7 ms·

Climate Change Authority Admits Mistake

54 points by anuleczka 17y ago

CWuestefeld 17y ago
Taking this error, in which the peer-review process was circumvented, together with last year's revelations of Hadley scientists discussing the wholesale subversion of peer review, is very troubling. I'm not sure how to express this to show disgust with the putative "scientists" while only casting skepticism on their work (rather than outright rejection). But it would seem that they are so caught up in their agenda that they believe that the end justifies the means, and are willing to compromise their work and mislead the rest of the world in order to realize their goals. But I have to note that impeaching the source doesn't necessarily invalidate the conclusions. Still, it means that we must subject their claims to increasing levels of scrutiny.
- chrisb 17y ago
  Note that this claim was not in the "Summary for Policy Makers" nor the "Overall Synthesis Report", which is what the vast majority of people read (myself included, I haven't even tried to read the entire report). Therefore very few people will ever have seen the claim until now. I'm not trying to excuse the mistake, but its consequences may have been overstated.
  - waterlesscloud 17y ago
    That's simply not the case. The claim got widespread media coverage.
    - lutorm 17y ago
      I think his point is that it was not significant to the bottom-line conclusions of the report.
tjic 17y ago
Hopefully all of those who called anyone skeptical of AGW over the last few years "climate change denialists" (by extension from "Holocaust denialists") are now acknowledging that there WERE serious issues with the assertions all along, and are now apologizing for their rashness and intemperance. I wouldn't bet on it though.
- gjm11 17y ago
  If those people were claiming that there were no mistakes anywhere in the high-profile AGW literature, then they should certainly be apologizing. (But then, anyone claiming that should have been apologizing anyway; everything has mistakes, near enough.) If they were merely saying: there's a huge body of scientific work supporting AGW, and claims to the contrary are consistently found to be the result of error or dishonesty ... well, then, I don't see how this makes the slightest difference to that.
  - CWuestefeld 17y ago
    Much of the trumpeting over AGW has been about "consensus among the scientific community", as if scientists get to vote to decide what's true. We are now discovering that if there is, indeed, such a consensus, then it's partly due to derailing the literature (see Hadley) or selling to us media sources as if they were scientists doing real research. I think they've got a lot to apologize for, and they now have a lot of work to try and prove their views to a world that has every reason to be critical.
    - Retric 17y ago
      Why do you think that is the case?
    - lutorm 17y ago
      While it's true that you can't do science by consensus, it is legitimate to look at a range of studies and see where they agree. Those parts that most studies agree on can justifiably be called the "consensus among the scientific community". Your last paragraph simply isn't justified. Do you think any action or conclusion lives up to that standard? In particular, why do you think those that argue that AGW is not happening should be given more of a benefit of the doubt? AGW is the conclusion of applying simple physics to the problem. In my mind, if you are going to argue that it's not happening, you have much more justification to do.
lutorm 17y ago
The IPCC reports are thousands of pages, so it's not surprising that there are errors. You can find errors in a large fraction of scientific papers if you look hard enough. The relevant question is whether there are more errors in the papers that support the idea of global warming than those that don't. Just judging from what I've seen, the complete crackpot papers (like this one: http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161v4 http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161v4) are in the second category.
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  Perhaps. But the IPCC is sold (and mostly accepted) as a sort of bible of climate change science. The article you linked appears to me not to claim such broad authority, but to advocate skepticism. It seems to me like items in the first category need to be held to a higher standard. Indeed, the scientific method itself tells us that those putting forward a theory (such as AGW) bear the burden of proof.
  - ugh 17y ago
    >Perhaps. But the IPCC is sold (and mostly accepted) as a sort of bible of climate change science. Oh, come on. Really? Sure, most people won't question the IPCC. But most people also won't question other similar institutions. The real question is whether scientists feel that the IPCC is their bible. And I don't think they do.
    - yters 17y ago
      I read the FOIA feedback on the IPCC's report and it was full of really incredulous scientists' comments about the innacuracy and question begging nature of their report. To substantiate what I said, check in the documents folder: ipcc-tar-master.rtf ipcc-tar-master2.rtf
  - Retric 17y ago
    In the scientific communality IPCC is mostly viewed as reasonably accurate if watered down for political reasons.
  - 17y ago
teilo 17y ago
