Rodney Hide:
Breaking news: the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) admits assessments nonsense.
That’s not quite true. The IPCC made the admission but it wasn’t breaking news. In fact, it wasn’t news at all.
A kind reader alerted me to the admission.
It goes like this. Schoolboy errors in the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment were widely publicised in 2010. The UN Secretary General and the IPCC chair responded asking the InterAcademy Council (IAC) to undertake an independent review of IPCC “processes and procedures.” Last month, the IPCC announced that it had implemented “a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the InterAcademy Council.” That is, the IPCC accepted the IAC’s findings.
That’s the admission.
Here is what the IAC found. “The IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and no “transparent author-selection process or well-defined criteria for author selection” (P15).
It’s mates choosing mates. And the most important thing is for authors to believe the human-induced global warming nonsense before they start.
The information used in “IPCC assessments often appears in the so-called “grey literature,” which includes model output produced by government agencies, international organisations, universities, research centres, nongovernmental organisations, corporations, professional societies and other groups. The extent to which such information has been peer-reviewed varies a great deal, as does its quality” (P16).
So much for the constant refrain from IPCC whooper-uppers that it’s all peered-reviewed and top notch science. It’s nothing of the sort.
Indeed, “Many of the conclusions in the ‘Current Knowledge About Future Impacts’ section of the Working Group II Summary for Policymakers are based on unpublished or non-peer-reviewed literature” (P34).