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Thomas Paine

To argue with a person who has renounced the use of reason is like administering medicine to the dead.

Wednesday, February 8, 2012

8 February - Political Climate

Arctic September Sea Ice Extent: Observations ...Image via Wikipedia
Français : Stock de carbone mondial (hors océa...Image via Wikipedia
Flag of the World Meteorological OrganizationImage via Wikipedia
Ipcc fig1-5Image via Wikipedia
Key Note presentation by Vicente Barros , Co-c...Key Note presentation by Vicente Barros , Co-chair of Working Group II, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Photo credit: Citt)
Key Note presentation by Vicente Barros , Co-c...Key Note presentation by Vicente Barros , Co-chair of Working Group II, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (Photo credit: Citt)
Defeat McKeon

McKeon Nominated for ‘Porker of the Year’ Award

Kansas Wants To Shield Doctors Who Lie To Women About Abortion

Kansas state Rep. Barbara Bollier (R-Mission Hills) may be the bravest Republican in the country right now.
The retired anesthesiologist is speaking out against a radical new anti-abortion bill that exempts doctors from medical malpractice suits if they withhold medical information to prevent an abortion and also protects them from malpractice claims if a woman suffers an injury from a pregnancy as a result of information withheld from her to prevent an abortion mandates doctors tell patients. The bill also mandates doctors disclose a link between abortions and breast cancer, even though medical experts have disproved any link

Read more: http://www.care2.com/causes/kansas-wants-to-shield-doctors-who-lie-to-women-about-abortion.html#ixzz1lmKIWNPb
( I've been a member for years. Jump in if you haven't joined - the place is a worldwide environmental activist information resource and news networking site not to be missed, which optionally links to Facebook )

Tar Sands Destroying Wolf & Caribou Populations In Canada


Destroying The Mojave Desert: The Dark Side Of Solar Power

John F.

1:07AM PST on Feb 8, 2012
"Doing it for the climate."
There's your answer to the riddle of who 'wins' when you buy into the proposition that co2 increase leads global warming at a time when we have been coming out of a mini ice age - rather than recognizing that the fossil record indicates warming leads co2 rise. ( Who is the IPCC )
Don't pollute. That quip about the insanity of blowing the tops off mountains is 'bang on'. And Sourcewatch has a shocking information nexus about the dangers of coal ash accumulation from scrubbers. Nor should we quit keeping industry and mining away from our waterways and protected areas.
Is it antiscientific to require a proposition conforms to Scientific Method to be referred to as 'science'? Denierism is a lie and political opinion shaping tool borrowed from Logical Fallacy for Strawman Argumentation by Poisoning the Well - which totally disables logical review.
You are playing games based on a culturally appropriate adaption of using a crystal ball.
  

What is the IPCC ?
september 2003
website of the author : www.manicore.com - contact the author : jean-marc@manicore.com
 
