Sunday, April 18, 2010

Our audit of the IPCC: Torpedoed again.

With what is now becoming a horribly frustrating irony, the denial that anything is remotely wrong in alarmist circles is now nothing short of astonishing, not to mention frightening.

This week, Canadian sceptic, Donna Laframboise of noconsensus.org released our Audit, for which I was one of the auditors, of the IPCC's supposed gold standard peer review references in their 2007 report.

If you're short on time, the press release is here, which gives the main points. 21 of the chapters provide less than 60% peer-reviewed references, despite the continual claims by Rajenda Pachuri that their work uses only peer reviewed work.

The work we did got front-paged on climate depot and Watts Up With That but - unsurprisingly - didn't make it much further beyond the sceptical blogosphere. It is however further hard evidence of the IPCC's, and in particular its chairman's mendacity and yes you can check the raw data for yourself and see the methods used to gather it.

Back to the future

In the course of this investigation, one of the auditors noticed something remarkable that really deserves much wider acknowledgement: "While doing the Audits assigned to me (and skimming each of the above 44 documents while standardizing the formatting), a number of questions and quite a few anomalies jumped out at me – not the least of which were several references to articles and other material with a publication date of “2007“. I thought this rather odd, in view of the fact that the publication deadline for inclusion of material in the 4th Assessment Report was December, 2005 (or sometime in February 2006 at the very latest.)"

Just a few typos right? Wrong:



"Together, team IPCC succeeded in taking a combined total of 354 leaps back to the future.
This astounding number raises far more questions than it answers."


The most obvious conclusion is that the IPCC included 354 references outside the review process, and presumably in the final editorial stage of the document.

Meanwhile....

Incredibly, now their manifesto has been released it appears that the Greens have managed to piss off even Sunny Hundal and his merry band with their "anti-science" (their words) approach: "In short, while The Greens mean well, we found that their science policies in many areas were a disaster" - yes you read that right. Furthermore: "The truth isn’t democratic, and the whole structure of the party works against the idea of evidence-based policy." - welcome to the world of Post Normal Science guys - it is has become the Green's forte.

The fact that this is on Liberal Conspiracy of all places, is off the scale. Sadly, reading through to the linked Guardian article, it is clear that they i) haven't considered the possibility that if the Greens have such a shoddy understanding of science generally whether this might also apply to Climate Science and ii) still present climate scepticism ("denialism" - oh yea gods, the irony!) as fundamentally irrational without having yet - to my knowledge - debunked any of the massive holes ripped in the Alarmist case.

It is, in fact, now so laughably straightforward to debunk that I challenge any alarmist out there to make their case to me. The brain of the enormous Tyrannasaurus is dead yet the body still stomps around causing untold damage.....

.....speaking of which - despite all of the alarmist hysteria, it appears a single volcano has single handedly done more damage to the U.K. in a few days than what we are told "global warming" will do to the country over the course of the next century.

4 comments:

Dol said...

On the 2007 thing, just to take a random journal:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.advertisers/503295/description#description

Plenty there available online first. Certainly, with the book citations, some won't have been published yet. E.g. just two examples from WG1 (note the last part of both refs):

Menon, S., and A. Del Genio, 2007: Evaluating the impacts of carbonaceous aerosols on clouds and climate. In: Human-Induced Climate Change: An Interdisciplinary Assessment [Schlesinger, M., et al. (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, in press.

Penner, J.E., et al., 2007: Effect of black carbon on mid-troposphere and surface temperature trends. In: Human-Induced Climate Change: An Interdisciplinary Assessment [Schlesinger, M., et al., (eds.)]. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, UK, in press.

So it could be sinister, or that the papers/books weren't physically published at the time. If it were me, I'd prefer to have bang up-to-date research in my synthesis reports.

Katabasis said...

That's a fair point, however the primary drive behind this was to dig out the oft-repeated claim (admittedly from activists rather than scientists) that this was 100% peer reviewed research.

Dol said...

Seems that the comments by Pachauri are a particular target. Not sure why anyone would even want to claim a report was 100% peer reviewed, if that means they're not allowed to included books, conference reports etc. If anyone asked me about my PhD, I think I'd want to say "it's based on the peer-reviewed literature" without an examiner coming to the viva saying, "but only x% of your references are peer reviewed." I'd think they were taking the piss.

It's interesting that both our 'sides' have a problem with government involvement in the IPCC process, but for entirely opposite reasons!

Katabasis said...

Agreed Dan.

I have a problem with rent-seeking groups in general - that includes the energy monopolies too.