UN climate change panel based claims on student dissertation and magazine article

[Wabash]

By Richard Gray, Science Correspondent and Rebecca Lefort
Published: 9:00PM GMT 30 Jan 2010

The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.

The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.

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.

The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.

It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.

Sceptics have seized upon the mistakes to cast doubt over the validity of the IPCC and have called for the panel to be disbanded.

This week scientists from around the world leapt to the defence of the IPCC, insisting that despite the errors, which they describe as minor, the majority of the science presented in the IPCC report is sound and its conclusions are unaffected.

But some researchers have expressed exasperation at the IPCC's use of unsubstantiated claims and sources outside of the scientific literature.

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."

The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government's worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.

The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled "Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming".

It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.

The report also states that the section is intended to "assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects".

But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.

The magazine article, which was written by Mark Bowen, a climber and author of two books on climate change, appeared in Climbing magazine in 2002. It quoted anecdotal evidence from climbers of retreating glaciers and the loss of ice from climbs since the 1970s.

Mr Bowen said: "I am surprised that they have cited an article from a climbing magazine, but there is no reason why anecdotal evidence from climbers should be disregarded as they are spending a great deal of time in places that other people rarely go and so notice the changes."

The dissertation paper, written by professional mountain guide and climate change campaigner Dario-Andri Schworer while he was studying for a geography degree, quotes observations from interviews with around 80 mountain guides in the Bernina region of the Swiss Alps.

Experts claim that loss of ice climbs are a poor indicator of a reduction in mountain ice as climbers can knock ice down and damage ice falls with their axes and crampons.

The IPCC has faced growing criticism over the sources it used in its last report after it emerged the panel had used unsubstantiated figures on glacial melting in the Himalayas that were contained within a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) report.

It can be revealed that the IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed WWF reports.

One claim, which stated that coral reefs near mangrove forests contained up to 25 times more fish numbers than those without mangroves nearby, quoted a feature article on the WWF website.

In fact the data contained within the WWF article originated from a paper published in 2004 in the respected journal Nature.

In another example a WWF paper on forest fires was used to illustrate the impact of reduced rainfall in the Amazon rainforest, but the data was from another Nature paper published in 1999.

When The Sunday Telegraph contacted the lead scientists behind the two papers in Nature, they expressed surprise that their research was not cited directly but said the IPCC had accurately represented their work.

The chair of the IPCC Rajendra Pachauri has faced mounting pressure and calls for his resignation amid the growing controversy over the error on glacier melting and use of unreliable sources of information.

A survey of 400 authors and contributors to the IPCC report showed, however, that the majority still support Mr Pachauri and the panel's vice chairs. They also insisted the overall findings of the report are robust despite the minor errors.

But many expressed concern at the use of non-peer reviewed information in the reports and called for a tightening of the guidelines on how information can be used.

The Met Office, which has seven researchers who contributed to the report including Professor Martin Parry who was co-chair of the working group responsible for the part of the report that contained the glacier errors, said: "The IPCC should continue to ensure that its review process is as robust and transparent as possible, that it draws only from the peer-reviewed literature, and that uncertainties in the science and projections are clearly expressed."

Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the US research organisation Resources for the Future who also contributed to the IPCC's latest report, added: "The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy.

"It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation tend to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives."

The IPCC failed to respond to questions about the inclusion of unreliable sources in its report but it has insisted over the past week that despite minor errors, the findings of the report are still robust and consistent with the underlying science.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/env...e-article.html

[Wabash]

42 hours later...no comments from the Left on these bozos!

[Wabash]

Margaret Wente

Published on Friday, Feb. 05, 2010 6:45PM EST Last updated on Saturday, Feb. 06, 2010 4:15AM EST

In 2007, the most comprehensive report to date on global warming, issued by the respected United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, made a shocking claim: The Himalayan glaciers could melt away as soon as 2035.

These glaciers provide the headwaters for Asia's nine largest rivers and lifelines for the more than one billion people who live downstream. Melting ice and snow would create mass flooding, followed by mass drought. The glacier story was reported around the world. Last December, a spokesman for the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group, warned, “The deal reached at Copenhagen will have huge ramifications for the lives of hundreds of millions of people who are already highly vulnerable due to widespread poverty.” To dramatize their country's plight, Nepal's top politicians strapped on oxygen tanks and held a cabinet meeting on Mount Everest.

