Climate Corruption

[lynnvinc]

Hi Lynn,

Why zactly do you think the IPCC is the gold standard?

It is the gold standard re the science of AGW, tho I have my own criticisms of it (see at the bottom).

It is based on the top climate science from around the world. Considering that it is put together by scientists and scholars who are doing it in their free time and for free, it is absolutely amazing there are not more mistakes than what has been found. You should read it sometime and see all the work that was put into it – plus all the work that went into all the myriad of studies they cite. You’ll see how amazing it is.

For me It is a great source for finding and going to the original articles. That’s how I found the glacier mistake…and sort of thought it was a mistake bec I’d been in contact with climate scientists around 2005-6 (before AR4 came out) re a futuristic screenplay I was writing, and asked them when they thought the sea would rise (incl glaciers melt) to 60 meters in a worst-case scenario, and they said it would take many centuries (can’t remember exactly what they said, only that I set my story around 2700). My sense when reading the 2035 date was that it seemed wrong, but since I’m not an expert I really didn’t know for sure it was wrong (apparently the person who make the mistake is not a glaciologist, so he probably didn’t have a clue his sources were wrong – I’m thinking it may have been based on one glacier under study, maybe a small one, could be melted away by 2035, which someone then extrapolated to all glaciers). When I saw they had used grey lit I was sort of surprised bec I thought only they could only use peer-reviewed lit, but later learned that was permissible in WGII - Impact chapters, but not WGI - Science chapters. And as I mentioned, the synthesis reports by humanitarian and environmental orgs are usually top quality, themselves based on peer-reviewed lit.

A year later from my reading (about 2 years after AR4 had come out!!!) the mistake was finally discovered by a glaciologist. I was absolutely shocked to my gourd that no one, NO ONE, except me (and maybe a few others), had read the report about impacts on Asia. NO ONE CARED ABOUT ASIA. That was my reaction, and still is. That is the important take-away message from glaciergate.

To err is human. I find nothing wrong with errors in such a massive report. I make errors, and I suspect you do too. What is shocking is that it took so long for them to find the error, because NO ONE WAS INTERESTED IN READING ABOUT AGW IMPACTS ON ASIA. NO ONE. That is the shocker.

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RE my criticisms of the IPCC reports:

Science is very reticient and conservative, because scientists strive to avoid the FALSE POSITIVE of making untrue claims, usually requiring 95% confidence before making a claim. They cannot be “the boy who called wolf” or no one will believe them again, so their individual studies are very cautious in any claims, and full of caveats, etc.

When you put a bunch of cautious scientists and scientific studies together in a big report like the IPCC reports, it’s like “caution squared” - or the least common denominator of the issues and problems re AGW. I’m sure most of their errors are that they UNDERESTIMATE the issue of AGW. Those will be found out when we suffer repercussions from AGW that exceed what they have projected.

Unlike scientists, we laypersons and policy-makers should be concerned about avoiding the FALSE NEGATIVE of failing to address a true catastrophe and disaster. We cannot afford to be “the villagers who got eaten by the wolf.” We buy insurance, we don’t not feed our children with something that even has 50% confidence that it will harm or kill them. Even if there is only 50% confidence that the lump is cancerous, we want to have it removed or treated; we don’t want to wait around for 95% confidence. Our caution is on the side of “expecting the worst” and prudently striving to avoid it. Since our immortal souls are also in jeopardy if we fail to address the potential harms of AGW – which we have been duly warned about in scientific reports and synthesis reports, like the IPCC – the matter is all the more serious.

So when I read the IPCC, I think the situtation is at least a bad as what’s written there, and probably much much worse. I think pablum pablum. If they’re saying X, then it must be 2X.

 

[Kilbourne]

It is based on the top climate science from around the world.

Hi Lynn,

Hope you had a blessed and joyful Easter.

How zactly do we know it is based on the top climate science from around the world?

One big reason why I doubt this is BIAS: the evident bias in the folks that organized the IPCC, the bias built into its charter, the bias of the present and previous IPPC honchos, and the bias of its authors and other participants.

