The Fifth's first fiddle
Oct 1, 2013
Bishop Hill in Climate: IPCC, Climate: Models, Climate: Surface

The full text of the Fifth Assessment Report has been out for less than 24 hours and the tales of malfeasance are flowing already. Steve McIntyre has already blogged about some misleading behaviour by senior scientists involved in the review, but his post this morning is amazing, revealing how the discrepancy between climate models and observations was systematically hidden between the final review of the draft and the report issued to the public.

For the envelopes from the first three assessments, although they cite the same sources as the predecessor Second Draft Figure 1.4, the earlier projections have been shifted downwards relative to observations, so that the observations are now within the earlier projection envelopes. You can see this relatively clearly with the Second Assessment Report envelope: compare the two versions. At present, I have no idea how they purport to justify this.

None of this portion of the IPCC assessment is drawn from peer-reviewed material. Nor is it consistent with the documents sent to external reviewers.

Read the whole thing.

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