The IPCC (abreviation that stands for Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) is an organization that was set up in 1988, following a demand by the G7 (a group that gathers the 7 richest countries in the world : USA, Japan, Germany, France, Great Britain, Canada, Italy), by
The World Meteorological Organization
and
the United Nations Environnement Programme
The role of the IPCC is to "assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information that relates to human induced climate change".
It is therefore not a research lab, but a organism that assesses and summarizes research work done throughout the world. This is an important point, because any research worker that belongs to a relevant discipline - including, of course, someone that would support the absence of influence of man on the climate - can ask for an assessment of his work in the reviewing processes managed by the IPCC.
The supreme body of the IPCC is the general assembly
The IPCC is divided in three working group that each have the role of conducting assessments on :
The works published, or in progress, that concern the physical (and chemical !) processes of the climate, and their past or future variations (group 1).
The works published, or in progress, that concern the possible impacts of a human induced climate change on the biosphere and our socio-economic systems, and the possible ways to adapt (group 2).
The works published, or in progress, that concern the future greenhouse gases emissions and the mitigation possibilities of climate change (group 3).
The general architecture of a report is the following : each chapter deals with a specific subject (for exemple the physical properties of the greenhouse gases, the adequacy of the representation of the climate processes in the numerical models, the past climatic variations, the evolution of the greenhouse concentrations in the atmosphere, etc), and the authors of the related chapter are in charge of wrinting a synthesis of the available scientific knowledge on the corresponding topic.
What they are asked is not to give an opinion "like that" : they carry out a long - and sometimes not that funny - compilation of all the available scientific litterature, or of the works in progress in the research labs that investigate the subject. For example, the chapter "model evaluation" (in the report of the working group 1) is written by model specialists that analyze hundreds of articles opn model evaluation (meaning : do models correctly reproduce this or that phenomenum) published in the scientific litterature (the bibliography is always indicated at the end of each chapter).
These sectoral syntheses allow to produce a first draft of report, that will be read and criticized by other experts of the concerned disciplines, what will lead to a second draft, that will be sent to the same experts than for the first draft, and, in addition, to representatives of the governments of member countries. It's only after the draft went to and fro twice, with very formal procedures, that a definite document is submitted to the general assembly of the IPCC, in order to be approved before publication.
Overall, several thousands people - generally renowned researchers, but the process is open to anybody who wishes to be heard, as mentionned below - are involved into the writing and the reviewing of the report that will be published.
Before being published and declared "official reports" of the IPCC, these assessment reports are explicitely approved by the full assembly of the member countries, where representatives are generally competent - but not always - in science. Up to this day, all the assessment reports of the IPCC have been unanimously approved by the member countries, including by the USA, or by Saudi Arabia.
The documents produced by the IPCC are used as a reference in the international negotiations on greenhouse gases
These publications result from a long debate between experts, who are the only ones to know whether a given uncertainty prevents from giving a general conclusion or not. The general assembly, where all the countries that have at least one competent scientist, has always approved unanimously the proposed assessment reports.
It is therefore legitimate to consider that all that is consensual in the IPCC reports can be held as an established fact*. This particularly includes :
The CO2 concentration in the atmosphère is now 30% higher than during any time of the previous 400.000 years,
increasing the CO2 concentration in the atmopshere will generate a climate change, that will include an increase of the average near ground air temperature. It's the magnitude of the temperature increase that remains - and will remain for long - an open debate, but not the fact that globally the temperature will rise.
* Political fact
Given this, what should we think of the various individuals that periodically throw themselves in front of cameras or get headlines in the papers and contest "the scientific file" ? Here are a couple of reflexions :
First of all any assessment process conducted by the IPCC is opened to any scientist that wishes to formulate a remark or submit a work, and this process is preciseley designed so that the debate can happen between people who know what they are talking about, and not brought in front of a general public that is not able to judge. The IPCC is not hosting a conspiracy !
Debating is a normal part of the activity of any researcher, but somebody who is a competent - and honest - researcher in a given discipline will always do the the same if he (or she) questions an explanation considered as established : this somebody will begin by submitting to his peers, through the publication of an article in a scientific paper (where articles are reviewed by other experts before being published) such as Nature, Science, Quaternary Review, Physics Today, etc (neither Scientific American nor the Washington Post or The Financial Times or The Economist are such scientific papers) a detailed explanation indicating why the commonly admitted theory is wrong, by what means and deductions he or she managed to get to this conclusion, and what experimental confirmations of the new explanation can be obtained. A normal researcher will never begin by throwing himself in front of cameras or by wrinting in the general press to expose his views : as there is no validation process by competent people, such publications will never be put to his credit by his peers.
Apart from one exception (discussed below), all the "contestations" that I have read up to now in the general press come from people that do not have any particular scientific competence on climate change. Practically, all the "skeptics" I heard of belonged to one or another of these categories :
non-scientific authors whose long lasting personnal theories or personnal interests are hardly compatible with the probable implications of fighting against climate change. That includes "diehard liberals", globally against any constraint whatsoever, a category to which probably belongs M. Philip Stott (writer of an article in the Wall Street Journal which is a pure marvel of nonsense), oponents to nuclear energy (which is a possible action level of any policy aimed at a fast decrease of greenhouse gases emissions), individuals that belong to an industrial sector heavily dependant on fossil fuels (coal mines, oil companies, but also steel companies, chemists...)...
researchers or engineers that belong to a field which has no particular ties with the climate change problem (any "scientists" is not competent in any scientific field, just as any physician is not competent in heart surgery, or any mechanics is not able to fix an Atlas rocket !) but that nevertheless express themselves on the subject for various reasons (personal ego, political role, people put under pressure by the press or by publishers that seek - very hard sometimes - contradictors....).