 

[lynnvinc]

Hi Lynn,

Hope you had a blessed and joyful Easter.

How zactly do we know it is based on the top climate science from around the world?

One big reason why I doubt this is BIAS: the evident bias in the folks that organized the IPCC, the bias built into its charter, the bias of the present and previous IPPC honchos, and the bias of its authors and other participants.

Bec is based on peer-reviewed, top-tier science journal articles and working climate scientists who publish in those journals.

Peer-review (which is a brutal process) is a necessary step to establishing scientific “facts” (that which is accepted as science). Most of the “skeptical climate science” comes from various blogs, talk shows, and websites (many of which that freely slander and lie), which no professor would accept as sources for establish facts in term papers, much less scientists accept as science.

I say peer-review is “necessary.” The next step is that many such peer-reviewed studies converge from many different angles, which leads to the science becoming “robust.” So while the first studies to find evidence of anthropogenic global warming published in peer-reviewed top-tier science journals came out in 1995, it took many scientists another 5 years before they overcame their typical scientific skepticism.

By 2000 there were enough studies from many differnet anges out on AGW by then to convince most scientists of AGW’s validity. The science supporting AGW had become robust. And now it has become irrefutable within the scientific community…tho there might be a few scientists either funded by fossil fuel industries or sincerely working on alternative explanations that might not totally accept AGW, or might not view it as dangerous.

The evidence just keeps mounting in favor of AGW, and against the null hypothesis. However, it seems there is a vast divide between science and public perceptions. AGW is truly an “inconvenient truth,” as Gore pointed out.

I too would like to wake up and find it was all just an unpleasant dream and life on earth is doing just fine with an excellent prognosis for the future. But I cannot engage in untruths, bec I also long for heaven, and that we all can be there…

 

[Kilbourne]

Bec is based on peer-reviewed, top-tier science journal articles and working climate scientists who publish in those journals.

Peer-review (which is a brutal process) is a necessary step to establishing scientific “facts” (that which is accepted as science).

Donna Laframboise, in her book The Delinquent Teenager, gives us good reasons to doubt this. First off, in actuality there doesn’t appear to be any second layer of due diligence at the IPCC level. A survey of IPCC participants done by the InterAcademy Council, showed that IPCC insiders do not scrutinize the studies they rely on. They by and large assume the quality of the data in these studies, data quality assurance being “beyond the scope of the work of the IPCC.” [p. 34]

But we know from the Hockey Stick affair that the journals, even “top-tier” journals like Nature, don’t check the data quality at all. So the IPCC’s prevailing practice is based on an flawed and dangerous assumption.

Laframboise goes on to make the point that there are thousands of journals, but no accreditation process to ensure their quality.

She also put peer-review in perspective, quoting from Richard Horton, the editor of The Lancet:

“Peer review does not prove that a piece of research is true…Experience shows, for example, that peer review is an extremely unreliable way to detect research misconduct.”

Another commentator cited by Laframboise says: “Conflating peer review with scientific soundness impoverishes our appreciation of the scientific process. Peer review should be one criterion that people use in assessing the strength of any given piece of research–nothing more, nothing less.”

She then concludes: “What this all adds up to is that the only time research findings can be considered valid is if someone else, working entirely independently, follows the same procedures as those described in the paper and arrives at the same result.” But again, we know replication is a real problem in climate science. There is a real problem with transparency, without which there can be no replication, as richly demonstrated by the Hockey Stick Affair. And what about the lack of transparency with the temperature records? e.g. I doubt that Phil Jones could reproduce his own work, let alone make his data and methods sufficiently available to an independent third part so he can replicate them. Remember, this is the guy who responded to a request for his data this way: “Why should I let you have my data, when all you want to do is find something wrong with it.”

So, the IPCC’s trust in the peer-review process is naive at best.

 

[Kilbourne]

Secondly, the IPCC, despite the representations of Dr. P that it only relies on peer-reviewed studies, makes extensive use of sources that are not peer-reviewed, sometimes material from activist organizations (as you pointed out with regard to Glacier-gate).

