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November 27, 2009

Climate Scientist: maybe IPCC has run its course, climate science too partisan & political

This is a surprise. Professor Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia suggests that the “I.P.C.C. has run its course”. I agree with him. We really need to remove a wholly political organization, the United Nations, from science.

Republished from New York Times Reporter Andrew Revkin’s Dot Earth:

Dot Earth: Insights from Mike Hulme at the University of East Anglia, which was the source of the disclosed files. Hulme, a climate scientist at the University of East Anglia and author of “ Why We Disagree About Climate Change,” has weighed in with these thoughts about the significance of the leaked files and emails. In November 2009, Hulme was listed as “the 10th most cited author in the world in the field of climate change, between 1999 and 2009. (ScienceWatch, Nov/Dec 2009, see Table 2).

Hulme Key Excerpt:

[Upcoming UN climate conference in Copenhagen] “is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. [...] It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science. It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

Full Hulme Statement:

The key lesson to be learned is that not only must scientific knowledge about climate change be publicly owned — the I.P.C.C. does a fairly good job of this according to its own terms — but the very practices of scientific enquiry must also be publicly owned, in the sense of being open and trusted. From outside, and even to the neutral, the attitudes revealed in the emails do not look good. To those with bigger axes to grind it is just what they wanted to find.

This will blow its course soon in the conventional media without making too much difference to Copenhagen — after all, COP15 is about raw politics, not about the politics of science. But in the Internet worlds of deliberation and in the ‘mood’ of public debate about the trustworthiness of climate science, the reverberations of this episode will live on long beyond COP15. Climate scientists will have to work harder to earn the warranted trust of the public – and maybe that is no bad thing.

But this episode might signify something more in the unfolding story of climate change. This event might signal a crack that allows for processes of re-structuring scientific knowledge about climate change. It is possible that some areas of climate science has become sclerotic. It is possible that climate science has become too partisan, too centralized. The tribalism that some of the leaked emails display is something more usually associated with social organization within primitive cultures; it is not attractive when we find it at work inside science.

It is also possible that the institutional innovation that has been the I.P.C.C. has run its course. Yes, there will be an AR5 but for what purpose? The I.P.C.C. itself, through its structural tendency to politicize climate change science, has perhaps helped to foster a more authoritarian and exclusive form of knowledge production – just at a time when a globalizing and wired cosmopolitan culture is demanding of science something much more open and inclusive.

h/t to Marc Morano

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Filed under  //   Climategate   CRU   IPCC   Mike Hulme  

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October 2, 2009

IPCC "is a four-legged stool that is fast losing its legs"

From the National Post:

T

he official United Nation’s global warming agency, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is a four-legged stool  that is fast losing its legs.  To carry the message of man-made global warming theory to the world, the IPCC has depended on 1) computer models, 2) data collection,  3) long-range temperature forecasting and 4) communication.  None of these efforts are sitting on firm ground.

Over the past month, one of the IPCC’s top climate scientists, Mojib Latif, attempted to explain that even if global temperatures were to cool over the next 10 to 20 years, that would not mean that man-made global warming is no longer catastrophic. It was a tough case to make, and it is not clear Mr. Latif succeeded. In a presentation to a world climate conference in early September, Mr. Latif rambled somewhat and veered off into inscrutable language that is now embedded in a million blog posts attempting to prove one thing or another.

A sample: “It may well happen that you enter a decade, or maybe even two, you know, when the temperature cools, all right, relative to the present level...And then, you know, I know what’s going to happen. You know, I will get, you know, millions of phone calls, you know —‘What’s going on?’ ‘So is global warming disappearing, you know?’ ‘Have you lied on us, you know?’ So, and, therefore, this is the reason why we need to address this decadal prediction issue.”


Read the rest here.

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Filed under  //   climate change   climate models   IPCC   Mojib Latif  

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July 10, 2009

Global temperature falls again in June

Saturday, July 11, 2009 at 07:18am
image
Both the UAH and RSS statellite data show the globe cooled in June. Lucia now plots the temperature trend since 2001, and contrasts it with the trend you’d expect from the IPCC’s gloomy warning of a temperature rise of 2 degrees by the end of the century (brown line).
 
