Greenpeace provides IPCC lead author!

[marchesarosa]

climateaudit.org/2011/06/14/ipcc-wg3-and-the-greenpeace-karaoke/#comments

Steve McIntyre once again takes a revealing delve into IPCC personnel and influences!

He concludes:

The public and policy-makers are starving for independent and authoritative analysis of precisely how much weight can be placed on renewables in the energy future. It expects more from IPCC WG3 than a karaoke version of Greenpeace scenario.

It is totally unacceptable that IPCC should have had a Greenpeace employee as a Lead Author of the critical Chapter 10, that the Greenpeace employee, as an IPCC Lead Author, should (like Michael Mann and Keith Briffa in comparable situations) have been responsible for assessing his own work and that, with such inadequate and non-independent ‘due diligence’, IPCC should have featured the Greenpeace scenario in its press release on renewables.

Everyone in IPCC WG3 should be terminated and, if the institution is to continue, it should be re-structured from scratch.




Short and sweet. Read it!

[marchesarosa]

The IPCC has published a Summary for Policymakers of its forthcoming report on renewable energy - Working Group III Mitigation of Climate Change, Special Report on Renewable Energy
Sources and Climate Change Mitigation srren.ipcc-wg3.de/report

The Guardian claims,

Renewable energy can power the world, says landmark IPCC study....

Hmm…

Sven Teske, renewable energy director at Greenpeace International, and a lead author of the report, said: “This is an invitation to governments to initiate a radical overhaul of their policies and place renewable energy centre stage. On the run up to the next major climate conference, COP17 in South Africa in December, the onus is clearly on governments to step up to the mark.”

Isn’t it a bit odd, that a policy director of Greenpeace should be a lead author of a report? Isn’t the IPCC supposed to start from a policy-neutral perspective? After all, what would we make of such a report if it found the opposite way, and it turned out that one of its lead authors was a director of a free-market think-tank that stood accused of being funded by Exxon?



more here
www.climate-resistance.org/2011/05/the-inter-ngo-panel-on-climate-change.html

[marchesarosa]

WWF’s Chief Spokesperson Joins IPCC

April 25, 2011

My upcoming book has a section titled Why We Can’t Trust AR5. The last major Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report was published in 2007. It’s known as the Fourth Assessment Report – or AR4 for short.

The latest edition, AR5, is expected to completed in 2013. Its personnel were announced by the IPCC last June. By then that organization had already been wounded by the Himalayan glacier scandal, which involved faulty information published in a World Wildlife Fund (WWF) document. A few critics had also, by that time, shone light on the IPCC’s not infrequent use of literature produced by organizations such as the WWF and Greenpeace.

But the IPCC, it has been observed, is a slow learner. If this were not the case there’s no way it would have appointed Jennifer Morgan as an AR5 review editor.

According to its marketing department, the IPCC is a scientific body that writes scientific reports. If that were strictly true, it’s unclear why AR5 is going to devote an entire chapter to International Cooperation: Agreements and Instruments.....

According to IPCC mythology, those involved in this historic report-writing exercise are the world’s top scientists and best experts. Morgan is a perfect example of how this is utter nonsense. For several years she was the WWF’s chief spokesperson on climate change. She led its Global Climate Change Program and headed its delegation to the Kyoto Protocol negotiations.

Prior to that, Morgan worked for the Climate Action Network (according to her online bio, it’s a collection “of over 200 environmental groups worldwide with eight regional offices”).

Currently she’s employed by the World Resources Institute (Al Gore is on its board). In other words, Morgan is not one of the world finest scientific minds. She is a professional activist.

As recently as 10 months ago the IPCC recruited her to help prepare a report that is supposed to be objective, rigorous, and balanced. If previous media coverage is anything to judge by, once it’s released we’ll all be told this report should be considered Holy Writ since “this is what the world’s scientific community thinks”.

Honestly, these people have no shame.

