Despite the best efforts of the likes of Peter Gleick and other assorted detractors, Donna Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert is doing very well, thank you very much!
Australia’s Andrew Bolt, who “runs the most-read political blog in Australia and hosts Channel 10’s The Bolt Report”, interviewed Donna yesterday (which was today, there, I believe!)
He introduces the video as “My interview yesterday with Donna Laframboise, author of a stunning expose of the IPCC, headquarters of the global warming faith”.
Bolt also includes a link to an excellent review of The Delinquent Teenager … in Australia’s Quadrant Online by Tony Thomas, a “retired economics/business journalist (Age, BRW) and author of Stolen Generations: The Pocket Windschuttle“. Here are some excerpts:
Donna Laframboise’s small study on IPCC processes has a clumsy title, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert.
The ‘delinquent’ is the IPCC. The study is a game-changer.
It is not about the science of human-caused global warming, it is just the first serious publication on the organisational integrity of the IPCC, a somewhat influential body.
[...]
[The InterAcademy Council's] report in August 2010 found “significant shortcomings in each major step of IPCC’s assessment process.” (Emphasis added). Thus Laframboise is no wild-eyed ranter; she’s in respectable company.
Laframboise provides safeguarded hyperlinks to all her significant sources.
For example, IPCC head Rajendra Pachauri is quoted, in Nature, 19/12/2007, (no less):
We have been so drunk with this desire to produce and consume more and more whatever the cost to the environment that we’re on a totally unsustainable path,” he says. “I am not going to rest easy until I have articulated in every possible forum the need to bring about major structural changes in economic growth and development. That’s the real issue. Climate change is just a part of it. (Emphasis added).
I tested the link; it worked fine. No-one is making this stuff up.
Unlike Gleick and his cohorts, Thomas decided to read the book before he wrote his review. And it shows, in the several excerpts he selected for his readership – along with convenient links so that they could immediately purchase the Kindle, PDF or Paperback version:-)
The Australian carried a review by the U.K.’s Matt Ridley, author of The Rational Optimist:
A LITTLE-KNOWN Canadian freelancer who writes a short book dense with data and argument, and self-publishes a kindle version on Amazon, can hardly expect fame and fortune.
Yet this seems to be what is happening to Donna Laframboise, the author of The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken For The World’s Top Climate Expert.
Her book has garnered nearly 90 reviews on amazon.com in just two weeks, about four-fifths of them giving it five stars.
The web is alive with discussion of this remarkable little book. The World Wildlife Fund has put out a press release denouncing it.
What is all the fuss about? Like many people, me included, Laframboise used to take climate science at face value. She thought the case had been made by a committee of many neutral scientists working for the UN that global warming was a serious threat.
After all, as Mark Twain once said, “people’s beliefs and convictions are in almost every case gotten at second-hand, and without examination, from authorities who have not themselves examined the questions at issue but have taken them at second-hand from other non-examiners, whose opinions about them were not worth a brass farthing”.
In 2009, two years after the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change received a Nobel Peace Prize, Laframboise, growing irritated with the shallow analysis of the issue in the news sources she trusted most, began reading and digging into the issue herself to get the first-hand version.
“After all,” she writes, “journalists are supposed to be sceptical. They aren’t supposed to take anyone’s word for anything. They’re supposed to dig, and question, and challenge.”
She was not the first Canadian outsider to do this. About seven years before, an expert mathematician named Stephen McIntyre, also a resident of Toronto, had begun to request the data and analysis behind the famous “hockey stick graph” that appeared six times in the 2001 report of the IPCC.
He eventually found that it was a house of cards, based on faulty data filtered through a distorting statistical lens. McIntyre’s careful “audit” is now legendary, as is the resistance and calumny he encountered. The hockey stick graph was dropped by the IPCC.
(Incidentally, both McIntyre and Laframboise were influenced by encountering stubborn injustice earlier in their careers: McIntyre experienced police corruption at first-hand; Laframboise investigated a miscarriage of justice in a murder case.)
Laframboise focused on the IPCC reports themselves. How were they actually written and who by? The impression the UN gave was that they were composed by thousands of senior scientists.
In the words of Rajendra Pachauri, the head of the IPCC: “These are people who have been chosen on the basis of their track record, on their record of publications, on the research that they have done . . . They are people who are at the top of their profession.”
In fact, as Laframboise meticulously documents, world experts on malaria, hurricanes and other topics are excluded because of their sceptical views; while a relatively small clique does the actual writing, many of whom are young and have such a short “track record” that they barely have higher degrees.
Moreover, many of the authors are up to their necks in activism.
[... and Ridley concludes:]
To those who are being asked to make significant economic and environmental sacrifices to prevent global warming, and are relying on second-hand accounts of this threat from the press: you have been let down. The press, derelict in its duty, has passed on opinions that in many cases are not worth Twain’s “brass farthing”.
There you go! Three treats, no tricks … Happy Hallowe’en! But speaking of tricks, Ridley has also posted this review to his own blog, where he notes by way of introduction that “The review prompted a [knee-jerk bleat ooops, sorry -hro] tweet from Michael Mann that I was wrong to say the IPCC had dropped the hockey stick”.
Ridley provided a source, so that his readers can judge for themselves. To Mann’s credit, though, at least he wasn’t foolish enough to attempt to refute anything else Ridley had written about the book – or that which the book contains about the IPCC.
