4 ms·

Refutation of current media storm against IPCC

24 points by chrisb 17y ago

chrisb 17y ago
What action is it possible to take over some of the (deliberatly?) incorrect/inaccurate journalism? Can a legal challenge be made? Or is there any other effective way to stop the lies? I'm not trying to suggest that honest debate be stifled; but the continual use of 'facts' that are wrong, and people being mis-quoted or quoted out of context, is not helpful.
- patio11 17y ago
  Conducting debate by lawsuit is not a very good idea when you believe that the other side is composed of well-funded special interest groups. I mean, its a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but that particular reason is one you should find appealing. If I'm a corporate stooge for SaudiExxoFoxlican Party it is highly likely I can afford to outspend you virtuous protectors of truth on lawyers, and it is highly possible that given a debatable point of fact I could litigate you into penury.
- jerf 17y ago
  You are advocating that the government, in the form of the judicial system, be given complete power over what the press prints. This is a cure worse than the disease. Even putting aside the question of the ability of the legal system to actually determine truth. I'm not even sure which side you're referring to. At this point assuming "realclimate.com" has clean hands when it comes to "lies" requires a rather large helping of blind trust, IMHO.
patrickgzill 17y ago
Realclimate got caught with their hand in the cookie jar when the original "CRU" emails got out, IIRC. They were offering carte-blanche moderation power on the site to one side only in the debate.
- Zarkonnen 17y ago
  Surely the question to ask here is whether the analysis in the linked article stands up. What they are saying is that there were indeed errors in the report, but these were minor errors of the kind you can find in any report hundreds of pages long, compiled by many people: misunderstood statistics and some mismatch between sections prepared by different people.
  - patio11 17y ago
    I think, major irony alert, they're using the weakest claims against them ("the exact percentage of the Netherlands under sea level matters" -- seriously, who cares) to sweep the most damning claims against them under the rug. This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”. That is a lovely two-step there: this keruffle about a footnote is largely meaningless so it is essentially meaningless that the head of one of the most prestigious research institutions in the world successfully destroyed evidence rather than handing it over to opposed investigators.
    - nice1 17y ago
      Exactly right: the behaviour of the CRU is anti-scientific to the core. To deny access to data and the analysis on which their claims are made is the antithesis of science, it is more like religious zealotry in the worst sense of the phrase. This is the reason why climategate is a lot more than a media storm.
      - lutorm 17y ago
        You can't blame the IPCC for the behavior of the CRU group, though.
    - Zarkonnen 17y ago
      'sweep the most damning claims against them under the rug' Which claims are those? One of the problems with this debate is that both sides keep on going "but that's not the main issue, it's something else" and then don't specify what the main issue is.
lionhearted 17y ago
> The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva > The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports. There's your consensus - 10 full time staff and many volunteers. Doesn't it seem like you'd have obvious selection bias with who would volunteer for the IPCC? We're talking about the most passionately pro-environmentalism people in the world. People that would make the argument, "Even if global warming doesn't exist, we still need to do something." Yet when an untrained amateur tries his hand at it and finds the numbers don't work, he's a "denier". I've seen enough decent analysis that goes against the general IPCC position by engineers, programmers, and other people with general science backgrounds who aren't specifically climate scientists. The most damning was that the algorithms that produced the hockey stick curve created the same scary graph with red noise in over 90% of simulations. So, random temperature data showed in 90% of cases that imminent global warming catastrophe was coming. Despite presenting things sensibly and respectfully, these amateurs often get compared to Fox News or other such ad hominem. Sure, there's knuckleheads on both sides, but you've got severe selection bias in favor of who is working at the IPCC, and intelligent amateurs who respectfully produce data or show that the numbers don't work are shouted down, compared to Fox, or compared to fundamentalist religious people.
- lutorm 17y ago
  "Doesn't it seem like you'd have obvious selection bias with who would volunteer for the IPCC?" Yes it does: Those who care about its conclusion. I don't understand why you think someone who thinks climate change is not happening should be less likely to volunteer, given the impact of the report. As the article said: the IPCC is only assessing and compiling results of climate research. Those "untrained amateurs" that you talk about, are they "assessing and compiling", or are they doing their own research? If they are doing research, then they should not be compared to the IPCC but to one of the thousands of references that constitute the sources of the assessment report. And if their results are really believable, then hopefully they will be published and be one of the sources used for AR5.
lionhearted 17y ago
Oh wow, this is even worse: > The IPCC does not carry out primary research, and hence any mistakes in the IPCC reports do not imply that any climate research itself is wrong. A reference to a poor report or an editorial lapse by IPCC authors obviously does not undermine climate science. Any mistakes in the IPCC reports does not imply that any climate research itself is wrong? Doesn't that mean that anything presented in IPCC reports does not imply that any climate research is right either? You can't have it both ways...
- patio11 17y ago
  At the bottom it is a marketing problem. See, if you describe global warming as a robust ongoing academic debate, then when you start proposing seriously expensive regulations to take it on, the opposing party will say "Whoa, whoa -- all of these impressive PhDs think it isn't really happening, so how about we wait a while to see how things shake out and save the money?" So the decision was made that the robust academic debate couldn't be allowed to exist, because that would provide cover to The Bad Guys (TM). Thus there needed to be a Consensus on climate, something which could be referred to as the authoritative Voice of Science. It needed to be international, both because science is international and because a major portion of the intended office of the argument keeps offices in Europe as opposed to America. (Global warming is pretty much a dead letter elsewhere else: Africa is too poor to care, China and India are getting too rich on high-polluting industries to care about the issue except to the extent it allows them to wring concessions out of the First World, etc) Hence, the IPCC. Now, the IPCC doesn't matter two hills of beans for science. The papers say what they say. But the IPCC, as the official Voice of Science, has quite a bit of sway in corridors of power, such as European governments and your local newspaper's editorial board. The ready made The Science Is Settled narrative worked at what it was supposed to do: marginalized as "deniers" and deviants anyone who questioned The Science, and paved the way for expensive interventions against climate change. The problem with marketing, though, is that eventually you have to deliver on what you're selling... and delivering on infallibility is pretty hard. Perhaps recognizing this, some scientists (like the illustrious Phil Jones, climatology heavyweight and editor of a section in the last IPCC report) have gone to some lengths to avoid being seen as losing on issues of fairly minor import. And, as so often happens, it turns out the coverup did more damage than the original lapse. I mean, paleoclimatology: hard to understand. Statistics behind hockey sticks: hard to understand. Impropriety of deleting data to avoid other scientists from seeing it: not too hard to understand.

