Herald unhappy with IPCC errors

The Herald editorial looks at the IPCC woes:

More than one mistake has been found recently in the work of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, set up by the United Nations to provide authoritative reports on global warming, and the errors are hardly peripheral.

The IPCC’s powerful Fourth Assessment Report in 2007 declared there was a probability of glaciers disappearing from the Himalayas by 2035 or sooner.

And those pointing out the error were labelled as pushing voodoo science by the IPCC Chairman.

If the Himalayan debacle was bad enough, the panel references to disappearing ice in the Andes, the European Alps and Africa are even more embarrassing.

They turn out to have been based on a student dissertation and an article in a climbing magazine.

And there is more …

Last week, the IPCC’s attempts to link natural disasters to global warming was critically examined.

Its claim in 2007 that the world had “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s” turns out to have been based on a paper that had not been peer-reviewed or published at that time.

When the paper was published in 2008 it included a caveat that the evidence was insufficient to establish a statistical relationship between the global temperature increase and catastrophes.

Yet the panel said nothing about the caveat before last year’s Copenhagen Conference where the fear of natural disasters loomed large among African nations in particular.

The IPCC seem to have gone for any article anywhere that supports the thesis, regardless of whether or not it is peer reviewed.

These errors are not merely academic; they cause real worry in the regions concerned.

And generate lots of funding to study said problems.

Climate scientists are anxious to deny that these “slip-ups” discredit the IPCC’s conclusions overall but sceptics of climate change have seized upon them to do exactly that.

The IPCC’s reputation is not helped now by the argument of authority its supporters have employed for so long. Criticism was dismissed as conceit in the face of a “scientific consensus” that by implication could not be wrong.

Well the consensus has been wrong, or at least careless on several points. Scepticism has strengthened, but it is only scepticism; human-induced climate change has not been disproved. It remains too worrying to be dismissed.

Governments need dispassionate scientific assessments of it, not anecdotes, unchecked papers and agitators’ propaganda.

The IPCC urgently needs new leadership and a return to strict scientific rigour if it hopes to be taken seriously again.

At a minimum the IPCC Chairman needs to resign. Anything pubished under his watch will not be regarded as credible after his voodoo science comments.

iPredict has the chance of the Chairman resigning as 60%. It was only 20% up until the end of January and has shot up in the last few days.