This category includes Blorn Lomborg (who is a statistician, therefore holds a university position, but in a speciality that has no connections with climate change ; look here for a commentary on the "climate change" chapter of his book "the skeptical environmentalist"), or someone like Claude Allègre (a competent french geophysicist that became Secretary of state, in charge of schools ans universities), or the late Haroun Tazieff (a weell know vulcanologist in France that also had a political role) - but that was a long time ago.
scientists that do not criticize the least the IPCC reports, but that seem to do so after a skillfull editing done by a journalist, who did not necessarily do it intentionally by the way. When, after one hour of interview, if not more, just 2 sentences are broadcasted on the radio, on TV, or printed in the paper (this situation being more the rule than the exception, I can personally testify !), on one hand it is not the person interviewed that chose them but the journalist (in short it's the journalist that decides what the scientist will say), and on the other hand the interviewed scientist will not necessarily be able to validate his words (generally he (she) doesn't have this possibility). There is no doubt this way of proceeding facilitates misinterpretations.
various bad faith behaviours, that might come from competent scientists. A famous representative of this category is an MIT professor, Richard Lindzen, who contributed a lot to trouble minds (it was intentional, of course) by expressing publicly his doubts on some elements of the file in such a way that it was easy to consider that he was dismissing the whole file (which is not the case, even though he lets journalists say so). My guess is that he was offended not to be among the lead authors of the first IPCC assessment report in 1990, in spite of the fact that he was - and is - an eminent specialist of atmospheric processes.
He eventually ended being a lead author in the 2001 assessment report, and several months later - pure coincidence ? - he co-signed a paper published by the american National Academy of Science, written on Bush Jr's demand (the object was to assess...the IPCC assessment process), in which the following sentences can be found (page 4) : "The committee finds that the full IPCC working group 1 report is an admirable summary of research activities (...). It is critical that the IPCC process remains truly representative of the scientific community.(...)" (the second sentence clearly suggests that the IPCC process IS representative today). So what should we think of M. Lindzen's declarations to the press after that ?
journalists that misunderstood the conclusions of the IPCC reports. The assessment reports are not accessible to the general public : they are in english (may I remind my reader that MOST people - and therefore most journalists - in the world are not fluent in English ?), 800 pages thick, and it is really scientific litterature, every page containing expressions like "the effects of fresh water pulse on AABW formation", or "AVHRR-derived albedo estimates can now be mapped".... In France, I am totally sure that there is not one journalist of the general media that has read the whole group 1 report, or even two chapters in extenso while understanding everything. When a journalist writes about what there is in the report, he does so without having read it : this can lead to some little side effects !
journalists that reproduce a contestation without knowing whether it is sound because "there must always be someone for and someone against" (a lot of journalists deeply hate universal truths, even when they exist ; this does not happen often with human behaviour, what consitutes their everyday life, but happen often in sciences : 2+2 always make 4 ; must some audience be given to someone who would argue that 2+2=3 just to "diversify the opinions" ?). This lust for contradictors of the media has certainly played a central role in the rise of all the "skeptics" I heard of.*
* Wonder how hard he's looked given the tone of 'comment threads' dominated by pro AGW pundits : echo chambers pushing orthodoxy at all costs and denying financial implications exist. This regarding a global tax on 'carbon'....use of Fire. Did you catch the reasons for the flight of small nations at Copenhagen ? Fraud on the UN reports and switched position papers setting debate.
people that only read the newspaper and that are inspired, for there own literary production, by a journalist who wrote nonsense : such an individual will explain that this or that conclusion of the science is false, when it is not mentionned in the IPCC report, but just in the article of a journalist that badly understood !
This observation generates the following advice, for those interested by climate change : never ever consider an article of the general press as a reliable source of information, but always go back to the original documents. All those that are in the position to compare what they personnally know on a complex or technical subject and how the corresponding facts are generally presented in the press will surely understand me !
And at last one must recall that all the "counter-arguments" invoked by the "skeptics" that are of scientific nature (role of the sun, for example) have been long known by the competent scientists, since they are precisely examined and discussed in the assessment reports.
Finally, an individual who is not a competent scientist directly involved in climate change - which is my case, all I have done is reading a non ridiculous amount of scientific litterature and discussing with a small part of the competent scientists - is not able to have a technical judgment on a field he does not know (I would not dare judging the way ice cores have been extracted, or whether the calibration of the mass spectrometer was correctly done : on what basis could I do so ?). All we can do is ask ourselves these two simple questions :
do several thousands of high ranking scientists, perfectly respected otherwise (they include members of the academy of sciences is many countries...), have particular reasons to deliberately say nonsense in the present case ? It is doubly improbable :
The results on which thay lean are perfectly admitted in other contexts,
There would be no mobile to the crime. The sometimes heard argument about drawing attention to have research credits might seem admissible, but actually it's rather the opposite that happens : in Europe, the more the file appears solid, and the less public money is poured, because governments consider that the file is sufficient to act and that there is no need to fund additional research. And it's in the US that the most money is poured at the present time : with the present government, money there is probably easier to get for people that would try to demonstrate that there is no risk !
In addition, such a reasoning (a world conspiracy to get money for research) might apply to a couple of people, but suggesting that thousands of researchers, that are generally honest people, coming from dozens of different disciplines, can try to enforce this same idea at the same time, seems totally improbable. Anyway, speculating on this possibility to consider that we don't have any reason to be worried is a bet that I will not take.
What do we risk if we don't believe them ? Just to loose part of a comfortable planet, and the life of part of our descendants, which isn't nothing...
 ( Powerful, isn't it ? Yet the statement is clear - if you don't belong to the club of the committed your opinion doesn't count with international governmental authority. Are you familiar with Logical Fallacies ? Would you bet spin specialists aren't ? Appeal to Authority