Courtesy of Donna Laframboise
nofrakkingconsensus.com/2011/04/25/wwfs-chief-spokesperson-joins-ipcc/

[StuartG]

In Passing.
I found this the other day, presumably this will be an 'Aide-mémoire' for this 'AR5'.
THE IPCC FIFTH ASSESSMENT REPORT (AR5)
Draft Guidance Notes for Lead Authors of the IPCC Fifth Assessment Report on Consistent Treatment of Uncertainties
www.ipcc.ch/meetings/session32/inf09_p32_draft_Guidance_notes_LA_Consistent_Treatment_of_Uncertainties.pdf
Please note that this is a 'draft', so itself will contain 'Uncertainties' I'm almost sure.
StuartG

[marchesarosa]

Mark Lynas has posted an article on the IPCC/Greenpeace shambles:


The IPCC must urgently review its policies for hiring lead authors – and I would have thought that not only should biased ‘grey literature’ be rejected, but campaigners from NGOs should not be allowed to join the lead author group and thereby review their own work. There is even a commercial conflict of interest here given that the renewables industry stands to be the main beneficiary of any change in government policies based on the IPCC report’s conclusions. Had it been an oil industry intervention which led the IPCC to a particular conclusion, Greenpeace et al would have course have been screaming blue murder.

more here
www.marklynas.org/2011/06/new-ipcc-error-renewables-report-conclusion-was-dictated-by-greenpeace/

[marchesarosa]

Manfred comments

Following Greenpeace Germany and Potsdam Institute of Climate Science, the next "independent" input from Germany for the 2014 report is already in the pipeline – 2 Munich Re employees.

www.munichre.net/en/media_relations/company_news/2010/2010-06-24_company_news.aspx

------

Louise will be pleased! But will the IPCC to live up to its stated goals regarding conflict of interests and the use of peer reviewed literature?

[marchesarosa]

Mark Lynas takes hard line over IPCC Greenpeace Lead author.

He says:

if the ‘deniers’ are the only ones standing up for the integrity of the scientific process, and the independence of the IPCC, then I too am a ‘denier’

www.marklynas.org/2011/06/questions-the-ipcc-must-now-urgently-answer/


Here’s the scenario. An Exxon-Mobil employee – admittedly an energy specialist with an engineering background – serves as a lead author on an important IPCC report looking into the future of fossil fuels. The Exxon guy and his fellow lead authors assess a whole variety of literature, but select for special treatment four particular papers – one produced by Exxon-Mobil. This paper heralds great things for the future of fossil fuels, suggesting they can supply 80% of the world’s energy in 2050, and this headline is the first sentence of the ensuing IPCC press release, which is picked up and repeated uncritically the world’s media. Pleased, the Exxon employee issues a self-congratulatory press release boasting that his paper had been central to the IPCC effort, and urging the world’s governments to get on with opening up new areas to oil drilling for the benefit of us all.


Well. You can imagine the furore this would cause at Greenpeace. The IPCC would be discredited forever as an independent voice. There would be pious banner-drops by Greenpeace activists abseiling down Exxon HQ and harshly criticising the terrible stranglehold that fossil fuel interests had achieved over supposedly independent science....

more

[marchesarosa]

Remember that lovely scene in the Kevin Klein movie "In and Out" when all family and friends, including the Fire brigade stood up to declare "I'm gay!" in solidarity?

[marchesarosa]

[marchesarosa]

Judith Curry piles in, too, on the Greenpeace IPCC lead author. She is another former supporter of the IPCC (also Climate Professor at Georgia Tech) who has reconsidered her position re AGW after her eyes were opened by the Climategate affair. She has suffered enormous hostility from Alarmists since becoming somewhat more circumspect in accepting the IPCC as gospel truth.

She now runs Climate Etc, a blog open to sceptical ideas.

