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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."
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.
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
"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.
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?
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
It's a good analogy in that Y2K was more than just a scare, required a lot of people working on it to prepare, and even though there WERE issues, we managed to evade the catastrophy due to hard work and determination.
The only issue we have right now is that Global Warming doesn't have the same commitment the Y2K scare had, and Global Warming is not something that can be fixed by computer scientists alone.
Global Warming: The Y2K Scare for the New Century.
Absolutely. People realised well before the crisis occurred that remedial action was necessary to address shortcomings in human-designed systems whose effects, while difficult to quantify (and the subject of wild speculation), were known to be adverse.
While some efforts began well in advance of the crisis itself, consensus concerning action didn't arise immediately. The result was a late push toward a technical fix that ended up costing businesses and governments more, because once-plentiful resources were now in high demand.
The difference between Y2K and Climate Change, of course, is that one only required that a date field be fixed, and the systems we were modeling were entirely of human creation. Our sense of the scope of the problem, and therefore our predictive capability, was much better. This didn't stop an ill-informed media from announcing the Apocalypse and helping drive a millennial fervour among many, but those in this know were nonetheless able to concentrate on the task at hand and, for the most part, remedy it before it became a problem.
Our understanding of the scope and nature of Climate Change, on the other hand, is based on observation of a nearly infinitely more complex natural system. Achieving a clear understanding of the scope and exact nature of the problem is therefore exceedingly difficult. Scientific speculation about possible effects has led to an ill-informed media announcing the Apocalypse and helped drive a (Mayan) millennial fervour among many.
Those in the know are thwarted by competing economic interests who see mere acceptance of the concept of global climate change as a threat to their profitability. They have therefore recruited numerous 'public relations' companies to subvert the credibility of said researchers and to use any means necessary to cast doubt on the research itself. This has hampered efforts to win public support for action, which in turn has made it politically difficult to commit to anything but often meaningless half measures (e.g. cap-and-trade).
... But aside from the differences, yeah, they're exactly alike. 8^)
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
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.
It is a small error in the grand scheme of things. Some measurements need only be precise to the order of magnitude to be significant. In this case, the fact that such a large amount of land can be underwater is still relevant even if they're off by a factor of 10.
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
> 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.
Do you have any regard for the truth, or do you just think sound bites are sufficient?
The truth is that there are a number of predictions that come from climate science that have been confirmed by observation:
1. The surface temperature will increase - it has
2. The heat content of the oceans will increase - it has
3. The poles - especially the nth pole will warm faster than the rest of the planet. The observed warming of the Nth pole is dramatic.
4. The stratosphere will cool as the troposphere warms. It has.
5. Ocean acidity will rise - it has.
A couple of these predictions are more than a century old, having been first made by the Swedish chemist Svante Arrhenius in 1896. He was the first to arrive at an estimate of sensitivity of climate to increase in atmospheric CO2. An estimate not that different to what is the accepted range today.
Not only have these predictions been confirmed by observation, but no other plausible explanation has been found other than an enhanced greenhouse effect. Despite exhaustive efforts, attribution of climate change principally to solar changes, cosmic rays, astronomical cycles etc etc has been shown to be plainly incompatible with available observation.
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"?
"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.
If they couldn't write an accurate report the size of IPCC report, they should have written a smaller one.
Gee, by that standard, the deniers should shut the fuck up.
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck