Jennifer Marohasy

a forum for the discussion of issues concerning the natural environment

Archives for November 23, 2011

Reform or Abandon the IPCC

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A leading environmental economist has called upon governments to either radically reform or abandon the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

In his report ‘What is Wrong with the IPCC? Proposals for Radical Reform’ published today by the Global Warming Policy Foundation, Professor Ross McKitrick (University of Guelph, Ontario, Canada) reviews the IPCC’s own procedures in detail and highlights a number of serious flaws and weaknesses.

McKitrick’s report shows that, under current procedures:

1. The IPCC’s managing bureau unilaterally selects Lead Authors, giving it direct influence on the content of reports;

2. IPCC Lead Authors are frequently asked to review their own work and that of their critics, placing them in a conflict of interest;

3. The IPCC peer review procedures allow Lead Authors to overrule reviewers, and to rewrite the text after the close of peer review, rendering it ineffective at preventing bias;

4. Government review and oversight through the plenary panel is cursory at best, with the vast majority of member governments failing to take any active role.

McKitrick presents a number of case studies that illustrate how these various procedural flaws have had material effects on key sections of past reports.

McKitrick proposes a set of rule changes that would aim to make IPCC editorial procedures as rigorous as those of a standard academic journal. Even this modest target would require substantial changes.

Read more here: http://www.thegwpf.org/images/stories/gwpf-reports/mckitrick-ipcc_reforms.pdf

Climategate II

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TWO years after Climategate – the scandal caused by the leaking of over one thousand emails detailing correspondence between leading climate scientists exposing conspiracy and collusion including how to stack review committees, exaggerate warming trends, and avoid the disclosure of sensitive information – another batch of emails have been leaked, again from the University of East Anglia and again from the infamous Michael Mann, Phil Jones, Ben Santer, Kevin Trenberth and the hapless Keith Briffa.

According to bloggers and columnists who’ve been up earlier than me and who have already start reading the file: what these emails confirm is that the great man-made global warming scare is not about science but about political activism.

The new leaked file of emails, dubbed FOIA 2011, is apparently introduced with comment from the Whistleblower:

“Over 2.5 billion people live on less than $2 a day. Every day nearly 16,000 children die from hunger and related causes. One dollar can save a life — the opposite must also be true. Poverty is a death sentence. Nations must invest $37 trillion in energy technologies by 2030 to stabilize
greenhouse gas emissions at sustainable levels. Today’s decisions should be based on all the information we can get, not on
hiding the decline.”

James Delingpole, breaking new for the UK Telegraph, concurs:

“If you’re going to bomb the global economy back to the dark ages with environmental tax and regulation, if you’re going to favour costly, landscape-blighting, inefficient renewables over real, abundant, relatively cheap energy that works like shale gas and oil, if you’re going to cause food riots and starvation in the developing world by giving over farmland (and rainforests) to biofuel production, then at the very least you it owe to the world to base your policies on sound, transparent, evidence-based science rather than on the politicised, disingenuous junk churned out by the charlatans at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).”

Download the emails here:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=ROCGBR37