A Brief History…

By Bradley J. Fikes

(Cross-posted at Brad’s Sci-Tech Blog)

Farce, actually. I couldn’t make this stuff up if I tried.

First, the head of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has contributed to global warming with a steamy sex novel.

IPCC now in Bizarroland: Pachauri releases “smutty” romance novel
Just when you think things can’t get any more bizarre with the IPCC, having just learned that the IPPC 2007 report used magazine articles for references, head of the IPCC, Dr. Rajenda Pachauri, provides comedy gold. According to the UK Telegraph, he’s just released what they describe as a “smutty” romance novel, Return to Almora laced with steamy sex, lots of sex. Oh, and Shirley MacLaine.

*****************************************************************

Second, more revelations that the IPCC’s 2007 report used more amateurish sources in its supposedly high-quality report on climate change, the same report that included a now-retracted claim that some Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2025.

UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master’s degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps…
Professor Richard Tol, one of the report’s authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: “These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.
“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 (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.
“There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense.”

Pachauri can always blame the error on being uh, otherwise occupied.

***************************************************************

Third, Pachauri appears to have learned of the falsity of the Himalayan glacier claims earlier than he admitted:

Climate chief was told of false glacier claims before Copenhagen
Rajendra Pachauri was told that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assessment that the glaciers would disappear by 2035 was wrong, but he waited two months to correct it. He failed to act despite learning that the claim had been refuted by several leading glaciologists…
Asked whether he had deliberately kept silent about the error to avoid embarrassment at Copenhagen, he said: “That’s ridiculous. It never came to my attention before the Copenhagen summit. It wasn’t in the public sphere.”
However, a prominent science journalist said that he had asked Dr Pachauri about the 2035 error last November. Pallava Bagla, who writes for Science journal, said he had asked Dr Pachauri about the error. He said that Dr Pachauri had replied: “I don’t have anything to add on glaciers.”

****************************************************************

Fourth, with friends like these . . .

‘Bin Laden’ blames US for global warming
A new message said to be from al-Qaeda leader Osama Bin Laden has blamed global warming on the US and other big industrial nations.
The audio tape, broadcast on al-Jazeera TV, urges a boycott of the US dollar “to free humankind from slavery”.
It comes days after another tape said to be from Bin Laden was released, praising the attempted bombing of a US airliner on 25 December.
The authenticity of neither tape has been verified.
But IntelCenter, a US group that monitors Islamist activity, has said the voice on the earlier tape appeared to be that of Bin Laden.

***************************************************************

UPDATE: A commenter has kindly provided the text of a statement from Scripps Institution of Oceanography professor emeritus Richard Somerville, defending global warming theory against attacks by “denialists.”

I have given my responses to the statement in the comments. Somerville’s statement is entirely an appeal to authority, without any links to evidence backing up his claims. He even repeats the increasingly farcical claim about “solid settled science.”

Most hilariously of all, Somerville tries to puff up certainty about AGW theory by bragging about the high quality of scientific work.

“Science has its own high standards. It does not work by unqualified people making claims on television or the Internet. It works by scientists doing research and publishing it in carefully reviewed research journals.”

Shortly after Somerville issued his Jan. 14 statement, the IPCC retracted its sensational claim that many Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035. The report, which was supposed to use only peer-reviewed sources, made its claim based on one article that appeared in the New Scientist, not a peer-reviewed journal.

The telephone-game quality of the claim is vividly illustrated in a story in the UK Sunday Times.

The IPCC says its statement on melting glaciers was based on a report it misquoted by WWF, a lobby group, which took its information from a report in New Scientist based on an interview with a glaciologist who claims he was misquoted.

And as this post indicates, other errors and poorly-sourced claims are still being found in the IPCC’s work.

Scientists in other fields should be wary of the increasingly desperate attempts of AGW believers to mute criticism of their own sloppy research by appealing to the credibility of science.

Tags: global warming

This entry was posted on Sunday, January 31st, 2010 at 1:46 pm and is filed under science. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.