But the claim was rubbish, and the world's top glaciologists knew it. It was based not on rigorously peer-reviewed science but on an anecdotal report by the WWF itself. When its background came to light on the eve of Copenhagen, Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC, shrugged it off. But now, even leading scientists and environmental groups admit the IPCC is facing a crisis of credibility that makes the Climategate affair look like small change.

“The global warming movement as we have known it is dead,” the brilliant analyst Walter Russell Mead says in his blog on The American Interest. It was done in by a combination of bad science and bad politics.

The impetus for the Copenhagen conference was that the science makes it imperative for us to act. But even if that were true – and even if we knew what to do – a global deal was never in the cards. As Mr. Mead writes, “The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.” Copenhagen was never going to produce a breakthrough. It was a dead end.

And now, the science scandals just keep on coming. First there was the vast cache of e-mails leaked from the University of East Anglia, home of a crucial research unit responsible for collecting temperature data. Although not fatal to the science, they revealed a snakepit of scheming to keep contradictory research from being published, make imperfect data look better, and withhold information from unfriendly third parties. If science is supposed to be open and transparent, these guys acted as if they had a lot to hide.

Despite widespread efforts to play down the Climategate e-mails, they were very damaging. An investigation by the British newspaper The Guardian – among the most aggressive advocates for action on climate change – has found that a series of measurements from Chinese weather stations were seriously flawed, and that documents relating to them could not be produced.

Meantime, the IPCC – the body widely regarded, until now, as the ultimate authority on climate science – is looking worse and worse. After it was forced to retract its claim about melting glaciers, Mr. Pachauri dismissed the error as a one-off. But other IPCC claims have turned out to be just as groundless.

For example, it warned that large tracts of the Amazon rain forest might be wiped out by global warming because they are extremely susceptible to even modest decreases in rainfall. The sole source for that claim, reports The Sunday Times of London, was a magazine article written by a pair of climate activists, one of whom worked for the WWF. One scientist contacted by the Times, a specialist in tropical forest ecology, called the article “a mess.”

Worse still, the Times has discovered that Mr. Pachauri's own Energy and Resources Unit, based in New Delhi, has collected millions in grants to study the effects of glacial melting – all on the strength of that bogus glacier claim, which happens to have been endorsed by the same scientist who now runs the unit that got the money. Even so, the IPCC chief is hanging tough. He insists the attacks on him are being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits.

Until now, anyone who questioned the credibility of the IPCC was labelled as a climate skeptic, or worse. But many climate scientists now sense a sinking ship, and they're bailing out. Among them is Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria who acknowledges that the climate body has crossed the line into advocacy. Even Britain's Greenpeace has called for Mr. Pachauri's resignation. India says it will establish its own body to monitor the effects of global warming because it “cannot rely” on the IPCC.

None of this is to say that global warming isn't real, or that human activity doesn't play a role, or that the IPCC is entirely wrong, or that measures to curb greenhouse-gas emissions aren't valid. But the strategy pursued by activists (including scientists who have crossed the line into advocacy) has turned out to be fatally flawed.

By exaggerating the certainties, papering over the gaps, demonizing the skeptics and peddling tales of imminent catastrophe, they've discredited the entire climate-change movement. The political damage will be severe. As Mr. Mead succinctly puts it: “Skeptics up, Obama down, cap-and-trade dead.” That also goes for Canada, whose climate policies are inevitably tied to those of the United States.

“I don't think it's healthy to dismiss proper skepticism,” says John Beddington, the chief scientific adviser to the British government. He is a staunch believer in man-made climate change, but he also points out the complexity of climate science. “Science grows and improves in the light of criticism. There is a fundamental uncertainty about climate change prediction that can't be changed.” In his view, it's time to stop circling the wagons and throw open the doors. How much the public will keep caring is another matter.
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/...rticle1458206/

[Cookie Parker]

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/topics/we...cientists.html

A study by the Met Office which went back 350 years shows that such extreme weather now only occurs every 20 years.

Back in the pre-industrial days of Charles Dickens, it was a much more regular occurrence - hitting the country on average every five years or so.

During that time global temperatures has risen by 1.7 F (0.8 C), studies have shown.

"Even though this is quite a cold winter by recent standards it is still perfectly consistent with predictions for global warming," said Dr Myles Allen, head of the Climate Dynamics group at Department of Physics, University of Oxford.