Dr. Richard A. Muller is a physicist at Berkeley with a rather eclectic mélange of interests (which you can read about on his rather garish personal website). I first learned of him some months ago when he launched the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature (BEST) project which is designed to:
resolve current criticism of the former temperature analyses, and to prepare an open record that will allow rapid response to further criticism or suggestions. Our results will include not only our best estimate for the global temperature change, but estimates of the uncertainties in the record.
Muller is far from being a new kid on the climate science block, as his bio on the BEST site notes:
he also spent over a decade researching paleoclimate. His primary interest was in the Milankovitch cycles, and is the author of a technical book “Ice Ages and Astronomical Causes” [...], which emphasizes methods of mathematical climate analysis.
His views on Climategate – and in particular the infamous hockey-stick – have been circulating around the blogosphere for quite some time and are perhaps best summarized in this excerpt from a much longer video:
Yet Muller is far from being a Johnny-come-lately in his criticisms of the work of Michael Mann and the hockey-team. As early as October 2004, he wrote a rather scathing critique in which he supported the (by now well-known) work of McIntyre and McKitrick, and in which he reasonably concluded:
How does this bombshell affect what we think about global warming?
It certainly does not negate the threat of a long-term global temperature increase. In fact, McIntyre and McKitrick are careful to point out that it is hard to draw conclusions from these data, even with their corrections. Did medieval global warming take place? Last month the consensus was that it did not; now the correct answer is that nobody really knows. Uncovering errors in the Mann analysis doesnt settle the debate; it just reopens it. We now know less about the history of climate, and its natural fluctuations over century-scale time frames, than we thought we knew.
If you are concerned about global warming (as I am) and think that human-created carbon dioxide may contribute (as I do), then you still should agree that we are much better off having broken the hockey stick. Misinformation can do real harm, because it distorts predictions. [...]
A phony hockey stick is more dangerous than a broken one–if we know it is broken. It is our responsibility as scientists to look at the data in an unbiased way, and draw whatever conclusions follow. When we discover a mistake, we admit it, learn from it, and perhaps discover once again the value of caution. [emphasis added -hro]
It was unfortunate that many scientists endorsed the hockey stick before it could be subjected to the tedious review of time. Ironically, it appears that these scientists skipped the vetting precisely because the results were so important.
Let me be clear. My own reading of the literature and study of paleoclimate suggests strongly that carbon dioxide from burning of fossil fuels will prove to be the greatest pollutant of human history. It is likely to have severe and detrimental effects on global climate.
an Op Ed piece Muller wrote for the WSJ in December 2009, strongly suggests that he includes himself in the ranks of the “CO2 realists”. In this article, he observed:
Naked Copenhagen
Imagine a “dream” agreement emerging from Copenhagen next week: The U.S. agrees to cut greenhouse emissions 80% by 2050, as President Barack Obama has been promising. The other developed countries promise to cut emissions by 60%. China promises to reduce its CO2 intensity by 70% in 2040. Emerging economies promise that in 2040, when their wealth per capita has grown to half that of the U.S., they will cut emissions by 80% over the following 40 years. And all parties make good on their pledges.
Environmental success, right? Wrong. Even if the goals are all met, emissions will continue rising to nearly four times the current level.
[...]
The reason is that most future carbon emissions will not come from the currently industrialized world, but from the emerging economies, especially China.
[...]
Every 10% cut in the U.S. is negated by one year of China’s growth. By 2040 China could be the most economically dominant nation on earth. The West might be able to cajole it, but won’t be able to impose sanctions on China. Temperature will be at the mercy of the newly powerful economies.
Moreover, an expensive effort to reduce Western emissions sets a worthless example. Only emissions cuts that provide measurable economic benefit to the developing nations will be adopted by them. If the 80% U.S. emissions cut winds up hurting the U.S. economy, it guarantees China will never follow our example.
[...]
Another option is that we could learn to live with global warming. Despite claims to the contrary, storms aren’t increasing. The rate of hurricanes hitting the U.S. coast has been constant for a century, and the number of damaging tornadoes has been going down. Will Happer, a former director of research for the Department of Energy, argues that additional CO2 may have helped the agricultural revolution. And chilly Berkeley might be nicer with a few degrees warming.
GreenGov™ is a service offered by Muller & Associates for Governments, International Organizations, non profits, and other organizations that work with Government. The aim is to provide politically-neutral counsel that is broad in scope while rooted in the hard facts of state-of-the-art science and engineering. The key is to make the right patch between the best technologies and the strengths of the government. We know that to be effective the political dimension must be integrated into the technical plan from the start. [pls see update of Aug. 1/12 below]
And while he seems to be in favour of both solar and wind as part of the future energy mix, Muller also seems to have a common sense approach to the energy problem, as noted in this conclusion to his Op Ed published on the day of Obama’s inauguration:
Part of President Obama’s challenge will come from green bickering. Solar supporters hate nukes, nuclear experts make fun of solar; CFL advocates argue that LEDs are too expensive, LED ads exaggerate the dangers of the miniscule amounts of mercury in CFLs.
Such cleaner than thou squabbling interferes with good energy policy. The energy problem requires not one but many solutions: efficiency, conservation, solar, wind, biofuels, clean coal, nukes, LEDs, CFLs, the whole spectrum. The only reasonable energy policy is this: we need it all.
