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Scientists eye climate panel

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WASHINGTON -- The world's biggest scientific guns are being called in to mop up after a trickle of unsettling errors in the authoritative reports written by a global warming panel.

The U.N. and the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that a group of 15 national academies of science will study how the warming panel does its job.

That independent review will be finished by the end of August, said Robbert Dijkgraaf, co-chairman of the group, the InterAcademy Council.

A panel of experts created by the council will try to figure out how better to catch and correct errors, Dijkgraaf said. It will also consider whether the climate panel should use non-peer reviewed literature, how governments review IPCC material, and even how the IPCC communicates with the public.

Mistakes in the IPCC reports, found in recent months, don't undercut the broad consensus on global warning, but they have shaken the credibility of climate scientists and given skeptics of global warming ammunition.

Dijkgraaf said the review is "a forward-looking report" but will examine the errors already found as "case studies." He said it will not be a comprehensive review of the "vast amount of data that has already been obtained."

The review will involve a mix of outside experts and climate scientists who have worked with the IPCC before but are "far enough removed to be truly independent," Dijkgraaf told The Associated Press in a telephone interview before a briefing at the U.N. The idea is to have expertise and insight into how IPCC works without including current leaders, he said.

"The full panel needs gravitas and I think scientific stature," Dijkgraaf said. The members of the panel haven't been chosen, but it will likely be 10 scientists.

The evaluation group will be chosen when the InterAcademy's board meets on March 22, Dijkgraaf said. The InterAcademy has done science reviews before for the United Nations.

"The (review) panel will have great liberty to function and work and write a report with an open mind," Dijkgraaf said. And the conclusions of the panel itself will be peer-reviewed by outside scientists.

The IPCC was formed in 1989 by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organization to study global warming and its causes and effects.

Both critics and supporters of the IPCC process cheered the outside review.

"The idea sounds fine. I hope people like me have input. Otherwise it's just the usual members of the establishment defending to themselves what's been done," said researcher John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville, a prominent IPCC critic and warming skeptic.

Prominent mainstream climate scientist Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research said "climate science has become a political hot potato." He said the reviewers should not just look at the IPCC but the standards of its critics.

The IPCC, which is mostly a collection of volunteer scientists, shared the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007 with former Vice President Al Gore.

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On the Net

The IPCC: www.ipcc.ch

The InterAcademy Council: http://www.interacademycouncil.net/




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 3 Total Comments
3.
    Posted by Mr. Destiny March 11, 2010
OSV,

I am happy to hear that you finally have admitted you have been duped. That is a good first step in your recovery from acute socialitis and liberhea...

2.
    Posted by onesmallvoice March 11, 2010
Quite obviously some of us are incapable of original thought and can only, literally, regurgitate what they have been fed by their cult leaders.

1.
    Posted by AMT March 11, 2010
"...a trickle of unsettling errors ..."???!!!

It is not a trickle, it is a deluge.

And they are not errors - in every case they are deliberate lies published after repeated notifications of the contrary facts.

Read on ...

What to say to a 'warmer'
By MARK LANDSBAUM
Published: Feb. 12, 2010
Updated: Feb. 14, 2010 10:24 a.m.

Some talking points for refuting the claims of global warming alarmists.

It has been tough to keep up with all the bad news for global warming alarmists. We're on the edge of our chair, waiting for the next shoe to drop. This has been an Imelda Marcos kind of season for shoe-dropping about global warming.
At your next dinner party, here are some of the latest talking points to bring up when someone reminds you that Al Gore and the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won Nobel prizes for their work on global warming.

ClimateGate " This scandal began the latest round of revelations when thousands of leaked documents from Britain's East Anglia Climate Research Unit showed systematic suppression and discrediting of climate skeptics' views and discarding of temperature data, suggesting a bias for making the case for warming. Why do such a thing if, as global warming defenders contend, the "science is settled?"

FOIGate " The British government has since determined someone at East Anglia committed a crime by refusing to release global warming documents sought in 95 Freedom of Information Act requests. The CRU is one of three international agencies compiling global temperature data. If their stuff's so solid, why the secrecy?

ChinaGate " An investigation by the U.K.'s left-leaning Guardian newspaper found evidence that Chinese weather station measurements not only were seriously flawed, but couldn't be located. "Where exactly are 42 weather monitoring stations in remote parts of rural China?" the paper asked. The paper's investigation also couldn't find corroboration of what Chinese scientists turned over to American scientists, leaving unanswered, "how much of the warming seen in recent decades is due to the local effects of spreading cities, rather than global warming?" The Guardian contends that researchers covered up the missing data for years.

HimalayaGate " An Indian climate official admitted in January that, as lead author of the IPCC's Asian report, he intentionally exaggerated when claiming Himalayan glaciers would melt away by 2035 in order to prod governments into action. This fraudulent claim was not based on scientific research or peer-reviewed. Instead it was originally advanced by a researcher, since hired by a global warming research organization, who later admitted it was "speculation" lifted from a popular magazine. This political, not scientific, motivation at least got some researcher funded.

