On Gristmill, Andrew Dessler provides us with an excuse for a self-indulgent recap:
I was at a meeting earlier this week and was talking to one of the coordinating lead authors of the recent IPCC working group 1 report on the physical science of climate change. He remarked that he was quite surprised that how little substantive criticism the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report had received since its release just about one year ago.
Reflecting on why this might be the case, he says:
the scientists writing the report knew that the denial machine would go over the report with a fine tooth comb looking for any “gotcha” mistakes to use to discredit the IPCC. Because of that, the IPCC report was extremely carefully worded so as to make virtually every statement in the report bulletproof.
That may be so. But as we’ve reported before, the ‘denial machine’ is way behind the warmers – media, politicians and the IPCC itself – when it comes to misrepresenting what the IPCC reports have to say. Writing about AR4, for example, the BBC’s Richard Black claimed that ‘The IPCC states that climate change is “unequivocal” and may bring “abrupt and irreversible’ impacts”‘. When we looked at the report, however, it was clear that Black had simply taken words from the report and reassembled them to mean something entirely different. The report itself only used the word ‘abrupt’ once: ‘The MOC is very unlikely to undergo a large abrupt transition during the 21st century’. ‘Very unlikely’ becomes ‘may’.
The ‘irreversible impacts’ part is just as tenuous. According to the report:
Climate change is likely to lead to some irreversible impacts. There is medium confidence that approximately 20-30% of species assessed so far are likely to be at increased risk if increases in global average warming exceed 1.5-2.5oC (relative to 1980-1999). As global average temperature increase exceeds about 3.5oC, model projections suggest significant extinctions (40-70% of species assessed) around the globe.
But as we said at the time:
likely… some… medium confidence… approximately… 20-30% of species assessed so far… likely… increased risk… if… Of how many ‘assessed species’, exactly?
But such caveats and unknowns don’t stop the BBC hack using the word ‘irreversible’ to sex up an article that would have otherwise been “IPCC report marginally less alarmist than last time, yet doesn’t say anything all that new”.
Likewise, IPCC Chair Rajendra Pachauri can’t resist the temptation to extravagate the IPCC’s findings beyond recognition, for dramatic (comic?) effect.
We picked up on Andrew Dessler’s argument last year that the earth was like a sick child, which needed the attention of the equivalent of specialist pediatric doctors – the IPCC – rather than engage with any of the ideas put forward by sceptics. ‘So given the critical nature of the climate change problem, who should we listen to?’ he wondered.
My opinion, and the opinion of all the governments of the world, is that we should listen to people who specialize in climate science. That’s the IPCC.
Following that, our survey of the contributing authors to the IPCC AR4 reports showed that most weren’t climate scientists, as he had argued. Many, in fact, were precisely the social scientists, computer scientists, and economists he believed should be excluded from the debate.
In his latest contribution, Dessler goes on to say:
In fact, it is quite amazing to me that essentially none of the IPCC documents produced over the last 18 years has been found to contain any substantive errors.
He obviously has not been listening to climate catastrophist and IPPC author James Hansen, who said in New Scientist last year:
I find it almost inconceivable that “business as usual” climate change will not result in a rise in sea level measured in metres within a century. Am I the only scientist who thinks so?
And has he forgotten the controversy caused by the use of the “Hockey Stick” graph, invented by Micheal Mann, who also happened to be lead author on the IPCC working group which made it famous? (Roughly equivalent to a researcher “peer-reviewing” his own work).
With all this in mind, Dessler goes on to say:
The trolls, of course, will come out with their litany of “errors” that the IPCC contains (I suspect a few will appear in the comments to this post), but when you look closely, the trolls are almost always misrepresenting the IPCC’s statements.
In fact, that’s the most common attack on the IPCC: make the claim that the IPCC said something ridiculous (which it didn’t actually say), then disprove that ridiculous statement, and then use that as evidence that the IPCC’s reports cannot be trusted. “The IPCC says that 2 + 2 = 5, but that’s just hogwash. We know that 2 + 2 = 4. Thus, climate change is a hoax.” Yeah, right.
But Dessler is doing the trolls’ work for them. It’s just that he is only sensitive to the misrepresentation of the IPCC in one direction. It is even funnier that he himself misrepresents the IPCC. One of the people doing the best job of discrediting the IPCC in the world right now is Andrew Dessler himself. May he keep up the good work.
To put Dessler to bed, I actually downloaded, printed and read parts of the IPCC IV. The whole thing reads like a public school science textbook for stuggling students at an inner city high school — the kind where the 10th graders read like 4th graders and science means a picture of an astronaut on the cover.
No real scientist would ever deign to criticize the IPCC report, because it’s not a scientific paper. It is polemic that throws in a lot of references to scientific papers and they says “see, I told you so”.
Scientists, by nature, focus on small areas of clearly identifiable research. They want results that can be quantified. Something as sweeping as the IPCC report would never be reviewed because it’s not science.
As far as the under pinnings of the report, one thing that stands out it that it spends pages and pages trying to justify itself. Look, Albert Einstein didn’t go around gladhanding people and writing essays about how he must be rigth — he published simple papers that laid it out and said “look, here it is…” and the world said “yeah”. It’s the exact opposite of the IPCC.
One major flaw in the whole process in the complete lack of papers that show any attempt to research real world climate and weather behavior. I went to Google Scholar to find the 1000 papers that the IPCC, Gore and Dessler talk about and I did a search that asked to omit the papers that had the word “model” in them. The number of papers shrunk to about 70.
The real vastness of the manipulation, fraud and tragedy of the IPCC will be felt in decades to come.