Wednesday
Jun152011
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill New consensus: IPCC is dumb
Jun 15, 2011 Climate: IPCC Energy Greens Lots of interest on Twitter re the Greenpeace's involvement in the IPCC renewables report. Both sides appear united in their disbelief that the IPCC could be so foolish after everything that has gone before:
Having read the post, I think McIntyre is onto something. Kudos to him for spotting this.
Looks like IPCC hvnt learnt lessons
Might have known concl was dictated by Greenpeace Germany!
My sentiments echo McIntyre: 'hoped against hope'. V dumb of IPCC to let this happen after evrythng
Reader Comments (33)
Steve McIntyre also says:
So not just Greenpeace involvement, but also the vested interests of the renewables industry.
Corruption rules in the IPCC
A telling summary comment at CA:
Its stinks that true , but to be honest is a smell we are well used to coming from the IPCC
This is a watershed. Or rather, it could be if not drowned out by the lowing herd of energy fantasists.
Are the IPCC really so removed from reality in their own little alarmist bubble that they never expected anybody to find this flagrant deception?
So convinced of their own invincibility that they thought their word was Law?
Or just so far up their own arses that they don't care any more?
It must be one of the three, unless anyone has any better hypotheses......
The may be 'clever' people (I;m sure it takes a world class intellect to qualify for climatology at UEA :-) ), but streetwise they ain't. [Snip - venting]
Also interesting to see how Mark Lynas views Greenpeace Germany now he has joined the ranks of the energy realists.
A watershed it could be. Lynas and Hickman suggest so. Are they deniers too, now?
But will the [snip - language] MSM or the appalling BBC pick up on this in between cutting and pasting government press releases and "papping" slebs?
Great title by the way Bish. There's a lot of mileage in the terms 'consensus' and 'deniers' this week.
Lets not forget the efforts of Donna Laframboise.
http://nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/03/14/peer-into-the-heart-of-the-ipcc-find-greenpeace/
I have to say real life Canadians make the fictional characters Sherlock Holmes and Hercule Poirot look like the Keystone Cops.
Rajendra Pachauri better watch out the Mounties always get their man:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:RCMP_with_serge_(1).jpg
Well, the effort is sincere and that must be commended.
I look forward with interest to this being covered in Leo Hickman's blog/column , rather than the usual "how green is my (insert any household object, fruit, vegetable or activity) ....." anodyne efforts.
Even if I were a passionate believer in the idea that man-made CO2 is dangerously warming the planet I would be starting to look a little askance at the IPCC.
As I am not, I am happy for them to go blundering on.
Does anybody have good contacts at the Torygraph (other than Loopy Louise and Geriatric Geoffrey)?
With their recent apparent conversion to mild scepticism from unthinking and credulous alarmism, this would make a good story for them.
No hint of the story at the BBC so far: http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science_and_environment/
Can't be significant in that case...
Seeing as the Graun and BBC reported this, I assume the error will be reported very soon as well ?
*(giggles)
I usually have a quick look at the Graun every morning. I used to become really angry with the demonstrable drivel that both Lynas and Hickman pass off as journalism, but their output has recently become so infantile and silly that I tended to smile and move on. With the latest whatevergate breaking, the two of them may be beginning to use a vestige of their supposed critical and sceptical abilities, or perhaps the coming denoument of the IPCC is going to be such a major event that they are scrambling for a new position that will allow them to avoid the fall-out.
Why do stray thoughts of rats and sinking ships occur to me?
It is amazingly interesting to see people like Leo Hickman (and Mark Lynas, as mentioned in the other post) criticizing this. For people who read sceptic blogs, the idea that some of the IPCC's statements may not be purely science based, that there is a lot of groupthink going on in IPCC circles, or that the arrangements whereby lead authors can review their own work (and work coming from people with competing points of view) are perverse, are hardly revelations. But the mainstream just does not accept this. Perhaps in part because people are reluctant to doubt scientists, and because the argument between sceptics and the consensus has been presented as being mainly about the basic science. Indeed, incidents like this are probably not going to make convinced people look again at WG1's conclusions (Lynas writes "I still hold the hard-science Working Group 1 of the IPCC in very high regard"). But people are more used to disagreeing with politicians and with lobbyists, and that is to a great extent what WG3 is about. Having the debate shifted over to the workings of the IPCC in its WG3 form might be quite good, then, from the sceptics and lukewarmers point of view. It could lead to a re-think even by some of the convinced about the respectability of some of the lukewarmers' views: that CO2 may lead to some extra warming, but that the evidence for warming so severe that it will lead to a uniquely serious outcome is light, and that it is bizarre that the only policy considered to be acceptable is cutting down severely on CO2 emissions. That might be something that more people are prepared to talk about.
