BBC - Richard Black's Earth Watch on the forthcoming review of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Will it be more widely trusted? It's possible to divide published opinions on the issue into three broad categories: those who are only concerned with getting the message across that man-made climate change is an over-riding threat requiring urgent action, those who are concerned about the issue but are more concerned by what they see as lack of rigour and transparency within the IPCC, and those who are convinced that global warming is a fraud anyway and the IPCC one of the lead swindlers.... ...how independent the scientists on the Inter-Academy Council's review panel will be from the scientists who contributed work to the IPCC in the first place. There's also the wider...

Another error in the influential reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports has been identified. This one concerns the rate of expansion of sea ice around Antarctica... was brought to the IPCC Chapter 4 authors’ attention by several IPCC commenters. And not corrected. Three times the IPCC was warned that the obviously, blatantly idiotic global warming wildfire claims in the 3000 page AR4 report were actually idiotic. Three times the warnings were ignored. That is two reports just this morning showing how the final IPCC report ignores inconvenient...

Scientists have been forced to withdraw a study on projected sea level rise due to global warming after finding mistakes that undermined the findings. The study, published in 2009 in Nature Geoscience, one of the top journals in its field, confirmed the conclusions of the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It used data over the last 22,000 years to predict that sea level would rise by between 7cm and 82cm by the end of the century. At the time, Mark Siddall, from the Earth Sciences Department at the University of Bristol, said the study “strengthens the confidence with which one may interpret the IPCC results“. The IPCC said that sea level would probably rise by 18cm-59cm by 2100, though stressed this was based on incomplete information...

The Booker column is posted, under the main heading: "African crops yield another catastrophe for the IPCC". The strap line tells us: "One more alarming claim in the IPCC's 2007 report is disintegrating under closer examination, says Christopher Booker".Interestingly, the IPCC is stalling on this one, especially after Pachauri's outburst on Friday. Yet, it has given way on the Netherlands affair. It has issued a "background note" admitting that AR4 wrongly stated that 55 percent of the country was below sea level.This is rather like a bank robber being caught speeding fleeing from the scene of his crime, then pleading guilty to that offence and denying the more serious crime. Yet the IPCC knows full well that, to admit to "Africagate" will do it great damage, hence the current tactic...

Bowing to the inevitable, IPCC vice chairman Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, has held his hands up and admitted that his beloved institution has "made some mistakes". This is according to the Wall Stree Journal, hot off the press, citing van Ypersele saying that the climate summit in Copenhagen didn't rely "on the precise date of the demise of Himalayan glaciers, or African agriculture" to tackle global warming."It's the body of evidence" in the whole report that makes the case for action, he says, stressing that the revelations don't impugn the IPCC's main conclusions: that climate change is largely due to man-made greenhouse-gas emissions and could have dangerous consequences. Effectively, they are holding their hands up on "Africagate".Nevertheless, Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist who...

In politics, what you see is rarely what you get. In common with magicians (and confidence tricksters) skilled politicians are masters of the sleight of hand, their words and actions designed to deceive rather then illuminate.It thus takes Barun S Mitra - director of the Liberty Institute, an independent think tank in New Delhi - writing in the Wall Street Jorunal to sneak a look beyond the smoke and mirrors of Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh's expression of support last Friday for the embattled IPCC chief, Rajendra Pachauri.The move has surprised many observers, writes Mitra, but it may prove to be politically astute. Assailed by "gates" of all manner and description, the credibility of the IPCC is in tatters which, on top of the much-publicised spat between Ramesh and Pachauri,...

The Indian 2010/02/06/lawrence-solomon-ipcc-beyond-the-himalayas.aspx">2010/02/06/lawrence-solomon-ipcc-beyond-the-himalayas.aspx" target="_blank" rel="nofollow">Financial Express has at last begun to recognise that there is a thing called the blogosphere out there.Thus, while the great and the good rush to the defence of the saintly Pachauri, it has noticed that calls for Pachauri's ouster from IPCC chairmanship "are still going strong in the blogosphere that's been at the heart of a gathering storm."Closer to home, we have a political class which is totally oblivious to this "gathering storm", internalising its focus on local institution issues, not realising that no-one outside the Westminster bubble really gives a damn.But then, when you see what Tory candidates are looking at (which...

