I guess if you polled Jim Jones’s Georgetown contingent about drinking poisoned Kool Ade they would all say it was a good idea. In a similar vein, if you polled 11 authors of the Summary Report for Policy Makers, a part of the IPCC Report on Climate Change, they would all agree that scary things are going to happen because of man-made global warming. Reuters did just that and sends it out as NEWS!!! And the 11, by gum, were prepared to provide scary stories that would even outdo Al Gore.
The Summary, by the way, was written to match political needs and was completed before completion of the scientific part of the IPCC Report. In fact the science part had to be modified to match the already written Summary. This should provide extra confidence that these 11 are dispassionate observers with no preconceived beliefs.
Read the Reuters poll here:
The New York Times did a similar story. The idea was to see if “tipping points” could be identified and defined. Well we all know about tipping points because Prince Charles has one. His tipping point happens about 100 months from now. But then it is not too specific and I don’t guess a lot of the AGWers are jumping on the Prince’s bandwagon. My favorite part of the NYT article is this quote:
“There are real tipping points out there, and they might be politically useful at first, but if you’re too specific about particular thresholds that’s a quick trip to lost credibility,” said Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford University who said he could point back to some overly precise climate predictions of his own in the 1970’s as evidence.”
So, the message is to say there are tipping points but don’t tie yourself down with specifics. This good advice needs to be passed on to those who every now and then predict the end of the world.
You can read the article
Climate Change Sanity 