Unfortunately the big headline in the media happened last month when the "summary" of this rubbish was released. The disclosures about Greenpeace will result in little or no reporting by the media.
@ Latimer
Are the IPCC really so removed from reality in their own little alarmist bubble that they never expected anybody to find this flagrant deception?
So convinced of their own invincibility that they thought their word was Law?
Or just so far up their own arses that they don't care any more?
The latter, plus they don't have to care because nobody important cares.
It's a bit rich for the likes of Lynas and Hickman to be surprised that the IPCC is so shameless. If they and the rest of the mainstream media had done their jobs and, you know, asked a question occasionally instead of just adding extra superlatives into IPCC, Greenpeace and WWF press releases then the IPCC would have soon have realised that it had to at least make an attempt to look like it wasn't a blatant fix.
If the worms turn, the hunt by fooled journalists to find anyone to blame but themselves will be vicious. Oh dear, what a shame that would be.
Wow! Not content to break the story about the IPCC and Greenpeace in the mainstream media, The Independent now comes out with this:
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/green-living/they-tell-us-recycling-is-good-for-us-garbage-2297961.html
Is The Independent undergoing a seachange? maybe too early to tell.
Sorry - I managed to post the following in the unthreaded thread (and my previous comment here):
Wow! The Independent has woken up to the story about IPCC and Greenpeace. Even mentions Climate Audit.
http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/climate-change/climate-change-panel-in-hot-water-again-over-biased-energy-report-2298055.html
It's a bit rich for the likes of Lynas and Hickman to be surprised that the IPCC is so shameless. ....... the hunt by fooled journalists to find anyone to blame but themselves will be vicious. Oh dear, what a shame that would be.
Jun 16, 2011 at 1:23 AM artwest
I don't believe people like Hickman and his Grauniad/Indie/BBC buddies were "fooled" at all.
Like the IPCC insiders, they're basically an outreach arm of the "activist" community.
They've been attending conferences, interviewing IPCC luminaries and unquestioningly parroting their press releases for so long - they must have known who they were dealing with.
Just consider the case of one senior IPCC figure exposed by Donna Lamframboise recently - the Australian scientist Bill Hare.
http://www.advance.org/en/dir/483/
In the 90's he was happy to describe himself as Greenpeace's "Director of Climate Policy".
Then he popped up as an IPCC lead author on two reports.
Meanwhile, his main job has been at the notorious Potsdam Institute - leading their PRIMAP project
https://sites.google.com/a/primap.org/www/the-team/bill-hare
........and recently he's popped up again (using the same PR CV) in an activist organisation called "Climate Analytics".
https://sites.google.com/a/climateanalytics.org/test/welcome/team
These people are activists through and through - the IPCC is stuffed with them - and Hickman and his ilk have known it for years.
The horse is now out of the barn, but here's a shameless May 9 press release from the "energyblueprint" site (owned by Greenpeace and EREC) which touts the IPCC report and Sven Teske's involvement in it.
http://www.energyblueprint.info/1327.0.html
I am still shaking my head in amazement that someone over at Marks blog tries to defend the IPCC with..
"Or as IPCC advocate Maurice Strong quipped, Isn’t the only hope for the planet that the industrialized civilizations collapse? Isn’t it our responsibility to bring that about?”
Imagine holding up a criminal on the run and hiding in China as a reason to trust the IPCC!