Yet, on March 31 of this year, Muller, who had been invited to testify to the U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space and Technology, for some reason (that I, amongst others, have still not been able to fathom) decided that it would be appropriate to speak about “preliminary” results that pertained to work on data that had been shared with him in confidence by Anthony Watts.
I’m not a physicist (or a climate scientist); however, I would have thought that considering the “preliminary” nature of the BEST findings, the contentiousness of the issue, and the high profile nature of his appearance, a little circumspection would have been in order. Watts, understandably IMHO, was sufficiently disappointed in Muller’s actions that he took the step of writing a letter to the same committee, outlining his concerns.
As Dr. Judith Curry noted in a post a few days later, the focus of the hearing was “Climate Change: Examining the Processes Used to Create Science and Policy”. In her post, Curry posed the question:
4 days after the testimony, in hindsight, should/could Muller have done anything differently? He could have declined to testify, but I’m not sure how that would have helped anything (other than to save Muller alot of personal grief). He could have thrown Watts under the bus and published results using Watts’ data. Other ideas?
During the course of the somewhat heated discussion that followed, when asked:
Would you, being a member of the BEST team, present the same findings that Dr. Muller presented in a testimony that you were invited to present to a congressional committee?
I do not feel any obligation to defend Muller’s testimony. I can resign from the group at any time, I have no formal appointment with the group and receive no $$$ from them. If I were invited to testify I probably would have submitted different testimony, focused more on the broader issues that were of concern and less on specific results. Given Muller’s immersion in the BEST project, its difficult to imagine how he could separate out testifying on this subject from presenting his current understanding of the issue based on his preliminary analysis. [emphasis added -hro]
I admire Curry’s diplomacy. As I did more recently, when she announced on her blog that BEST was releasing the papers – on which her name appears as co-author, because a decision had been made that the four papers were a “team effort”. Curry expressed the view that two of the papers were not ready for prime time.
As I had commented in a later thread on “BEST (?) PR”:
I find it hard to believe that BEST was unaware of how badly the MSM has behaved for so many years when reporting developments that have any bearing (valid or ultimately invalid) on climate science.
Yet, when I reviewed the text of the press release on the BEST site, it seemed to me that (giving them the benefit of the doubt!) they were incredibly naïve – and very presumptuous in their claim to the effect that the papers were ready for inclusion in the IPCC’s 5th Assessment Report.
Seems that everything was geared towards an Oct. 20 release date. But I’d like to know what was so magical or crucial about Oct. 20.
Why choose a deadline that evidently precluded incorporating the changes that Anthony had suggested – not to mention, a more thoughtful consideration (prior BEST to going public or submitting to journal) by quiet circulation (with ample time for discussion and incorporation of feedback) to Pielke, Watts and McIntyre amongst others?
[...]
Another issue that I find somewhat disconcerting .. the Press Release indicates that the team consists of inter alia “climatologists” [note the plural!]. Yet, if one views the credentials attributed to “The Berkley Earth Team”, you are the only person who is identified as a climatologist. And all four papers (as you had previously indicated) have your name as a co-author (notwithstanding your stated limited involvement).
[description of an incident from another milieu, many moons ago, which led me to:]
[...] while you were fortunate not to have been used by the IPCC, I’m not entirely confident that you may not have been used by BEST. Not to mention that ever since I learned of Muir Russell’s endorsement of the “team-work” sidestep, I have reservations about how easily responsibility and accountability become foggily diffused when I read/hear that “this was a team effort”, OWTTE.
To my mind, Muller made a mistake in March when he chose to highlight Watt’s data – and feature BEST’s preliminary findings. Recent events, however, would suggest that he may not have seen it that way, or if he did, he certainly did not learn from his mistake. The BEST findings are still preliminary, yet (again for reasons that I have been unable to fathom), BEST decided to embark on a full-court press blitz which included (but certainly was not limited to):
The November 2011 issue of The Atlantic – in which Muller is featured as a “2011 Brave Thinker”.
The October 22 issue of The Economist which notes that:
Yet Berkeley Earth’s results, as described in four papers currently undergoing peer review, but which were nonetheless released on October 20th, offer strong support to the existing temperature compilations. The group estimates that over the past 50 years the land surface warmed by 0.911°C: a mere 2% less than NOAA’s estimate. That is despite its use of a novel methodology—designed, at least in part, to address the concerns of what Dr Muller terms “legitimate sceptics”. [emphasis added -hro]
However, The Atlantic author noted that:
Muller is not a climate-change denier. He concedes that the world is warming and that human enterprise is playing a role. He insists, however, that it’s unclear just how much temperature trends correlate with greenhouse-gas emissions.
[...]
[During Muller's March testimony] he reported “a global warming trend that is very similar to that previously reported by the other groups.” In his testimony, he cited data indicating that the Earth had warmed 0.7 degree Celsius since 1957, with man-caused warming contributing 0.6 degree C. He summarized: “I believe that some of the most worrisome biases are less of a problem than I had previously thought.” [emphases added -hro]
And a really simplistic and insulting Op Ed by Muller, datelined October 21, in the Wall Street Journal:
Are you a global warming skeptic? There are plenty of good reasons why you might be.
[...]
