The Realists Take on Climate Change

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

InterAcademy Council Asked to Review Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change

AMSTERDAM, Netherlands -- The InterAcademy Council (IAC), a multinational organization of the world's science academies, has been requested to conduct an independent review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) processes and procedures. The study comes at the invitation of the United Nations secretary-general and the chair of the IPCC, and will help guide the processes and procedures of the IPCC's fifth report and future assessments of climate science.

The IAC has been asked to establish an ad hoc Independent Evaluation Group (IEG) of experts from relevant fields to conduct the review and to present recommendations on possible revisions of IPCC practices and procedures. In addition, the IEG is asked to recommend measures and actions to strengthen the IPCC's capacity to respond to future challenges and ensure the ongoing quality of its reports.

Founded in 2000, the IAC was created to mobilize top scientists and engineers around the world to provide evidence-based advice to international bodies such as the United Nations and World Bank -- including preparing expert, peer-reviewed studies upon request. The IAC Board is composed of the presidents of 15 academies of science and equivalent organizations -- representing Argentina, Australia, Brazil, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, South Africa, Turkey, the United Kingdom, and the United States, plus the African Academy of Sciences and the Academy of Sciences for the Developing World (TWAS) -- and representatives of the InterAcademy Panel (IAP) of scientific academies, the International Council of Academies of Engineering and Technological Sciences (CAETS), and the InterAcademy Medical Panel (IAMP) of medical academies. The IAC Secretariat is hosted by the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) in Amsterdam. The IAC Board has final approval authority over conducting and publishing IAC studies.

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Tourism Minister Marthinus van Schalkwyk must be a sucker for punishment if he’s putting himself up for the job of deputy United Nations climate chief (Van Schalkwyk has SA nod for UN job, March 9).

That’s because the UN’s flagship climate body, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has become a laughing stock as revelations pile up about dodgy science, erroneous forecasts and outright manipulation of data. Not for nothing is it known in sceptic circles as the International Panel of Climate Crooks.

Meanwhile, newer published studies around climate science, more accurate temperature records from satellites, and freezing snow and blizzards in much of the northern hemisphere continue to undermine the thesis of man-made global warming.

The tide is turning.

The smart money is on global warming going the same way as bird flu, swine flu, Y2K, the ozone layer, the population explosion, the food crisis, the energy crisis, global cooling and the litany of Armageddon-type predictions of the past 30 years that never came to pass.

THE chairman of the ABC, Maurice Newman, has told about 250 leading journalists, program-makers and managers at the ABC that the media had displayed "group-think" on the issue of climate change in a speech that led to a feisty exchange with senior journalists and forced managing director Mark Scott to try to smooth the waters.

Describing himself as an agnostic on climate change, Mr Newman said climate change was an example "of group-think where contrary views have not been tolerated, and where those who express them have been labelled and mocked".

He warned ABC staffers that he would not tolerate anyone suppressing information, citing the fact that a BBC science correspondent knew for a month before the scandal broke of damaging emails at the University of East Anglia in Britain highlighting the politicised nature of climate science but did not report them.

Mr Newman said the Guardian newspaper had noted that the moment climatology is sheltered from dispute, its force begins to wane.

"Which raises an important question for a media organisation," Mr Newman said in the speech obtained by The Australian. "Who, if anyone, decides what to shelter from dispute? And when?

There is an English saying that you have “lies, damned lies and statistics”. Here, I would like to introduce a variation on this expression: “There are lies, damned lies, statistics … and sloppy science”.

This morning, there was lot of noise in the Dutch media (unfortunately in Dutch only) about new research that was claiming a dramatic warming of 4 degrees in 2050. The news report quoted Dutch econometricians from the University of Tilburg. They had done a statistical analysis of temperature data and the influence of CO2 and solar radiation and concluded that aerosols masked much more of the warming of greenhouse gases than previously thought. This also means there is more warming in the pipeline for the future if the trend of global brightening, that has been detected by researcher Martin Wild of ETH in Zürich, will continue in the coming decades. They also draw policy conclusions from their research stating that in order to avoid more than 2 degree warming more drastic measures are to be taken.

