The IPCC rebuttal

The right wing climate denial blogosphere of Un PC, No Minister, Kiwi Blog and Mac Dr have been making big oil funded Frank Luntz proud with their increased attack on the science behind the IPCC report based on cherry picked attacks on the anecdotal elements of the IPCC report alongside the inadequacies within Peer reviewed science. The Guardian makes the same points, but the fact is that there were problems with peer reviewed science WELL BEFORE climate change research, pretending that it is some type of new sneaky evil being forced upon the world by those tricky tree huggers is a lie and fails to acknowledge the rest of the vast body of research which shows that man made pollution is causing the planet to warm.

Hot Topic does a very good job of dismantling the Herald editorial and of course their attack on Poneke's recent climate denial nonsense is another reminder that climate denial still hasn't done a thing to diminish the point that human made pollution is causing the planet to warm.

The climate skeptic position that Greenpeace with $30 million can out spin Exxon Mobil valued at half a trillion is as believable as the climate skeptic position that all 6 billion of us and our pollution has NO EFFECT on the planets climate whatsoever. That is fairies at the bottom of the garden stuff.

The IPCC rebuttal of these criticisms came out on the 2nd of Feb and makes for interesting reading...

An IPCC assessment involves a very large proportion of the climate science community at one level or another. For the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report (AR4), 450 scientists from 130 countries served as Lead Authors. Another 800 served as contributing authors. More than 2500 experts provided over 90,000 review comments. And the scientists who were not directly involved in the writing or reviewing contributed through producing some of the literature on which the entire assessment is based. In the course of four lead author meetings, the chapter teams discussed and debated the quality and validity of the literature and used their expert judgment to agree conclusions. The process requires not only outstanding scientific expertise and the ability to synthesize large bodies of literature, but also effective teamwork. None of these authors or reviewers is paid for working on an IPCC assessment which, for the lead authors, can represent a very significant fraction of their time. The work is entirely on an unpaid, volunteer basis, including that of the chair of IPCC and all of the elected leadership.

The integrity in the IPCC assessments and their fidelity to the underlying scientific information comes from four main components, all thoroughly specified in the IPCC procedures. These are (1) broad, balanced participation in the author teams, (2) emphasis on a comprehensive treatment of the relevant scientific literature, (3) two stages of widely distributed, independently monitored review, and (4) word-by-word, consensus approval, by governments, of the Summaries for Policymakers. With each component, important features help ensure high fidelity to the underlying science and minimal opportunity for messages to be shaped by the views of one or a few individuals. The broad, international author teams, selected from government nominations to give appropriate geographical and gender balance as well as scientific expertise, usually include people who do not know each other before the process starts. Often, authors on a single chapter may disagree about important details. The emphasis on a comprehensive treatment of the literature means that relevant topics cannot get missed, if they are raised by authors or in the reviews. The multi-stage review process provides the opportunity for a very wide range of experts to have inputs, and independent monitoring ensures that author teams respond appropriately to every review comment. The fourth stage, word-by-word consensus approval by governments, is an important check on all the other components of the process. It is remarkable to think that every participating government has approved every word in an IPCC Summary for Policymakers.

Have poor research methods regarding peer reviewed material come to light? Yes, but they WERE ALWAYS THERE – pretending that it is unique to the Climate Warming debate is a lie in itself, and these criticisms are again cherry picked fringe anecdotal issues to the vast body of work that shows us man made pollution is heating the planet in a manner that threatens our ability for modern civilization as we know it to continue. Climate denial simply attempts to deny the political movement necessary to push through the sustainable change that are now vital to offset breaching tipping points within our biosphere.

Climate deniers are still the creationists at an evolution conference.

UPDATE George Monbiot whom I consider one of the best commentators alongside the Guardian's Fred Pearce on Climate Change makes the point in his latest blog attacking the University peer review standards...

Climate change email scandal shames the university and requires resignations
Damaging as some of this material is, at least people on this side of the climate science fence are able to confront the problem. Both stories – the glacier error and the revelations about the Chinese weather stations – were broken by the brilliant reporter Fred Pearce, who is possibly the world's longest serving environmental journalist, and has spent decades explaining and championing climate science. The IPCC's glacier claim was actually drawn from an article of Fred's, published in New Scientist in 1999. But it was he who exposed the mistake the panel had made.

On the other side of the debate, people are in denial not only about the science of climate change but also about manipulation and deception by other climate change deniers. They stoutly ignore far graver evidence of falsification and fabrication by their own side, even when there is smoking gun evidence that their champions have secretly taken money from fossil fuel companies to make false claims. They make no attempt to hold each other to account or to sustain any standards of truth at all.

In fact, as Fred Pearce has shown, even their claims about the material in the hacked emails are almost all false.

The vast body of climate science still shows that manmade climate change is real and that it presents a massive challenge to human survival. But those of us who seek to explain its implications and call for action must demand the highest possible standards from the people whose work we promote, and condemn any failures to release data or admit and rectify mistakes. We do no one any favours – least of all ourselves – by wasting our time promoting false claims