"If it wasn't for global warming this cold snap would happen much more regularly. What is interesting is that we are now surprised by this kind of weather. I doubt we would have been in the 1950s because it was much more common.

"As for snowfall that could actually increase in the short term because of global warming. We have all heard the expression 'too cold to snow' and we have always expected precipitation to increase.

"All the indicators still suggest that we are warming up in line with predictions."

This winter seems so bad precisely because it is now so unusual. In contrast the deep freezes of 1946-47 and 1962-63 were much colder - 5.3 F (2.97C) and 7.9 F (4.37C) cooler than the long-term norm.

And with global warming we can expect another 1962-63 winter only once every 1,100 years, compared with every 183 years before 1850.

Dave Britton, a meteorologist and climate scientist at the Met Office, said: "Even with global warming you cannot rule out we will have a cold winter every so often. It sometimes rains in the Sahara but it is still a desert."

Scientists point out that the people must distinguish between climate and weather. Weather is what happens in the short term whereas climate is the long term trend.

"Just as the wet summer of 2007 or recent heat waves cannot be attributed to global warming nor can this cold snap," said Bob Ward, spokesman for the Grantham Research Institute for Climate Change at London School of Economics.

"What is important to do is look at the long term global trends and they are still up. What we experience in the short term in this country is not important. After all, Melbourne had a heat wave last week."

As for the suggestion that the recent cold weather is due to a reversal of the warming Gulf Stream and the North Atlantic Drift - otherwise known as the Thermohaline Circulation - this has been mostly ruled out by recent research.

"It has a very low chance of happening and if it does occur it will be in centuries time," added Mr Ward.

The North Atlantic Drift is an extension of the Gulf Stream which brings warm tropical water from the Gulf of Mexico to northern Europe, including Britain. Its effect is to bring up the average temperature.

[Oceanbreeze]

Wabby, I thought liberals were against capitalism?

[Wabash]

Originally Posted by Oceanbreeze

Wabby, I thought liberals were against capitalism?

Liberals are against all kinds of things.......except when they are for it!

Al Gore and Ed Begley Jr. are in hiding, the media is frozen, the only REAL source of power for snow blowers and big trucks and plows is................you guessed it...FOSSIL FUELS!


Try running all those machines on "solar power"

It's about time that libs realized that Fossil Fuels are the best and cheapest source of energy available! Alternative energy is a nice gesture, but will not be replacing OIL for a long time, probably never!

[Wabash]

February 9, 2010

Posted Matt Dempsey matt_dempsey@epw.senate.gov

UPDATE: The following Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works hearings have been postponed due to inclement weather this week:

- The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, Subcommittee on Water and Wildlife, will hold a hearing entitled, "Collaborative Solutions to Wildlife and Habitat Management."

- The Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works will hold a hearing entitled, "Global Warming Impacts, Including Public Health, in the United States."

Once the hearings are rescheduled, information will be posted at www.epw.senate.gov
http://epw.senate.gov/public/index.c...8-8fa00c661d62

[Wabash]

By Alexander Bolton - 02/09/10 09:30 PM ET

Record snowfall has buried Washington — and along with it, buried the chances of passing global warming legislation this year.

Cars are stranded in banks of snow along the streets of the federal capital, and in the corridors of Congress, climate legislation also has been put on ice.

Democratic senators say a bill that was once a top priority for the party and for President Barack Obama cannot be dug up again during 2010.
RELATED ARTICLES

* Kerry: 'Dead wrong' to write obituary on climate change bill

Voters are mostly concerned with jobs and the economy. Global warming is at the bottom of their list. And now, on top of that, the paralyzing snowfalls have made the prospect of winning support for a climate bill this year even less likely.

Sen. Jim DeMint (R-S.C.) on Tuesday used the D.C. snowstorm to make a political jab, saying that it provides evidence for global warming skeptics.

“It's going to keep snowing in DC until Al Gore cries “uncle,” the conservative Senator tweeted on Twitter.

Sen. Jeff Bingaman (D-N.M.) said the blizzards that have shut down Congress have made it more difficult to argue that global warming is an imminent danger.

“It makes it more challenging for folks not taking time to review the scientific arguments,” said Bingaman, who as the chairman of the Energy and Natural Resources Committee has jurisdiction over energy and climate change issues.

“People see the world around them and they extrapolate,” Bingaman said. “I think that it’s hard to see an economy-wide cap-and-trade [proposal] of the type that passed the House could prevail,” he added, though he suggested a more limited alternative could have a better chance.

