David Stockwell has a fascinating post about a paper in Nature by Thomas et al. Thomas is Chris Thomas of the University of Leeds and his co-authors include a bevy of academics as well as NGO people from bodies like the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds and Conservation International.
The subject is the effects of climate change on biodiversity and the paper appears to be quite monumentally bad - one naturalist described it as the worst paper he had ever read. Thomas et al not only use climate models that have no proven skill at the habitat level as the basis for their projections but then assume that any species whose range expands under climate change will...go extinct. Amazing.
And this made it past the editorial team at Nature, the peer reviewers at Nature and the 2500 scientists in the IPCC's Fourth Assessment Report.
And has Philip Campbell resigned? Or Raj Pachauri?
This is why it's hard to give any credence to the utterings of the IPCC. Both they and the underlying scientific literature they claim to rely on are so corrupt, so bereft of any integrity, the idea of relying on them as the basis for public policy is absurd.