So why else do you think the IPCC’s conclusions are based on the best climate science from around the world? Is it because it utilizes the best scientists?

 

[Kilbourne]

You may be interested in this. It is off topic somewhat, but the gist of the report is the lack of rigorous standards in university studies, in this case biology. But. If this is happening in laboratories where conditions are easily controlled how much more reliable are any statistically driven results about planet wide systems like weather?
news.yahoo.com/cancer-science-many-discoveries-dont-hold-174216262.html

Other scientists worry that something less innocuous explains the lack of reproducibility.
Part way through his project to reproduce promising studies, Begley met for breakfast at a cancer conference with the lead scientist of one of the problematic studies.
“We went through the paper line by line, figure by figure,” said Begley. “I explained that we re-did their experiment 50 times and never got their result. He said they’d done it six times and got this result once, but put it in the paper because it made the best story. It’s very disillusioning.”

Also, Lynn, see Steve’s previous post on this subject generally. Policy makers need to be much more skeptical about how scientists do their science, and we especially need to be skeptical of how the IPCC approaches its task of summarizing the best science.

 

[lynnvinc]

Secondly, the IPCC, despite the representations of Dr. P that it only relies on peer-reviewed studies, makes extensive use of sources that are not peer-reviewed, sometimes material from activist organizations (as you pointed out with regard to Glacier-gate).

In WGII - Impacts chapters and maybe WGIII (not sure). Apparently Dr. Pachauri, like me, did not know those chapters could use “grey lit.” From what I understand the WGI - Science chapters are very solid (even underestimating AGW), and based solely on peer-reviewed articles.

Sorry to say but top-tier peer-reviewed science journals are the best we have…far better than “blog-science.” Sometimes they publish studies that don’t pan out to be scientifically accepted “facts” later on. For one thing, science is ever-changing with more and better data and better theories. Another thing, the scientist may have made mistakes that were not caught by the peer-reviewers (but I can say re my own experiences being peer-reviewed, most peer-reviewers are pretty relentless in their critiques). That is why one study does not science make – and no one is claiming it does. Peer-review is a necessary but not sufficient requirement for establishing science. It takes many studies leading to the same conclusions – and AGW has passed that test at least as far back as by 2000, and subsequent studies have only furthered that scientific robustness.

Scientists by nature are skeptical, and they would love to come up with a different finding – which would be like a feather in their cap – so I sincerely doubt that all the scientists of the world who have been researching and publishing on various aspects of climate science are in some kind of vast conspiracy to lie and deceive.

This might help: You can get email alerts from the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the largest general scientific society in the world) and specify topics of interest, like climate change – see sciencemag.org/cgi/alerts/main . I’ve been getting their alerts for maybe 10 years, and have been following climate science like a hawk (even before signing up with them for alerts). They cover a very wide variety of science and medical journals.

Another thing I do is have climateark.org as my home page, which lists a huge variety of newspaper and media coverage of AGW. When they have a story about a new study I’m interested in, then I do a web search using the author’s name, and get the study. That’s how I found out about the evidence of H2S poisonous outgassing during the end-Permian great warning and extinction event in which over 90% of life on earth died 251 mya (see geology.gsapubs.org/content/33/5/397.abstract )

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RE Pachauri and the relentless slander against him: Before Pachauri (an engineer) became chair of the IPCC, Robert Watson (climate scientist) was chair, but Bush and the fossil fuel industries didn’t like Watson, so they got rid of him and put Pachauri in, thinking he would be more mild about AGW. It was a big fiasco.

I think it prudent and wise to be cautious about slandering a person based on fallacious accusations from websites and talk show hosts. For the other side of Dr. Pachauri’s story see: guardian.co.uk/environment/georgemonbiot/2010/aug/26/rajendra-pachauri-financial-relationships and guardian.co.uk/environment/interactive/2010/aug/26/kpmg-review-pachauri-accounts

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A HELPFUL LIFE LESSON: In the early 60s the elders at our Presbyterian church disbanded the children’s choir and we kids were all upset (that was actually what led me to leave that church…and years later become a Catholic). On our last night of choir practice our meek and mild choir master informed us we were disbanned and gave us this lesson: He pointed his finger and told us that whenever we point a finger at someone, see, there are three fingers pointing back at us. It didn’t sink in at the time; I was still hopping mad. However, later I came to understand that it is one of the greatest lessons I’ve ever learned.