The seasonal snowfall total for Washington reached 45 inches after nearly two feet of snow dumped on the region over the weekend.

Forecasts predicted another six to 20 inches to fall on Tuesday and Wednesday, putting the city on course to break a 111-year-old record for its snowiest winter. The record snowfall has forced the House to cancel all votes this week. The Senate met Tuesday, but may not meet the rest of the week.

For critics, it was an opportunity to poke fun at the issue’s most prominent advocate.

“Where’s Al Gore when we need him?” quipped Senate Republican leader Mitch McConnell (Ky.), who burst out laughing when asked about the prospect of passing cap-and-trade legislation Tuesday while the city was still digging out.

Some Senate Democrats dismiss the role snow has played in the debate, but they acknowledge there is growing consensus that global warming legislation will not pass in the 111th Congress.

“I don’t think that the climate change with cap-and-trade is going to pass this year,” said Sen. Kent Conrad (D-N.D.), who as Budget chairman is putting together Congress’s annual estimate of how much revenue the government will collect next year and in future years.

The effort to pass global climate change legislation has suffered a succession of blows over the past six months.

One of the most damaging setbacks was the emergence last year of hundreds of private e-mail messages sent among American and British climate scientists at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and the University of East Anglia.

The documents, which were hacked from a university computer server, prompted accusations that researchers may have edited the presentation of data to overstate the threat of warming.

In December, a much-heralded international summit on climate change held in Copenhagen, Denmark, failed to produce the international emissions deal that many environmentalists had wanted. International negotiators did not set any targets for reducing emissions but agreed to a framework that could serve as the basis for an enforceable treaty sometime in the future.

This year, Obama administration officials had to defend a landmark 2007 report from the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change that included the unsubstantiated claim that Himalayan glaciers would vanish by 2035.


Senior administration officials do not seem enthusiastic to battle with Congress over climate change. Although Obama urged Congress last week not to give up on climate change legislation, a senior adviser later suggested that lawmakers would have to reach agreement largely of their own accord.

Senior White House political adviser David Axelrod said: “If a consensus can be reached, we want to support that, but this is clearly an issue that Republicans and Democrats are going to have to do together. It is not something that one party or the other party can do.”

At the start of 2009, Obama hoped to fund a major middle-class tax cut with the income from a cap-and-trade regulatory program that would have charged companies for pollution permits. But hardly anyone in the Senate is counting on new revenue from a cap-and-trade program anytime soon.

“I think that there’s a general understanding that maybe cap-and-trade is dead,” said Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.), a member of the Energy and Natural Resources panel, after Senate Democrats held a retreat last week.

Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-Calif.), chairwoman of the Environment and Public Works Committee, which approved a cap-and-trade proposal last year, acknowledged that there are not yet 60 votes for an energy reform and cap-and-trade proposal.

Boxer said she has not yet given up.

But even the most ardent proponents of curbing greenhouse gas emissions sense their backs are up against the wall.

Sen. John Kerry (D-Mass.), who is leading a bipartisan effort to put together a compromise on energy and climate change legislation, has exhorted allies to act with greater urgency.

“I want you to go out there and start knocking on doors and talking to people and telling people, ‘This has to happen!’” Kerry said at a forum hosted by environmentalists last month.

“You know, if Tea Party folks go out there and get angry because they think their taxes are too high, for God’s sakes, a lot of citizens ought to be angry about the fact that they’re being killed and our planet is being injured by what is happening on a daily basis by the way we provide our power and our fuel and by the old practices we have,” Kerry told his allies.

But many Senate Democrats are not nearly as eager as Kerry even to bring a climate change bill to the floor.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-Nev.) has called moving the bill a “headache.”

Reid promised last month to put a comprehensive energy and climate package on the floor sometime this spring, but lawmakers are growing increasingly skeptical of that plan.


Ben Geman contributed to this report.
http://thehill.com/homenews/senate/8...ecord-snowfall

[Wabash]

God has a Great Sense of Humor!

[Cookie Parker]

Your denials do not discount the thousands of scientists who know this exists. All your denials do, Wabby, is allow corporations to pollute and kill people.

As with all republicans and their pro-corporate figthts, they must lie about it to push it through.

This world in dying from pollution. It's on republians and their support of keeping the rich richer.

HAve fun in your denial land, Wabby. IT's destroying the earth, but then your god doesn't care about that, huh?