24 points by chrisb 17y ago

What action is it possible to take over some of the (deliberatly?) incorrect/inaccurate journalism? Can a legal challenge be made? Or is there any other effective way to stop the lies? I'm not trying to suggest that honest debate be stifled; but the continual use of 'facts' that are wrong, and people being mis-quoted or quoted out of context, is not helpful.

patio11 17y ago
Conducting debate by lawsuit is not a very good idea when you believe that the other side is composed of well-funded special interest groups. I mean, its a bad idea for a lot of reasons, but that particular reason is one you should find appealing. If I'm a corporate stooge for SaudiExxoFoxlican Party it is highly likely I can afford to outspend you virtuous protectors of truth on lawyers, and it is highly possible that given a debatable point of fact I could litigate you into penury.
jerf 17y ago
You are advocating that the government, in the form of the judicial system, be given complete power over what the press prints. This is a cure worse than the disease. Even putting aside the question of the ability of the legal system to actually determine truth. I'm not even sure which side you're referring to. At this point assuming "realclimate.com" has clean hands when it comes to "lies" requires a rather large helping of blind trust, IMHO.

patrickgzill 17y ago

Realclimate got caught with their hand in the cookie jar when the original "CRU" emails got out, IIRC. They were offering carte-blanche moderation power on the site to one side only in the debate.

Zarkonnen 17y ago
Surely the question to ask here is whether the analysis in the linked article stands up. What they are saying is that there were indeed errors in the report, but these were minor errors of the kind you can find in any report hundreds of pages long, compiled by many people: misunderstood statistics and some mismatch between sections prepared by different people.
- patio11 17y ago
  I think, major irony alert, they're using the weakest claims against them ("the exact percentage of the Netherlands under sea level matters" -- seriously, who cares) to sweep the most damning claims against them under the rug. This has some similarity to the CRU email theft, where precious little was discovered from among thousands of emails, but a few sentences were plucked out of context, deliberately misinterpreted (like “hide the decline”) and then hyped into “Climategate”. That is a lovely two-step there: this keruffle about a footnote is largely meaningless so it is essentially meaningless that the head of one of the most prestigious research institutions in the world successfully destroyed evidence rather than handing it over to opposed investigators.
  - nice1 17y ago
    Exactly right: the behaviour of the CRU is anti-scientific to the core. To deny access to data and the analysis on which their claims are made is the antithesis of science, it is more like religious zealotry in the worst sense of the phrase. This is the reason why climategate is a lot more than a media storm.
    - lutorm 17y ago
      You can't blame the IPCC for the behavior of the CRU group, though.
  - Zarkonnen 17y ago
    'sweep the most damning claims against them under the rug' Which claims are those? One of the problems with this debate is that both sides keep on going "but that's not the main issue, it's something else" and then don't specify what the main issue is.

