Thursday
Sep132012
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill More evidence that the IPCC is a busted flush
Sep 13, 2012 Climate: RP Jnr Climate: WG2 Roger Pielke Jr's latest post outlines how the IPCC responded to his evidence that the Fourth Assessment Report was flawed as regards trends in weather-related disasters. I think it's fair to say that they have an almost comical inability to admit error.
I've gone on the record before as saying that the Fifth Assessment Report is dead in the water already.
It looks as if I was right.
Reader Comments (14)
The IPCC is itself dead in the water. Statements by Rajendra Pachauri AND by Lord Deben on 4th Sept at his annointment as Chair of the Climate Change Committee tell us that Climate Change does not matter, sustainability is what matters, adios IPCC you have served them well.
Amazing..... but no longer surprising. Those seem like simple clear-cut cases, just make the corrections! No, the point of the exercise appears to be that the IPCC wants to *seem* to have a process open to corrections, but with a loyal bureaucratic gate-keeper determined not to actually allow corrections (at least in these four cases). If they can't make these corrections what hope is there in more intricate matters?
p.s. I have experienced the same mentality more than a few times in bureaucrats of many stripes: a pretense of openness to new information but an absolute inability to process and engage with the new information. Of course, that's the sort of cognitive defect alleged by all sides against opponents in the "climate wars" and in many contentious debates, but in the IPCC WG2 case with Pielke, Jr. those should have been almost automatic corrections in a rationally based organization.
2+2=5.
For an epitaph I nominate - drum roll - RIP Voodoo Science AR1 to AR5.
The fraud that has been planned for AR5 is the physically-impossible 'abyssal heat'.**
** See the UNESCO equation of state for water and see why the deep ocean isotherms are what they are.
lapogus, the IPCC did indeed write 2+2=5, in the erroneous computation of the average cloud albedo forcing value from the numbers listed in Table 2.7. When I reported this the IPCC refused to admit it, saying that "While the text could have been even more explicit on this, the present text is not in error",
meaning that the text could have been a bit clearer by saying that what they meant was 2+3=5, but there was no error in writing 2+2=5.
Pielke made some errors in that. For example, in Error #1 he is wrong to allege that the IPCC claim is factually incorrect. What the IPCC said is, as they explain to him, factually correct. It is of course constructed in such a way as to try to form an incorrect conclusion in the mind of the reader, but that is a different kind of problem.
The CLA Finding is actually more problematic. "The statement does not infer that the overall pattern of losses would be different". The word 'infer' makes no sense here as a statement does not have a brain. If you substitute it with 'imply' then the sentence is a lie. The statement under consideration most certainly does imply to me that the pattern would be different were 2004 and 2005 included, and was surely constructed deliberately to give that impression.
The same goes for Error #2. The IPCC have cherry-picked their facts and admitted as much ("one study" rather than "studies" or "research" or similar). The IPCC statement may be misleading and Pielke could have taken issue with it on that basis, but it is not factually incorrect as he claims.
The IPCC may be slime, but it is clever and fairly careful slime.
It makes you want to puke. My only question is, why Roger waited till now to bring this into the open?
The 5th report will be rowed to glory by the BBC and DECC.
@bloke - He the got response today.
With respect to #1, here is a comment from the 2007 AR4 review process on this passage:
“I think this is inappropriate. It leads the reader into interpreting recent events in a particular way without providing supporting information. This suggestion, that the losses in 2004 and 2005 draw Pielke’s results into question, needs to be supported with a reference or a solid in chapter assessment. What does Pielke think about this?”
(Francis Zwiers, Canadian Centre for Climate Modelling and Analysis)”
Here is the IPCC response to Zwiers at the time:
“I believe Pielke agrees that adding 2004 and 2005 has the potential to change his earlier conclusions – at least about the absence of a trend in US Cat losses.”
The IPCC lied then and are lying now. It is that simple.
As indicated above, the IPCC explained the “but” in that sentence, and it was not referring to the timeline.
It might be comical if they didn't expect world governments to spend trillions based on their reports.
It was kind of the IPCC to provide further evidence in support of Donna's thesis in The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World's Top Climate Expert. Not that any was needed.
Nor do I find any of their "responses" in the least bit surprising. For example:
is remarkably similar to many that I found two and half years ago, when I was writing The climate change game … Monopoly: the IPCC version. Although the "rationales" were often somewhat shorter - but no less obfuscatory.
@ morph mea culpa