The temperature-station quality is largely awful. The most important stations in the U.S. are included in the Department of Energy’s Historical Climatology Network. A careful survey of these stations by a team led by meteorologist Anthony Watts showed that 70% of these stations have such poor siting that, by the U.S. government’s own measure, they result in temperature uncertainties of between two and five degrees Celsius or more. We do not know how much worse are the stations in the developing world.
Using data from all these poor stations, the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change estimates an average global 0.64ºC temperature rise in the past 50 years, “most” of which the IPCC says is due to humans. Yet the margin of error for the stations is at least three times larger than the estimated warming.
[...]
Without good answers to all these complaints, global-warming skepticism seems sensible. But now let me explain why you should not be a skeptic, at least not any longer.
Over the last two years, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature Project has looked deeply at all the issues raised above. I chaired our group, which just submitted four detailed papers on our results to peer-reviewed journals. We have now posted these papers online at http://www.BerkeleyEarth.org to solicit even more scrutiny.
[...]
Global warming is real. Perhaps our results will help cool this portion of the climate debate. How much of the warming is due to humans and what will be the likely effects? We made no independent assessment of that.[emphasis added -hro]
From where I’m sitting, far from “cooling” any portion of the climate debate, Muller has inflamed it by giving such short shrift to that which BEST did not assess, which is of far greater concern to skeptics than the views he has attributed to those who choose not to put all their scientific eggs in the dreaded C02 basket.
Oh, and there’s an October 20 two-page summary of BEST’s “findings” which begins – and ends:
Global warming is real, according to a major study released today. Despite issues raised by climate change skeptics, the Berkeley Earth Surface Temperature study finds reliable evidence of a rise in the average land temperature of approximately 1°C since the mid -1950′s.
[...]
What Berkeley Earth has not done is make an independent assessment of how much of the observed warming is due to human actions.[emphasis added -hro]
BEST gave very little warning to those who were subsequently called upon by various media outlets to comment on the story; but, most bizarrely, because at least one of the papers submitted for peer review was to a journal that requires peer reviewers to maintain confidentiality until publication, Dr. Ross McKitrick is prevented from providing any informed comment – while Muller seems to have no such constraints placed upon him. [Pls. see Update of Aug. 1/12 below]
YMMV, but this suggests to me that there is something really wrong with this picture. But, needless to say, many MSM outlets have picked up on the “fat tale” of “global warming is real” – as though it is a startling revelation (which it most certainly is not).
In an article in yesterday’s U.K. Mail Online, Curry was quite frank about her concerns regarding some of Muller’s statements. The article is worth a read – and you will see some examples of the “fat tale” headlines generated in the U.K. press. (See also Curry’s clarification and account of her subsequent discussion with Muller).
To be quite honest, I’m not sure who the real Richard Muller might be – or what he really stands for. I am quite, well, skeptical, about the “reasons” he has given for this premature media blitz. All of this to “get the attention of the IPCC”?! I do hope that Curry directed him to a copy of Donna Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager …
Not to mention – as Steve McIntyre recently did – the proudly, and it would seem prematurely, announced availability of the data and code:
given the press releases and press blitz, I think that they should have had all their ducks in a row. Saying that there will be a better release in a couple of weeks seems weird to me – why not wait until the better release if it’s important? what’s so pressing that they had to go before they were ready?
Almost a year ago, Muller wrote a book called The Instant Physicist. The blurb for this book on his personal website reads:
Learn why wine is required to be radioactive to be legal, and why you don’t want the greenhouse effect to end.
Perhaps his next book will be The Instant Climatologist. In the meantime, here’s an interesting quote:
In most fields of science, researchers who express the most self-doubt and who understate their conclusions are the ones that are most respected. Scientists regard with disdain those who play their conclusions to the press. [emphasis added -hro]
UPDATE: 11/1/2011 01:52 PM PDT As readers know, I am not a physicist, statistician, or mathematician. Steve McIntyre, though, most definitely does have very finely honed skills as a mathematician and statistician. His verdict on BEST:
I don’t see anything in the BEST corpus that would cause a reasonable person with views on recent temperature change informed by satellite data to now prefer CRU or BEST as more probable measurements of land temperature change in the satellite period. It seems entirely reasonable to me that someone would attribute the difference between higher CRU and BEST trends and satellite trends not to the accuracy of CRU and BEST with flawed data, but to known problems with surface stations and, in the case of BEST, to artifacts of Mennnian methodology. I don’t plan to spend much more time on it.
[...]
The new temperature calculations from Berkeley, whatever their merit or lack of merit, shed no light on the proxy reconstructions and do not rebut the misconduct evidenced in the Climategate emails.[emphases in original -hro]
Seems to me that Muller’s interests would have been far better served had he heeded his own advice.
UPDATE: August 1, 2012 Well, as I’m sure you must know by now, a few days ago, for a brief moment in time Muller became a born-again “skeptic” so that he could … uh … recycle his performances of last October, and be “skeptic” no more! Unfortunately, at least one of his much vaunted October papers has been rejected by the journal, as Ross McKitrick reported:
[Update July 30: JGR told me "This paper was rejected and the editor recommended that the author resubmit it as a new paper."]
This did not deter Muller from from embarking on yet another venture into the realm of “science by press release” to announce yet another paper that may well meet the same fate.