Well, if even PowerLine makes it here, I guess I might as well go whole hog
U.N. Looks to Take Charge of World's Agenda
Details concerning the two-day, closed-door sessions in the comfortable village of Alpbach were closely guarded. Nonetheless, position papers for the meeting obtained by Fox News indicate that the topics included:

-- how to restore “climate change” as a top global priority after the fiasco of last year’s Copenhagen summit;

-- how to continue to try to make global redistribution of wealth the real basis of that climate agenda, and widen the discussion further to encompass the idea of “global public goods”;

-- how to keep growing U.N. peacekeeping efforts into missions involved in the police, courts, legal systems and other aspects of strife-torn countries;

-- how to capitalize on the global tide of migrants from poor nations to rich ones, to encompass a new “international migration governance framework”;

-- how to make “clever” use of new technologies to deepen direct ties with what the U.N. calls “civil society,” meaning novel ways to bypass its member nation states and deal directly with constituencies that support U.N. agendas.
Not coincidentally, the conclave of bureaucrats also saw in “global governance” a greater role for themselves.
According to the paper prepared by Secretary General Ban’s own climate change team, however, the newly rebranded challenge still depends on the same economic remedy proposed for Copenhagen: a drastic redistribution of global wealth, “nothing less than a fundamental transformation of the global economy.”
What is at stake, the papers make clear, is not only the alleged betterment of the world, but the U.N.’s soaring ambitions for itself — no matter what roadblocks national sovereignty may throw in its way.
Read more: http://www.foxnews.com/world/2010/09/08/years-setbacks-looks-world-leader/#ixzz1ln96JhiI
)

We Are Winning the Debate and Greens Don’t Like It

February 7th, 2012
Source: UK Express

Lord Lawson says there is no scientific basis for some of the alarmism
LORD LAWSON had barely removed his microphone when the vitriolic attacks began.
The veteran politician had just taken part in a calm debate about the merits of extracting gas from shale. During the discussion on the BBC’s Today programme he stated his firmly held view that there has been no global warming so far this century.
It was the catalyst for an outpouring of venom on message boards and social networking sites. In a selection of the printable insults Lord Lawson was described as “a rabid climate change denier”, “a liar” and “a lone nutcase”. One listener even posted: “Why isn’t he dead yet?”
Former Chancellor Lord Lawson celebrates his 80th birthday in March and might be forgiven for wondering, at his time of life, if he really needs to endure all this. His supporters insist he is turning the tide in the bitter debate over the impact of global warming but such is the might of the green lobby there must have been occasions when he felt like a lone voice. Read the rest of this entry »

