Slashdot Mirror
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."
All this means is that scientists are in fact humans and make small errors just like everyone else. I'm just glad that scientific academies and agencies have the integrity to publicly admit when they're wrong in spite of the obvious fear-mongering and finger-pointing that will result from the anti-AGW camp.
What decade long decline? You mean since 2005 when it was really warm?
Interesting.
Global Warming: The Y2K Scare for the New Century.
In reports of this size, there will always be small errors. The problem is that right wing bloggers trumpet these up to raise doubts about the basic science, and then fox news et. al. broadcast this even further. The result is a complete disaster: people will not make the sacrifices needed to stop climate change if they have doubts about whether it is happening. A great example is leakegate, where the Sunday Telegraph used a tiny citation error to suggest a conspiracy of scientists to falsify evidence of global warming (the UN report cited another report which contained the peer reviewed work, rather than directly citing the peer reviewed work). Eventually, the Telegraph retracted their article, but not before the damage was done. http://www.realclimate.org/index.php/archives/2010/06/leakegate-a-retraction/ As Mark Twain said, lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is still putting its boots on...
Deconstruct the State
It's not one small error, it's a massive, brain-dead (or malicious) methodological error. Go to the IPCC report, check out WGII, and look at the citations page. It is so full of non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed references that as a scientific document it is practically worthless. A lot of them to WWF which however admirable the work it does may be (hey, who's not in favor of saving pandas really?), is still an advocacy group not a research group. It is really pathetic how horribly put together WGII was, just shameful.
Fortunately WGI was put together significantly more reliably, and each section is typically written by the top scientists in their respective fields, and includes both scientists who are smeared as 'believers' and 'deniers.' I say it is fortunate because WGI is such a convenient way to educate yourself on the scientific issues surrounding global warming, it would be bad if it were similarly corrupted.
Qxe4
"Keep hiding that decline, boys. Wouldn't want anybody to realize that we are in a global cooling snap and have been for a decade now."
Really. Such fools as you should be put against the wall and shot. Then buried with the stake through heart, just to be sure.
The garbage you're spewing is based on a simple fact of 1998 being a statistical fluke. However, the last year is the _hottest_ year on records and beats 1998. So no, there's just no global cooling. There are just stupid fools who don't understand the basics.
>>>Saying that Africa is going to have water shortages in 10 years and then say it might be 220 million years is more than a small error.
Always frakking everything up.
Oh.
Wait.
"I disapprove of what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it." - historian Evelyn Beatrice Hall
55% to 26% is a small error? Sounds like double to me. I'm not going to deny that climate change is happening, its happened for millions of years. I've seen layers of sandstone with sea shells it them, in the next foot of rock above there was petrified wood. From sea to forest in a short geological time span and back then humans weren't around. We may see climate change on such scales, that doesn't frighten me, we can adapt. The thing that does frighten me is politicians who use climate change as a platform to push whatever agenda they please.
"none of the errors affected the fundamental conclusion by a UN panel of scientists" but it did affect the fundamental conclusion of the public as a whole. If you want the entire planet to shift the way it lives, to spend more money and get less for it, then "small errors" likes these are anything but small and completely unacceptable. Measure twice, cut once.
No mention of the 6,475,248 correct statements in the report.
A squid eating dough in a polyethylene bag is fast and bulbous, got me?
All this means is that scientists are in fact humans and make small errors just like everyone else.
Well actually, overstating by 200% the amount of land underwater in a small country is not really a "small" error.
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. If the report is not consistent in accuracy throughout, trusting the result because they claim to have found "none of the errors actually matter" is not reassuring. It comes off more as sounding like, they already know what the conclusion should be, so the science was just there as window dressing to scare you good and proper.
It would be nice if other scientists could examine the data themselves to see in fact if there are not any errors that actually matter...
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If the climate miraculously stops changing and steadies at current levels, and even if it is so predictable that we can evacuate places before storms hit, there will still be millions of people starving because the population keeps growing and the planet and its resources doesn't.
So meh to climate change. A few thousand people can live in a desert or tundra, 20 billion cannot.
They whose government reduces their essential liberties for temporary security, receive neither liberty nor security.
The problem is that right wing bloggers trumpet these up to raise doubts about the basic science
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. To just blow past that and still claim there's even science going on, much less that it is sound, is pretty incredible to me on a site where people are otherwise very level-headed about technical matters.
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.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you pick 1998 as the year to start, then yes, temperatures have declined from that extraordinary El Nino weather pattern.
Similarly, I can say that the economy has been roaring since late 2008 - the stock market is up over 30%! Or I can say the economy has been suffering since early 2008 - the market is down over 40%! Both cases are a little misleading, and not only because the Dow Jones has little to do with the real economy.
