The IPCC Consensus Was Phoney, Says Mike Hulme

[Questioning_Climate]

News from Financial Post via The Global Warming Policy Foundation:

Quote: The IPCC Consensus Was Phoney, Says Mike Hulme
Sunday, 13 June 2010 16:20 Lawrence Solomon, Financial Post

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hilme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.
Financial Post, 13 June 2010

http://www.thegwpf.org/ipcc-news/1092-th...hulme.html

[Mike Davis]

QC:
Maybe it was just my interpretation of his paper but I came away thinking they were saying the IPCC did not exaggerate enough. The consensus was a watered down representation of what was known about climate. I learned a while back to read everything that one says. Hulme is also a social science rather than a physical or natural science person who believes in his version of "Post Normal Science"! With the proper coconut headphones on the planes with the "Cargo" will return! If we burn all the "Witches" the climate will get better! The Tarot Cards predict this will come to pass unless we sacrifice "NON-BELIEVERS"!

[strogoff]

Mike,

I "read" the paper too and didn´t get that impression. It is a broad and aseptic autocriticism of IPCC and its reports, not only about consensus. They´re exposing their vulnerabilities to the "enemy".

Which I find more interesting is that the criticism comes from the IPCC´s own ranks. Something similar is said in a Richard Tol´s post:

IPCC5 Key Economic Sectors and Services

..coming from Roger Pielke´s Blog:

IPCC: This Time Will be Different (Not), A Guest Post by Richard Tol

Quote:The IPCC is a victim of its own success. Policy makers trust the IPCC reports as neutral and authoritative assessments of climate research. Therefore, people with a political agenda have tried to influence the IPCC. Such attempts were largely in vain in AR2 and AR3, but this is not true for AR4. Working Group 2 systematically portrays climate change as a bigger problem than is scientifically acceptable. (Examples include the date of disappearance for glaciers in the Himalayas, the mix-up on weather and climate for agriculture in Africa, and the projected number of people at risk from water stress.) Working Group 3 systematically portrays climate policy as easier and cheaper than can be responsibly concluded from academic research. (Examples include the attribution of market-driven and welfare-improving improvements in energy efficiency to climate policy, the omission of the opportunity costs of energy research and development, and the use of gross (rather than net) estimates of job creation.) These biases can be found in the chapters, the technical summaries, the summaries for policy makers, and the synthesis report.

[Questioning_Climate]

In my opinion the report was a bit of a mixture, but as you'd expect biased to support the agenda. It does seem to attack Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen rather pointedly in an unbalanced way which most people, unless in the know, would not realise. She has clearly rattled Mike Hulme et al.

Overall, it reminds me of the infamous Club of Rome bible in a semi-opaque scientific wrapper.

[Sunsettommy]

This is new news?

I knew this several years ago,that the claimed consensus was false.

It was talked about way back in 2001 that the "consensus" was baloney.

[Mike Davis]

Excerpt:
But consensus-making can also lead to criticism for being too conservative, as Hansen (2007) has most visibly argued. Was the IPCC AR4 too conservative in reaching its consensus about future sea-level rise? Many glaciologists and oceanographers think they were (Kerr, 2007; Rahmstorf, 2010), leading to what Hansen attacks as ‘scientific reticence’. Solomon et al. (2008) offer a robust defence, stating that far from reaching a premature consensus, the AR4 report stated that in fact no consensus could be reached on the magnitude of the possible fast ice-sheet melt processes that some fear could lead to 1 or 2 metres of sea-level rise this century. Hence these processes were not included in the quantitative estimates.
The other criticism was the lack of social science's contribution to the process.
The word MANY can mean as few as 3 or as many as all those in a field. It means the same as some and if I find 10 researchers that come to a different conclusion then it actually be few. Dot providing a reference point he can say anything and later claim his words were taken out of context.
I think this entire paper was designed to be used as evidence that his words were taken out of context! In conclusion please provide more funds so we can continue.

It was never about real science and Hulme is not a real scientist!