This news was copied by many Dutch news outlets.

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The United Nations is to announce an independent review of errors made by its climate change advisory body in an attempt to restore its credibility.

A team of the world’s leading scientists will investigate the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and ask why its supposedly rigorous procedures failed to detect at least three serious overstatements of the risk from global warming.

The review will be overseen by the InterAcademy Council, whose members are drawn from the world’s leading national science academies, including Britain’s Royal Society, the United States National Academy of Sciences and the Chinese Academy of Sciences.

The review will be led by Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the Interacademy Council and president of the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences.

He has been asked to investigate the internal processes of the IPCC and will not consider the overarching question of whether it was right to claim that human activities were very likely to be causing global warming.

The review, which will be announced in New York by Ban Ki Moon, the UN Secretary General, and Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, is expected to recommend stricter checking of sources and much more careful wording to reflect the uncertainties in many areas of climate science.

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Sad news: George Monbiot, the high priest of the AGW cult, is feeling frustrated and depressed. He is oppressed by the realisation that, as the politicians phrase it, he is not getting his message across. And this blog, at least in a small way, bears some part of the responsibility. From his pontifical throne in the Vatican of global warming – The Guardian – he has issued an anathema. Quoting from a recent anti-AGW scam posting by me, he observes: “The attack on climate scientists is now widening to an all-out war on science.”

Don’t get carried away, George. It is only an all-out war on bogus science, such as the global warming superstition you champion. The good guys can carry on inventing antibiotics and curing diseases with our whole-hearted support. It is the con men who have taken Al Gore’s shilling that we distrust and despise. Monbiot even has some insight into this. Of the perception of scientists as sinister schemers he concedes: “Sometimes this isn’t far from the truth.”

He cites those scientists who have weaponised anthrax, or isolated terminator genes for biotech companies to prevent farmers from saving seed, or written misleading endorsements of drugs for pharmaceutical companies. He even denounces the practices of scientific journals “whose monopolistic practices make the supermarkets look like angels”. I wonder if he has had a word with Phil Jones about that.

Wars come and go, cities are destroyed and rebuilt, monuments are erected, and life goes on. This is the traditional view of war, but right now the world is engaged in the latest battle of a “climate war” that has been going on since the 1970s when the Club of Rome concluded in a report titled, “The real enemy then, is humanity itself”, that the world’s population had to be reduced.

Whereas wars in the modern era have killed millions and communism as practiced in the former Soviet Union and the early decades of Red China under Chairman Mao killed millions more on a scale with which war could not compete, the advocates of population reduction rival the worst despots to have ever walked among us.

With the revelations from leaked emails between the conspirators who kept the global warming fraud going for many years, the so-called “climate scientists” who, in fact, had created phony computer models and engaged in endless studies to “prove” that global warming posed a threat to mankind, the term “Climategate” was coined to describe their collusion.

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Critics point to mistakes, e-mail theft to raise doubts on research; poll shows less public concern

A series of highly publicized errors in a landmark report about manmade global warming - and lingering controversy over hacked e-mails between climate scientists - is eroding public confidence in the research and could further stall efforts in Congress to pass climate legislation.

The errors - involving projections, citations of source materials, and geography - have been seized on by skeptics of the scientific consensus that the burning of fossil fuels is almost certainly the most significant cause of earth’s rising temperature. Now, there are signs the critics are succeeding at raising doubts.

In recent weeks, Texas, Virginia, and Alabama officials filed challenges to the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that manmade greenhouse gases threaten public health, and Senator Jay Rockefeller, a Democrat from the coal state of West Virginia, introduced a bill to postpone for two years EPA rules stemming from that determination.

Republican senators have pointed to the errors as another reason to oppose a climate bill, spearheaded by Senator John F. Kerry, that would limit carbon dioxide emissions.