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Sqrl on 19 February 2010
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I think a lot of people are missing the bigger picture from what has happened recently. The issue is the death of the IPCC's credability by recent revelations, and the implications of that are much bigger than the Phil Jones interview ever could be.

Just to build the case a bit:

Could someone explain to me precisely how (this is rhetorical, I answer it below) the IPCC, which is supposedly made up of the best scientific minds in climate science as we've been told repeatedly could have some of the following errors (note: this is far from a comprehensive list of errors discovered in just the last 2 weeks):

  1. Glaciergate:  If it weren't bad enough that the claim 'The Himalayans will be gone by 2035' was based on a misquoted and missunderstood statement in a radio interview from circa 1998, the issue is made worse by the fact that the IPCC's "climate chief" knew about this being an error well before the scandal became big news.  Some might downplay this as a minor gaffe but quite frankly the concept that a major glacier could melt in such a short timespan defies basic scienctific reasoning. Literally any scientist with a shred of background in glacier melt should have immediately spotted this as complete and utter crap.  Glaciers melt over thousands of years not a couple of decades!  Accelerating the process the required amount would require immense warming rates that would likely boil the oceans away before the glacier would melt - this is no small oversight regardless of whether it is intentional or not.                                                                           .
  2. Amazongate: In this scandal it's again not only an issue of the fact that they got it wrong, it's the source they used to get it wrong in the first place.  With the IPCC claim that '40% of the Amazon is threatened with rapid deterioration due to climate change' it sounds like things could get really bad in the rain forest and soon right?  Well come to find out the source of this claim is the WWF (World Wildlife Fund - the folks behind this tasteless add) which is an environmental advocacy group (thus their inclusion violates the "peer-review only" policy of the IPCC).  But wait, that's not all...not even close.  Looking at the authors of this report, neither of them were anywhere near qualified (by IPCC standards) to discuss the Amazon's climate. The autors are Dr PF Moore who is a Policy Analyst along with the report's lead author Andy Rowell who is...wait for it....a freelance journalist whose only real environmental cred is that he has worked with Greenpeace in the past.  Oh but is that all?  Nope not quite yet...  Looking into the report in detail they never even make the alarmist 40% claim in the report to begin with. (Note I don't take issue with the credentials or motives of Moore and Rowell, my issue is that the IPCC has rules about contributors, my personal view is that people can read their report and decide its merit for themselves but the IPCC should not have considered it by their own policies). Source                                                                                                                                                                                                       .        
  3. More WWF Inclusions: Oh and as long as we're on the subject of un-reviewed papers cited in the IPCC's AR4 JUST from the folks at WWF here is the list...thus far anyways (AR4 is just now recieving the first real scrutiny, so new information is coming out literally by the day and by the hour):
    • Allianz and World Wildlife Fund, 2006: Climate change and the financial sector: an agenda for action, 59 pp. [Accessed 03.05.07: http://www.wwf.org.uk/ filelibrary/pdf/allianz_rep_0605.pdf]
    • Austin, G., A. Williams, G. Morris, R. Spalding-Feche, and R. Worthington, 2003: Employment potential of renewable energy in South Africa. Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Denmark, November, 104 pp.
    • Baker, T., 2005: Vulnerability Assessment of the North-East Atlantic Shelf Marine Ecoregion to Climate Change, Workshop Project Report, WWF, Godalming, Surrey, 79 pp.
    • Coleman, T., O. Hoegh-Guldberg, D. Karoly, I. Lowe, T. McMichael, C.D. Mitchell, G.I. Pearman, P. Scaife and J. Reynolds, 2004: Climate Change: Solutions for Australia. Australian Climate Group, 35 pp. http://www.wwf.org.au/ publications/acg_solutions.pdf
    • Dlugolecki, A. and S. Lafeld, 2005: Climate change – agenda for action: the financial sector’s perspective. Allianz Group and WWF, Munich [may be the same document as "Allianz" above, except that one is dated 2006 and the other 2005]
    • Fritsche, U.R., K. Hünecke, A. Hermann, F. Schulze, and K. Wiegmann, 2006: Sustainability standards for bioenergy. Öko-Institut e.V., Darmstadt, WWF Germany, Frankfurt am Main, November
    • Giannakopoulos, C., M. Bindi, M. Moriondo, P. LeSager and T. Tin, 2005: Climate Change Impacts in the Mediterranean Resulting from a 2oC Global Temperature Rise. WWF report, Gland Switzerland. Accessed 01.10.2006 at http://assets.panda.org/downloads/medreportfinal8july05.pdf.
    • Hansen, L.J., J.L. Biringer and J.R. Hoffmann, 2003: Buying Time: A User’s Manual for Building Resistance and Resilience to Climate Change in Natural Systems. WWF Climate Change Program, Berlin, 246 pp.
    • http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/climate_change/our_solutions/business_industry/climate_savers/ index.cfm
    • Lechtenbohmer, S., V. Grimm, D. Mitze, S. Thomas, M. Wissner, 2005: Target 2020: Policies and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. WWF European Policy Office, Wuppertal
    • Malcolm, J.R., C. Liu, L. Miller, T. Allnut and L. Hansen, Eds., 2002a: Habitats at Risk: Global Warming and Species Loss in Globally Significant Terrestrial Ecosystems. WWF World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland, 40 pp.
    • Rowell, A. and P.F. Moore, 2000: Global Review of Forest Fires. WWF/IUCN, Gland, Switzerland, 66 pp. http://www.iucn.org/themes/fcp/publications /files/global_review_forest_fires.pdf
    • WWF, 2004: Deforestation threatens the cradle of reef diversity. World Wide Fund for Nature, 2 December 2004. http://www.wwf.org/
    • WWF, 2004: Living Planet Report 2004. WWF- World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund), Gland, Switzerland, 44 pp.
    • WWF (World Wildlife Fund), 2005: An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China. World Wildlife Fund, Nepal Programme, 79 pp.
    • Zarsky, L. and K. Gallagher, 2003: Searching for the Holy Grail? Making FDI Work for Sustainable Development. Analytical Paper, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Switzerland                                                                                                                                          .       
  4. AfricaGate: This one includes the claim that 'North Africa's crop production will be cut by up to 50% by 2020'.  Unfortunately it too is based on a non-peer reviewed paper from 2003 which never makes the claim to begin with.  Nevertheless as the article linked here points out "Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim."                                                                                                                                                                             .
  5. Just to wrap this up let me also say citations have been made to student disserations (un-reviewed) as well as magazine articles from climbing magazines among others.  If anyone really doubts these I can look up the links but given what I've listed already I hope this neither seems outlandish or even surprising.