An opening mind. Part II
Posted on June 17
by Judith Curry

Mark Lynas has a new post up entitled “Questions the IPCC must now urgently answer.” It is even more powerful than his previous post. I may not be able to predict the climate, but I think I can predict certain outcomes in the climate debate.....

What we have here is Mark Lynas behaving like an investigative journalist, with a watchdog and accountability role, the 5th estate and all that. The climate establishment has been berating the journalists for their failure to effectively communicate climate change and its risks. That is not the job of the journos, but of the climate scientists themselves. Journalists for the most part have dropped the ball on the climate change issue, and the watchdog/accountability role has been ceded to the blogospheric auditors, notably Steve McIntyre. There are very few mainstream journalists behaving in a true investigative way on the climate change issue. The pointman just posted an interesting essay on this.

As I predicted in my previous post, the criticism being leveled at Lynas by the greens is sending him in the other direction. I described this phenomenon in my essay heresy and the creation of monsters:




www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vx-t9k7epIk

[marchesarosa]

Pointman's thepointman.wordpress.com/2011/06/17/the-death-of-journalism-and-the-irresistible-rise-of-the-blogosphere/

THE DEATH OF JOURNALISM AND THE IRRESISTIBLE RISE OF THE BLOGOSPHERE.
Posted by Pointman on June 17, 2011



The IPCC has screwed up again. They published a claim last month in their renewables report saying that renewable technologies could supply 80% of world-wide energy needs by the mid-century. What they actually published was an executive summary of the report, not the report itself. That was published a full month later.

The summary or should I be more honest and call it the press release, was given to the journalists of the MSM (Main Stream Media) who promptly and dutifully cut and pasted it into their news streams.

When the report was published, a certain Mr. McIntyre went through it to determine the scientific basis of the 80% figure and was more than mildly surprised to find out it not only originated from Greenpeace but the original author of the piece, an employee of Greenpeace, had also been the same person who reviewed and edited the piece for the IPCC working party which produced the report. Conflict of interest doesn’t even begin to describe this situation.

Of course, the blogosphere is now laying into the IPCC with a vengeance and while they deserve it, I think mention should be made of another party whose laziness and slipshod practices stand yet again nakedly exposed by this particular episode. I’m of course referring to the journalists of the MSM.

In what now seems to be a bygone era, junior reporters had hammered into them by editors what were called the two golden rules. The first one is never believe a word from a government or any official spokesman. The second one is that when you’re handed a story on a plate by somebody, ask yourself what’s in it for them. At face value these rules may appear to be cynical but they were what kept the fourth estate from lapsing into a public relations organ of any and all vested interests.

When looked at in the context of these two simple rules, this was a massive fail by all those journalists concerned. All they did was regurgitate the PR release without applying any critical faculties to the claim being made. Given the current under performance of renewable energy sources and the not unreasonable estimate that the world with its extra two billion people will be demanding more energy by the mid-century, the claim looks hopelessly optimistic.

The story on a plate of course serves the purposes of Greenpeace and the renewables industry. In the current financial climate, the latter are fighting to save the government subsidies that are keeping their corporate profitability on life support. Judging from their bombed out share prices, investors are not optimistic on their chances of survival.

Of course, the situation could have been retrieved if just one enterprising journalist somewhere in the world had checked the claim when the full report was published. Just one. This never happened and in my experience, was unlikely to ever happen either. Instead a certain Mr. Steve McIntyre, the man who debagged the hockey stick, did the spade work and the truth came out.

What does this all mean? Well actually it means independent journalism in the MSM is dead. What’s left is a thinly disguised PR mechanism for the establishment. Yes, the establishment. It’s a very sixties moment when you finally realise this. Its function is to present a monolithic officially approved viewpoint on any non-trivial subject. It doesen’t even bother any more to project even a shadow of an illusion of plurality. It is now “the man” and, as they said in the sixties, you’ve got to go up against the man. A lot of other people at the time chose to drop out; the opinions, lifestyle and aspirations on offer were all so totally alien to them. In the absence of any other alternative, they created their own thing.