blog.chron.com/…cc-reports-were-essentially-crooks/

Defund the IPCC Now

Guest Post by Willis Eschenbach
Well, I woke up to some bad news this morning. It turns out that the GAO, the US General Accounting Office, says US has been secretly hiding their funding of the IPCC for the last decade.
They were already told not to do that by the GAO. In the 2005 GAO report with the swingeing title of “Federal Reports on Climate Change Funding Should Be Clearer and More Complete”, the GAO said … well, basically what the title said. But noooo, those sneaky bureaucrats didn’t do that at all.
The latest 2011 GAO Report says the US government has not changed their ways. They have been clandestinely providing about half the operating funds for the IPCC for the last decade. In other words, the IPCC funding arrangements are of a piece with their “scientific” claims and their other actions—secretive, shabby, with a hidden agenda, and full of disinformation.
The report says that the State Department provided $19 million dollars to the IPCC. Thanks, guys. Foolish me, I hadn’t realized that paying for bureaucrats to go party in Cancun and Durban was part of the function of the United States Department of State.

I also found out that the IPCC got $12.1 million dollars from the US Global Change Research Program. That one really angrifies my blood. The IPCC flat out states that they do not do a single scrap of scientific research … so why is the US Global Change Research Program giving them a dime, much less twelve million, that was supposed to go for research?
The 2011 GAO report had some strong advice for the climate profiteers behind this secretive funding. They said:
“Congress and the public cannot consistently track federal climate change funding or spending over time,”
Oh, no, wait, that’s what the GAO said back in 2005. Unfortunately, they have no enforcement powers. What they said this time around was that the funding information:
“… was not available in budget documents or on the websites of the relevant federal agencies, and the agencies are generally not required to report this information to Congress.”
The GAO report is available here. And all is not lost, at least one Congressman is working to defund the IPCC:
 Wrapped into the many amendments recently passed by the House of Representatives — a total of $60 billion in spending cuts that the president called a “nonstarter” — was one by Republican Missouri Rep. Blaine Luetkemeyer that would prohibit $13 million in taxpayer dollars from going to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the group whose occasional missteps have been the source of countless confrontations among climate scientists over the past year.

Support for the saturated greenhouse effect leaves the likelihood of AGW tipping points in the cold

 From The Hockey Shtick, word of a new paper that supports Miskolczi’s theory of saturated greenhouse effect.
in this new paper there appears to be some evidence for a negative climate feedback, in the form of slightly lowered relative humidity trend, which makes climate sensitivity lower. Relative humidity (RH) is the ratio of the actual amount of water vapor in the air to the amount it could hold when saturated expressed as a percentage OR the ratio of the actual vapor pressure to the saturation vapor pressure expressed as a percentage. The amount of water vapor the air can hold increases with temperature. Relative humidity therefore decreases with increasing temperature if the actual amount of water vapor stays the same. While the study found a slight increase in specific humidity (the mass of water vapor per unit mass of air), relative humidity (near the surface, 2 meter measurement) decreased by 0.5% per decade, resulting in an overall slightly drier atmosphere.
If a positive water vapor feedback response existed in the climate system, you’d expect both the specific and relative humidity to increase with time. It didn’t. This ends up putting the kibosh on the idea of tipping points, and a lack of positive water vapor feedback pretty much takes all the scare out of CO2 induced climate change.


It seems PEW is superseded by the Centre for Climate and Energy Solutions
Navigating the American Carbon World (NACW) conference
Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative Enters Second Phase

Lord Christopher Monckton @ Truth Agenda Dublin on(PSTV)Tonight Sky Channel 201@ 9:00 PM

