriety of deleting data to
avoid other scientists from seeing it: not too hard to understand.

~~~
Locke1689
OK, this post seems a little out there. Right now you're proposing a massive
global academic conspiracy to hide the "truth" of climatology. Do you have a
citation for such a large scale cover-up?

~~~
mnemonicsloth
The Implausible Conspiracy has got to be one of the all-time top strawman
arguments.

Consider: hot dogs are sold in packs of 12, and hot dog buns are sold in packs
of 8. When you run out of hot dog buns you have hot dogs left over and buy
more buns. When you run out of hot dogs, you have buns left over so you buy
more hot dogs.

Somehow the makers of hot dogs and hot dog buns manage to get this done
without decoder rings, secret handshakes, ominous chanting, or ritual
sacrifice.

(see also <http://xkcd.com/140/>)

~~~
Locke1689
It is certainly not a strawman argument. The problem with conspiracy theories
is that they often fail in a number of ways: Occam's Razor and falsifiability
especially. One of the problems with the AGW conspiracy theory is that it
supposes that academics all over the world are actively suppressing evidence
to the contrary.

The other problem with your hot dog system is that it's not a conspiracy
theory. It was quite likely that the actual arrangement happened entirely by
accident. Once there, the manufacturers just decided it wasn't in their best
interests (profit) to change. To make the same argument about AGW you would
have to argue that there is a huge benefit to climatology supporting AGW --
enough to not only convince the academic departments of every major university
to go along with it, but also some kind of silencing of the morally grounded
climatologists. Instead it seems that disproving the AGW theory would prove
quite a nice feather in the cap of any recently hired associate professor at a
major university.

I'm not saying that all of this is impossible. What I am saying is that this
requires _extraordinary evidence_ for such an _extraordinary claim._

