No Frakking Consensus:
Former CERN official says 65 prominent IPCC authors have abandoned “scientific rigour.”
Among the documents recently submitted to a UK Parliamentary committee, a live grenade nestles in the straw.
It was written by a scientific luminary, Pierre Darriulat. For nearly 50 years, his professional life has been devoted to particle physics, nuclear physics, condensed matter physics, and astrophysics. For seven years, he was Director of Research atCERN – one of the world’s largest, most famous, and respected laboratories.
The biography included with his submission tells us that Darriulat was spokesperson for
one of the two experiments that simultaneously discovered the weak bosons and gave evidence for quarks and gluons being produced in the form of hadronic jets.
He is the recipient of prestigious science honours, and advises us that his “scientific work is recognized by the international community.”
Now let us recollect that Al Gore says the climate debate is about “high school physics.” And let us recall that Martin O’Malley, the Governor of Maryland, hassuggested that climate change (by which he means dangerous, human-caused climate change) is scientifically as uncontested as gravity. In his words, “It is physics, pure and simple.”
The implication of this line of argument is clear. If you don’t think climate change is a planetary emergency you’re a dunce – a scientific know-nothing who should keep quiet and accept the judgment of your intellectual superiors.
In light of their public statements, one would expect Messrs Gore and O’Malley to be keenly interested in what a renowned physicist has to say about the recent Summary for Policymakers (SPM) released by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). That’s the document that was drafted by 65 hand-picked IPCC personnel.
Here’s a direct quote from Darriulat’s submission:
The way the SPM deals with uncertainties (e.g. claiming something is 95% certain) is shocking and deeply unscientific. For a scientist, this simple fact is sufficient to throw discredit on the whole summary. The SPM gives the wrong idea that one can quantify precisely our confidence in the [climate] model predictions, which is far from being the case. [bold added]
Darriulat says “the main point to appreciate” is that, because the Summary was written for policymakers rather than for other scientists, it “can not be a scientific document.” His next remarks deserve to be displayed on every billboard in Times Square:
When writing the SPM, the authors are facing a dilemma: either they speak as scientists and…recognize that there are too many unknowns to make reliable predictions…or they try to convey what they “consensually” think…at the price of giving up scientific rigour. They deliberately chose the latter…they have distorted the scientific message into an alarmist message… [bold added; click here for the full, unedited version]
Of course the IPCC report is alarmist. If it were scientific, the flow of money would dry up.
This is about money, after all. Those billions of dollars go to fund something that is very sexy.
It looks like the enactors really care when they fund climate research. They are preserving us from universal catastrophe, after all.
Facts are such difficult things. The climate scientists who cannot forecast the weather ten days from now, and cannot calculate the cloud cover two days from now, are in no position to make verifiable predictions about 50 or 100 years in the future.
The data is not there. The facts are not there. The North Pole ice refuses to go away. The glaciers in the Himalayas keep flowing downhill. The sea will just not rise.
Oh, well.
Scare campaigns are such fun.
2013 Will Finish One Of The Ten Coldest Years In US History, With The Largest Drop In Temperature
But but but…all the AGW cultists insist that denial of AGW is a sign of not understanding SCIENCE!
Only greedy, data-falsifying charlatans and weak minded “desperate to belong to the popular crowd” folks still follow the AGW insanity.
Gore’s icecap prediction, allegedly obtained based on his discussion with AGW pseudo-scientists, disproves the cultists’ laughable claim of the science being “settled”.
…that and the fact that Gore places no limits on his personal use of fossil fuels despite the alarmist claims he keeps making all the time…..
@Pete:
Unfortunately we can’t sue scientists for malpractice.
@mathman: ” The climate scientists who cannot forecast the weather ten days from now, and cannot calculate the cloud cover two days from now, are in no position to make verifiable predictions about 50 or 100 years in the future.” Heck, using their own models they cannot even predict the PAST, yet we are supposed to believe them and just hand over our paychecks.