Follow the Money: 78 Names at the IPCC

Source: NFC
October 1, 2011
In a sensible universe, the list that appears below would be sufficient to vaporize the credibility of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – now and forever, once and for all.
Beginning in 2004 (around the time that work was beginning on the 2007 Climate Bible) the activist World Wildlife Fund (WWF) systematically began recruiting IPCC scientists. By late 2008 it says it had persuaded 130 “leading climate scientists mostly, but not exclusively from” the IPCC to join its parallel initiative called the Climate Witness Scientific Advisory Panel.
The scientists whose names appear below have not only been examining one of the world’s most important questions for the IPCC. They have a documented, public relationship with professional lobbyists who have a strong interest in influencing this matter. (For readers who are just tuning in, the WWF believes it is “nearly impossible to overstate” the threat posed by climate change – see here, backup link here.)
The people on the list below either played some role in the 2007 Climate Bible or are helping to write the next IPCC report which is expected to be completed in 2013. In many cases, they’re doing dual duty.
On this list are 23 coordinating lead authors – those the IPCC placed in charge of an entire chapter. The list also includes Osvaldo Canziani. Having served as Working Group 2 co-chair for both the 2001 and 2007 reports, he is one of the IPCC’s most senior officials.
    • Peter Ambenje – a Working Group 1 contributor to the 2007 report
    • Sophie des Clers - a contributing author to two chapters of the 2007 report
    • Antoine Guisan - a contributing author to two chapters of the 2007 report
    • Claudio Guillermo Menéndez – who served as a lead author for the 2007 report
    • Batimaa Punsalmaa – a lead author for two chapters of the 2007 report (here and here)
I took two snapshots of this WWF Scientific Advisory Panel webpage. The first was back in July 2010. The second was a  few weeks ago.
The only apparent difference between them is the absence of Stephen Schneider‘s name from the second (he died in 2010).

The IPCC Exposed: Political To Its Core 

We meet here at a time when greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere have never been higher, when the number of livelihoods that have been dissolved by climate change impacts has never been greater and when the need for action has never been more compelling or more achievable.’

So said Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), as she opened the organisation’s latest extravaganza in Durban, South Africa this week. Her words are a neat demonstration of how UN bodies like the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), far from being neutral and independent organisations, are highly political. The task before the gathered governmental delegations is urgent, we are told, because the concentrations of greenhouse gases have ‘never been higher’, the impacts have never been ‘greater’ but action is ‘achievable’. (Figueres was also being disingenuous - there’s pretty much zero chance of any meaningful agreement coming out of the Durban talks.)
These statements are all built upon the wisdom provided by what Donna Laframboise rightly refers to regularly as the ‘Climate Bible’: the periodic assessment reports produced by the IPCC. But while the UNFCCC is clearly a political body, hammering out just who is going to pay to sort out the planet-threatening problem of global warming, the IPCC is widely seen as a body simply offering the very best expert advice from the finest scientific minds in the world.
In The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert (a fabulous title that surely deserves to be a winner with charades players everywhere), Laframboise provides chapter and verse on the Climate Bible and the body that produces it. The IPCC is presented as being made up of thousands of top scientists who work tirelessly and self-critically to bring together the best peer-reviewed research and reach an unbiased, cautious and independent assessment of where global temperatures are heading and what the consequences will be. Sadly, as Laframboise shows, the reality is very different.
Sitting in a coffee shop around the corner from the spiked office, Laframboise explains to me how she came to write the book. Formerly a feature writer and editorial board member at Canada’s National Post, she left the paper in the early Noughties and turned her back on journalism, feeling it was ‘time for a change’. She continues: ‘I didn’t write anything for seven or eight years but in early 2009 I became so annoyed at the way climate change was being covered in the media, it was just so shallow... so I started doing my own research and I started blogging.’
What Laframboise found was that there is a lot more uncertainty about climate change and its effects than the general public has been led to believe. Indeed, her original book project was simply going to spell out 10 reasons why we should stay calm about the whole issue. What really drew her to focus on the IPCC, she tells me, is that ‘this organisation is regarded as a prototype. It’s the golden child, it’s won the Nobel Peace Prize. So the UN has now set up an IPCC-like body for biodiversity and another one for agriculture, and another for soil degradation. And in each case, they appear to be trying to recruit the science and the scientists to help them pursue a global agenda on these issues.’
Before digging deeper into the issue, Laframboise tells me that she assumed - like most people - that the IPCC was ‘dependable, trustworthy and professional’. She adds: ‘The more I investigated the IPCC, the more I thought it was like a child that had been praised and flattered, that had been given rules to follow but, when it doesn’t follow the rules, faces no consequences. And now it’s grown up into a problem, collectively, for all of us.’
In her book, Laframboise takes us through the major claims made about the IPCC and demolishes them one by one.
For example, there’s the idea that the IPCC report is the product of the world’s top experts. But in reality, knowing a subject well is not nearly as important, it seems, as having a face that fits. So, leading IPCC contributors sometimes do not even have PhDs in their subjects, never mind being world-class experts, while other researchers in charge of chapters had expertise in a completely different area to the one they were working on. Meanwhile, the nature of the review process means that when leading experts are critical, they can safely be ignored by chapter authors.
Another piece of IPCC spin is that its reports are built upon the best available research. In fact, there is heavy reliance on the so-called ‘grey’ literature - material that is not from peer-reviewed journals at all. This material can even just be magazine articles or propaganda from environmentalist groups. The most famous example of this is the ‘Himalayagate’ affair, which centred on the important claim made in the 2007 report that glaciers, apparently crucial to the water supply for billions of people, would disappear entirely by 2035.
Nothing could demand urgent action more than this. However, nothing could be further from the truth. The glaciers are likely to last for hundreds of years, as was pointed out by expert reviewers - who were ignored. However, in early 2010, it was pointed out that the erroneous idea came from a document produced by environmental group WWF, which in turn had quoted an earlier interview in New Scientist magazine.

