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:

Met Office (probably @richardabetts) respond to @mattwridley @thegwpfcom, but cannot bring themselves to name him or link to his talk. https://t.co/Kmu2YwBw6a

— Paul Matthews (@etzpcm) October 20, 2016

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:

Yes the post says it's me! BTW I link to your blog Paul: main WG2 report was released on same day as SPM, not "6 months later" as MR claimed https://t.co/O3qliZjKuj

— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) October 20, 2016

And:

@etzpcm Yes, there used to be a delay. In AR5, I was one of those who pushed to get main report released at same time as SPM. @mattwridley

— Richard Betts (@richardabetts) October 20, 2016

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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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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