Although their tone is still very cautious, two American news outlets have finally published lengthy stories discussing the recent series of embarrassments currently weighing down the Nobel Peace Prize-winning IPCC report Climate Change 2007.
From The Washington Post: “Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda“
With its 2007 report declaring that the “warming of the climate system is unequivocal,” the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Prize — and a new degree of public trust in the controversial science of global warming.
But recent revelations about flaws in that seminal report, ranging from typos in key dates to sloppy sourcing, are undermining confidence not only in the panel’s work but also in projections about climate change. Scientists who have pointed out problems in the report say the panel’s methods and mistakes — including admitting Saturday that it had overstated how much of the Netherlands was below sea level — give doubters an opening.
From the Associated Press: “Scientists seek better way to do climate report“
A steady drip of unsettling errors is exposing what scientists are calling “the weaker link” in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning series of international reports on global warming.
The flaws — and the erosion they’ve caused in public confidence — have some scientists calling for drastic changes in how future United Nations climate reports are done. A push for reform being published in Thursday’s issue of a prestigious scientific journal comes on top of a growing clamor for the resignation of the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The work of the climate change panel, or IPCC, is often portrayed as one massive tome. But it really is four separate reports on different aspects of global warming, written months apart by distinct groups of scientists.
No errors have surfaced in the first and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible. So far, four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to translate what global warming might mean to daily lives around the world.
Let me make some clarifications here. If you’ve been following the Climategate scandal then you know that the “science” that props up the conclusions of IPCC Working Group I has been shown to be extremely weak in several critical areas. Even though the report from Working Group I does not contain the sloppiness found in the report from Working Group II (misquotes, lack of credentialed sourcing, typos, etc.), serious questions about the data collection and statistical methods used by Working Group I have now been raised.
Second, the Working Group II report is (and has always been) the big bogey-man of the IPCC reports, the IPCC’s equivalent of the kind of enviro-porn that shows up in movies like The Day After Tomorrow. It is the fear-factor report that says, here is what will surely happen IF WE DON’T DO SOMETHING. It is the part of the report primarily used to justify major global policy proposals.
What kind of policy proposals? My WizBang colleague Rick highlighted a vitally-important quote last week that I think summarizes the fundamental agenda of the IPCC pretty well:
“The Nobel prize was for peace not science … government employees will use it to negotiate changes and a redistribution of resources. It is not a scientific analysis of climate change,” said Anton Imeson, a former IPCC lead author from the Netherlands … The IPCC should have never allowed itself to be branded as a scientific organisation. It provides a review of published scientific papers but none of this is much controlled by independent scientists.” (emphasis added)
As I noted in an earlier WizBang post:
Even though leftists always openly showed contempt for the Cold War, I have always wondered whether, deep down, they were really jealous of its success; of its ability to rally much of the world together in an effort to resist a common enemy. How many times have leftists wondered: What if we could lead our own “cold war,” a revolution against capitalism and traditional Western values? What if we could rally the world around a new radical wealth redistribution plan by convincing them that the end was near, and our plan was the only way to guarantee their survival?
Enter climate change. The leftists who now control multi-national governing bodies have latched onto man-made global warming theories and have aggressively begun to use those theories as a basis for policies that will establish a permanent wealth redistribution system that continually drains financial resources from the West.
And there you have it. Climate change = social justice. Progressives will never give up their quest for the chimera of “social justice” no matter how flawed their plans for achieving it may be, for within the quest for social justice lies the ultimate goal of progressivism — the secular perfection of humanity. Likewise, progressives won’t give up on the current best hope for achieving social justice until something demonstrably better comes along. In other words, “climate change” is here to stay, until the next revolution — whatever that may be.
We should probably expect to see very little progressive establishment criticism directed toward the climate change movement. The “keep doing what you’re doing, only don’t make so many mistakes the next time” tone of the AP and Washington Post stories probably serves as a good example of the type of climate change criticism that our mainstream press will produce. Therefore it is up to the rest of us to keep the pressure on and do the job that the skeptics in the scientific and public policy arenas were supposed to be doing in the first place, before they were buried under an avalanche of political correctness.