Nigel Lawson Calls For DECC To Be Broken Up

Nigel Lawson, the former Chancellor and a former energy secretary, has called on the Government to break up the Department of Energy and Climate Change (DECC). He believes the time has come to put responsibility for climate policy back into the environment department, and to put energy policy into the Department for Business, Innovation and...

Read more...

www.sciencepoles.org/…h_sea_level_rise_projections/
Apr 18, 2011 ... He was a coordinating Lead Author for the 4th Assessment Report released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 2007 ..

www.powerlineblog.com/…2/01/who-is-anti-science.php

Jan 16, 2012 ... The IPCC has failed to establish a strong link between changes in atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and changes in temperatures; ... 

The Journal of Climate & the IPCC

We’re supposed to trust the conclusions of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) because much of the research on which it relies was published in peer-reviewed scientific journals.
But what happens when the people who are in charge of these journals are the same ones who write IPCC reports?
Today’s exhibit is the Journal of Climate. It’s published by the American Meteorological Society – which certainly sounds reputable. But let’s take a look at its IPCC connections.
It’s chief editor, Anthony J. Broccoli, was a contributing author and expert reviewer for the IPCC’s 2007 report (known as AR4).
Nathan Gillett, one of its editors, served in four separate AR4 capacities – as a lead author, an expert reviewer for both Working Group 1 and Working Group 2, and as an expert reviewer of the Synthesis Report. He is now a lead author for the upcoming IPCC report (AR5).
Marika Holland, another editor at the Journal of Climate, contributed to two chapters of the 2007 climate bible.
Editor Andrew Pitman was an IPCC lead author, a contributing author, and an expert reviewer for the 2007 edition. Moreover, he’s involved in the upcoming report as a review editor.
As editor James Renwick’s bio page makes clear, he was a contributing author to the 2001 IPCC report, a lead author for the 2007 report, and is currently a lead author for AR5.
Editor Brian Soden was a 2007 contributing author and an expert reviewer who is currently serving as an AR5 lead author.
Editor Shang-Ping Xie is currently an AR5 lead author, and editor Michael Alexander was a 2007 IPCC expert reviewer.
Other personnel associated with the Journal of Climate may be found under the headings Editors Emeritus and Associate Editors. Prominent IPCC participants such as Michael E. Mann, Gavin Schmidt, Andrew Weaver, Francis Zwiers, Gabriele Hegerl and Peter Stott appear on these lists.
Is this not too incestuous for words?
Is no one concerned that there is no distance whatsoever – never mind anything approaching a  firewall – between the people who decide whether a study deserves to join the haloed ranks of the scientific peer-reviewed literature – and the people who then write IPCC reports declaring what this peer-reviewed literature tells us about climate change?
And let’s not even talk about what percentage of the published papers authored by some of those mentioned above earned their peer-reviewed status via the Journal of Climate. That’s another story for another day.
www.globalclimatescam.com/…egory/copenhagen-treaty/
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www.actionaid.org.uk/doc_lib/farmgate_2002.pdf
Found exclusively on: Yahoo! Search
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