India Ditches UN Climate Change Group

Several readers have told us that the Indian Government is moving to establish its own group to address the science of climate change since it "cannot rely" on the official United Nations panel. "The move is a severe blow to the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) following the revelation parts of its 3000 page 2007 report on climate science was not subjected to peer review. A primary claim of the report was the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035, but the claim was not repeated in any peer-reviewed studies and rebuffed by scientists. India's environment minister Jairam Ramesh announced that the Indian government will established a separate National Institute of Himalayan Glaciology to monitor climate change in the region. 'There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism,' Ramesh said. 'I am for climate science.'"

Comments

Inaccurate

[Gudeldar]

It doesn't appear as though India is pulling out of the IPCC at all. They are just sending a representative (or "minder" depending on how you look at it).

http://indiatoday.intoday.in/site/Story/82542/India/India's+IPCC+'tracker'+soon.html
http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/india/PM-expresses-confidence-in-IPCCs-work-lauds-Pachauris-leadership/articleshow/5540596.cms

Before poeple freak out, her is a couple of points

[geekoid]

1) Publishing is usually the beginning of peer review. SO finding a discrepency isn't uncommon
2) The person who made that statement was an Indian Scientist. SO the irony of thise story is rich.
3) is doesn't invalidate the peer reviewed papers, or the overall conclusion.

Here is a good write up:
http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg20527434.300-debate-heats-up-over-ipcc-melting-glaciers-claim.html

Be sure to follow the read more link.

Yes, yes, most people want some sort of black and white answer. There isn't one, and if you are truly interested you will
read about this is reputable journal. That way you have a chance to see all the facts that lead up to this.

Re:It's shitty science, Rei.

[Rei]

So why the decrease when the CO2 keeps increasing year after year?

I swear, it's like a whack-a-mole game sometimes.

No, it hasn't.

Want to know how badly the people you've been listening to have been misleading you? Take a look at a temperature graph. To get that "decrease" in temperature, they have to:

1) Cherry-pick the hottest year they can as the starting point (1998 -- one of the most intense El Nino events on record) and use that as a starting point. See the huge one-year spike in 1998? That's what they're picking as their starting point.
2) Pick a lower subsequent year and use that as an end point (often 2008, a La Nina year)
3) Pick the one (of three) major global temperature datasets that makes 1998 hotter than 2005.
4) Ignore the actual way you create a trend line (you don't just look at the start and end points -- you also include a weighted average of the intermediary points.

If you skip any one of those things, you get the opposite result. Let me explicit: anyone who pushes that point who's not just passing along something they heard from someone else is deliberately trying to hoodwink you.

In case you're curious about El Nino/La Nina: El Nino involves the weakening of the Walker Circulation, an equatorial atmospheric wind pattern. This slows the upwelling of deep, cold water in the Pacific. So the equatorial Pacific in an El Nino year has a big splotch of warm water across it, which heats the atmosphere more than usual. In a La Nina year, the Walker Circulation increases, leading to a big splotch of cold water across the equatorial Pacific, cooling the atmosphere.

Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill

[Rei]

Have you noticed that all of the complaints are from IPCC WGII and WGIII? Not like you know the difference, so let me explain. WGI is about the science of climate change. WGII is about impacts, while WGIII is about how to avert it.

In all of its reports, the IPCC is explicitly not limited to peer-reviewed materials. They can use, and I quote:

"Peer reviewed and internationally available scientific technical and socio-economic literature, manuscripts made available for IPCC review and selected non peer-reviewed literature produced by other relevant institutions including industry".

(I bolded the last part because you'll never see the deniers complaining about that, so I thought it deserved particular emphasis!). They can quote peer-reviewed material, governmental material, NGO material, and industry studies. The reason for this is because not everything on the planet is peer-reviewed. Peer-review is for science.

WG1 is almost entirely peer-reviewed. It's about science, so that's what you do. WGII is mostly about "news". While a good chunk of what it mentions is peer reviewed, it does include a number of non-peer-reviewed reports. The same goes with WGIII (which has more of a focus on policy and industry).

Most of the IPCC review effort, likewise, goes into WG1. WGII and WGIII review is much less emphasized. But the real key is that if you find something wrong with WGII or WGIII, you're not attacking the science of climate change, because those reports aren't about science. The science is in WGI. And if you find a non-peer-reviewed report anywhere in the IPCC, it is *not* violating its guidelines. WG1 just avoids them.

Sadly, some of the people who know better (Watts, I'm looking at you) love to spread misconceptions about all of this.

Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill

[WhiplashII]

Which is ludicrous in the context of CO2, since we can measure isotopic ratio changes (indicating the change in old carbon versus fresh carbon) and have good accounting for human inputs to the system versus sources and sinks.

Regardless of what you think about climate change, you should reject this particular bad science. The isotopic ratio does not mean what is claimed.

Here is a thought experiment for you: You have a bathtub. The drain is open, the faucet is on. You also have a drip tube putting red colored water into the tub. (This is a vaguely "to scale" stand in for the CO2 in the atmosphere. Large sinks, large sources, tiny human influence.)

You then find that the bathtub is turning red. In fact, almost none of the red dye seems to go down the drain at all! Now consider what that means - does it mean that the drip tube is causing any level changes seen in the water? Obviously, it can't. If all else was equal, you'd expect the drip tube to be diluted by the ratio between the drip tube and the faucet.

The only explanation is that the drip tube's dye must not be absorbed. And, in fact, this has been shown to be true. The carbon isotopes being measured have extremely different properties when is comes to atmospheric scrubbing. So the trace isotopes in the "buried" CO2 are not absorbed, and build up in the atmosphere. Unfortunately, that says nothing about the causes of the overall level change.

I will now be modded down because I disclosed a mistake in one of the arguments commonly used in climate change debates, thus confirming the underlying issues in politicizing science.

Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill

[dbIII]

I think one was actually near a pub, in Australia?

Everything apart from absolute wilderness is near a pub in Australia.

Re:Before poeple freak out, her is a couple of poi

[NeutronCowboy]

NOAA has several gigs of data publically available via FTP, and some open format like csv. No, I'm not going to again link to them. Want to peer review that? Go for it. Or, since you're so sure that all the data is garbage, feel free to go up to any industry threatened by carbon caps and taxes, and propose them a research program that will demonstrate once and for all (ONCE AND FOR ALL!!) that there is no global climate change. Should be a cinch, right? Imagine: you'll be rich, you'll be famous, you'll be the savior of humanity!

Or, you can bitch on slashdot. Your call.