And in other Muller news … evidently [h/t Bruce of Newcastle via JoNova] GreenGov™ has been “disappeared” from the Muller & Associates website … but they are still providing the same “services” noted above and (as of this writing) it can still be found on their LinkedIn profile.
UPDATE: August 3, 2012 See also Don Aitkin’s excellent analysis and commentary: He’s changed his mind
First the good news! At the National Review, one of my favourite writer/historians, Victor Davis Hanson, weighs in on the current state of “the global warming craze”. His assessment includes:
Not long ago, candidate Obama promised to cool the planet and lower the rising seas. Indeed, he campaigned on passing “cap-and-trade” legislation, a radical, costly effort to reduce America’s traditional carbon energy use.
[...]
Fairly or not, the warming movement appeared to be a tiny elite attempting to impose costs on a poorer and supposedly less informed middle class.
[...]
Corruption within the climate-change industry explains some of the sudden turnoff. “Climategate” — the unauthorized 2009 release of private e-mails from the Climatic Research Unit in the United Kingdom — revealed that many of the world’s top climate scientists were knee-deep in manipulating scientific evidence to support preconceived conclusions and personal agendas. Shrill warnings about everything from melting Himalayan glaciers to shrinking polar-bear populations turned out not always to be supported by scientific facts.
[...]
Of course, it didn’t help that the world’s most prominent green spokesman, Nobel laureate Al Gore, made tens of millions of dollars from his own advocacy. And he adopted a lifestyle of jet travel and energy-hungry homes at odds with his pleas for everyone else to cut back.
But even without the corruption and hypocrisy, sincere advocates of the theory of man-made global warming themselves overreached. At news that the planet had not heated up at all during the last ten years, “global warming” gave way to “climate change” — as if to warn the public that unseasonable cold or wet weather was just as man-caused as were the old specters of drought and scorching temperatures.
Then, when “climate change” was still not enough to frighten the public into action, yet a third term followed: “climate chaos.” Suddenly some “green experts” claimed that even more terrifying disasters — from periodic hurricanes and tornadoes to volcanoes and earthquakes — could for the first time be attributed to the burning of fossil fuels. At that point, serially changing the name of the problem suggested to many that there might not be such a problem after all.
[...]
The public apparently would prefer developing more of our own gas, oil, shale, tar sands, and coal as an alternative to going broke by either importing more fuels from abroad or subsidizing more inefficient windmills and solar panels at home.
[... and Hanson concludes]
We simply don’t know positively whether recent human activity has caused the planet to warm up to dangerous levels. But we do know that those who insist it has are sometimes disingenuous, often profit-minded, and nearly always impractical.
Other good news – hot off the press, so to speak – comes from Donna Laframboise, whose excellent exposé of the IPCC, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert is now available in paperback!
The bad news is that whoever does the research for CBC’s The Current, a daily morning radio show from Canada’s “national” broadcaster, seems to be blissfully unaware of many of the latest developments – not the least of which is, as Dr. Judith Curry noted in a recent blogpost in response to some:
Well thank you IPCC authors for letting us know what is really behind that “very likely” assessment of attribution 20th century warming. A lot of overbloated over confidence that cannot survive a few years of cooling. The light bulbs seem to be just turning on in your heads over the last two years. Think about all the wasted energy fighting the “deniers” when they could have been listening, trying to understand their arguments, and making progress to increase our understanding of the causes of climate variability and change.
Two recent interviews on The Current with some high profile politicians strongly suggest that one is behind the times and the other has jumped on the so-called Green Economy bandwagon.
Peter Kent is Canada’s Environment Minister. Yesterday, he was interviewed on The Current – and, considering that he’s a politician, he did fairly well. He avoided the impending catastrophe meme, but he hasn’t yet caught on to the fact that the upcoming Durban confab of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) – which, to his credit, Kent acknowledges is not going to result in a “binding agreement” to replace Kyoto – very much depends on the increasingly discredited work of the IPCC.
There may be more hope for Kent (and Canada!) though, than for former Prime Minister, Paul Martin. Martin was interviewed by The Current this morning on the subject of “Natural capital”. He took great pains to establish his “environmentalist” credentials (and to defend his record as former Finance Minister under Chretien) by telling listeners that he’s been a “fan of Amory Lovins” for 40 years!
Perhaps Martin has seen the writing on the “climate change” (aka “global warming”) wall; this is may be the reason that he has jumped on the “green industries”, green economy bandwagon, promoted by the IPCC’s younger sibling, IPBES – whose goal is to get “nature on the balance sheet”.
Martin also claims to be a fan and/or a friend (can’t quite recall which!) of (according to wikipedia) “one of the most frequently cited economists in the world”, Joseph Stiglitz.
No doubt it was a very innocent oversight on Martin’s part that during the course of this interview (with an inevitable tilt towards “sustainability”, biodiversity and “tipping points”) he made no mention whatsoever of the proposed “mechanisms” that can be conveniently put in place once we start “measuring” our “natural capital” as he urges!
