THE TROUBLE WITH THE IPCC...
Monday, August 6, 2007 at 09:42AM This is a good article to read highlighting the fact that the sacrosanct United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is "a seriously flawed enterprise and unworthy of the slavish respect accorded to it by most governments and the media. In the decisions which have already been made on climate-change mitigation, to say nothing of future decisions, the stakes are enormous. In guiding these momentous judgments, the flawed IPCC process has been granted, in effect, a monopoly of official wisdom."
Whoops. The author of this article is Clive Crook, one of the leading economics journalists on the international landscape and in it he observes the IPPC's gross errors such as the way emissions scenarios have been calculated. The projections had used long-range cross-country projections of gross domestic product that were based on exchange rates unadjusted for purchasing power. This mistake yielded projections for individual countries that were in some cases patently absurd. Far from acknowledging the point and correcting the projections, the IPCC treated these eminent former civil servants as uncredentialed troublemakers. Its head, Rajendra Pachauri, issued a prickly statement complaining about the spread of disinformation. Then there is the small matter of the notorious "hockey stick" chart showing the 1990s as the northern hemisphere's hottest decade of the millennium....
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Reader Comments (7)
This is more nit-picking. Back in the real world:
The duration of heatwaves in Western Europe has doubled since 1880, a study has shown. The authors of the research also discovered that the frequency of extremely hot days has nearly tripled in the past century. The study shows that many previous assessments of daily summer temperature change underestimated heatwaves in Western Europe by about 30%. The research appears in the Journal of Geophysical Research - Atmospheres. The team found that heatwaves lasted an average of three days now, with some lasting up to 13 days. This compares with an average of about 1.5 days in 1880.
Full report HERE
To be fair to Clive Crook he is not a knee-jerk denialist. I could not disagree with his conclusion in the linked article:
The IPCC may be right: climate change may indeed be mankind's biggest and most urgent challenge. It would be wrong to demand certainty before doing more. The scientific consensus, though not quite as strong as usually claimed, is surely strong enough to warrant a carbon tax or equivalent.
But if governments are to get the best advice, they need information and analysis from an open and disinterested source - or else from multiple dissenting sources. With the environmental risks calmly laid out, framing the right policies demands proper political accountability and a much wider range of opinion and expertise than the IPCC currently provides. One incompetent institution, committed to its own agenda, should never have been granted this degree of actual and moral authority over the science, over public presentation of the science and over calls for "more serious action" that go well beyond the science.
Royal British Legion petition.
Would anyone like to sign this petition. The basis of the petition is
'I agree that by putting their lives on the line for their country our servicemen and women deserve more from their government. Our nation has a life long duty of care for them.
I wish to register my interest in and support for the Legion's broken covenant campaign to adress the growing sense of disillusionment among service personnell and veterans about their treatment by the state.
http://www.britishlegion.org.uk/index.cfm?asset_id=516704
or visit
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Young Peter,
So a paper is published in JGR Atmospheres and is immediately gospel truth? Either the BBC summary of the paper is confused or else the paper itself is a load of tosh. I'll read in when our lab gets the printed copy. At first blush it looks very much like more Warmist Alarmism.
Cheers,
Captain Fatty.
Capt Fatty
If you've already decided that the paper is "a load of tosh" then why waste your valuable time reading it when it comes to hand?
Hello young Peter,
I will read it to make sure that it is a load of old tosh. If it confounds my suspicions (note - I haven't already decided it is bunkum only that it looks like it may be - the "at first blush" sort of gave that away) then I will revise my opinion viz climate change (but not the anthropomorphic kind, which is a pile of dingos' kidneys). I also find that it is hardly ever a waste of time (valuable or otherwise) to investigate what others are saying especially on matters where I take a different viewpoint than them; it aids debate. Oh wait, there is no debate anymore is there? Long live the concensus.
Toodle pip.
Captain Fatty
Anthropomorphic? Anthropogenic surely, Fatty? Ah let's settle for man made.
Fatty