The real question here is: Does anyone still believe that the IPCC is a legitimate scientific panel? They are a political action committee with an agenda. Whether or not their agenda is legitimate is not the point. Good on them, however, for admitting the problem.
- chrisb 17y ago
  The real answer is: Yes
  - yters 17y ago
    I guess anyone who hasn't checked the FOIA docs. Otherwise, I can't see how any intellectually honest person can. Just briefly skim README.txt in the documents folder if you are skeptical. It's the programmer's journal detailing all the atrocities he ran across as he reengineered the datasets and climate models.
    - KirinDave 17y ago
      I have read the README.txt and I am not particularly surprised, nor should it shake anyone's belief in the consensus opinion. I guess if you're relatively uninformed and haven't been keeping up and you think in terms of "one line of evidence" then you might get a net negative opinion. But the boring truth is that there are numerous lines of evidence. If a few turn up sour or turn out to be poorly supported, the scientific process is to discard them (and this happens all the time in every branch of science, it's why things move slowly in research) and move on with the remaining lines of evidence. This is the model that most types scientific research follow: gather data, extrapolate, gather data and discard data, extrapolate, refine. Consider this: a bunch of aggressively anti-climate-change folks, like yourself, are constantly digging at the IPCC. To the point of engaging in international data theft to try and dig up dirt. They've been at this for a few years now. At the same time, scientists have been checking and double checking results, throwing out bad data and challenging AGW models at every turn. What do you have so far? 1. An overhyped case of data smoothing and normalizing for a specific set of data. All of the original data is recoverable (claims it was "lost" were misinterpretations, big shock), all the operations are now public and seem relatively benign. 2. Some occasional errors in source validation (which evidence so far has only produced a few isolated cases of). This is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. It means that people _are_ fact checking their sources. 3. A consensus that climate is going to get weirder before it gets warmer. This is the inevitable conclusion for any changing complex system: "It's complicated." Given the extreme paucity of data for some kind of climate conspiracy, I really don't see how someone can rationally arrive at the conclusion that the IPCC is corrupt in this regard. Who is paying them? The people with all the money are explicitly not happy about their findings. What's their agenda? Do you imagine them in a futuristic control center with C.H.A.O.S. uniforms, with Vega and M.Bison giving orders before they beat up married men and raise their children as assassins?
kevinholesh 17y ago
It seems like climate scientists are more occupied with manipulating the data to suit them rather than reporting the facts. Sample from some climate emails: "Ammann/Wahl - try and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with." Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704779704574553652849094482.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870477970457455...
- lutorm 17y ago
  Simple selection bias. It "seems" that way because there's no story to write about people just doing their work.
  - lutorm 17y ago
    And I'm being downmodded why? Maybe selection bias also isn't happening??
  - ajross 17y ago
    Exactly. Scandal leads. So we've got a war between "We're all going to drown!" and "AGW is a liberal conspiracy!". The demographic for "Maybe we should look seriously at cheap options for energy efficiency and carbon mitigation." is practically zero.
    - anamax 17y ago
      > The demographic for "Maybe we should look seriously at cheap options for energy efficiency and carbon mitigation." is practically zero. Actually, that demographic is huge. Folks would love cheaper energy. What they're being offered is more expensive energy and carbon mitigation.
      - ajross 17y ago
        Hah. I wish. We can barely get even the most pathetically meaningless measures through our governments. Tighter car efficiency standards are almost free. Better transit options are available for a tiny fraction of what we spend on highways. Aluminum recyling more than pays for itself in energy costs, etc... All of these ideas get fought tooth and nail by people who claim to be in the "center" of the debate. It's all a sad joke.
deleted 17y ago
[deleted]
roundsquare 17y ago
I guess this is as good a time as any to ask if people have good sources on both sides of the debate. I can search around but have trouble discerning credible sources from non-credible ones. Any links/book recommendations would be appreciated.
chromophore 17y ago
I notice some people above saying that it could be a mistake. I think it could be. But it is less likely that it was. I say that because Pachauri had been saying for a year that the Indian government was being arrogant by not agreeing to their "findings". And he rejected research such as this : http://moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/MoEF%20Discussion%20Paper%20_him.pdf http://moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/MoEF%20Discu... Compiled by people who have 3-4 decades of experience in Himalayan glaciology. Please do check that review paper. It is not easy to find.