Oh, well … continuing my musical theme of this week, here’s the Friday funny, as promised! Derek Harrington, a Dubliner transplanted to Canada, seems quite fond of Canada’s eastern-most province, Newfoundland – affectionately known to many as “The Rock”. He certainly rocks in this catchy satire on “global warming”! Enjoy:-)
As Andrew Montford (aka Bishop Hill) noted the other day, Donna Laframboise’s The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert is a very important work. Following an excerpt from Peter Foster’s review in the National Post, Montford wrote:
Getting some MSM coverage can make a big difference to a book. The review in the FP is the first time I’ve come across an MSM outlet reviewing a self-published book, and to my mind this shows just how important Donna’s work is.
I agree! And it is worth noting that Dr. Judith Curry also agrees (and has high praise for Montford’s excellent work, as well). As Curry noted in response to one of the comments (in that now very lengthy thread):
[...] I give Montford’s book The Hockey Stick Illusion a full 5 stars. Montford’s book will stand the test of time in terms of a history of science book about this episode, and it is being cited in scholarly papers (check google scholar). It remains to be seen whether Laframboise’s book will achieve the same stature. That said, Laframboise’s book may be more influential politically in the short term.
And here’s an excerpt from one of the more recent reviews on Amazon.com:
A must read, even if you have been following this insanity for the two plus decades it has been propagated, as I have. You will learn something – many somethings. You will be entertained and disappointed in human folly. You will despair at the absolute waste of money which could have been better spent. You will be appalled at how blinded – no, how STUPID – our elected leaders can be.
The one thing you will NOT be is able to stop until you are finished reading. Fear not – it is concise, to the point and has no wasted word – unlike the now too-many iterations of the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Assessment Reports]
Those of us who are Earth and Atmospheric scientists but don’t toe the alarmist line need many voices to which the public will listen. Here is one such voice which will resonate with non-subscribers to the dictates of the Inquisitorial Polemicist Climate Church.
Buy one for yourself, one each for your State Senator and Representative, one for your kids’ school library, one for your public library – and most important, distribute them. Commit it to memory. You won’t be able to state any rebuttal to climate craziness better than what’s between the covers of this little bombshell of a book.
Unlike Peter Gleick (or, in fact, any of the 9 lame flaming “one star” reviewers who are far outnumbered by the more reasoned – and evidently more helpful – voices of 74 four- and five-star reviewers), the author of the above review, geologist, T. D. Gillespie has read The Delinquent Teenager ….
Someone who shares Gleick’s apparent deficiency in reading comprehension skills (if one is inclined to give him the benefit of the doubt and assumes that by now he actually has read it) is the writer of a recent Press Release from the abundantly-funded World Wildlife Fund (WWF).
As Laframboise observed on her blog – and during the course of an excellent interview, yesterday, with SunTV’s Charles Adler – WWF have called the (well documented) charges in her book “ludicrous”. But as anyone who’s read the book knows, and as she reiterates (after putting the WWF writer to further shame, with a summary of <gasp> facts):
That word ludicrous really is apt. The WWF calls my book “a new climate change denial book.” But as the thousands of people who’ve already purchased it know, climate change is discussed only tangentially.
The IPCC as an organization is the real focus of my book. It has been around for 22 years, and has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Yet this is the first time anyone has taken a sustained, critical look at it.
What I’ve found is not pretty.
Here’s the SunTV interview, btw:
Donna Laframboise interviewed by Charles Adler on SunTV 2011-Oct-24 (click image to view video)
In keeping with theme of my virtual trip down musical memory lane, inspired Gleick, it seems to me that WWF (whose interests, vision ‘n “values” far too cosily coincide with those of the IPCC) just might be, well, Running Scared :-)
P.S. If you haven’t yet bought the book, you might want to take a look at the second of two excerpts published by the National Post.
Although you’d never know it to look at me (of course!), I grew up in the era when folk music reigned supreme! And I still have (although I cannot play due to incapacitated record player) some <gasp> LP (long playing) vinyl recordings by (amongst others) The Kingston Trio. Those were the good old days when it was actually possible hear the lyrics … or in climatological data parlance, distinguish the signal from the noise;-)
But speaking of signals and noise … when Donna Laframboise’s exposé of the IPCC, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert – which I wrote about a few days ago – began climbing rapidly in Amazon.com’s rankings* Peter Gleick** was amongst the first (of relatively few) to make a lot of negative noise which signalled very strongly (as I was the first to write in response) that he had failed to actually read the book before putting his knee-jerk fingers to keyboard.
* As I write this post, the status of The Delinquent Teenager … is:
Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (71 customer reviews)
71 Reviews
5 star: (54)
4 star: (9)
3 star: (1)
2 star: (0)
1 star: (7)
› See all 71 customer reviews…
Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #425 Paid in Kindle Store (See Top 100 Paid in Kindle Store)
#1 in Books > Outdoors & Nature > Conservation
#1 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Science > Environment > Conservation
#2 in Kindle Store > Kindle eBooks > Nonfiction > Politics & Current Events > International > Relations
**I’m sure you’ve heard his name, because (at least according to him) he’s “an internationally recognized climate and water expert and works at the intersection of science and policy, including issues related to the integrity of science.”
Gleick may or may not be concerned about “the integrity of science” – or perhaps “integrity” means something completely different in Gleick-speak. There is certainly no indication of any integrity on his part on Amazon: He’s been singing sounds of silence there ever since.