[Questioning_Climate]

Mike Davis,
You have touched on this but could there be something more behind it. The paper could be interpreted as a call to arms for social scientists to join the battle. It is almost as though Hulme sees the need for reinforcements and that social science aspects of the IPCC coverage are lacking. Could it be that there is a large pool of such people looking for opportunities of easy funding and the potential to influence world politics? Recruiting sympathetic and onside candidates from the 'soft' sciences would be a trivial task and no doubt highly successful. Thus we can look forward to a whole new side of 'climate science' emerging to sure-up the crumbling storyline of the IPCC.

[strogoff]

I commented here the day before yesterday and it seems my comment went to a spam folder or something like that. I´ll try again.

Sunsettommy,

what I thought was new is the autocriticism, which might again be baloney. Enough to be alert. The appearance of Mr. Connolley (Wikipedia´s magician) in #12 at Pielke´s blog makes the whole issue a bit stinky.

I am fully convinced that all those guys don´t deserve any trust and I find quite interesting what you are saying.

Re – social scientists

What IF actually social aspects are poorly assessed in the AR4? One could answer that everything is poorly assessed as they reach AGW conclusions. I guess that recruiting social scientists will bring a new orientation to the scaremongering (from being roasted by temperature to bitten by our peers).

Re – Witchcraft and Club of Rome bible

It also reminded me of that. Models, thats it, assumptions, estimates, oversimplification, unresolved questions... A tool for thinking, the same as a crystal ball or tarot cards.

They are not modeling only parameters but also uncertainties and scenarios on the basis of the first ones, the same as in the Limits to Growth. I have only read half of the CSIRO´s paper we were talking about in the Population Control thread (http://www.globalwarmingskeptics.info/fo...e-2.html), but it looks much the same:

Quote:This position reflects that of others who have thought hard about how best to construct uncertainty for policy-relevant assessments (Van der Sluijs, 2005; Van der Sluijs et al., 2005). For these authors ‘taming the uncertainty monster’ requires combining quantitative and qualitative measures of uncertainty in model-based environmental assessment: the so-called NUSAP (Numerical, Unit, Spread, Assessment, Pedigrees) System (Funtowicz & Ravetz, 1990).

In my country we call this “to curl the curl”.

Re – Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen

I have not progressed enough to appreciate some nuances. Q_C, please, would you mind telling me where to see the attack to Sonja in the Hulme-Mahony paper?



The thing is that a paper which at first glance looked like a harmless collate of citations now has become a “war tactic”.

[Questioning_Climate]

These are the sections referring to SBC. I'm sure there are a number of possible interpretations; my view being just one of them.

Quote:More critical readings of the emergence of the IPCC have also been offered. Boehmer-Christiansen (1994a,b,c) argued that establishing the IPCC as a ‘single established source’ of information about climate change suited a convergence of scientific, political and some business interests. She pointed to dangers for scientific practice and scientific institutions from scientists being used to feed this new politically charged activity. Shackley and Skodvin (1995) offered a measured response to Boehmer-Christiansen (others have been less forgiving), arguing that such a ‘conspiratorial’ account of the emergence of the IPCC was too simplistic. Yes, interests were being mobilised for all sorts of reasons and certain voices being privileged over others, but such a complex process of institution building could not be reduced to science exerting its hegemony over policy or a cabal of scientists seeking means to secure their own further funding.

Quote:Shackley and Skodvin therefore advocated an expanded role for interpretative social scientists in understanding the internal and external dynamics that led to the construction of the IPCC and in scrutinising the types of knowledge it produced - which is what Elzinga (1996), Demeritt (2001) and Miller (2004; 2007), for example, later produced. Miller approached the origins of the IPCC from a more analytical and much wider historical perspective than Boehmer-Christiansen, drawing upon social studies of science to inform his analysis. Using Sheila Jasanoff’s idiom of co-production (Jasanoff, 2004), Miller showed how many things converged in the late 1980s to allow a fruitful space within which a body such as the IPCC could emerge: the loss of cultural and social readings of climate and the re-framing of climate as ‘global’; the rising power of climate modeling and Earth system science; the rise of global environmental politics during the 1980s; the politics surrounding the end of the Cold War; and a new ‘green’ imperialism in European societies.