54 points by anuleczka 17y ago

Taking this error, in which the peer-review process was circumvented, together with last year's revelations of Hadley scientists discussing the wholesale subversion of peer review, is very troubling. I'm not sure how to express this to show disgust with the putative "scientists" while only casting skepticism on their work (rather than outright rejection). But it would seem that they are so caught up in their agenda that they believe that the end justifies the means, and are willing to compromise their work and mislead the rest of the world in order to realize their goals. But I have to note that impeaching the source doesn't necessarily invalidate the conclusions. Still, it means that we must subject their claims to increasing levels of scrutiny.

chrisb 17y ago
Note that this claim was not in the "Summary for Policy Makers" nor the "Overall Synthesis Report", which is what the vast majority of people read (myself included, I haven't even tried to read the entire report). Therefore very few people will ever have seen the claim until now. I'm not trying to excuse the mistake, but its consequences may have been overstated.
- waterlesscloud 17y ago
  That's simply not the case. The claim got widespread media coverage.
  - lutorm 17y ago
    I think his point is that it was not significant to the bottom-line conclusions of the report.

tjic 17y ago

Hopefully all of those who called anyone skeptical of AGW over the last few years "climate change denialists" (by extension from "Holocaust denialists") are now acknowledging that there WERE serious issues with the assertions all along, and are now apologizing for their rashness and intemperance. I wouldn't bet on it though.

gjm11 17y ago
If those people were claiming that there were no mistakes anywhere in the high-profile AGW literature, then they should certainly be apologizing. (But then, anyone claiming that should have been apologizing anyway; everything has mistakes, near enough.) If they were merely saying: there's a huge body of scientific work supporting AGW, and claims to the contrary are consistently found to be the result of error or dishonesty ... well, then, I don't see how this makes the slightest difference to that.
- CWuestefeld 17y ago
  Much of the trumpeting over AGW has been about "consensus among the scientific community", as if scientists get to vote to decide what's true. We are now discovering that if there is, indeed, such a consensus, then it's partly due to derailing the literature (see Hadley) or selling to us media sources as if they were scientists doing real research. I think they've got a lot to apologize for, and they now have a lot of work to try and prove their views to a world that has every reason to be critical.
  - Retric 17y ago
    Why do you think that is the case?
  - lutorm 17y ago
    While it's true that you can't do science by consensus, it is legitimate to look at a range of studies and see where they agree. Those parts that most studies agree on can justifiably be called the "consensus among the scientific community". Your last paragraph simply isn't justified. Do you think any action or conclusion lives up to that standard? In particular, why do you think those that argue that AGW is not happening should be given more of a benefit of the doubt? AGW is the conclusion of applying simple physics to the problem. In my mind, if you are going to argue that it's not happening, you have much more justification to do.

lutorm 17y ago

The IPCC reports are thousands of pages, so it's not surprising that there are errors. You can find errors in a large fraction of scientific papers if you look hard enough. The relevant question is whether there are more errors in the papers that support the idea of global warming than those that don't. Just judging from what I've seen, the complete crackpot papers (like this one: http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161v4 http://arxiv.org/abs/0707.1161v4) are in the second category.

CWuestefeld 17y ago
Perhaps. But the IPCC is sold (and mostly accepted) as a sort of bible of climate change science. The article you linked appears to me not to claim such broad authority, but to advocate skepticism. It seems to me like items in the first category need to be held to a higher standard. Indeed, the scientific method itself tells us that those putting forward a theory (such as AGW) bear the burden of proof.
- ugh 17y ago
  >Perhaps. But the IPCC is sold (and mostly accepted) as a sort of bible of climate change science. Oh, come on. Really? Sure, most people won't question the IPCC. But most people also won't question other similar institutions. The real question is whether scientists feel that the IPCC is their bible. And I don't think they do.
  - yters 17y ago
    I read the FOIA feedback on the IPCC's report and it was full of really incredulous scientists' comments about the innacuracy and question begging nature of their report. To substantiate what I said, check in the documents folder: ipcc-tar-master.rtf ipcc-tar-master2.rtf
- Retric 17y ago
  In the scientific communality IPCC is mostly viewed as reasonably accurate if watered down for political reasons.
- 17y ago

teilo 17y ago

The real question here is: Does anyone still believe that the IPCC is a legitimate scientific panel? They are a political action committee with an agenda. Whether or not their agenda is legitimate is not the point. Good on them, however, for admitting the problem.

