Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
I wish we had more people like that in government in the US.
"Be prepared, son. That's my motto. Be prepared." --Joe Hallenbeck
'There is a fine line between climate science and climate evangelism,' Ramesh said. 'I am for climate science.'
That was nicely worded. The line is not very fine in many cases, however. The biggest difference between a climate evangelist (read: Al Gore) and a scientist is the presence of uncertainty in reporting the state of the climate. It is hard to be preachy when data remains inconclusive.
0 = 1 + e^(Alt something)
I'm sure that most countries, at least most relatively developed ones (and I consider India as such), already have their own group investigating climate change. Besides, I don't see any mention from the article that India is actually "ditching" the UN group. It's just establishing its own group, rather than relying 100% on the UN group to base their national policies and laws upon.
... written by hundreds of individuals = "climate evangelism". Apparently.
No, putting in primary claims which are known to be suspect from a non-peer-reviewed journal with an agenda, for the ADMITTED purpose of 'influencing policymakers'... THAT is evangelism.
Try again. That wasn't the only error.
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news/jamesdelingpole/100023598/after-climategate-pachaurigate-and-glaciergate-amazongate/
They make a major claim about the affect of climate change on the Amazon. The problem is the original study was done by an advocacy group (WWF), wasn't peer reviewed, and wasn't even on the subject of global warming! It was a study on wildfires.
And keep going in that vein...
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/01/24/the-scandal-deepens-ipcc-ar4-riddled-with-non-peer-reviewed-wwf-papers/
These reports are NOT peer reviewed science and DO NOT belong in the IPCC report, which claims to be properly peer reviewed.
The IPCC fucked up big.
Learning HOW to think is more important than learning WHAT to think.
Yes, there were a couple mistakes in a 3,000 page document
These weren't "mistakes", they were intentionally included for the purpose of raising hysteria. The people composing the report were warned by scientists that these claims were not supported before the report was written. A company partially owned by the head of the IPCC received a multi-million dollar grant to investigate the supposed loss of the glaciers in the Himalayas by 2035. Oh yeah, he then hired the guy who was the source for it (n a casual conversation with a journalist as an off the cuff comment not based on anything). So the head of the IPCC is told that there is no science behind the claim, but includes it in the report anyway and then takes a grant for millions of dollars to investigate it.
The truth is that all men having power ought to be mistrusted. James Madison
The sun? Oh my god, what a brilliant idea! Nobody has ever thought of that one before! Quick, young lad, make haste! Inform the world that people ought to consider the sun -- the single most widely studied object outside of Earth, monitored by thousands of ground-based instruments, satellites in various Earth orbits, and even custom satellites in our Lagrangian points. That data might be useful! Perhaps a couple dozen people people should write several dozen papers studying what sort of direct and indirect effects the sun might have on our climate! And then perhaps they should be summarized in the IPCC report! .... oh wait....
Yes, we've studied the Sun intently. Is that supposed to mean that we have a complete understanding of its effect on the climate? Really? Do you honestly think we have all the answers now? That we're even close to having all the answers?
That's my whole problem with the "science is settled" meme. Science is never settled. It's constantly progressing, proving old assumptions wrong much of the time. Not only is the science not settled here, its becoming more and more apparent that we don't have near the understanding of the climate that we thought we did. After all, even most of the die-hard warming advocates admit that they can't explain the current cooling trend in their models.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
They used two different measuring systems, and diddled the numbers until the graphs overlapped. They used data from measuring stations that were not properly shielded from mundane human activity (I think one was actually near a pub, in Australia?) and whose data could not be normalized using nearby measuring stations. They declined to use proper measuring stations that showed a decline in temperature. And they actively, and conciously, LIED about this.
Carbon good, carbon bad, we don't know. Possibly it's not good, probably we should limit our output of it (can't hurt to be neutral), but to suppose we should spend billions of dollars on fixing a potential non-problem, trusting in what we know to be bad science, that's just fucking bullshit.
Yes, finding several major errors makes the entire document suspect. Especially given the amount of time and money that went into it. The errors that have been found are inexcusable.
No. Water vapor is the largest greenhouse gas factor by a large margin. It completely swamps any possible CO2 contribution because, unlike CO2, which remains generally stable regardless of atmospheric temperature change (that's most of the basis for the claim that CO2 will incur warming, in fact), the evaporative cooling process accelerates enormously when the atmosphere warms. Warm water goes up, radiates at least half its heat spaceward in energy ranges that CO2 is largely transparent to, and then comes down (much) cooler. This cycle serves as a self-regulating heat pump from surface to space. Heat radiated in this manner is gone forever.
The real question here, especially after the scandals of the tweaked data, the lockout of contrary input, the use of glacial statistics that were entirely false, the unforgivable falsification of the "hockey stick"... the real question is: Can we call AGW good, established science?
To answer that question, one asks: Does the the global warming hypothesis give rise to models with testable predictions? Yes. There have been numerous models.
So, critically, are the results of the models compatible with the predictions made? If so, we have a theory.
But the answer to that is a resounding no. We have this stall in temperature rise; we have the failure of all the models to predict results across all latitudes at once; we have sea level changes that don't match the predicted results; we have wildly varying predictions from different models indicating fundamental disagreement among the AGW hypothesis proponents. In many cases, the models results are not in yet (predictions are for the future, and the future, to be blunt, is not here yet) and so we literally have no results at all -- merely speculation based upon models that have demonstrated themselves to be flawed over and over again. So it tuns out that we have no more than an unsubstantiated idea, a hypothesis with holes in it.
Given this situation, we reasonably can, and we should, ask the proponents of the AGW hypothesis and the resulting models to go back to their workbenches and refine those models until the predictions work out to within a reasonable margin of error. When they get it right (and they may yet do so), that is the time to get behind policy decisions that use the science -- because when the predictions work, then it is science, in the sense that now, finally, one has a theory.
Right now, AGW is a hypothesis, no more, and an entirely unsupported one at that. We don't actually know what our contributions to warming or cooling are, consequently deciding to spend huge amounts of money and effort to further muddy the waters is foolish in the extreme.
Let's put the science back in science fiction.