Showing posts with label IPCC. Show all posts
Showing posts with label IPCC. Show all posts

Monday, February 15, 2010

IPCC begins to acknowledge mistakes in its reporting

From the WSJ:

Some top officials of a Nobel Prize-winning climate-science organization are acknowledging the panel made some mistakes amid a string of recent revelations questioning the accuracy of some of the information in its influential reports.

Officials of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations-sponsored network of scientists whose reports strongly influence global policy on greenhouse-gas emissions, initially played down some of the allegations. Increasingly, however, they are acknowledging the panel's mistakes and saying it needs to tighten its procedures.

VH: Since the IPCC is used by AGW advocates as a "scientific" international agency that legitimizes their position and which is used as justification to steer policy (re: billions of American taxpayer dollars) towards mitigating "climate change," one would hope that their reporting should be held to a higher standard. Apparently not.

Friday, February 12, 2010

You just can't trust the IPCC

According to this piece in the WSJ, the IPCC routinely omits the positives of Global Warming in their reports:

According to a 2004 paper by British geographer and climatologist Nigel Arnell, global warming would likely reduce the world's total number of people living in "water-stressed watersheds"—that is, areas with less than 1,000 cubic meters of water resources per capita, per year—even though many regions would see increased water shortages. Using multiple models, Mr. Arnell predicted that if temperatures rise, between 867 million and 4.5 billion people around the world could see increased "water stress" by 2085. But Mr. Arnell also found that "water stress" could decrease for between 1.7 billion and 6 billion people. Taking the average of the two ranges, that means that with global warming, nearly 2.7 billion people could see greater water shortages—but 3.85 billion could see fewer of them.

The IPCC's much-shorter "Summary for Policy Makers" is even more one-sided. It is riddled with warnings of warming-induced drought and—while acknowledging that a hotter Earth would bring "increased water availability" in some areas—warns that rising temperatures would leave "hundreds of millions of people exposed to increased water stress." Nowhere does it specify that even more people would probably have more water supplies.

VH: After reading the article, who can believe that the IPCC is even handed in its treatment of climate issues? The IPCC is essentially a mouth piece for AGW advocates.

Friday, February 5, 2010

The IPCC error campaign continues

The IPCC's beleaguered climate report faces the prospect of still more errors, as Dutch authorities point out factual inaccuracies about the Netherlands.

Dutch environment ministry spokesman Trimo Vallaart has asked the U.N.'s climate change panel to rethink its assertion that more than half of the Netherlands is below seal level. Dutch authorities explain that, in fact, only 26 percent of the country is below sea level.

...correcting the error had been "on the agenda several times" but had never actually happened. Vallaart told the AFP that he regretted the fact that proper procedure was not followed, adding that it should not be left to politicians to check the IPCC's numbers.

Monday, January 25, 2010

Another Climate Panel Problem

After a week down with the flu, I'm back.

Here's an interesting piece I found in this week's issue of The Economist. Once again we see how fallible the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) really is:

The idea that the Himalaya could lose its glaciers by 2035—glaciers which feed rivers across South and East Asia—is a dramatic and apocalyptic one. After the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said such an outcome was very likely in the assessment of the state of climate science that it made in 2007, onlookers (including this newspaper) repeated the claim with alarm. In fact, there is no reason to believe it to be true. This is good news (within limits) for Indian farmers—and bad news for the IPCC.

And shameful news for publications (like the once vaunted Economist) that parroted the IPCC warning without proper due diligence. What has happened to healthy skepticism? It seems that with the subject of Global Warming any pretense to question the science is seen as sheer heresy or a mark of stupidity. But again we see another example of where the IPCC, supposedly an authority on this matter, fails to properly carry out a simple review process. Quite frankly, no government should put any trust into anything the IPCC publishes.