Wednesday
Apr022014
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill What the IPCC left out
Apr 2, 2014 Climate: WG2 Rupert Darwall has a smashing post in the National Review examining the IPCC's cherrypicking and its failure to report the benefits of global warming:
...the summary speaks of rapid price increases following climate extremes since the 2007 report. This negligence amounts to downright dishonesty, as the summary omits mention of one of the principal causes of the 2007–08 spike in food prices, which is highlighted in the main body of the report. It was not climate change that increased food costs, but climate policies in the form of increased use of food crops in biofuel production, exacerbated by higher oil prices and government embargoes on food exports.
Reader Comments (14)
Like all the dinosaurs they still have the culture from a time before social media when all they had to contend with was a few arts graduates at the Gawdian and they could get away with that.
It's clearly taking the IPCC a lot longer than some to come to terms with the modern era of social media.
So how much longer are we going to sit on our hands bemoaning the carefully orchestrated campaign which is successfully putting forward false and manipulated science to control our future?
We are not an insignificant minority.
We are, according to recent research, a group of educated and intelligent people who take an interest in what is loosely called "Climate Science" and believe very strongly that much of what we are being told is not true.
Surely the time has come to use our collective influence to put a stop to the bad science, distortion of the facts, lies and corruption.
If we continue to sit back and accept it meekly, we will have no one to blame but ourselves.
You really have a bee in your bonnet about this dinosaur mentality, don’t you, Mike? You are right, and we ought to take every advantage we can over them for it, so – Global Warming: Nuisance or Nemesis?
Well, we know how right they were in answering the previous version of that question; do you think they will be right, now?
There must be a way to say this better, but in a sense climate change is human caused: In the same sense that a scary movie or horror story is human caused.
This week's obviously coordinated deceptive hype by the climate obsessed is creating climate change, not reporting on accurately on anything actually happening in climate.
John Carter: "Surely the time has come."
You are right, but the first step is to stop underestimating the huge power and influence that skeptics already have. First, social media has dramatically evened up the playing field so now people like Andrew are very much on an equal footing with huge institutions and governments. It's no longer "The committee allowing Andrew to speak" ... it is now "Andrew allowing the committee to be heard by his readers".
We have to stop believing they have control over us - they don't - the social media revolution now means that (if we believe it) we have control over them. Just as the high-street shops tried to deny the influence of the internet, so now the "high street" institutions of academia and government are trying to deny the power of the internet which is slowly undermining their position.
The social media battle is not one the big institutions and big parties who used to dominate our society can possibly win.
Second, we must stop thinking of Skeptics (or engineers as most are) as "second rate scientists", the reality is that those who society calls: "scientists" are in fact second rate Skeptics.
A Skeptic is someone whose views are determined by the evidence. It is someone for whom a theory or model must work in practice to have any credibility. This is natural to most engineering, but not all natural to academia from where we get most of what is called "science".
Yes, some scientist espouse the skeptic aims and many achieve our standards, but likewise many, particularly those in climate science or environmental science do not. The result is very much a two-tier area formally known as "science". In the bottom tier we have those "post-normal" academics like most of those in climate, who reject the idea of testing theories and models before asserting them to be "unequivocally true" or "the science is settled". In the top tier, we have most engineers and many hard scientists (and CERN would be a notable example) for whom nothing (even the speed of light) is proven unless the theory is backed up with evidence.
So, I believe, it is time we encouraged academics to decide whether they want to be mere "scientists" for whom "peer review" (aka buddy review) is all that matters (as in climate science), or whether they espouse the much higher evidential standards of skeptics: that assertions are only "true" when supported by the evidence and practical tests. And even then one is very cautious not to go beyond the evidence and to have an open mind.
You are correct it was the ''climate mitigation'' measures like biofuels that caused food prices to rocket. At the moment I am trying to get the truth about the Drax conversion to biofuels. They claim that their requirements will be satisfied by forest waste and thinnings alone. They also claim that they do not use fuels grown on food producing land. This is a lie. Some former wheat producing fields in Lincolnshire are now growing biofuel for Drax.
The IPCC report is not a compendium of the latest science for general consumption - it is written for a specific audience, and that audience requires to find things to do, as policymakers, in order to make the world a better place.
This means that every IPCC report will focus on negatives. Every positive consequence is just not interesting to the audience.
Well that explanation for the price hikes is also biased guesswork. Most real evidence points to rampant commodities speculation in 2007 and consequent food hoarding to deliberately spike the price for short-term profit. It's a failure of capitalism, not statism. Nothing to do with climate change either of course; which the real-world evidence suggests should increase the food supply.
Of course environmentalists are against using food as fuel too and the corn for ethanol idea started prior to the main climate scares as a red-state subsidy help US farmers during a period of glut. Sugar is far better for the purpose and we don't seriously need that for food anyway. Lord knows where the palm oil scam came from but it seems to be a combined statist/capitalist failure.
