Category Archives: AGW

Further evidence that the IPCC should be disbanded is the extent of non-peer reviewed literature that supports the “findings” in Assessment Report 4 (AR-4).  A team of people  (43 Citizen Authors) from 12 countries participated in a review of AR-4.   And they found that 21 of the 44 chapters that make up AR-4 had flunking grades.  The Non-consensus.org blog supplied the following summary and table:

United Nations countries belong to an organization called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which publishes a report every six years. Often referred to as the “climate bible” the latest one was released in 2007 and is relied on by governments around the world. Billions of dollars are spent on national and international policies based on its findings. Judges consult it when trying cases. Scholars and journalists cite it thousands of times a year.

The IPCC report contains 44 chapters and is nearly 3,000 pages long. Written by people organized into three teams – Working Group 1, 2 and 3 – it consists of three smaller reports bundled into one.

This Citizen Audit focused its attention on the peer-reviewed literature claim. A team of 43 volunteers from 12 countries examined the list of references at the end of each chapter. We sorted these references into two groups – articles published in peer-reviewed academic journals and other references. (Non-peer-reviewed material is often called “grey literature”.)

21 out of 44 chapters contain so few peer-reviewed references that the IPCC received an F. The IPCC relied on peer-reviewed literature less than 60 percent of the time in these chapters.

5,587 references in the IPCC report were not peer-reviewed. Among these documents are press releases, newspaper and magazine articles, discussion papers, MA and PhD theses, working papers, and advocacy literature published by environmental groups.  To read the full report click here.

A look at the details indicates that Working Group 1—PHYSICAL SCIENCE BASIS, got all of the “A’s” and 3 of the 5 “B’s”.     Although they did not meet the standard that EVERYTHING was peer-reviewed literature, they came by far the closest to that standard of the three Working Groups.  We noted in a previous blog that the Oxburgh Committee reviewing the CRU fiasco had excused the CRU scientists saying that they may have made mistakes, but it was the IPCC AR-4 authors that put in the temperature exaggerations.  However, the Coordinating Lead Authors for the WG-1, Chapter (3), Observations:  Surface and Atmospheric Climate Change were none other than Phillip Jones and Kevin Trenberth.  Those two gentlemen are featured prominently in the Climategate leaked e-mail and this puts to lie the Oxburgh Committee excuses.

WG-2— IMPACTS, ADAPTATION AND VULNERABILITY had 0 “A’s”, 2 “B’s”, 5 “C’s”, 3 “D’s” and 10 “F’s”.

WG-3—MITIGATION OF CLIMATE CHANGE had no “A’s or B’s”, 1 “C”, 1 “D” and 11 “F’s”.

The Summary For Policy Makers was loosely based upon the AR-4.   The juicy part for the media was the terrible things that were going to happen to the Earth if CO2 emissions were not brought under control.  And most of this came from the failing-grade WG-2 and WG-3.

See also  The IPCC Must Go-Part 3

The IPCC Must Go-Part 2

The IPCC Must Go-Part 1

Cbdakota

Before we get back to the task of showing why the IPCC must go, lets looks at the Weekly Standard’s takedown of the AGW climate campaign.

The Weekly Standard’s posting  is titled “In Denial-The meltdown of the climate campaign.  It is a tour de force by Steven Hayward.  It is comprehensive at some six pages long. I have selected some of the notable sections for you:

The U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), hitherto the gold standard in climate science, is under fire for shoddy work and facing calls for a serious shakeup. The U.S. Climate Action Partnership, the self-serving coalition of environmentalists and big business hoping to create a carbon cartel, is falling apart in the wake of the collapse of any prospect of enacting cap and trade in Congress. Meanwhile, the climate campaign’s fallback plan to have the EPA regulate greenhouse gas emissions through the cumbersome Clean Air Act is generating bipartisan opposition.

Al Gore is in for some scathing comments:

Al Gore was conspicuously missing in action before surfacing with a long article in the New York Times on February 28, reiterating his familiar parade of horribles: The sea level will rise! Monster storms! Climate refugees in the hundreds of millions! Political chaos the world over! It was the rhetorical equivalent of stamping his feet and saying “It is too so!” In a sign of how dramatic the reversal of fortune has been for the climate campaign, it is now James Inhofe, the leading climate skeptic in the Senate, who is eager to have Gore testify before Congress.

How are the AGWers holding up in this storm of criticism?

The rout has opened up serious divisions within the formerly closed ranks of the climate campaign. Before Climategate, expressing skepticism about catastrophic global warming typically got the hefty IPCC report thrown in your face along with the mantra that “2,500 of the world’s top scientists all agree” about climate change. Now the IPCC is being disavowed like a Mission Impossible team with its cover blown.

