Impeach McConnell, Boehner, and Cantor Today: AP's Seth Borenstein says 'climate science' now focuses on events that 'grab headlines, cause economic damage, and kill people'

Tuesday, July 3, 2012

AP's Seth Borenstein says 'climate science' now focuses on events that 'grab headlines, cause economic damage, and kill people'

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Update, 7/3/12, "Comment On Seth Borenstein AP News Article “This US Summer Is ‘What Global Warming Looks Like’,” Roger Pielke, Sr.
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11/1/2011, "APNewsbreak: Panel says wild weather worsens," AP, Seth Borenstein

"This marks a change in climate science from focusing on subtle changes in daily average temperatures to concentrating on the harder-to-analyze freak events that grab headlines, cause economic damage and kill people."...

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NY Times is apparently in sync with confusing people about climate science:

4/18/12, "Who Cares What the Science Says?" Roger Pielke, Jr.

"The latest NYT story on extremes and climate change celebrates the fact that many Americans fail to understand how human-caused climate change may be related to recent extreme events. Today's NYT reports a new poll that indicates that a large portion of the public believes that specific, recent events can be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions.

Yet, rather than citing recent research on the topic -- such as the IPCC SREX report -- the NYT decides to cheer about the public misunderstanding and speculate on its possible political usefulness...

Simply put, weather is not climate....

As most scientists will explain, weather events and even climate patterns over a period of years simply cannot be attributed to greenhouse gas emissions. Detecting changes in climate requires decades of observations. A very cold winter or two does not disprove a decades-long warming trend, and a series of damaging hurricanes is not evidence of a human influence. ...Given the degree of politicization of the climate debate, we should not be surprised that

even the weather gets politicized."...(image below from Roger Pielke Jr. blog)

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Update, 7/6/12: The link for the New Scientist article referenced below seems to be inactive now. Most if not all of the original article remains below as I copied it. I found a similar article which references that of New Scientist: 6/19/12, "Climate panel slammed for embracing controversial 'grey literature' ," zeenews.india.com. It was filed from London.

The UN IPCC itself is washing its hands of being the arbiter of what does or doesn't qualify as man-caused catastrophic global climate warming. They now say they gladly accept 'grey' or non peer-reviewed material and that diversity is their first priority. According to this article, the United States no longer exists for UN IPCC purposes. "North America" is listed but the US is not mentioned separately. Which makes it even funnier that the US taxpayer picks up half the bills for the UN IPCC.

6/26/12, "Climate panel adopts controversial 'grey' evidence," New Scientist, Fred Pearce

"On 24 June 2012 the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change published a statement about this article (link here – PDF)."

"Climate scientists are likely to face charges of putting politics before science, following two decisions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

At a meeting in Geneva, Switzerland, earlier this month, the IPCC decided for the first time to impose strict geographical quotas on the elected officials that make up its bureau. There will also be a push to increase the representation of women among its authors.

It had also voted at a meeting in Kampala in November 2011 to formalise the use in those assessments of "grey literature": publications not subject to peer review. Using such material in the last assessment is what led to the "glaciergate" scandal in 2010, when the report was found to have vastly overestimated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are losing ice.

The panel publishes three voluminous assessments of the state of climate science every six years, the last of which came out in 2007 Speaker .

Some critics New Scientist spoke to say the changes, which have not so far been publicly announced, will reduce the quality of the assessments by excluding the best scientists and muddying the waters between peer-reviewed and other literature.

However, the changes were backed this week by a senior IPCC scientist, Thelma Krug, a Brazilian co-chair of the panel's task force in greenhouse gas inventories. Speaking at a side event at the Rio+20 environment conference in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, she said the changes will correct geographical biases that have skewed past assessments.

Grey literature was responsible for several embarrassing errors in the 2007 report. These included the false claim that the Himalayas could be ice-free within 30 years and the assertion that African farmers could suffer yield losses of up to 50 per cent by 2020 because of climate change. The latter claim was formally corrected at this month's Geneva meeting.

After the scandals, some called for grey literature to be banished from IPCC assessments. Instead, the meeting embraced it, and set criteria for its use. From now on, for instance, any grey literature used in an IPCC report will have to be put online so that reviewers can assess its quality.

Krug told New Scientist this would correct an imbalance in the assessments as it is harder for people in developing countries to get research findings into the major peer-reviewed journals.

"There is a lot of information available in [the grey literature of] developing countries that would balance IPCC literature," she said.

The IPCC is an intergovernmental body, but its reports are written by scientists. In the past these have been chosen largely on their scientific merit, but from now on the 30-person IPCC bureau - which oversees all publications - will have geographical quotas. For instance Africa will have five members and North America four. In addition, each of its three working groups must now include at least one person from every continent in their eight-person bureaux.

Richard Klein, an IPCC stalwart from the Stockholm Environment Institute in Sweden, told New Scientist this was mostly a formalisation of current practices. "Membership has always been based on expertise, geographical balance and gender." But Krug said it represented

a breakthrough for involvement of developing-world scientists."

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Ed. note: The UN IPCC is officially no longer the final word in climate science. No one can claim otherwise since they've said so themselves. Whether they ever were is doubtful as the article states, "Richard Klein, an IPCC stalwart" says recent moves are "mostly a formalization of current practices."