Refutation of current media storm against IPCC
realclimate.org
realclimate.org
They were offering carte-blanche moderation power on the site to one side only in the debate.
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.
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.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
> 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...
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.
Consider: hot dogs are sold in packs of 12, and hot dog buns are sold in packs of 8. When you run out of hot dog buns you have hot dogs left over and buy more buns. When you run out of hot dogs, you have buns left over so you buy more hot dogs.
Somehow the makers of hot dogs and hot dog buns manage to get this done without decoder rings, secret handshakes, ominous chanting, or ritual sacrifice.
(see also http://xkcd.com/140/)
The other problem with your hot dog system is that it's not a conspiracy theory. It was quite likely that the actual arrangement happened entirely by accident. Once there, the manufacturers just decided it wasn't in their best interests (profit) to change. To make the same argument about AGW you would have to argue that there is a huge benefit to climatology supporting AGW -- enough to not only convince the academic departments of every major university to go along with it, but also some kind of silencing of the morally grounded climatologists. Instead it seems that disproving the AGW theory would prove quite a nice feather in the cap of any recently hired associate professor at a major university.
I'm not saying that all of this is impossible. What I am saying is that this requires extraordinary evidence for such an extraordinary claim.
If the IPCC wrote that elephants can fly, that would not have any impact on the state of climate research or on the state of elephants. It would just mean that the IPCC report was wrong.
Mistakes in the IPCC report only means the conclusions of the IPCC report could be wrong (if they are bad enough). It can never alter the state of the studies that the IPCC references. They can be right or wrong just like any other studies.
And the article posted makes a pretty convincing case that these mistakes were not in any way central to the conclusions of the IPCC.