Mind you, Gleick certainly was very noisy over at Judith Curry’s blog a few days ago. There were many requests that he substantiate the claims he had made on Amazon. Yet in his 16 “comments”, he studiously avoided doing so. He even ignored the request of Dr. Richard Tol:
Now that we’re on the subject, you accuse Laframboise of telling lies. Can you quote chapter and verse?
Please note that I have a stake here. I reviewed two drafts of the book. I did not find any falsehoods (let alone lies, which imply intention). I would like to know where I went wrong in my duty as a reviewer.
And I could detect no signal of integrity in any of Gleick’s “responses”. Alas, he’s the man who never returned who seems to have Lost (his integrity) On The MTA.
But I do owe Gleick a vote of thanks for inspiring me to take this virtual trip down musical memory lane. And in return – since Gleick obviously would benefit greatly from knowing how a book review (worth reading) is actually written – I offer him a link to Peter Foster’s review of The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert that appears on page FP19 in today’s edition of the National Post, along with the first of two excerpts from the book.
I do have a minor quibble with Foster’s claim that “One of Ms. Laframboise’s greatest coups was to gain access to at least some of the responses to a questionnaire the IAC sent to IPCC authors.” As Donna had graciously noted in her Acknowledgements, it was I who “gained the access“.
But overall, I’d give Foster’s review an “A+”. Clearly he has read the book – and understands what it’s all about. Gleick, OTOH, is a worried man (singin’ a worried song!) who has yet to demonstrate that his “review” is deserving of anything more than an “F-”.
Two years ago, I had never heard of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) – or perhaps I had, but it certainly hadn’t registered on my radar.
Nor could I have imagined that, two years hence, I would be playing the role of “midwife” at the birth of the PDF version of a book that I know is going to be a best-seller. Make a note of this title, folks:
The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert
by Donna Laframboise.
It’s available now in electronic version for Kindle (and, of course .pdf) at a price that anyone can afford: US$4.99, and a paperback version will be available at Amazon within the next week or so. Details and all relevant links are on Donna’s blog.
This is not a book about climate science.
Nor, as Donna notes, is this:
a catalog of every bad thing the IPCC has ever done. Rather, it is an argument. I have chosen my examples with care, selecting ones I thought might be easily digested by the average person who knows little about the climate debate.
In my mind’s eye I am addressing an audience of ordinary citizens and the questions under discussion are: What is the IPCC? and Can it be trusted? I’ve marshaled my evidence and ordered my argument in the way that seemed to me to have the greatest chance of persuading a reasonable person with an open mind that this organization wields an inappropriate level of influence over our lives – and that it has a credibility score of zero.
Donna Laframboise. The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert (Kindle Locations 2588-2593). Ivy Avenue Press.
One cannot over-estimate the importance of this book in addressing the shortcomings of far too many so-called science journalists (and other media mavens) who have been content to let the UN’s IPCC rest on its self-anointed laurels for far too many years.
Until this book, far too many questions about the IPCC had been unasked – by far too many influential people. Donna has asked these questions, and meticulously researched the answers, which she presents in an eminently readable (and easily verifiable) fashion.
As Prof. Ross McKitrick observed in his pre-publication review:
“Donna Laframboise shows that the IPCC’s actual operations bear little resemblance to its public reputation … far from being an open network of top experts it has turned itself into a narrow clique of like-minded activists … [The IPCC's] reports have come to be more like agenda-driven propaganda than competent, objective scientific assessments.”
A copy of The Delinquent Teenager … should be placed on the bookshelf (electronic or otherwise) of every scientist, politician and government functionary who has (unwittingly or not) ever relied on the authority of the IPCC’s assessment reports.
U.K. scientist and author of The Rational Optimist, Dr. Matt Ridley is the recipient of the ($50,000) 2011 Manhattan Institute for Policy Research’s Hayak Award. He describes The Delinquent Teenager… as “Blooming brilliant. Devastating”. And in a recent blogpost, in which he includes an excerpt, he observed:
Donna Laframboise is a journalist and civil libertarian in Toronto, who made her name as a fearless investigative reporter in the 1990s. She has recently been investigating the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and has come up with startling results about how its reports are compiled. For those of us who took the IPCC’s evaluations of climate at face value when they came out — I know I did — and thought that they were based on an impartial and careful process that relied on peer reviewed evidence, these revelations are shocking. Her book The Delinquent Teenager is [...] one of the most important pieces of investigative journalism in recent years. It demolishes the argument that we need the mainstream media because the blogosphere will never do the hard work of investigative journalism. The opposite is true. [emphasis added -hro]
Australia’s Dr. Garth Paltridge, an atmospheric physicist and author of The Climate Caper (cited in The Delinquent Teenager …), recently wrote [correspondence, shared with permission]:
Having just read Donna Laframboise’s new book, I don’t think I would touch the IPCC with a barge pole.
Dr. Judith Curry has weighed in with her review in which she cites several clips from the book. She concludes:
In terms of the broader audience, I have to say that I hope that this book leads to the discontinuation of the IPCC after the AR5 report (which is already well underway, and is arguably sufficiently tarnished that it is likely to have much less influence than previous reports.)
My personal reaction as a scientist is to be very thankful that I am not involved in the IPCC. I already feel duped by the IPCC (I’ve written about this previously), I am glad that I was not personally used by the IPCC.
Does the problems with the IPCC mean that WG1 science is incorrect? Not necessarily, but I agree that a “new trial” is needed. WG2 and WG3 reports pretty much belong in the dustbin, as far as I can tell.
I regret that so much of our intellectual horsepower and research funding has gone into supporting the IPCC assessments. Donna’s book could provide some impetus for changing this.
Still not convinced that you should buy this book?! Why not check out a sample of the Kindle version – or of the PDF version. Try it, you’ll like it :-)
If you’ve already bought the book, be sure to follow the many links you’ll find therein … some of which, I’m proud to say, will bring you right back here!
If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is to be believed (a prospect that becomes more dubious to more people by the day, I agree), the future of our planet depends on our making tremendous changes in our lifestyles, and bowing to the gods of “renewable energy“.
On this day of Canadian Thanksgiving, I give thanks that the landscape in the part of the country in which I reside has not (well, at least not yet) been blighted by these beasts:
Notwithstanding the “evidence of a lack of evidence for peer review’s efficacy” – as The Lancet editor Richard Horton had noted in an appendix to the 2010 Muir Russell report – publication in a “peer reviewed” journal is still the rallying cry regarding material included in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)’s reports.
Getting a retraction from the IPCC is somewhat akin to getting blood out of a stone. So I wonder what the IPCC’s powers that be will make of the following which appeared in today’s issue of NatureNews:
A surge in withdrawn papers is highlighting weaknesses in the system for handling them
This week, some 27,000 freshly published research articles will pour into the Web of Science, Thomson Reuters’ vast online database of scientific publications. Almost all of these papers will stay there forever, a fixed contribution to the research literature. But 200 or so will eventually be flagged with a note of alteration such as a correction. And a handful — maybe five or six — will one day receive science’s ultimate post-publication punishment: retraction, the official declaration that a paper is so flawed that it must be withdrawn from the literature.
It is reassuring that retractions are so rare, for behind at least half of them lies some shocking tale of scientific misconduct — plagiarism, altered images or faked data — and the other half are admissions of embarrassing mistakes. But retraction notices are increasing rapidly.
[...]
“I don’t think there’s any doubt that we’re detecting more fraud, and that systems are more responsive to misconduct. It’s become more acceptable for journals to step in,” says Nicholas Steneck, a research ethicist at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. But as retractions become more commonplace, stresses that have always existed in the system are starting to show more vividly.
[...]
… frustrations include opaque retraction notices that don’t explain why a paper has been withdrawn, a tendency for authors to keep citing retracted papers long after they’ve been red-flagged (see ‘Withdrawn papers live on’) and the fact that many scientists hear ‘retraction’ and immediately think ‘misconduct’ — a stigma that may keep researchers from coming forward to admit honest errors.
[...]
But as more retractions hit the headlines, some researchers are calling for ways to improve their handling. Suggested reforms include better systems for linking papers to their retraction notices or revisions, more responsibility on the part of journal editors and, most of all, greater transparency and clarity about mistakes in research.
[...]
The posts on Retraction Watch show how wildly inconsistent retractions practices are from one journal to the next. Notices range from informative and transparent to deeply obscure. A typically unhelpful example of the genre would be: “This article has been withdrawn at the request of the authors in order to eliminate incorrect information.” [New York City-based writer Ivan Oransky, executive editor at Reuters Health] argues that such obscurity leads readers to assume misconduct, as scientists making an honest retraction would, presumably, try to explain what was at fault.
To Drummond Rennie, deputy editor of the Journal of the American Medical Association, there are two obvious reasons for obscure retraction notices: “fear and work.”
The fear factor, says Wager, is because publishers are very frightened of being sued. “They are incredibly twitchy about publishing anything that could be defamatory,” she says.
‘Work’ refers to the phenomenal effort required to sort through authorship disputes, concerns about human or animal subjects, accusations of data fabrication and all the other ways a paper can go wrong. “It takes dozens or hundreds of hours of work to get to the bottom of what’s going on and really understand it,” says Shafer. Because most journal editors are scientists or physicians working on a voluntary basis, he says, that effort comes out of their research and clinical time.
But the effort has to be made, says Steneck. “If you don’t have enough time to do a reasonable job of ensuring the integrity of your journal, do you deserve to be in business as a journal publisher?” he asks.
[...]
A better vocabulary for talking about retractions is needed, says Steneck — one acknowledging that retractions are just as often due to mistakes as to misconduct. Also useful would be a database for classifying retractions. “The risk for the research community is that if it doesn’t take these problems more seriously, then the public — journalists, outsiders — will come in and start to poke at them,” he points out.
The only near-term solution comes back to transparency. “If journals told readers why a paper was retracted, it wouldn’t matter if one journal retracted papers for misconduct while another retracted for almost anything,” says Zen Faulkes, a biologist at the University of Texas–Pan American in Edinburg, Texas. [emphases added -hro]
Seems to me that there are a lot of lessons in the above that could be learned by the IPCC, which (we’re constantly told) has a “gold standard” reputation derived from the usage of “peer reviewed” material by its volunteer authors – not to mention (what some would consider its unfounded) claims of “transparency”, “clarity” and “integrity”. And they could certainly use a better vocabulary for discussing (inter alia) uncertainties.
Indeed, one might conclude that it is precisely because the IPCC does not appear to “take its problems more seriously”, that the public (if not journalists) ‘will continue to poke at them’.
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