And:

As Gore put it in his February 28 Times article, “the overwhelming consensus on global warming remains unchanged.” I note in passing that the 2007 Working Group I report uses the terms “uncertain” or “uncertainty” more than 1,300 times in its 987 pages, including what it identified as 54 “key uncertainties” limiting our mastery of climate prediction.

This central pillar of the climate campaign is unlikely to survive much longer, and each repetition of the “science-is-settled” mantra inflicts more damage on the credibility of the climate science community. The scientist at the center of the Climategate scandal at East Anglia University, Phil (“hide the decline”) Jones dealt the science-is-settled narrative a huge blow with his candid admission in a BBC interview that his surface temperature data are in such disarray they probably cannot be verified or replicated, that the medieval warm period may have been as warm as today, and that he agrees that there has been no statistically significant global warming for the last 15 years—all three points that climate campaigners have been bitterly contesting. And Jones specifically disavowed the “science-is-settled” slogan.

Are the skeptics at fault?

The climate campaign camp followers are exhausting their invective against skeptics. Harvard’s Jeffrey Sachs wrote in the Guardian that climate skeptics are akin to tobacco scientists—some of the same people, in fact, though he gave no names and offered no facts to establish such a claim. In the Los Angeles Times Bill McKibben compared climate skeptics to O.J. Simpson’s “dream team” of defense attorneys able to twist incontrovertible scientific evidence. Not to be outdone, Senator Bernie Sanders (Socialist-VT) compared climate skeptics to appeasers of Hitler in the 1930s, a comparison, to be sure, that Al Gore has been making since the early 1990s, but Sanders delivered it with his patented popping-neck-veins style that makes you worry for his health.

In addition to being a sign of desperation, these ad hominem arguments from the climate campaigners also make clear which camp is truly guilty of anti-intellectualism. Gore and the rest of the chorus simply will not discuss any of the scientific anomalies and defects in the conventional climate narrative that scientists such as Christy have pointed out to the IPCC.

What about “Apocalypse Fatigue”:

The lingering question is whether the collapse of the climate campaign is also a sign of a broader collapse in public enthusiasm for environmentalism in general. Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, two of the more thoughtful and independent-minded figures in the environmental movement, have been warning their green friends that the public has reached the point of “apocalypse fatigue.” They’ve been met with denunciations from the climate campaign enforcers for their heresy. The climate campaign has no idea that it is on the cusp of becoming as ludicrous and forlorn as the World -Esperanto Association.

This is really a good read and you can see it in its entirety by clicking here.

Cbdakota

It is satisfying to see the leaders of the Anthropogenic Global Warming (AGW) theory discussing what should be done about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in the wake of the scandals surrounding that organization.   Unfortunately, all they think is needed is a slight tweak here and another there.

What is it that they do not understand? The IPCC is irreparably broken. The IPCC report conclusions are based on science produced by fabulist masquerading as scientists and false prophets using their unproven computer forecasts. The foregoing are the people in charge of the IPCC input and output from the IPCC and should never be trusted again.

Next, the United Nations (UN) has demonstrated it isn’t an organization that can be trusted to provide impartial, honest leadership.   For example, following the expulsion of Iraq from Kuwait,  the Oil for Food program was designed to  allow Iraq to sell just enough oil to provide for the medical and food needs of its citizens.    The UN people in charge of the program siphoned off vast amounts of money for themselves and further allowed the moneys Iraq did receive to be used to line the pocket of Saddam Hussein.   We are now becoming aware of how misreporting of data in the 2007 IPCC climate report AR4 has been used to scam some funds.  The gold mine awaits these grifters, if they can control the use of carbon fuels and the sales of carbon credits.

Many national governments are using the global warming “threat” as a way to grab power.  The result of the cap and trade programs is really to tax and regulate.  This is the goal of every socialist society.  Others are using it to extract money from the developed nations.  On the surface most of these nations are asking for aid from the developed nations in the name of helping their people but history has shown that these despots usually keep the money  for themselves.  Neither of these groups necessarily believes the theory of man-made global warming, but they do like what the theory will allow them to do.  When asked about the details of the theory after the House passed their version of cap and trade last year,  Henry Waxman, Chairman of the Committee sponsoring the bill said he did not know anything about it but he said that did not matter to him.

The national governments are the enablers.  The last time I looked, the US alone had funded global warming studies to the tune of $5 billion.

So the IPCC must go.   It must be completely exposed for the hoax it has perpetuated.   Only then can the study of global climate be restarted having the appropriate protocols and controls so that  conclusions  based on the science, can be accepted with confidence.

In the next posting, we will show how the global temperature data has been manipulated to the point where it should not be accepted as proof of anything except blatant misrepresentation of facts.

Cbdakota