The IPCC Climate Change Numbers Hoax
0Z0NB
30 June 2008
It's an assertion repeated by politicians and climate campaigners the
world over: "2,500 scientists of the United Nation's Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agree that humans are causing a climate
crisis."
But it's not true. And, for the first time ever, the public can now see
the extent to which they have been misled. As lies go, it's a whopper.
Here's the real situation.
Like the three IPCC "assessment reports" before it, the Fourth
Assessment Report (AR4) released during 2007 (upon which the UN climate
conference in Bali was based) includes the reports of the IPCC's three
working groups.
Working Group I (WG I) is assigned to report on the extent and possible
causes of past climate change as well as future "projections". Its
report is titled "The Physical Science Basis".
The reports from working groups II and III are titled "Impacts,
Adaptation and Vulnerability" and "Mitigation of Climate Change"
respectively, and since these are based on the results of WG I, it is
crucially important that the WG I report stands up to close scrutiny.
There is, of course serious debate among scientists about the actual
technical content of the roughly 1,000-page WG I report, especially its
politically motivated Summary for Policymakers which is often the only
part read by politicians and non-scientists. The technical content can
be difficult for non-scientists to follow and so most people simply
assume that if large numbers of scientists agree, they must be right.
Consensus never proves the truth of a scientific claim, but is somehow
widely believed to do so for the IPCC reports, so we need to ask how
many scientists really did agree with the most important IPCC
conclusion, namely that humans are causing significant climate change -
in other words the key parts of WG I?
The numbers of scientist reviewers involved in WG I is actually less
than a quarter of the whole, a little more than 600 in total. The other
1,900 reviewers assessed the other working group reports. They had
nothing to say about the causes of climate change or its future
trajectory. Still, 600 "scientific expert reviewers" sounds pretty
impressive. After all, they submitted their comments to the IPCC editors
who assure us that "all substantive government and expert review
comments received appropriate consideration". And since these experts
reviewers are all listed in Annex III of the report, they must have
endorsed it, right?
Wrong.
For the first time ever, the UN has released on the Web the comments of
reviewers who assessed the drafts of the WG I report and the IPCC
editors' responses. This release was almost certainly a result of
intense pressure applied by "hockey-stick" co-debunker Steve McIntyre of
Toronto and his allies. Unlike the other IPCC working groups, WG I is
based in the US and McIntyre had used the robust Freedom of Information
legislation to request certain details when the full comments were
released.
An examination of reviewers' comments on the last draft of the WG I
report before final report assembly (i.e. the "Second Order Revision" or
SOR) completely debunks the illusion of hundreds of experts diligently
poring over all the chapters of the report and providing extensive
feedback to the editing teams. Here's the reality.
A total of 308 reviewers commented on the SOR, but only 32 reviewers
commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented
on all 11 chapters of the report. Only about half the reviewers
commented on more than one chapter. It is logical that reviewers would
generally limit their comments to their areas of expertise but it's a
far cry from the idea of thousands of scientists agreeing to anything.
Compounding this is the fact that IPCC editors could, and often did,
ignore reviewers' comments. Some editor responses were banal and others
showed inconsistencies with other comments. Reviewers had to justify
their requested changes but the responding editors appear to have been
under no such obligation. Reviewers were sometimes flatly told they were
wrong but no reasons or reliable references were provided.
In other cases reviewers tried to dilute the certainty being expressed
and they often provided supporting evidence, but their comments were
often flatly rejected. Some comments were rejected on the basis of a
lack of space - an incredible assertion in such an important document.
The attitude of the editors seemed to be that simple corrections were
accepted, requests for improved clarity tolerated but the assertions and
interpretations that appear in the text were to be defended against any
challenge.
An example of rampant misrepresentation of IPCC reports is the frequent
assertion that "hundreds of IPCC scientists" are known to support the
following statement, arguably the most important of the WG I report,
namely "Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the
observed global warming over the last 50 years".
In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this
statement appears, the critical chapter 9, "Understanding and
Attributing Climate Change". Of the comments received from the 62
reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60 per cent of them were
rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this
chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert
reviewers who appear impartial.
Two of these seven were contacted by NRSP for the purposes of this
article - Dr Vincent Gray of New Zealand and Dr Ross McKitrick of the
University of Guelph, Canada. Concerning the "Greenhouse gas forcing ."
statement above, Professor McKitrick explained "A categorical summary
statement like this is not supported by the evidence in the IPCC WG I
report. Evidence shown in the report suggests that other factors play a
major role in climate change, and the specific effects expected from
greenhouse gases have not been observed."
Dr Gray labeled the WG I statement as "Typical IPCC doubletalk"
asserting "The text of the IPCC report shows that this is decided by a
guess from persons with a conflict of interest, not from a tested model".
Determining the level of support expressed by reviewers' comments is
subjective but a slightly generous evaluation indicates that just five
reviewers endorsed the crucial ninth chapter. Four had vested interests
and the other made only a single comment for the entire 11-chapter
report. The claim that 2,500 independent scientist reviewers agreed with
this, the most important statement of the UN climate reports released
this year, or any other statement in the UN climate reports, is
nonsense.
"The IPCC owe it to the world to explain who among their expert
reviewers actually agree with their conclusions and who don't," says
Natural Resources Stewardship Project Chair climatologist Dr Timothy
Ball. "Otherwise, their credibility, and the public's trust of science
in general, will be even further eroded."
That the IPCC have let this deception continue for so long is a
disgrace. Secretary General Ban Kai-Moon must instruct the UN climate
body to either completely revise their operating procedures, welcoming
dissenting input from scientist reviewers and indicating if reviewers
have vested interests, or close the agency down completely.
Until then, their conclusions, and any reached at the Bali conference
based on IPCC conclusions, should be ignored entirely as politically
skewed and dishonest.
http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=7553&page=1
--
Warmest Regards
Bonzo
: "They don't tell you, that, in their computer models, it's assumed
that CO2 drives global warming. In other words, you assume the result
and say the computer model proves we were right. It's garbage in,
garbage out. If you don't program the computers to cause temperatures to
rise with CO2, then you have nothing." Dr. Don J. Easterbrook, Professor
Emeritus Geology, Western Washington University
V for Vendicar
"0Z0NB" <0Z...@do00od00.com> wrote
> Tom Harris and John McLean
Worthless KKKonservative Blog.