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Record breaking heat
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Merrick
Merrick
2148 posts

Edited Aug 25, 2010, 11:06
Re: Record breaking heat
Aug 13, 2010, 12:49
So let me get this straight: the IPCC reports cannot be trusted because a tiny proportion of the science used was not peer-reviewed. However, the entirely non-peer-reviewed science that contests climate change is sound.

jshell wrote:
Look at Merrick's last post.


What I actually said was "there have been numerous mistakes, which is not unlikely in documents thousands of pages long that, in turn, rely on thousands of inputs. The difference between the IPCC and the denialists is that the IPCC acknowledge mistakes and correct them. This is common in scientific endeavour".

The IPCC collates data from thousands of scientists. Because of the need to achieve consensus, its findings are often diluted. Then the governments it represents have to sign off on it, which gets a whole load more taken out. The last IPCC report had the line “North America is expected to experience locally severe economic damage, plus substantial ecosystem, social and cultural disruption from climate change related events” removed.

Why is it that deniers think governments want to exaggerate the threats to themselves and pretend to be greater failures than they are?

The issue is not whethere there are unreliable sources used by the IPCC, but how many, whether they get admitted and excised, and what happens to the perspective when they unreliable sources are removed.

Much of the science remains intact. Indeed, on some of the examples you give, it is far worse.

The story you link to about Amazonian dieback was picked up by the Sunday Times. Dr Simon Lewis, a Royal Society Research Fellow and forest ecologist from the University of Leeds, forced a full retraction of the story.
http://www.leeds.ac.uk/news/article/839/leading_scientist_forces_climate_article_apology_and_retraction

Papers published earlier (Cox et al 'Amazonian forest dieback under climate-carbon cycle projections for the 21st century' and Fu and Li 'The influence of the land surface on the transition from dry to wet season in Amazonia', both 2004) predict far worse than the WWF report. Both were used and cited by the same IPCC report.
http://www.ipcc.ch/publications_and_data/ar4/wg1/en/ch7s7-references.html

This in no way justifies the use of non-peer reviewed work. However, you need to separate a discrediting of one reference from discrediting the conclusions of a report using many thousands of creditable references.
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Re: Record breaking heat (jshell)
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