Tag Archives: IPCC

A Slow Burn on IPCC Coral Misrepresentation

One of my latest posts discussed how, after nearly a year's delay, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released material for its latest report. There's a lot of interesting things to be found in it. Today, I'd like to add to a previous post I've written, which you can find here. You don't need to read the post to understand what I'll discuss today, but I'd recommend it if you have the time.

As a quick summary of what I said before, the IPCC wrote about the supposed dangers faced by coral reefs if the world were to warm by 1.5°C or 2.0°C. That discussion took place in several parts of the report, with the different parts making inconsistent statements. On top of this, it was difficult to figure out where the numbers they used came from, and they seemed to misrepresent at least one source they cited. With the release of these materials, we can see how these inconsistencies happened and confirm the IPCC did in fact misrepresent sources to exaggerate the perceived threats of climate change.
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IPCC Releases Supporting Material After Ten Month Delay

Readers of this blog may remember I've written a about how it is difficult to discuss the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report due to the fact the IPCC did not release supporting material for it even though they were supposed to release nearly a year ago. I'm happy to announce that material is now available: I discovered this earlier today when the IPCC responded to a tweet of mine about the material:

Which led to me observing they put this material online quietly about a month ago, ten months after the IPCC launched a major PR campaign telling the world about the latest report it had published. I couldn't find any statement about this release, much less an explanation of why it took them ten months to make it, but hey, at least we have it now.

Of course, having it almost a year late means the contents of the material is largely irrelevant. The media talked about this report for a couple months. They're done with it. So is the public at large. By delaying its release of the material, the IPCC made sure anything that might be embarrassing in it will likely be ignored.

Even if there is nothing embarrassing in this material, the IPCC said it would publish this material when it published the report. Instead, it delayed the release of the material for ten months, without notification, explanation or apology. That is bad. One, the potential for malfeasance can easily do as much damage as actual malfeasance. Two, it's dishonest. It is not okay to tell the world you'll do one thing at a certain time then... just not do it and not tell people.

Bickering and Checking Sources, Part Two

Yesterday's post highlighted a bit of the petty nature of some disputes regarding a recent lecture given by one Matt Ridley. It also took note of how people can get basic facts wrong even though anyone who bothered to check the cited sources would know better. In fact, if one had checked the cited sources, they'd find one didn't even exist.

I thought that would be that. I didn't plan to revisit the topic. However, I recently saw a couple things I couldn't ignore. It started with this tweet on Twitter:

The article it links to is important, but a couple additional tweets will help explain why. First is this response from climate scientist Richard Betts:

And:

This seems great and all, with a climate scientist explaining to a "skeptic" how they were wrong and everyone coming to an agreement. The problem is the climate scientist is wrong. What he says simply is not true. It is also not true when the article I said is important repeats this claim:

The main report was published on the same day as the SPM.

This is from the Met office (to which Betts belongs), the national weather service for the United Kingdoms. It plays an important role in the global warming debate. It's also completely wrong.
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Interesting Update on IPCC Standards

As some of you may know, an article I wrote was published yesterday at DeSmog Blog. If you haven't read it, I highly encourage you to. It gives a brief overview of the history of work on the economics of global warming which the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) relied upon for its latest Assessment Report, work by Richard Tol. You may remember that name from previous posts of mine discussing his work, such as his paper claiming the less data we have, the more certain we are of our results.

Tol's work is stupendously bad, but the truly fascinating thing about it is both skeptics and the IPCC use it at the exact same time. Skeptics happily promote Tol's work to claim (some amounts of) global warming will be beneficial, while at the same time, the IPCC has allowed Tol to slip his work into its reports absent any sort of external review for some inexplicable reason. The result is both sides of the global warming debate are arguing from the same, terrible work on this topic.

As fascinating as that is though, the issue I want to talk about in this post is the fact the IPCC allowed Tol to add a bunch of material to its report absent any sort of external review, flagrantly violating its stated principles. I've talked about this a number of times on this site, and I've even attempted to take it up with the IPCC. Today, after half a year of trying to follow up on that, I'm here to report that I've gotten some manner of response.
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