With regard to the impact of the IPCC on policy development opinions become more polarised. Early on in the IPCC history, Moss (1995) laid out claims for the IPCC being policy relevant (i.e., neutral), but not policy driven (i.e., partisan), but even in the 1990s such claims of policy neutrality were challenged (e.g. Boehmer-Christiansen, 1994a). Miller (2001) examined whether the management of this science-policy boundary has been effectively secured by the body established by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to do just that: the Subsidiary Body for Science and Technology Assessment (SBSTA). Miller suggests that SBSTA constructs boundaries and confers legitimacy, enabling the “maintenance of a productive tension between science and politics” (p.495). This optimistic reading of SBSTA is echoed by Dahan-Delmedico (2008) who claims that the IPCC has thereby been able to deflect a certain category of criticism for being too close to policy advocacy.

This paragraph seems to sum up how most sceptics see the IPCC:

Quote:This is not a conclusion shared by others. In his analysis of the knowledge politics of climate change, Grundmann (2007) concludes that using science to provide “the basis for the legitimation of political decisions is a tried and tested instrument” (p.428) and that the IPCC fits this pattern very well. Pielke (2007) and Sarewitz (2010) agree that the IPCC has failed in its role as an ‘honest-broker’ and has moved towards being an ‘issue advocate’ in Pielke’s terminology, or even on some occasions a ‘stealth issue advocate’. Drawing upon insights from science and technology studies and citing wider examples of science controversies, Carolan (2008) explains some of the reasons why this may have been the case with the IPCC. None of this has stopped some researchers from holding up the IPCC as a role model for knowledge assessments that other areas of global environmental policy concern could emulate (e.g. Dahan-Dalmedico & Guillemot, 2006; Tonn, 2007).

And who are these people that want to hold the IPCC as a role model? We all know them very well and I would suggest that at least one is the author of that paper.

[Mike Davis]

I see this as an attempt to both trap sceptics into quoting from this document and overall call for more funding of the soft self proclaimed "Sciences" which could be called many things but using the word science as a descriptor when it is anything but!

The Gypsy Tarot Card readers should receive more respect than these people that are self proclaimed "Experts".

QC:
That was my take on the "Lead" author of this paper! When they came up with the term Post Normal Science, his group grabbed the name as a descriptor for what he does. If I read correctly Jerome Ravetz did not agree that AGW was related to PNS:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/09/cl...ormal-age/
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/02/22/je...y-critics/
There are more links to more threads about PNS also:
http://wattsupwiththat.com/?s=Jerome+Ravetz

A bit of reading and I interpreted it my own way.
A bit of background on this: When in my 20s I studied Astrology and was a certified astrologer. I also studied Palm, Tarot,Tea, Candle, and other "Reading" methods. All of that was in search of an answer to the question: WHY? I trained in Human machine interface and analyzing problems. I was paid to trouble shoot communication issues, Human-Human, Human- Machine, Machine-Machine. From basic mechanical to the latest digital communications equipment. The Pseudo research was sort of a hobby.
When talking about AGW or soft science the word Charlatan comes to mind.

[Sunsettommy]

Quote:I commented here the day before yesterday and it seems my comment went to a spam folder or something like that. I´ll try again.

There is no spam folder or similar for the forum.Might have been a rare post failure that you suffered from?

Quote:what I thought was new is the autocriticism, which might again be baloney. Enough to be alert. The appearance of Mr. Connolley (Wikipedia´s magician) in #12 at Pielke´s blog makes the whole issue a bit stinky.

Never trust pseudo-scientist Connelly ever!

Quote:I am fully convinced that all those guys don´t deserve any trust and I find quite interesting what you are saying.

I do not trust them because they have lied many times.They have resisted open discussions and demonized those who does not share their views.

There is no way they could have failed to notice that there were only a few dozen scientists who actually believed in the absurd never verified based 100% on far into the future projected climate models (which are always unverified)

I have known this fact for about 7 years now.

I do not trust Mike Hulme since he runs a notorious research center that has a less than sterling reputation to brag about.He runs this website I find rather disturbing:

The Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research

He thinks we need a LOW CARBON lifestyle to avoid bad climate change.