 

[Kilbourne]

Hi Lynn,

Nice website!

Re IPCC’s use of peer reviewed lit, Donna Laframboise, with the help of 43 citizen auditors from around the world, checked the references in the 2007 report, all 18,531 of them. Each chapter was audited 3 x. They found:

1. 5,587 were not peer-reviewed.
2. 21 out of 44 chapters had 59% or fewer peer-reviewed references.
3. 4 out of 44 chapters had 60-69%.
4. Only 8 out of 44 had 90-100%

Most of the non peer-reviewed references were in the Working Group 2 and Group 3 reports (2849 and 2307 respectively). Working Group 1 had 431 non peer-reviewed references.

 

[Kilbourne]

Apparently Dr. Pachauri, like me, did not know those chapters could use "grey lit.

I guess Dr. P doesn’t know how his own organization operates. Another reason for him to resign. Overall, 30% of the AR4 cites were not peer-reviewed. He shouldn’t go around telling folks “we only use peer-reviewed literature.” 70% is not 100%…

From what I understand the WGI - Science chapters are very solid (even underestimating AGW), and based solely on peer-reviewed articles.

Not true, according to the Laframboise audit. 7% of the WG1 references are not peer-reviewed. 93% isn’t 100%. Now you know.

 

[Kilbourne]

Sorry to say but top-tier peer-reviewed science journals are the best we have

But can you say with certainty that they only use top-tier science journals? Maybe we should do an audit on this question. Is there even an accreditation process by which we can judge what is top-tier? Given how Nature handled the Mann affair, I would guess they wouldn’t make it.

 

[Kilbourne]

Anyway, why else do you think the IPCC is the gold standard authority? Because they rely on the best scientists?

 

[lynnvinc]

Hi Lynn,

Nice website!

Re IPCC’s use of peer reviewed lit, Donna Laframboise, with the help of 43 citizen auditors from around the world, checked the references in the 2007 report, all 18,531 of them. Each chapter was audited 3 x. They found:

1. 5,587 were not peer-reviewed.
2. 21 out of 44 chapters had 59% or fewer peer-reviewed references.
3. 4 out of 44 chapters had 60-69%.
4. Only 8 out of 44 had 90-100%

Most of the non peer-reviewed references were in the Working Group 2 and Group 3 reports (2849 and 2307 respectively). Working Group 1 had 431 non peer-reviewed references.

That’s not bad. As I said WGII & WGIII allow non-peer-reviewed sources. I didn’t know that WGI also did, but considering the 8000+ sources used in all the WGI chapters, 431 is not too bad.

And in a way all of the sources are “peer-reviewed” in that the scientists working on the report look into the works they include in the sections for which they are responsible and decide whether or not to include. If a source violates the science as they know it or the laws of physics (such as claiming there is no such thing as the natural GH effect), then such works would be excluded.

Here are some of those “non-peer-reviewed” works in WGI, Ch.1 – mainly gov agency reports and a book:

• Warren, S.G., et al., 1986: Global Distribution of Total Cloud Cover and Cloud Type Amounts Over Land. DOE/ER/60085-H1, NCAR/TN-273 + STR, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO.
• Warren, S.G., et al., 1988: Global Distribution of Total Cloud Cover and Cloud Type Amounts Over the Ocean. DOE/ER-0406, NCAR/FN-317 + STR, National Center for Atmospheric Research, Boulder, CO.
• Weart, S., 2003: The Discovery of Global Warming. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, MA, 240 pp

(Seems your friend, Donna, is a bit picky to object to these. Weart’s book is lauded by all the climate scientists I know, and is not some whacky outside the mainstream work; and it seems quite okay to me to cite reports of gov agencies…which is using actual data.)

