In my PowerPoint presentation a week ago I included the chart above likening the IPCC process to an "Alarmist Religion" with IPCC Director Rajendra Pachauri as the "High Priest", the latest IPCC report their scriptures, a windmill their symbol, and a stranded polar bear their idol.Well, it seems the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) may soon join the UK Climatic Research Unit (CRU) and the US Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) under the spotlight for scientific malpractice known as "Climategate".
According to WUWT the IPCC has had to retract a claim in their latest report (2007) that there was a "very high" likelihood the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It seems the IPCC violated their rule that only peer-reviewed science would be included in their reports. The Himalayan claim was mere speculation published by the World Wildlife Fund on the basis of a hearsay report in the New Scientist.
The EU seems to have funded a study based on the bogus report to the tune of €10M ($14M) The IPCC Director appears to have a conflict of interest since he is also Director-General of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) that received some of the EU money for the study based on the scientifically unsupported report.
The cartoon below was published by the Times of India.
[NOTE: The following material was added 24 Jan]
The error regarding Himalayan glaciers is not the only instance of IPCC 2007 citing non-peered-reviewed "science" from the WWF. Here are some more examples, from Donna Laframboise's website.
She says: "I've only spent a few hours tracking these down, so there may be more. I haven't yet fully explored the Greenpeace citations, but two occur in the first paragraph on this page."
- Allianz and World Wildlife Fund, 2006: Climate change and the financial sector: an agenda for action, 59 pp. [Accessed 03.05.07: http://www.wwf.org.uk/ filelibrary/pdf/allianz_rep_0605.pdf]
- Austin, G., A. Williams, G. Morris, R. Spalding-Feche, and R. Worthington, 2003: Employment potential of renewable energy in South Africa. Earthlife Africa, Johannesburg and World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Denmark, November, 104 pp.
- Baker, T., 2005: Vulnerability Assessment of the North-East Atlantic Shelf Marine Ecoregion to Climate Change, Workshop Project Report, WWF, Godalming, Surrey, 79 pp.
- Coleman, T., O. Hoegh-Guldberg, D. Karoly, I. Lowe, T. McMichael, C.D. Mitchell, G.I. Pearman, P. Scaife and J. Reynolds, 2004: Climate Change: Solutions for Australia. Australian Climate Group, 35 pp. http://www.wwf.org.au/ publications/acg_solutions.pdf
- Dlugolecki, A. and S. Lafeld, 2005: Climate change - agenda for action: the financial sector’s perspective. Allianz Group and WWF, Munich [may be the same document as "Allianz" above, except that one is dated 2006 and the other 2005]
Fritsche, U.R., K. Hünecke, A. Hermann, F. Schulze, and K. Wiegmann, 2006: Sustainability standards for bioenergy. Öko-Institut e.V., Darmstadt, WWF Germany, Frankfurt am Main, November - Giannakopoulos, C., M. Bindi, M. Moriondo, P. LeSager and T. Tin, 2005: Climate Change Impacts in the Mediterranean Resulting from a 2oC Global Temperature Rise. WWF report, Gland Switzerland. Accessed 01.10.2006 at http://assets.panda.org/downloads/medreportfinal8july05.pdf.
- Hansen, L.J., J.L. Biringer and J.R. Hoffmann, 2003: Buying Time: A User’s Manual for Building Resistance and Resilience to Climate Change in Natural Systems. WWF Climate Change Program, Berlin, 246pp. http://www.panda.org/about_wwf/what_we_do/climate_change/our_solutions/business_industry/climate_savers/ index.cfm
- Lechtenbohmer, S., V. Grimm, D. Mitze, S. Thomas, M. Wissner, 2005: Target 2020: Policies and measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in the EU. WWF European Policy Office, Wuppertal
- Malcolm, J.R., C. Liu, L. Miller, T. Allnut and L. Hansen, Eds., 2002a: Habitats at Risk: Global Warming and Species Loss in Globally Significant Terrestrial Ecosystems. WWF World Wide Fund for Nature, Gland, 40 pp.
- Rowell, A. and P.F. Moore, 2000: Global Review of Forest Fires. WWF/IUCN, Gland, Switzerland, 66 pp. http://www.iucn.org/themes/fcp/publications /files/global_review_forest_fires.pdf
- WWF, 2004: Deforestation threatens the cradle of reef diversity. World Wide Fund for Nature, 2 December 2004. http://www.wwf.org/
- WWF, 2004: Living Planet Report 2004. WWF- World Wide Fund for Nature (formerly World Wildlife Fund), Gland, Switzerland, 44 pp.
- WWF (World Wildlife Fund), 2005: An overview of glaciers, glacier retreat, and subsequent impacts in Nepal, India and China. World Wildlife Fund, Nepal Programme, 79 pp.
- Zarsky, L. and K. Gallagher, 2003: Searching for the Holy Grail? Making FDI Work for Sustainable Development. Analytical Paper, World Wildlife Fund (WWF), Switzerland
It appears the IPCC and their supporters at the UK CRU and the US GISS actively discouraged peer-reviewed science journals from publishing papers authored by Skeptics, and used the "non-peer-reviewed" status to avoid mentioning their findings that challenged the level of human-caused Global Warming. Yet, they had no trouble citing WWF and Greenpeace and other partisan and non-peer-reviewed hearsay evidence in their aupposedly scientific findings. This is extremely troubling to me! I hope we all get to read about this in the major media soon.
Ira Glickstein
6 comments:
Ira said, "This is extremely troubling to me! I hope we all get to read about this in the major media soon."
