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The Things Scientists Say: Houghton, Lovelock and Curry
Climate alarmist, ‘hockey stick’ promoter and former head of IPCC WG1 Sir John Houghton trips himself up in a recent article in the Times, where he seeks to defend the indefensible and says:
“The IPCC is not a self-selected group of scientists with a political agenda. It was founded in 1988 by the World Meteorological Organisation and the UN Environment Programme with a mandate to produce accurate, balanced assessments about human-induced climate change.”
Whoops! So the IPCC aren’t investigating the causes of climate change, they are assuming a human cause.
“…a report from Greenpeace or any other campaigning body would not be included because the science would not be considered robust enough.”
Whoops! again. Houghton accepts the Himalayan glacier ‘error’ but fails to recognise the input from a WWF report. In fact the IPCC relied on many non-peer reviewed reports including ones from Greenpeace and WWF.
Sir John was alleged to have previously said:
“Unless we announce disasters, no one will listen.”
He denies having said this and there is no proof of him having used those exact words, but he did say this in 1995:
“If we want a good environmental policy in the future we’ll have to have a disaster.”
Moving on to Sir James Lovelock via Climate Depot:
Finally, some sanity from ‘consensus’ climate scientist Dr Judith Curry interviewed in Discover magazine:
Excerpts:
Where do you come down on the whole subject of uncertainty in the climate science?
I’m very concerned about the way uncertainty is being treated. The IPCC [the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] took a shortcut on the actual scientific uncertainty analysis on a lot of the issues, particularly the temperature records.
…
Is this a case of politics getting in the way of science?
No. It’s sloppiness. It’s just how our field has evolved. One of the things that McIntyre and McKitrick pointed out was that a lot of the statistical methods used in our field are sloppy. We have trends for which we don’t even give a confidence interval. The IPCC concluded that most of the warming of the latter 20th century was very likely caused by humans. Well, as far as I know, that conclusion was mostly a negotiation, in terms of calling it “likely” or “very likely.”
…
Are you saying that the scientific community, through the IPCC, is asking the world to restructure its entire mode of producing and consuming energy and yet hasn’t done a scientific uncertainty analysis?
Yes.
March 17th, 2010 at 10:09 pm
It’s worth comparing the IPCC and UNFCC definitions of climate change, Houghton is nearly right although you are also to point out the pre-determined bias re human-induced climate change.
UNFCC Article 1:
“Climate change” means a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.”
IPCC Working Group I (AR4, 2007) Summary for Policymakers, Footnote 1
“Climate change in IPCC usage refers to any change in climate over time, whether due to natural variability or as a result of human activity.”
From: http://www.whatisclimate.com/b205a-governments-ipcc-un-convention-climate-change-unfcc.html
There are many good articles about the inherent problems with this lack of commonality. Definitions are so important to science and yet this codswallop continues.
March 18th, 2010 at 7:06 am
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