chrisb 17y ago
The real answer is: Yes
- yters 17y ago
  I guess anyone who hasn't checked the FOIA docs. Otherwise, I can't see how any intellectually honest person can. Just briefly skim README.txt in the documents folder if you are skeptical. It's the programmer's journal detailing all the atrocities he ran across as he reengineered the datasets and climate models.
  - KirinDave 17y ago
    I have read the README.txt and I am not particularly surprised, nor should it shake anyone's belief in the consensus opinion. I guess if you're relatively uninformed and haven't been keeping up and you think in terms of "one line of evidence" then you might get a net negative opinion. But the boring truth is that there are numerous lines of evidence. If a few turn up sour or turn out to be poorly supported, the scientific process is to discard them (and this happens all the time in every branch of science, it's why things move slowly in research) and move on with the remaining lines of evidence. This is the model that most types scientific research follow: gather data, extrapolate, gather data and discard data, extrapolate, refine. Consider this: a bunch of aggressively anti-climate-change folks, like yourself, are constantly digging at the IPCC. To the point of engaging in international data theft to try and dig up dirt. They've been at this for a few years now. At the same time, scientists have been checking and double checking results, throwing out bad data and challenging AGW models at every turn. What do you have so far? 1. An overhyped case of data smoothing and normalizing for a specific set of data. All of the original data is recoverable (claims it was "lost" were misinterpretations, big shock), all the operations are now public and seem relatively benign. 2. Some occasional errors in source validation (which evidence so far has only produced a few isolated cases of). This is not a bad thing, it's a good thing. It means that people _are_ fact checking their sources. 3. A consensus that climate is going to get weirder before it gets warmer. This is the inevitable conclusion for any changing complex system: "It's complicated." Given the extreme paucity of data for some kind of climate conspiracy, I really don't see how someone can rationally arrive at the conclusion that the IPCC is corrupt in this regard. Who is paying them? The people with all the money are explicitly not happy about their findings. What's their agenda? Do you imagine them in a futuristic control center with C.H.A.O.S. uniforms, with Vega and M.Bison giving orders before they beat up married men and raise their children as assassins?

kevinholesh 17y ago

It seems like climate scientists are more occupied with manipulating the data to suit them rather than reporting the facts. Sample from some climate emails: "Ammann/Wahl - try and change the Received date! Don't give those skeptics something to amuse themselves with." Source: http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704779704574553652849094482.html http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142405274870477970457455...

lutorm 17y ago
Simple selection bias. It "seems" that way because there's no story to write about people just doing their work.
- lutorm 17y ago
  And I'm being downmodded why? Maybe selection bias also isn't happening??
- ajross 17y ago
  Exactly. Scandal leads. So we've got a war between "We're all going to drown!" and "AGW is a liberal conspiracy!". The demographic for "Maybe we should look seriously at cheap options for energy efficiency and carbon mitigation." is practically zero.
  - anamax 17y ago
    > The demographic for "Maybe we should look seriously at cheap options for energy efficiency and carbon mitigation." is practically zero. Actually, that demographic is huge. Folks would love cheaper energy. What they're being offered is more expensive energy and carbon mitigation.
    - ajross 17y ago
      Hah. I wish. We can barely get even the most pathetically meaningless measures through our governments. Tighter car efficiency standards are almost free. Better transit options are available for a tiny fraction of what we spend on highways. Aluminum recyling more than pays for itself in energy costs, etc... All of these ideas get fought tooth and nail by people who claim to be in the "center" of the debate. It's all a sad joke.

deleted 17y ago

[deleted]

roundsquare 17y ago

I guess this is as good a time as any to ask if people have good sources on both sides of the debate. I can search around but have trouble discerning credible sources from non-credible ones. Any links/book recommendations would be appreciated.

chromophore 17y ago

I notice some people above saying that it could be a mistake. I think it could be. But it is less likely that it was. I say that because Pachauri had been saying for a year that the Indian government was being arrogant by not agreeing to their "findings". And he rejected research such as this : http://moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/MoEF%20Discussion%20Paper%20_him.pdf http://moef.nic.in/downloads/public-information/MoEF%20Discu... Compiled by people who have 3-4 decades of experience in Himalayan glaciology. Please do check that review paper. It is not easy to find.