generalspeaking

IPCC Plummeting Reliability = Zero Trust

There we go again, the revelations keep coming, fast, thick and furious. The Sunday Telegraph has reported yet another little bit of information that will further erode the public trust and interest in anything that has the imprint of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. No sooner does the IPCC take shamed ownership of "poorly substantiated" predictions that have appeared in their Nobel-Prize-winning publication, than yet another challenge to their scientific professionalism emerges.

After the leaked emails revealing some members of the panel to be churlishly negative about countervailing results published by environmentalists whose findings irritatingly did not agree with their own, and their spurious attempts to forge a consensus by blithely ignoring inconvenient statistics, along with peevish comments about disagreeable dissenters to their Sole Truth, additional nasty bits come to light.

The latest represented by anecdotal narratives taken for scientific certainties. Where the 2007 report by the IPCC in its assembling of scientific evidence on climate change pointed to 'observed reductions' in mountain ice in the Andes, the Swiss Alps and in Africa. Two papers were cited as their information source. One, a 2002 feature article in Climbing magazine. Where the author quoted anecdotal perceptions derived from mountaineers.

The other taken from a dissertation by a geography student at Switzerland's University of Berne which similarly gave quote to the experiences and perceptions of mountain guides with respect to alterations in mountainsides and a decrease in ice-climbs. "These are essentially a collection of anecdotes", scoffed research professor Richard Tol, at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, just incidentally an IPCC member.

"Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy working Group Two (focusing on 'impacts, adaptation and vulnerability') has been. A table in the publication states that mountain ice reductions have been observed between 1900 and 2000 in the Andes, Alps and Africa.

"There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense" Professor Tol said dismissively. "The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organization with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy", according to a senior research fellow at the U.S. research organization Resources for the Future; another contributor to IPCC's last report.

As for the IPCC itself, it insists these are minor errors, and that the findings of their report remain consistent with the underlying science.

Ahuh!

And then there's Danish environmental author Bjorn Lomborg, who certainly believes in the reality of climate change, and his estimate that the economic impact of accepting the IPCC's emission targets would cost the world $40-trillion and in the end have "only a marginal impact" on the climate, and the lives saved.

Whereas, he contends, allocating "$3-billion annually on mosquito nets, environmentally safe indoor DDT sprays and subsidies for new therapies" within a ten-year span would save millions of lives. For this environmentalist perspective is everything. He believes alleviating world poverty, providing education for the young and deprived has at least equal primacy with climate change.

Without denying the need to produce new formulas resulting in ameliorating effects on climate change, the world needs to focus on other, equally needful priorities.

Labels: Environment, Particularities/Peculiarities, Science

posted by Pieface @ Monday, February 01, 2010