PachauriGate " Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman who accepted with Al Gore the Nobel Prize for scaring people witless, at first defended the Himalaya melting scenario. Critics, he said, practiced "voodoo science." After the melting-scam perpetrator 'fessed up, Pachauri admitted to making a mistake. But, he insisted, we still should trust him.

PachauriGate II " Pachauri also claimed he didn't know before the 192-nation climate summit meeting in Copenhagen in December that the bogus Himalayan glacier claim was sheer speculation. But the London Times reported that a prominent science journalist said he had pointed out those errors in several e-mails and discussions to Pachauri, who "decided to overlook it." Stonewalling? Cover up? Pachauri says he was "preoccupied." Well, no sense spoiling the Copenhagen party, where countries like Pachauri's India hoped to wrench billions from countries like the United States to combat global warming's melting glaciers. Now there are calls for Pachauri's resignation.

SternGate " One excuse for imposing worldwide climate crackdown has been the U.K.'s 2006 Stern Report, an economic doomsday prediction commissioned by the government. Now the U.K. Telegraph reports that quietly after publication "some of these predictions had been watered down because the scientific evidence on which they were based could not be verified." Among original claims now deleted were that northwest Australia has had stronger typhoons in recent decades, and that southern Australia lost rainfall because of rising ocean temperatures. Exaggerated claims get headlines. Later, news reporters disclose the truth. Why is that?

SternGate II " A researcher now claims the Stern Report misquoted his work to suggest a firm link between global warming and more-frequent and severe floods and hurricanes. Robert Muir-Wood said his original research showed no such link. He accused Stern of "going far beyond what was an acceptable extrapolation of the evidence." We're shocked.

AmazonGate " The London Times exposed another shocker: the IPCC claim that global warming will wipe out rain forests was fraudulent, yet advanced as "peer-reveiwed" science. The Times said the assertion actually "was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise," "authored by two green activists" and lifted from a report from the World Wildlife Fund, an environmental pressure group. The "research" was based on a popular science magazine report that didn't bother to assess rainfall. Instead, it looked at the impact of logging and burning. The original report suggested "up to 40 percent" of Brazilian rain forest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall, but the IPCC expanded that to cover the entire Amazon, the Times reported.

PeerReviewGate " The U.K. Sunday Telegraph has documented at least 16 nonpeer-reviewed reports (so far) from the advocacy group World Wildlife Fund that were used in the IPCC's climate change bible, which calls for capping manmade greenhouse gases.

RussiaGate " Even when global warming alarmists base claims on scientific measurements, they've often had their finger on the scale. Russian think tank investigators evaluated thousands of documents and e-mails leaked from the East Anglia research center and concluded readings from the coldest regions of their nation had been omitted, driving average temperatures up about half a degree.

Russia-Gate II " Speaking of Russia, a presentation last October to the Geological Society of America showed how tree-ring data from Russia indicated cooling after 1961, but was deceptively truncated and only artfully discussed in IPCC publications. Well, at least the tree-ring data made it into the IPCC report, albeit disguised and misrepresented.
U.S.Gate " If Brits can't be trusted, are Yanks more reliable? The U.S. National Climate Data Center has been manipulating weather data too, say computer expert E. Michael Smith and meteorologist Joesph D'Aleo. Forty years ago there were 6,000 surface-temperature measuring stations, but only 1,500 by 1990, which coincides with what global warming alarmists say was a record temperature increase. Most of the deleted stations were in colder regions, just as in the Russian case, resulting in misleading higher average temperatures.

IceGate " Hardly a continent has escaped global warming skewing. The IPCC based its findings of reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and in Africa on a feature story of climbers' anecdotes in a popular mountaineering magazine, and a dissertation by a Switzerland university student, quoting mountain guides. Peer-reviewed? Hype? Worse?

ResearchGate " The global warming camp is reeling so much lately it must have seemed like a major victory when a Penn State University inquiry into climate scientist Michael Mann found no misconduct regarding three accusations of climate research impropriety. But the university did find "further investigation is warranted" to determine whether Mann engaged in actions that "seriously deviated from accepted practices for proposing, conducting or reporting research or other scholarly activities." Being investigated for only one fraud is a global warming victory these days.

ReefGate " Let's not forget the alleged link between climate change and coral reef degradation. The IPCC cited not peer-reviewed literature, but advocacy articles by Greenpeace, the publicity-hungry advocacy group, as its sole source for this claim.

AfricaGate " The IPCC claim that rising temperatures could cut in half agricultural yields in African countries turns out to have come from a 2003 paper published by a Canadian environmental think tank " not a peer-reviewed scientific journal.

DutchGate " The IPCC also claimed rising sea levels endanger the 55 percent of the Netherlands it says is below sea level. The portion of the Netherlands below sea level actually is 20 percent. The Dutch environment minister said she will no longer tolerate climate researchers' errors.

AlaskaGate " Geologists for Space Studies in Geophysics and Oceanography and their U.S. and Canadian colleagues say previous studies largely overestimated by 40 percent Alaskan glacier loss for 40 years. This flawed data are fed into those computers to predict future warming.

Fold this column up and lay it next to your napkin the next time you have Al Gore or his ilk to dine. It should make interesting after-dinner conversation.

http://www.ocregister.com/articles/-234092--.html

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