IT HAS been a bad winter for the environmental movement. It started with climategate. Hacked or leaked e-mails from prominent climate scientists revealed a clique of academics who were sloppy with the science, tried to hide from outside scrutiny and worked hard to su
ppress contradictory evidence.
These scientists had made only minor contributions to the science of climate change. Climate change is as real now as it was before climategate. At the same time, these people were prominent in the public image of climate change and so climategate has shaken the public confidence in the impartiality of academics and the reality of climate change. A few months ago, one would rather admit to eating babies for breakfast than to any doubt about global warming or the need for drastic emission reduction. Climategate has changed all that. Climate doubt has become fashionable.
Climategate was followed by Copenhagen. Hopes for swift and drastic multilateral action on emissions reduction shattered on the rocks of realpolitik. But Copenhagen was more than the usual slow going of the United Nations. The US seemed to walk away from the UN and really talked with the other big boys only. While South Africa sat at that table, the EU did not. The self-proclaimed leader of international climate policy had put all its cards on the table months before the negotiations started – and was largely ignored as a result. European environmentalists were irrelevant in Copenhagen and will lose influence in Brussels as a result.
In the wake of Copenhagen, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Dr Rajendra Pachauri, was accused of conflicts of interest.
The IPCC summarises the science of climate change, its impacts, and possible countermeasures. It enables politicians to make informed decisions. The IPCC is not allowed to recommend any course of action. Dr Pachauri has increasingly used the platform he was given as the chairman of the IPCC to act as an advocate for climate policy.
This is deplorable. It degrades the IPCC from an honest broker of the scientific facts to yet another advocacy. Climate policy creates very substantial business opportunities for new energy companies. If the allegations of a conflict of interest are true, Dr Pachauri’s relationship with such companies is too cosy to be appropriate.
18 January 2010
Richard Tol on Climate Science and IPCC
Richard Tol, climate change polymath, has an op-ed in The Irish Times on the recent problems faced by the climate community and the IPCC. Here is an excerpt:
14 comments:
"The IPCC summarises the science of climate change, its impacts, and possible countermeasures. It enables politicians to make informed decisions."
Poor boy . . . living the life, living the delusion.
Fred: I'm not delusional. Sometimes one needs to talk about the ideal, though. In this case, I was merely paraphrasing the IPCC mandate.
"These scientists had made only minor contributions to the science of climate change"
I'm lookin' at you, Phil Jones! ;-)
Richard - as long as you're here, could you be more specific and tell us who these insignificant scientists are? If their work is of so little inportance, then surely naming names would do no harm.
"Climate change is as real now as it was before climategate." Bollocks!Who are the deniers now? The appalling behavior of the Climategate conspirators is only matched by the appalling data that the whole Global Warming edifice is built upon. Russian, Australian,US and New Zealand data is now being shown to be fiddled.
I think the old computer maxim of"garbage in - garbage out" applies.
Back in 2006 Dr. Pielke wrote: http://www.cato.org/pubs/regulation/regv29n1/v29n1-4.pdf
===============
More fundamentally,
in its extreme forms, the politicization of science by
scientists presents a threat to the institutions of science and
democracy. Because science, politics, and policy are inextricably
intertwined, a challenge exists for developing practical
strategies for decision-makers to use science effectively. Utopian
views of cleanly separating science from politics and facts
from values are not helpful.
================
Richard Tol's Utopian illusion of what the IPCC should have been strikes me as rather Polyannish and revealing of how "scientists" are just now discovering the lack of science and scientific process from themselves and their peers who are entrapped in a symbiotic relationship with political beasts.
@Mark B
"These scientists" obviously refers to the two main characters at climategate, Phil Jones and Michael Mann.
@Craig
I'm not being naive. The IPCC was set-up to be an honest broker, and in the first half of its existence it reasonably managed to live up to its expectations. If the IPCC cannot do that anymore, then it should be disbanded. I do not think the IPCC is beyond repair.
"These scientists had made only minor contributions to the science of climate change."
That is just an outright lie. Some of the participants are the main movers and shakers of the AGW fraud also known as "climate science" by people who don't know better and those that should.
Richard, you say "November brought rain and floods. Climate change will bring more winter rain in Ireland. The floods, however, were quickly blamed on bad planning and on faults in the response to the emergency. What could have been a rallying cry for emissions reduction became a call for reform in flood management policy."
Maybe I misunderstood, but this is how it should be. Blaming global warming for local failure and unpreparedness is a tried and tested trick among politicians!
Richard,
If you truly believe "It enables politicians to make informed decisions." then you are blind to the truth or delusional or living in Peter Pan Land.
Sorry to rain on your parade but open up your eyes the IPCC was set up to drive a political agenda and specified political outcome and no facts, doubts or truths will be allowed to get in the way.
I suppose we can be grateful some politician somewhere didn't make an "informed decision" based on the IPCC's reported-as-gospel-truth story of glacial melt rates in the Hindu Kush.
Guess we got lucky on that one.
Hi,
For blow by blow coverage of climategate, and the background into how a few scientists can influence a whole research sector, see
http://www.ecowho.com/articles/42/Climategate
Fred,
The IPCC was set up in response to a growing consensus amongst scientists that global warming would result from the continued emissions of GHG. Spencer Weart writes:
“The Reagan administration believed that any self-appointed group of scientists would issue alarmist, hyper-environmentalist statements. They forestalled that by promoting a complex international advisory structure, led by people appointed by governments rather than by the scientific community. To further impede any statements that might push toward government regulation, the advisory group’s conclusions would have to be consensual –the unanimous findings of representatives of all the world’s governments.
The result is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Surprisingly, the process produced useful advice.”
Sounds like the political purpose of installing a complex process such as the IPCC was opposite of what you make it out to be.
Bart
"climate doubt has become fashionable."
A bit of a generalization, wouldn't you say?
@Keith
This sentence was slipped in by the editor (no excuse, of course).
It certainly has become a lot less unfashionable since the fall.
I'm not sure if it's the doubt or the belief in manmade global warming that's the fashion here. After all a lot of the people who pretend to be green now and demand "action" are mostly abject hypocrites who were baying for cheap oil along with the rest of the electorate in the 70's, 80's and 90's and buying big gas guzzlers to burn it in. All of a sudden the chattering classes then pretended en masse to be self-righteously green without having actually done anything green.
Manmade warming and cooling made for a healthy number of scare stories last century but the consensus always reverted to the realism that climate can change all by itself and nobody can predict it with any more accuracy now than they did then. It'll do the same again, after a lot of rearguard action from scientists who've wasted half their academic lives being paid for peddling twaddle instead of doing something useful for society.
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