Global air and sea temperatures are on average going up, and have been doing so for decades. The US military is planning for the defense of the northwest passage. The USA, Russia, and Canada have already started bickering over the ownership of resources under the ice pack in the Arctic Ocean.
Something tells me that all of these things are not just coincidence.
The current debate over global warming is not unlike the debate over evolution, which is to say, there really isn't any rational debate, only people whose vested interests are threatened by the conclusions of science who are desperately grasping at straws to deny settled facts. In the case of evolution, the vested interest is an emotional attachment to long-discredited Bronze Age superstitions, while climate change deniers feel their (unsustainable) wealth and convenience are threatened by the growing recognition that those things cannot go on unchanged without risking our continued existence. As a result, each new fact added to the edifice of evolutionary theory, as with climate theory, leads to a perverse demand that science fill in the ever shrinking gaps. In the case of evolution-deniers, the gaps are now so small that they have been reduced to all but demanding a running video record of speciation. Climate change deniers have a little more wiggle room, the risk of global warming having been recognized for only sixty or so years now, but even they have been reduced to positing the existence of a global conspiracy of climatologists to rule the world.
It would be funny if the threats we faced were not both urgent and existential.
Proud member of the Weirdo-American community.
But, if we are honest, most of this is not about the science buy about the policy decisions. We are still reeling from the bad science that meant we could no longer increase yields by spraying crops with DDT just because a few radical scientists created massive birds deaths, like liberals caused the gulf oil spill to stop oil drilling. Or overstating the effects of lead on children, or asbestos, to destroy those industries and destroy capitalism. We all know that scientist don't really do science, but spend all their time trying to destroy democracy and all that is good.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
If you pick 1998 as the year to start, then yes, temperatures have declined from that extraordinary El Nino weather pattern.
And, if you go back to the end of the last ice age, you'll also see a warming trend. Long before the industrial age and man-made CO2 emissions.
And again, if you go back to the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch, you'll find that the Earth has cooled since then.
What's your point?
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"?
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
how is it rational to believe in a conclusion based on data they will not let you see?
How is it rational to instead believe the only possible alternative conclusion; that 98.5% of climatologists must be deliberately falsifying their conclusions in a global conspiracy to mislead the public for nefarious but unstated purposes?
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
If they couldn't write an accurate report the size of IPCC report, they should have written a smaller one. This report is a big deal, politicians are using as a guide for dramatic changes to the world's economy. I'm not saying it has to be perfect. But sloppiness and carelessness in unacceptable for something like this, and it is easy to keep the scope of a report small enough to ensure that every assertion made is accurate and meaningful.
"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.
Watch this typical example of how the anti-AGW camp operates. The journal "Nature" has said that scientists are in a street-fight. I mean, wtf? You'd think that people would be interested in what scientists have to say, but actually, we have reason on one side, and a dangerous delusional psychotic lunatic on the other side. Of course the delusional psychotic lunatic is going to engage in mirror-image projections to defend its ego.
So sad. So pointless.
We will destroy this world, because of our ignorance.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
There are ominous signs that the Earth's weather patterns have begun to change dramatically and that these changes may portend a drastic decline in food production - with serious political implications for just about every nation on Earth. The drop in food output could begin quite soon, perhaps only 10 years from now. The regions destined to feel its impact are the great wheat-producing lands of Canada and the U.S.S.R. in the North, along with a number of marginally self-sufficient tropical areas - parts of India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Indochina and Indonesia - where the growing season is dependent upon the rains brought by the monsoon.
The evidence in support of these predictions has now begun to accumulate so massively that meteorologists are hard-pressed to keep up with it. In England, farmers have seen their growing season decline by about two weeks since 1950, with a resultant overall loss in grain production estimated at up to 100,000 tons annually. During the same time, the average temperature around the equator has risen by a fraction of a degree - a fraction that in some areas can mean drought and desolation. Last April, in the most devastating outbreak of tornadoes ever recorded, 148 twisters killed more than 300 people and caused half a billion dollars' worth of damage in 13 U.S. states.
To scientists, these seemingly disparate incidents represent the advance signs of fundamental changes in the world's weather....
OOOPS!... sorry, I mistakenly was quoting scientific data from the 1970's with regards to Global Cooling. Nothing to see here I guess, just forget I ever mentioned this. Thank goodness we have honest reporting and scientific fact finding these days, nothing like an apocalyptic blast from the past eh? Now don't forget to stay scared and make sure you let your state agencies dictate how much you eat and what temperature you can keep your house at.
I'm sure they'll get it right with Global Warming this time!! Maybe we'll even die because of it in 10 years!
The magical number is: 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Source (via wikipedia).
You're right, it appears I was exaggerating. The actual consensus seems to be closer to 97-98%.
*No* climatologist would ever go to the extreme of predicting an end to snow anywhere. Google "outliers".