If you’ve been following the climate wars, there’s a delightful and witty piece that you must read at The Spoof (h/t WUWT):
New Study Suggests News Climate Is Warming
A new study suggests that the IPCC is losing 10% of it’s credibility mass every month, and could have completely disappeared by Christmas.
“It’s shrinking faster that we thought” said Anthony Watts the renowned skeptical blogger, who led a small team of dedicated bloggers, analysing over 10,000 news articles and blogs on the Internet. “Not one of them contained the phrase ‘The IPCC is innocent'”, explained Mr. Watts, “Not even their unofficial web-site
RealClimate.org”Intrepid Spoof reporters sought comments worldwide. Dr. Rajendra K. Pachauri, the eminent Himalayan glacier expert, was interviewed as he emerged from his hairdresser’s salon in downtown Delhi. “It’s a travesty!” he exclaimed, “I have newspaper cuttings and a 1988 photograph to prove it”.
Dr. Pachauri posed for photographs before he continued. “There was just one small error” he explained. “They wrote their reports in English. If they’d used Sanskrit, none of this would have happened”.
Dr. Pachauri spoke briefly to other reporters before posing for more photographs, and was then whisked off in his motorcade to a special meeting of the Railway Engineers Society of India, where he’s to be given a lifetime service award.
[…]
But speaking of new studies, the IPCC’s declining “credibility mass” and Pachauri … it’s fairly common knowledge that few words will pass his lips before he utters “peer-reviewed” at the mere hint of criticism (or, God forbid, questioning) of the “sound ‘n settled science”. Pachauri brandishes “peer-review” against his opponents like a crucifix before vampires!
As I had observed a little over a month ago, the IPCC has its very own version of Monopoly – with many rules, standards and procedures that he invariably avers (as he did in an E-mail to Reuters’ Gerard Wynn in the early post-climategate days):
INTERVIEW-Climate science untarnished by hacked emails-IPCC
Thu Nov 26, 2009 1:38pm EST[…]
[That] a laborious selection process, using only articles approved by other scientists, called peer review, and then subsequently approving these by committee had prevented distortion.
“The entire report writing process of the IPCC is subjected to extensive and repeated review by experts as well as governments,” he added in a written statement to Reuters.
“There is, therefore, no possibility of exclusion of any contrarian views, if they have been published in established journals or other publications which are peer reviewed.”
“This thoroughness and the duration of the process followed in every assessment ensure the elimination of any possibility of omissions or distortions, intentional or accidental.”
During the process of participating in Donna Laframboise’s IPCC Citizen Audit, because mousing around is not my forté, I had captured all 44 chapter reference pages from the IPCC site to make each one a keyboarder friendly alternative Word document available for any Auditor, who – not unlike me – will go to great lengths to avoid mouse-dependency!
The results of the IPCC Citizen Audit will answer the question: are Pachauri’s claims supported by the evidence in the references?
While doing the Audits assigned to me (and skimming each of the above 44 documents while standardizing the formatting), a number of questions and quite a few anomalies jumped out at me – not the least of which were several references to articles and other material with a publication date of “2007“. I thought this rather odd, in view of the fact that the publication deadline for inclusion of material in the 4th Assessment Report was December, 2005 (or sometime in February 2006 at the very latest.)
I had already discovered at least one or two from 2006 when doing my homework for the Monopoly post. But 2007?! This was the review schedule:
Screen capture from http://www.ipcc.ch/calendar_of_meetings/calendar_of_meetings_2006.htm
The “2007” instances I saw must have been “unintentional” typos … Hmmmm … I could go through each of the 44 docs, within a not too unreasonable period of time, and compile a spreadsheet to see what the numbers have to say. Thanks to Australia’s Peter B., who is doing some very interesting research into AR4 (but that’s a post for another day!), I didn’t have to do that! He kindly provided me with the data I needed. Here’s what the numbers told me:
Look, ma! No hockey stick ... just pure unhomogenized, unsmoothed, anomalies (Raw data, courtesy of Peter B., Australia)
As you can see from the above, of the 44 Chapters in AR 4, 40 had references to material that was not published until 2007; WG II wins the gold standard medal here, but is tied with WG III for highest number of 2007 references (21) in a single chapter. Mind you, with 17 in a single chapter, WG I is not too far behind. Together, team IPCC succeeded in taking a combined total of 354 leaps back to the future.
This astounding number raises far more questions than it answers. Stay tuned, folks! And if you’re interested in helping formulate – and finding answers to one or more of – these questions, pls do leave a reply below, or send me an E-mail: Hilary0001 AT gmail.com.
The View From Here 