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Dutch Agency Admits Mistakes In UN Climate Report
Hugh Pickens writes "The AP reports that the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has taken the blame for one of the glaring errors that undermined the credibility of a seminal, 3,000-page UN report last year on climate change, and disclosed that it had discovered more small mistakes. However, the review by the agency also claims that none of the errors affected the fundamental conclusion by a UN panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is happening and is threatening the lives and well-being of millions of people. The Dutch agency reported in 2005 that 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level, when only 26 percent is. The second previously reported error claimed the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, which the Dutch agency partly traced to a report on the likely shrinking of glaciers by the year 2350. The original report also said global warming will put 75 million to 250 million Africans at risk of severe water shortages in the next 10 years, but a recalculation showed that range should be 90 million to 220 million. The analysis said future IPCC reports should have a more robust review process, and should look more closely at where information comes from."
What decade long decline? You mean since 2005 when it was really warm?
Interesting.
Erm I kinda like having my computer with its internet connection.
Ok, so you like your computer to be on all the time. Try to make allowances in other places in your life.
Oh wait. Wind and solar power cant produce enough power to keep them going? Bye bye internet. Do you realise how much power Google uses alone?
Google likely uses a lot of power. However, wind and solar do have lots of power capacity. Wind has 5x the current world capacity (theoretically). 20 seconds, Wikipedia. In a directed study, like the UK, they predicted about 50x their power demands. This doesn't even count solar, tidal, geothermal. Also, why you do think that a transition to renewable energy and improving efficiencies and standards (such as CCS) would suddenly cause existing power generation and infrastructure to blow up?
Remember that these idiots are wanting to ditch coal power, refuse to use nuclear (wtf?) and if everyone cant power their lives off a small pinwheel then your being wasteful.
Sounds like a bit of a hyperbole. From my experiences, nuclear has more proponents among environmentalists who see it as an appropriate measure to move towards renewables and away from coal than among the anti-AGW crowd.
If you want to make more legitimate criticisms, look towards energy density of storage and transportation mediums, as an example. Also, invest in companies that do battery research.
Interesting.
The troll mods I would guess are because you are implying that the report in question (the one which used the 2035 number for the glacier melt) was supposedly to use only scientific sources. In fact that working group paper by definition was to use all sorts of sources, and specifically states that as the case. I would not call the 2035 error a mere typo, but I would also not try to use it as a means to discredit the science behind the WGI (the one which deals with the actual science) report. In my mind, your post (perhaps purposefully) obfuscates this difference.
Your analogy fails, to fix it there would be two sections to the college research paper, one that deals with scientific sources and the other that includes other sources such as the media reports and public opinion. Wikipedia turns out to be a pretty good jumping off point for the second section, though any good professor would still likely mock you for stopping at Wikipedia.
The IPCC report contains over six thousand factual assertions. Only 3 or 4 have been shown to be inaccurate, and they're all to do with the implications of GW. Not one of the assertions supporting the causes of AGW have been demonstrated to be inaccurate.
The errors in your comment show a serious lack of quality in your own research, and it sounds more like you've been believing in someone rather than trusting and verifying.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"Oh there's a far greater problem, it's people like you willing to whitewash inaccuracies and the inability for people to review the data used to reach the conclusion they claim is accurate."
Which. Fucking. Inaccuracies?
We're talking about several errors in a giant report. How do you imagine that they can change the very BASICS of the climate science?
Do you suggest that ALL climate scientists are members of a global conspiracy ring, spanning more than a century and more than 300 countries?
"If you can't peer review, it's not science. If you're theory cannot actually predict anything but the past, that's not a good theory and you need to go back to the drawing board."
It fucking can. IPCC predicitons from 1988 come true today, and they are statistically significant.
Hell, even Arrhenius' predictions from 1890-s are correct (within their margin of error).
Go on and study climate science before making stupid remarks.
Basically most of it was salt water marshes and lakes that we drained. Fortunately we are not living anywhere near a geological active region, nor do we have a rainy season or trouble with hurricanes. A lot of the world is not as lucky. We've spend oodles of money and time into building dikes and such. We are a highly organized, rich country. You cannot just take our solution and implement it anywhere else.
You won't even believe what we have to do to be safe from newer threats that come from the changes in climate. Basically we have to make all the dikes a lot higher. The chances of floods from rivers is much higher and the sea dikes were not build with higher water levels either.
BTW, fun fact, Schiphol was a lake, so when you land, don't forget that the runway already is 3m below sea level - and the train station is much lower than that :)
Just as a quick reminder, this report is talking about errors in the Working Group II report (the effects of climate change), and not the Working Group I report (the physical basis of climate change).
The errors discussed here don't call into question the physical basis of the fact that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect; they have to do with the question of what the effects of the warming will. (And even there, I'll point out that the WG-II errors in question are from misquoting the research, or in quoting sources that don't refer to actual research at all-- they don't seem to be errors in the original science sources.)
It's easy enough to get this confused, since most of the media reports don't distinguish the reports-- don't even seem to know that there is not just one report being discussed.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The changes aren't just not driving an SUV. It is things like not driving at all. Not being able to buy food in plastic packaging and only buy food that is grown within 100 miles or so of where you live. Things like starting to put people to work demolishing freeways in California so the space can be used to move people closer to where they work - no more driving, no more freeways, etc.
Do you begin to understand the magnitude of the changes that are actually required?
How about a simple one? Assuming the immigration influx into the US continues and the building of new powerplants continues on the rapid pace it has for the last 40 years (like none at all), you can expect that we will be running out of electricity commonly. We have to make some hard decisions about offices and homes - and telecommunity isn't a solution. If your refrigerator won't keep food cold for a day without electricity better think about getting a new one. If your pets can't live without air conditioning, time to start thinking about an aquarium instead.
Sure, we could supply the entire country's electrical needs from solar cells in Arizona and Nevada. Except, who is going to keep the protesters out of the meetings where the new transmission lines get decided on? Nobody? It is their right? Well, then you can forget about new transmission lines because way, way too many people "know" they cause cancer, impotence and all sorts of other bad things. So they will not be built and solar cell farms in Arizona and Nevada will never be built, just like the huge wind farms in Texas - because the electricity cannot be transferred from there to the cities where it is needed.
> Well actually, overstating by 200% the amount of land underwater in a small country is not really a "small" error.
yeah, it's about as serious as overstating the difference between 26% and 55% by about 100%.
hint: 55% is just over double 26%, not triple. so it would be an ~ 110% overstatement, not 200%.
hint2: anyone can make simple mistakes.
> Some of the other errors are small, true. But it's hard to put a lot of faith the conclusion is correct when so many other little things are wrong.
see, that's the thing. you don't put "faith" into the report. science is not about faith, it's about evidence and reason. faith is belief despite evidence or even despite the evidence. instead, you examine the evidence and analyse the rationale and the conclusions and decide a) whether they are consistent, logical, and rigorous, b) whether they match observed reality, and c) whether, over time, they are shown to be a good predictive tool for future observations of reality.
The CRU methodology has been completely cleared by three independent inquiries comprised of experts in the field, and their data fully vindicated.
Claims that the integrity of the data has been "lost somehow" show a lack of understanding of the statistical analysis methods used throughout the physical sciences. Claims that are all the more ironic when coming from the denialist crowd, whose accusations of "faked science" are riddled with obvious selection bias (exhibit A: the "cooling decade" argument referenced by the GP).
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
Actually, you are correct. But that doesn't mean what you hope it means.
For political reasons the actual projections were toned down and made milder, largely by excluding models that projected faster or more extreme warming. Then they averaged the remaining projections.
Now one can argue that this makes the report invalid, but I don't see how one can say it makes it overly dramatic.
One could argue that the models are invalid. I hope you are correct. But they have been validated by predicting past results in order to obtain some estimate of how accurate they are. All current models suffer from two kinds of error:
1) We don't have enough data, and
2) The models have been oversimplified to make it possible to run projections on available computers. Using all the factors and data we have available would result in models that ran in much slower than real time.
So ALL of the models are oversimplified, and known to be so. Sorry, that's the best we can do.
P.S.: I am not associated with any author of the report or any of the models used in the report. This post is a synopsis of things that I have read in the popular scientific press.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
Insightfull but misleading.
There are four volumes in the report, the report of which you speak uses "grey material" from goverment, industry and private sources that cannot be found anywhere else. In this case they used a government source for the percentage of land below sea level, unfortunately the Dutch govt got it wrong but that is about impacts and has nothing to do with the science. The scientific volume (WG1) only uses peer-reviewed sources and nobody has yet pointed out any errors in WG1, in fact the people who pointed out the 2035 error were contributors to WG1.
Note the prominent link directly above the reports to their statement about the 2035 mistake. The IPCC is widely recognised by scientific institutions as one of the most robust peer-review exercises ever conducted and it has been forthright about recognsing it's mistake but if your expecting perfection from a large bunch of humans over a 20yr period you will be dissapointed.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
"Revelation"??? - The reason Mann excluded the late 20th century tree ring record is fully explained in his Nature paper, I might add that the paper in question has recieved more scrutiny than any other I can think of for the last 50yrs simply because psudeo-skeptics have tried to paint it as the sole basis for AGW.
As many posters have said about the IPCC, you should try checking the primary source to find out if your adopted claims are factual or political.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
Again, the paper in question was not investigating the scientific basis of the climate change, that paper has never been found to have significant errors.
This is a DIFFERENT section of the report, which is designed to use "non-scientific" input in order to ascertain a POLITICAL impact of potential changes that were concluded in the scientific paper, separately.
Try to keep them separate, because they are.
Sorry, that myth has been comprehensively debunked. Here is one of many debunkings written by climate scientists:
climate-myths-we-cant-trust-computer-models
The climate models I am running on climateprediction.net begin in 1820. They do that to correlate the various models with the climate record since 1820. Only models that show a good correlation are used to predict the future. There are plenty of links on the site showing this correlation, take a peek.