Well to answer my question from above about how these errors could happen given the rigor we were all told was used by the IPCC, it is possible because they are now and have never been a scientific body, but rather a political advocacy group.  For this I need only point to the recent stories from those who were personally involved in the IPCC report process as they recount the interplays going on behind the scenes while these reports were being drafted:

"Wearing his other hat as IPCC author, Santer was also widely accused of being the man who added the key words “discernible human influence” to the body of the IPCC report, and of doing it very late in the day. True enough. This was messy and does not reflect well on the IPCC. Those words were agreed at a main session of the IPCC in late 1995, attended by politicians. They wanted them included in the report’s summary for policy-makers. But they went beyond what was said in the chapter from which the summary was supposedly drawn.

Yet IPCC procedure required that the chapters had to be made consistent with the summary, rather than vice versa. This is because the ultimate authors of the “intergovernmental” reports are the governments that approve the summary for policy makers. But such a rule puts the scientists in a difficult position, and Santer had the unenviable job of rewording his chapter to reflect the wording of the political summary. And of ensuring that all the authors were in agreement."

That and quotes like this:

“The Nobel prize was for peace not science … government employees will use it to negotiate changes and a redistribution of resources. It is not a scientific analysis of climate change,” said Anton Imeson, a former IPCC lead author from the Netherlands. “For the media, the IPCC assessments have become an icon for something they are not. To make sure that it does not happen again, the IPCC should change its name and become part of something else. The IPCC should have never allowed itself to be branded as a scientific organisation. It provides a review of published scientific papers but none of this is much controlled by independent scientists.”

The bottom line is that the IPCC has been a political advocacy group from the beginning and not a scientific body.  They certainly brought in scientists to do work but as seen above those scientist's involvement was always as a list of names to be attached to a political policy so it would be easily digested by the public.  With that said it should be no surprise that Scientists like Paul Reiter have had to threaten lawsuits to have their names removed from the contribution list (in fairness the IPCC denies his claim). 

This being my first post of the thread is not intended to be comprehensive, just to lay the groundwork for showing people that a lot of the BS behind "The consensus is in! The Debate is over!" has been brought about by the what is now, or will shortly be, a discredited political body.  The time for a reboot on the science is clearly here.

 

And on that note I'll focus on mainly on the science for the remainder of the thread.

ent in a radio interview from circa '98, it gets worse because the IPCC's "climate chief" knew about it well before the scandal became big news.  Some might claim this was a minor gaffe but quite frankly the concept that a major glacier could melt in such a short timespan defy's basic common sense and li
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