lionhearted 17y ago

> The IPCC is not, as many people seem to think, a large organization. In fact, it has only 10 full-time staff in its secretariat at the World Meteorological Organization in Geneva > The actual work of the IPCC is done by unpaid volunteers – thousands of scientists at universities and research institutes around the world who contribute as authors or reviewers to the completion of the IPCC reports. There's your consensus - 10 full time staff and many volunteers. Doesn't it seem like you'd have obvious selection bias with who would volunteer for the IPCC? We're talking about the most passionately pro-environmentalism people in the world. People that would make the argument, "Even if global warming doesn't exist, we still need to do something." Yet when an untrained amateur tries his hand at it and finds the numbers don't work, he's a "denier". I've seen enough decent analysis that goes against the general IPCC position by engineers, programmers, and other people with general science backgrounds who aren't specifically climate scientists. The most damning was that the algorithms that produced the hockey stick curve created the same scary graph with red noise in over 90% of simulations. So, random temperature data showed in 90% of cases that imminent global warming catastrophe was coming. Despite presenting things sensibly and respectfully, these amateurs often get compared to Fox News or other such ad hominem. Sure, there's knuckleheads on both sides, but you've got severe selection bias in favor of who is working at the IPCC, and intelligent amateurs who respectfully produce data or show that the numbers don't work are shouted down, compared to Fox, or compared to fundamentalist religious people.

lutorm 17y ago
"Doesn't it seem like you'd have obvious selection bias with who would volunteer for the IPCC?" Yes it does: Those who care about its conclusion. I don't understand why you think someone who thinks climate change is not happening should be less likely to volunteer, given the impact of the report. As the article said: the IPCC is only assessing and compiling results of climate research. Those "untrained amateurs" that you talk about, are they "assessing and compiling", or are they doing their own research? If they are doing research, then they should not be compared to the IPCC but to one of the thousands of references that constitute the sources of the assessment report. And if their results are really believable, then hopefully they will be published and be one of the sources used for AR5.

lionhearted 17y ago

Oh wow, this is even worse: > The IPCC does not carry out primary research, and hence any mistakes in the IPCC reports do not imply that any climate research itself is wrong. A reference to a poor report or an editorial lapse by IPCC authors obviously does not undermine climate science. Any mistakes in the IPCC reports does not imply that any climate research itself is wrong? Doesn't that mean that anything presented in IPCC reports does not imply that any climate research is right either? You can't have it both ways...

patio11 17y ago
At the bottom it is a marketing problem. See, if you describe global warming as a robust ongoing academic debate, then when you start proposing seriously expensive regulations to take it on, the opposing party will say "Whoa, whoa -- all of these impressive PhDs think it isn't really happening, so how about we wait a while to see how things shake out and save the money?" So the decision was made that the robust academic debate couldn't be allowed to exist, because that would provide cover to The Bad Guys (TM). Thus there needed to be a Consensus on climate, something which could be referred to as the authoritative Voice of Science. It needed to be international, both because science is international and because a major portion of the intended office of the argument keeps offices in Europe as opposed to America. (Global warming is pretty much a dead letter elsewhere else: Africa is too poor to care, China and India are getting too rich on high-polluting industries to care about the issue except to the extent it allows them to wring concessions out of the First World, etc) Hence, the IPCC. Now, the IPCC doesn't matter two hills of beans for science. The papers say what they say. But the IPCC, as the official Voice of Science, has quite a bit of sway in corridors of power, such as European governments and your local newspaper's editorial board. The ready made The Science Is Settled narrative worked at what it was supposed to do: marginalized as "deniers" and deviants anyone who questioned The Science, and paved the way for expensive interventions against climate change. The problem with marketing, though, is that eventually you have to deliver on what you're selling... and delivering on infallibility is pretty hard. Perhaps recognizing this, some scientists (like the illustrious Phil Jones, climatology heavyweight and editor of a section in the last IPCC report) have gone to some lengths to avoid being seen as losing on issues of fairly minor import. And, as so often happens, it turns out the coverup did more damage than the original lapse. I mean, paleoclimatology: hard to understand. Statistics behind hockey sticks: hard to understand. Impropriety of deleting data to avoid other scientists from seeing it: not too hard to understand.