However, I will admit that even the best peer reviewers and scientists may not catch all the problems and mistakes (esp in areas that are not their exact field of expertise–and some studies cover several different areas of expertise), and that goes for regular peer-reviewing in journals. It just happened that the poor guy working on p. 493 of Ch. 10 Asia of the WGII chapters was not a glaciologist and did not suspect the 2035 date of being wrong, and now everyone and their dog is spitting on him. However, the important point is that the glaciers are indeed melting and lossing mass (at least the ones they are studying), so we can conclude that under a BAU scenario the glaciers would eventually all melt away…maybe in some 100s of years. The people living then also count in my books, and it is a rotten thing for us to do to them – melt away their source of irrigation and drinking water.

I remember after “glaciergate,” some scientists who worked on WGI regretted not looking over the WGII chapters, and said that they would being doing so in the future.

Now remember they are working for free in their spare time (as are peer-reviewers for journals), while conducting their own research, but they felt they should put even more time in it to make sure such errors wouldn’t happen again. My understanding is the IPCC people have now developed safeguards against such errors in the future.

I think it’s sad skeptics have thrown out the whole of the IPCC reports with the bath water of a few errors, and that they are making mincemeat out of that poor guy who made the error. But that’s the vicious world we live in today.

 

[Kilbourne]

RE Pachauri and the relentless slander against him

and the articles you cited:

I have not accused Dr. P of financial misconduct. I have accused him of being biased. He has misrepresented the scientific rigor of his organization while at the same time maintaining bad policies and procedures which corrupt the IPCC’s reports.

 

[Kilbourne]

Admittedly, there are many things out of his control. Governments call the shots in a lot of matters, which is a very large part of the problem. But Dr. P is a partisan and not an honest broker.

 

[Kilbourne]

think it’s sad skeptics have thrown out the whole of the IPCC reports with the bath water of a few errors,

No, its a lot more than a few errors.

 

[Kilbourne]

But this has to be said. The chapters of the working groups can be very good. For example, Dr. Richard Lindzen, a very respected skeptic, is very proud of the work of his team in the year he participated. The real mischief is perpetrated in the writing of the executive summaries and summary for policy makers. This is where the scientifically unqualified, UN bureaucrats, the politicians, and the activists take over.

 

[lynnvinc]

and the articles you cited:

I have not accused Dr. P of financial misconduct. I have accused him of being biased. He has misrepresented the scientific rigor of his organization while at the same time maintaining bad policies and procedures which corrupt the IPCC’s reports.

Let’s first assume he made honest mistakes in defending the glaciergate mistake. He also is NOT a glaciologist. And he simply came into the IPCC group after the other chair was forced out, and I’m sure did not know all the ins and outs of IPCC operations.

It’s not right to accuse people of bias if they in all honesty didn’t realize how things operated. I had also assumed that the IPCC only accepted peer-reviewed studies from the parts I had read and few specific sources I had looked into (people read, but don’t always look up the source used),* and bec I remember a bunch of scientists rushing to get their work through peer-review and published before the AR4 report deadline.

Which brings us to another problem – the IPCC is already out-of-date by the time it is published. So a conscientious scholar should always look beyond such reports for to the latest studies. However, again single studies do not science make, and the IPCC stand solid as the science of climate change, though just a tad out of date.

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*I did, however, look up the source for the 2035 date while writing my own paper for a peer-reviewed journal in 2008, and was a bit surprised when I saw the WWF report cited. Now I know those types of reports are usually very high quality and based heavily on peer-reviewed lit themselves, so I looked up their source, and when I saw the jnl NEW SCIENTIST I decided NOT to mention that 2035 date in my paper. So really no harm done, and I’m totally flabbergasted by the extreme level of attacks against the IPCC and the unconscionable attacks against Dr. Pachauri and the person who made the mistake.

What’s the problem with people? The problem is with the attackers, not Dr. Pachauri.

 

[lynnvinc]

But this has to be said. The chapters of the working groups can be very good. For example, Dr. Richard Lindzen, a very respected skeptic, is very proud of the work of his team in the year he participated.