Joel responds: Another excellent job, Ira. I also hope that we'll hear about this in the major media. To do that, it would have to reach "critical mass." Just as neutrons are damped by a moderating material, news that runs counter to the liberal preconception is damped by liberal reporters. It's only when the heat of scandal rises to a critical level that the fame to be gained by the juiciness of the scandal overcomes the reporter's natural desire to suppress good news. If the IPCC used funds gained from their alarmist programs to hire underage prostitutes, the story would quickly reach critical mass. Otherwise, we would have to await a killer asteroid to push the alarmist view off the front page. -Joel
Right on Joel. Here is a video report from foreign media that seem to be ahead of ours:
Pachauri Must Resign.
Ira Glickstein
Today, a story in our local paper by Associated Press is entitled "Scientists Create Model of Frankenstorm." What a perfect example of the media's alarmist preoccupation with future disaster. Long ago, I marveled at Japanese films like "Godzilla" in which a creature destroys all of Tokyo. (This was long before American disaster films.) What is there in the human psyche that enjoys seeing the homeland suffer total destruction? -Joel
AP seems to have a particular problem with climate reporting. Our local newspaper seems to carry only AP climate stories and they all seem to have an 'alarmist' spin. None of my letters to the editor attempting to provide some balance have been published.
Three weeks ago, I was impelled to write the editor again (unsuccessfully) following a 'Climategate' whitewash story. One of the authors was Seth Borenstein, a (self-identified) science reporter for AP. He sent one of the emails in the CRU email collection (asking the 'team' to debunk a warmist story - which they did). Seems to me it would call for a recusal but that's just me! Though Borenstein has published a lot of science-related stories, I wasn't successful determining if he has any education in the area. (There are certainly a lot of web links that include 'biased' and 'alarmist' in the first paragraph, however.)
I'd recommend anyone be very cautious about any AP climate story.
Rick, according to this, Borenstein is a graduate of Bexley High School (Ohio) and earned a BS in Journalism at Boston University (1979-83). Upon graduation, he worked for various newspapers. His first specific science-related assignment seems to be as Space Writer for the Orlando-Sentinel (1994-98). While working as a National Correspondent for Knight-Ridder (1998-2006), he was part of a team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist in 2004 "for local reporting for coverage of the Columbia space shuttle accident and causes". He has been a member of the Society of Environmental Journalists since 1998 and received awards from them in 2004, 2005, and 2008. He has been an AP Science Writer since 2006.
Although he doesn't have a formal science degree, he seems to have considerable science and technology-related writing experience. The only problem I see is that he has written so many Alarmist and Warmist-oriented pieces that he may be personally invested in their ideology and unable to see things from a more balanced perspective.
It will take some time, IMHO, and perhaps a new generation of writers and scientists, for the bias in favor of human-dominated Global Warming to dissipate. Einstein has been gone for 55 years, yet a few of us are still fighting a rear-guard action against the quantum weirdness accepted by nearly all modern physicists that he could not accept. You and I think human-dominated Global Warming will turn out to be a modern version of the Flat Earth, but we could be wrong.
Ira Glickstein
A new 111-page online book by Joseph D’Aleo and Anthony Watts details the systematic distortion of global temperature data snd calls into question almost all accepted wisdom about global warming. Click the above link to read the entire paper. It is chock-full of data and graphics. Here is the SUMMARY FOR POLICYMAKERS
1. Instrumental temperature data for the pre-satellite era (1850-1980) have been so widely, systematically, and unidirectionally tampered with that it cannot be credibly asserted there has been any significant “global warming” in the 20th century.
2. All terrestrial surface-temperature databases exhibit very serious problems that render them useless for determining accurate long-term temperature trends.
3. All of the problems have skewed the data so as greatly to overstate observed warming both regionally and globally.
4. Global terrestrial temperature data are gravely compromised because more than three-quarters of the 6,000 stations that once existed are no longer reporting.
5. There has been a severe bias towards removing higher-altitude, higher-latitude, and rural stations, leading to a further serious overstatement of warming.
6. Contamination by urbanization, changes in land use, improper siting, and inadequately-calibrated instrument upgrades further overstates warming.
7. Numerous peer-reviewed papers in recent years have shown the overstatement of observed longer term warming is 30-50% from heat-island contamination alone.
8. Cherry-picking of observing sites combined with interpolation to vacant data grids may make heat-island bias greater than 50% of 20th-century warming.
9. In the oceans, data are missing and uncertainties are substantial. Comprehensive coverage has only been available since 2003, and shows no warming.
10. Satellite temperature monitoring has provided an alternative to terrestrial stations in compiling the global lower-troposphere temperature record. Their findings are increasingly diverging from the station-based constructions in a manner consistent with evidence of a warm bias in the surface temperature record.
11. NOAA and NASA, along with CRU, were the driving forces behind the systematic hyping of 20th-century “global warming”.
12. Changes have been made to alter the historical record to mask cyclical changes that could be readily explained by natural factors like multidecadal ocean and solar changes.
13. Global terrestrial data bases are seriously flawed and can no longer be trusted to assess climate trends or VALIDATE model forecasts.
14. An inclusive external assessment is essential of the surface temperature record of CRU, GISS and NCDC “chaired and paneled by mutually agreed to climate scientists who do not have a vested interest in the outcome of the evaluations.”
15. Reliance on the global data by both the UNIPCC and the US GCRP/CCSP also requires a full investigation and audit.
Ira Glickstein
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