What’s often forgotten is that a third way was found by many of the disillusioned people of the era. They started publishing their own magazines and periodicals. They were modest efforts and most of them eventually foundered but the best of them survived and went on to great success, which some of them still enjoy to this day. They prospered at the expense of the MSM until it restructured its offering.

In an analogous fashion, the blogosphere has become the information source of choice for those disillusioned with the MSM’s uniform and authoritarian output. It’s only there that you’ll find diversity and dissent from the officially approved party line. It’s there that you’ll find people prepared to give honest comment, analysis and insight without worrying what their employer might think; all the best ones are unpaid anyway. It’s there you’ll find people who are prepared to say what most people are thinking.

Ever since the blogosphere outed the Climategate scandal, its power and influence has increased at the expense of the MSM. What was once regarded as an underdog to be marginalised and ignored is now an opinion former. Across the world, newsrooms are being culled of journalists; the product simply isn’t selling. Conversely, more and more people are turning to the blogosphere.

Tune into the blogosphere and drop out of the MSM. It’s there that you’ll find people like Steve McIntyre. Investigative journalism is alive and well; it’s just moved house.

©Pointman

ps. One for the underdogs. They can really bite.

[marchesarosa]

Heresy and the creation of monsters
Posted on October 25, 2010
by Judith Curry

......A colleague of mine at Georgia Tech, a Chair from a different department, said something like this: “I’ve been reading the media stories on the Georgia Tech Daily News Buzz that mention your statements. Your statements seem really sensible. But what I don’t understand is why such statements are regarded as news?”

Well that is a question that deserves an answer. I lack the hubris to think that my statements should have any public importance. The fact that they seem to be of some importance says a lot more about the culture of climate science and its perception by the public, than it says about me.

The narrative

Why am I being singled out here? Richard Lindzen and Roger Pielke Sr. have been making far more critical statements about the IPCC and climate science for a longer period than I have. And both score higher than me in the academic pecking order (in terms of number of publications and citations and external peer recognition).

The answer must be in the narrative of my transition from a “high priestess of global warming” to engagement with skeptics and a critic of the IPCC. The “high priestess of global warming” narrative (I used to see this term fairly frequently in the blogosphere, can’t spot it now) arose from my association with the hurricane and global warming issue, which at the time was the most alarming issue associated with global warming.

The overall evolution of my thinking on global warming is described in the Q&A at collide-a-scape (the relevant statements are appended at the end of this post.) My thinking and evolution on this issue since 11/19/09 deserves further clarification. When I first started reading the CRU emails, my reaction was a visceral one. While my colleagues seemed focused on protecting the reputations of the scientists involved and assuring people that the “science hadn’t changed,” I immediately realized that this could bring down the IPCC. I became concerned about the integrity of our entire field: both the actual integrity and its public perception. When I saw how the IPCC was responding and began investigating the broader allegations against the IPCC, I became critical of the IPCC and tried to make suggestions for improving the IPCC. As glaring errors were uncovered (especially the Himalayan glaciers) and the IPCC failed to respond, I started to question whether it was possible to salvage the IPCC and whether it should be salvaged. In the meantime, the establishment institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere were mostly silent on the topic.

In Autumn 2005, I had decided that the responsible thing to do in making public statements on the subject of global warming was to adopt the position of the IPCC. My decision was based on two reasons: 1) the subject was very complex and I had personally investigated a relatively small subset of the topic; 2) I bought into the meme of “don’t trust what one scientists says, trust what thousands of IPCC scientists say.” A big part of my visceral reaction to events unfolding after 11/19 was concern that I had been duped into supporting the IPCC, and substituting their judgment for my own in my public statements on the subject. So that is the “dupe” part of all this, perhaps not what Lemonick had in mind....

more

judithcurry.com/2010/10/25/heresy-and-the-creation-of-monsters/