I wouldn’t rely on Lindzen’s theories (and he, BTW, accepts AGW) – they have not stood up strongly to the scrutiny of science; his iris cloud theory doesn’t hold a lot of water

See: skepticalscience.com/clouds-negative-feedback.htm :

For climate scientists who are skeptical that anthropogenic greenhouse gas emissions will cause a dangerous amount of warming, such as Richard Lindzen and Roy Spencer, their skepticism hinges mainly on this cloud cover uncertainty. They tend to believe that as the planet warms, low-level cloud cover will increase, thus increasing the overall reflectiveness of the Earth, offsetting the increased greenhouse effect and preventing a dangerous level of global warming from occurring. However, some recent scientific studies have contradicted this theory.

Most of the cloud feedback uncertainty is due to cloud changes near the equator, in the tropics and subtropics (Stowasser et al. 2006). Studies by Lauer et al. (2010) and Clement et al. (2009) both looked at cloud changes in these regions in the east Pacific, and both concluded that based on a combination of ship-based cloud observations, satellite observations, and climate models, the cloud feedback in this region appears to be positive, meaning more warming.

Dessler (2010) used cloud measurements over the entire planet by the Clouds and the Earth’s Radiant Energy System (CERES) satellite instruments from March 2000 to February 2010 to attempt to determine the cloud feedback. Dessler concluded that although a very small negative feedback (cooling) could not be ruled out, the overall short-term global cloud feedback is probably positive (warming), and may be strongly positive. His measurements showed that it is very unlikely that the cloud feedback will cause enough cooling to offset a significant amount of human-caused global warming.

So while clouds remain a significant uncertainty and more research is needed on this subject, the evidence is building that clouds will probably cause the planet to warm even further, and are very unlikely to offset a significant amount of human-caused global warming. It’s also important to remember that there many other feedbacks besides clouds, and there is a large amount of evidence that the net feedback is positive and will amplify global warming.

 

[lynnvinc]

Let’s first assume he made honest mistakes in defending the glaciergate mistake. He also is NOT a glaciologist. And he simply came into the IPCC group after the other chair was forced out, and I’m sure did not know all the ins and outs of IPCC operations.

However, yes, of course he is perhaps biased in favor of the org he heads. We all have our biases and don’t like to see our favorite orgs or our children attacked and threatened, and our first reaction is to get upset and defend them – in all honesty thinking the attacker wrong and the attacked correct.

There is perhaps another dynamic here. That WWF report with the mistaken 2035 date – An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts
in Nepal, India and China – may have been widely read by intellectuals and scholars in India concerned about AGW (assets.panda.org/downloads/himalayaglaciersreport2005.pdf ), but I don’t know for sure.

And just like lies and distortions supposedly debunking AGW travel virally among denialists, this WWF report or at least its mistaken claim may have traveled among those Indians concerned about AGW, since it pertained to their own country. Indians are very family oriented and concerned about their future generations. So that claim would have been a real shocker and sobering wake-up call.

So there may have been that parental/cultural factor leading to some bias.

I have a hard time explaining the importance of family and kinship in other societies to my anthro classes. So I tell them, you know how much family means to us here in the U.S. Well, multiply that by 10 and you’ll get an idea of how important it is to people in traditional civilizations like India; then multiply that by 10 and you’ll get an idea of how important it is to tribal peoples – it is everything to them.

One has to understand this, I think, to understand why some people are more concerned about AGW than others – it’s not their self-interest as some claim, but their “others-interest.” And this is why JPII (a European) was concerned about AGW back in 1990s, and why BXVI (another European) is today. At its root it is a matter of what we are doing against our families on into the future, including our human family. People steeped in traditions of rugged individualism will have a hard time understanding this and think it is all about money and self-pride, etc.

 

[lynnvinc]

No, its a lot more than a few errors.

Nothing, however, that contradicts the basic science of climate change. More like very minor errors mainly on how it will impact the glaciers or the Amazon rainforests – and that mistake turned ou from other findings not to be a mistake.

The IPCC has been thoroughly reviewed now and each and every error analyzed. Nothing to overturn the fact that AGW is real and dangerous.