However if artificial fuel price hikes cause such misery, imagine what overly high taxes or real undersupply can do. This lends weight to climate realist arguments for exploiting shale gas asap but also supports progressive arguments to research for useful alternatives sooner rather than later.
Radical Rodent: "You really have a bee in your bonnet about this dinosaur mentality, don’t you, Mike?"
I spent years trying to get the Scottish press to cover the skeptic view. Eventually I had a long talk to a journalist friend in which they explained the realities of modern journalism and e.g. that they didn't even have a science correspondent any longer let alone have anyone who could understand climate.
It then slowly dawned on me that the reason I couldn't get serious material into the "mainstream" media, was because the "mainstream" media for covering climate is now the internet and blogs like this and WUWT.
And the more I look the more I see areas of life where the "mainstream" news media are very clearly no longer the mainstream. So we need another name for them. Their main characteristics are:
1. Big
2. Slow to respond
3. Tiny brains without much intelligence (on issues like climate)
4. Many facing extinction
5. Being out competed by the smaller and more nibble "vermin" as many might like call bloggers taking their jobs on the social media.
Dinosaur seems a fairly good description. Less funny but perhaps a more accurate name might be "institutional News Media", because the "Dinosaur Media" are largely parasitic feeders of the large institutions like government, universities, police, etc. In other words, they are the means these large institutions aka the "establishment" use to spread their propaganda to the plebs like us.
So, yes the parliamentary committee & IPCC are right to think that in the past they could write a report and the Dinosaur news Media would obligingly publish it verbatim without serious questioning. But those days are gone.
Just as people used to shop in the high-street and now many turn straight to the internet resulting in the extinction of many "species" like Woolworths, so people who used to buy a newspaper for all their news. Now these people go to the internet which is having the same catastrophic effect on journalists as it did on the high streets (and two of my friends were journalists - only one can get a job and the other's wife is having to go back to work).
But let's not forget that not all dinosaurs died ... we still have the birds!
The toasty Holocene Climate Optimum several thousand years ago was warmer. Years ago, I recall reading that forests grew in the Sahara and there were many horses and other creatures that left their remains there when the climate changed again.
Since then we have also had the Minoan Warm Period, the Roman Warm Period, and the Medieval Warm Period. These also get referred to as climate optimums, despite what the IPCC would like. The clue is, as they say, in the words. Optimum is not a new word, nor was it invented by the oil industry or critics of the IPCC.
If IPCC authors can't find the positives in global warming then maybe that's because it hasn't warmed significantly for about 17 years? Never mind. At least we are still getting the benefits from increased CO2:Enhanced plant growth and a wealthy, and relatively healthy, industrial civilization.
Lord Stern also pointed to crop failures resulting from rising temperatures in his egregious report.
Thus
1) Why did he exclude mainstream papers from his review that clearly show that plant productivity will increase under the future [CO2] and temperature scenarios he predicts?
2) Why did he deliberately remove data from the Wheeler et al (1996) paper, which clearly stated “grain numbers per ear did not decline with an increase in temperature at elevated CO2”, to suggest precisely the opposite?
3) Why did he further manipulate the already altered graph, using a superimposed line, to emphasise a decline in productivity when, in fact, no such decline existed under his stated scenario?
4) Why did he further compound the misinformation presented in the Wheeler paper with that of Vara Prasad et al (2001) which does not duplicate the conditions of his chosen high [CO2], high temperature scenario?
Stern is a liar.
And just what, according to the cretins in the IPPC, is the Earth's "ideal" temperature?
What is is now?
What it was 100 year's ago?
The depths of the "Little Ice age"?
At the Holocene Optimum?
The last Ice age?
The Earth's productivity provides the answer- and it is not when it is cold.
omnologos --I agree with your comment. The most important part of the IPCC report is the Summary for Policy Makers as it is probably the only part, the real decision makers will read ( if they read anything).
Donna Laframboise has out lined on her blog the tortuous process that it goes through to be produced. Firstly the scientists write a Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). For this lastest IPCC report their summary was taken to Stockholm in Oct 2013 and the bureaucrats and politicians spent 4 days going through it word by word , negotiating the best wording and data to make it politically acceptable. Out of it a new SPM results along with 10 pages of corrections to go back to the individual chapter head authors to change so that they align with the SPM.
All this has been reported before BUT between Oct and March 2014 the revised SPM was revised again ( probably as the result of pressure from various groups with vested interests) and taken to Yokohama for another 4 day word by word session to make even more changes. So it anyone's guess on how much of the original scientist's facts or interpretation of them remains after being replaced with political spin.
No matter what your beliefs are with regard AGW , how anyone can take the IPCC report seriously is beyond me.
And just what Global Temperature do the cretins in the IPCC think is best?
Today’s?
That 200 years ago?
At the Holocene Optimum?
In the middle of the last Ice Age?
The Earth’s bioproductivity at these different times should give these numpties a clue.