Foxgoose
Unfortunately I think you have to look at each case individually. Many people bought wholeheartedly into CAGW because it exactly matched their worldview (to be fair, many people were anti-AGW in an equally knee-jerk manner but were lucky enough to be, in my opinion, right). They never heard anything against CAGW except for the bits which filtered through from people whose worldview they despised. No-one they admired or agreed with on other matters questioned the "consensus". In fact all the people and institutions they felt closest to decried any questioning as anti-science propagated by "deniers" in thrall to Big Oil (aka Satan). Of course it isn't true but you wouldn't be convinced of this if all your information came from the mainstream media, Greenpeace, WWF, realclimate, et al.
Of course there are charlatans but there are also blind true believers.
Just because someone is an activist it doesn't mean they haven't been fooled - in fact I would suggest that the vast majority of them have been, and not all of them foot-soldiers.
Many graduated smoothly from campaigning against deadly poisons being tipped into rivers and animals being unnecessarily abused into "combating global warming" without appreciating that there was any difference in the amount of evidence that it was even happening.
Lynas has been an activist, written numerous books and even more newspaper articles on the subject of CAGW yet admits that he doesn't understand Mann's "work" and hasn't read the most significant book which examines that work critically. This is a high profile campaigner who seems to know less about the sceptical view of CAGW than the average layperson who has spent a couple of hours reading a handful of blogs. I think he is far from alone.
Pete H, the smiley at the end was rather intended to suggest that that comment on the Lynas post (chris y, 15 June 2011, 4:19 pm) was meant to be a joke. Though its a good one - it took me in for a bit at least.
Artwest,
yours is an attractive position; that many of the CAGW promoters are not dishonest, simply mistaken. I live in Australia so I don't know what the situation is there in the UK but here there is so much sanctimony, so much self righteousness on the part of the Catastrophists that ordinary spectators must be either developmentally stunted or or trusting beyond adult human capacity in order not to smell a rat and blindly accept their propaganda. For example, the government TV stations, the ABC, (our equivalent of the BBC) always show visuals of thick smoke coming out of a smokestack when they talk about climate change being man made. Surely everyone knows that the theory has it that carbon dioxide , which is totally invisible, is the agent which is claimed to be changing the climate, and that smoke coming from a chimney stack is no more connected with CO2 than is a bunch of diamonds on the Queen's tiara. Surely this is an obvious example of the propagandist's black arts?
Here the claim is still perpetually made that "the science is in, the case is proved," and "all the significant scientists agree." Now, even if the CAGW theory were correct, it only takes twenty minutes research to discover that there is an enormous number of top flight scientists, from top flight universities and scientific institutions, who vehemently reject the idea. You don't need to have any scientific training at all to discover that this claim, that "all the scientists of any substance agree" is a stupendous lie. Does no-one in the media in the UK make this point, that the catastrophists' first and final statement is an easily discoverable lie? The ordinary Joe in the street might not be aware of it but someone who's deeply involved must surely know.
I will grant that many of the refutations of the catastrophists' case are made by right wing types who tend to be pretty gross, but the catastrophists themselves are often blatantly absurd; when they rabbit on about Gaia, for example, or when they drop the term "global warming" and slip sideways to "climate change" when the warming doesn't happen. I know the mainstream media are very biased, and I know that some stay-calmists like Monckton, for example, are caricatures of rich, selfish conservatives, but surely there must be a few convincing journalists or scientists who present the stay-calm case in a believable manner.
I have just noticed the heading at the top of the page; "A dissentient afflicted with the malady of thought."
Isn't "dissentient" the opposite of "sentient", meaning "conscious?"
Isn't a "dissentient" one who is unconscious?
Isn't "dissident" the well-used and appropriate word for this context?
Warwick
It's from John Stuart Mill's On Liberty - he talks about "dissentients afflicted with the malady of thought".
BH. I am ashamed to say that I have always wondered but was afraid to ask ;-)
Bishop Hill,
I really put my foot in it with the last comment about using the word "dissident" instead of "dissentient."
Of course the opposite of "sentient" is "insentient," not "dissentient."
And the word "dissident" has a more activist meaning than "dissentient;" you hear about Russian "dissidents" being jailed or shot.
The word I was looking for is "dissenter" but 'dissentient' is given in my Collins dictionary as having the same meaning. I had never encountered the word "dissentient," but I imagine that others are very familiar with it. And if John Stuart Mill employed it then we can, also.
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