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

Re:Sounds like a coal industry shill

[Rei]

Let's look at "fluff.info", shall we?

Here, apophenia kicks in, and after you've seen that BPM and GDP are correlated, you'll have no problem inventing a model for it.

The first problem with that argument is that the hypothesis of CO2 causing warming came from *before* worldwide datasets were even availabl3e. It was first proposed in the late 1800s based on laboratory experiments showing that some gasses absorb heavily in the infrared range but minimally in the visible range. Secondly, "you'll have no problem inventing a model" for how beats per minute of a Billboard 100 song affects GDP? Really? Um, no.

There's also the problem that it is very difficult to write down a model for which there isn't another model with the causation the other way `round

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. Is warming supposed to make us want to dig up more coal?

Without a model to say anything about the extra variables

Too bad we have nothing more than first principles itself to rely on...

(Actually, we do have other things beyond first principles as well! But that's another story)

For example, for many types of game, if you have two players repeating the game a thousand times, the distribution of actions that player one took will have nothing at all to do with the distribution of actions that player two took

If you're using that as an analogy for global warming, it corresponds to claiming that the laws of physics have changed. Fat luck with that.

And seriously -- do you honestly think that statisticians aren't involved in these papers? Really?