Meanwhile, a reporter goes to a far more authoritative source on global warming than a lousy satellite:
 
image
 
UPDATE
Yet Prince Charles says we’re just eight years to sayonara:
Delivering the annual Richard Dimbleby lecture, Charles said that without “coherent financial incentives and disincentives” we have just 96 months to avert “irretrievable climate and ecosystem collapse, and all that goes with it.”
 
 
Eight years, five years, ten years etc etc. People have been saying we've only got this much time left for at least the past 30 years.
 
Why anyone would be stupid enough to pay any attention at all to these numbers, that are clearly just pulled out of thin air, is beyond me.
 

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Filed under  //   climate change   global temperature   IPCC   RSS statellite data   UAH statellite data  

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May 27, 2009

Climate change is the cholera of our era?

A May 25, 2009 article in the UK Times warning that "climate change is the cholera of our era" has raised the ire of an internationally known disease expert formerly of the UN IPCC.

"The article is a rehash of a similar load of garbage unloaded in 1996, plus (identical wording) other writings of the past, including, I suspect, IPCC," Dr. Paul Reiter told Climate Depot.

Reiter is a malaria expert formerly of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and professor of entomology and tropical disease with the Pasteur Institute in Paris and a member of the World Health Organization Expert Advisory Committee on Vector Biology and Control.

The UK Times article, by Professor Sir Muir Gray is Public Health Director of the Campaign for Greener Healthcare, alleges that man-made global warming is a greater threat to mankind than the scourge of cholera -- an acute diarrheal illness-- which killed an nearly 3000 people in Zimbabwe alone earlier this year. A May 26, 2009 article from VOA reveals cholera cases are expected to reach 100,000 in Zimbabwe alone.

Muir wrote in the UK Times: "In the 19th century, cholera outbreaks that escaped from the slums to kill rich and poor alike caused the great Victorian revolution in public health. Fear of cholera ensured that vast sums were spent on building sewers and ensuring that everyone had clean water. Climate change is the cholera of our era — fear of the havoc that climate change will wreak should stimulate a new public health revolution." "Smoking, Aids, swine flu? They all pale into insignificance compared to climate change's threat to health," Muir added.

But Reiter, was blunt in his rebuttal to Muir's article in the UK Times. "They have cherry picked without remorse. I have huge response to my article in Malaria Journal. Yet these peddlers of garbage quote a 1998 model by two activists whose work is ridiculed by those of us who work in this field," Reiter continued. "What the hell can we do? I am flabbergasted that this can go on, and on, and on," Reiter, who is featured in the U.S. Senate Report of more than 700 dissenting scientists of man-made global warming, concluded.

Reiter was also formerly with the UN IPCC and was so appalled at UN IPCC process that he threatened legal action to get his name removed from the reports.

SOURCE
 
 

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Filed under  //   cholera   climate change   Greenpeace   health   IPCC   Paul Reiter   Sir Muir Gray  

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May 1, 2009

Reasons not to trust the IPCC

Just got my copy of Ian Plimer's new book, Heaven and Earth: Global Warming:The Missing Science.
 
Going to be a good read I reckon. It must be sticking in the alarmists craw that 10,000 copies sold here in Australia in just two days and it had to be reprinted.
 
Here's a snippet:
 
In the 1996 report on the impact of global warming on health, one contributing author was an expert on the effectiveness of motorcycle helmets. That author had also written on the health effects of mobile phones. Other authors were environmental activists, one of whom had written on the health effects of mercury poisoning from land mines. If a land mine explodes, the last thing one thinks about is the health effects of mercury poisoning. In the 2007 report, the health effects of global warming were expertly dealt with by two lead authors, one of whom was a hygienist and another a specialist in coprolites (fossil faeces). Those who drove the publication of the chapters on the health effects of global warming had no formal expertise in the chapters' subject material, especially tropical diseases. In fact, the expert opinions of tropical disease scientists were ignored by the other lead authors with no experience in the field.
 
I know that when a biography check was done on a number of the supposed "expert" reviewers listed for the Fourth Assessment Report (from an admittedly less technical part of the report), a number turned out to be administrative assistants, website designers, database administrators, lawyers and the like.
 

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Filed under  //   climate change   Ian Plimer   IPCC   science  

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