Experts who worked on the IPCC report say the error by social and biological scientists has unfairly maligned their workClimate scientists who worked on the UN panel on global warming have hit out at "sloppy" colleagues from other disciplines who introduced a mistake about melting glaciers into the landmark 2007 report.The experts, who worked on the section of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report that considered the physical science of global warming, say the error by "social and biological scientists" has unfairly maligned their work. Some said that Rajendra Pachauri, the panel's chair, should resign, though others supported him.The IPCC report combined the output from three independent working groups, which separately considered the science, impacts and human...

British news organizations are now combing through the IPCC reports, finding more errors and material sourced to non-peer-reviewed material, including student papers and reports by advocacy organizations.  Most of these errors continue to relate to the more policy-oriented aspects of the IPCC reports — practical consequences of climate change and potential policy responses.  This is further evidence that the more IPCC sought to make its reports relevant to policy-makers, the less reliable the reports became. Copyright © 2010 This feed is for personal, non-commercial use only. The use of this feed on other websites breaches copyright. If this content is not in your news reader, it makes the page you are viewing an infringement of the copyright. (Digital Fingerprint:...

This has been a good year so far, certainly in the opinion of your humble Devil. The decision to prosecute even some of the thieving MPs is a small victory for those of us who have long maintained that those fuckers were stealing our money.But far greater vindication, as far as I am concerned, has come in the slow but steady collapse of the climate change alarmist camp; as someone who has been calling "bullshit" on this scam—in writing at least—for five years, watching the destruction started by the leak of the CRU documents has been a joy to behold.Whilst some of us swarmed over the emails and the data—delighting at the revelations about dirty tricks and shoddy statistical analysis that revealed the truth of our suspicions—EUReferendum was leading the charge against the High...

We ask a range of experts: what damage has been done by recent criticisms of climate science credibility?George MonbiotTremendous damage is doneThese scandals have done tremendous damage. This is not because they threaten the canon of climate science – that would require similar exposés of tens of thousands of scientific papers – but because they create an atmosphere of opacity and evasion. Rajendra Pachauri's initial dismissal of questions over the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's Himalayan glacier date suggests a failure to listen, which is inimical to scientific discourse. I am also amazed to learn that the IPCC doesn't pay its chairman, obliging him to work elsewhere, which has caused the other scandal in which he's embroiled. Anyone would think that running the...

Pachauri is looking even more shaky, according to Ben Webster in The Times, as his allies peel away.The latest is John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK, who wants Pachauri replaced. He says of the Himalayan glaciers that the good doctor should have acted as soon as he had been informed of the "error", even though issuing a correction would have embarrassed the IPCC on the eve of the Copenhagen climate summit."Mistakes will always be made," says Sauven, "but it's how you handle those mistakes which affects the credibility of the institution. Pachauri should have put his hand up and said 'we made a mistake'. It's in these situations that your character and judgment is tested. Do you make the right judgment call? He clearly didn't."Pachauri is the man, of course, who when first confronted...

It is almost impossible to suppress a snigger when Pachauri, with all the sincerity he can muster, tells us it would be "hypocritical" to apologise about the melting glaciers. Hypocrisy is something Pachauri knows a great deal about, and on this he is perfectly right. It would indeed be hypocritical, for he feels not the slightest bit of remorse. Nor does he seem to have any sense of responsibility for his own conduct.Nor indeed, do his statements have even a passing acquaintance with the truth, as he persists in perpetrating the falsehood that the glacier claim was "an isolated mistake," that it was "down to human error" and "totally out of character" for the panel.Those that care enough to find out will already know that it was not a mistake – the inclusion of the false claim was...

No apology from IPCC chief Rajendra Pachauri for glacier fallacy - The Guardian In an exclusive interview with the Guardian, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, said it would be hypocritical to apologise for the false claim that Himalayan glaciers could melt away by 2035, because he was not personally responsible for that part of the report. .. He said reports of further errors in the IPCC report linked to grey literature were spurious and the result of a "factory" of people "only there to create pinpricks and get attention". ...His salary from the research institute that employs him is fixed in the range of 190,000 rupees (£2,600) a month, he said, while he receives only travel expenses for chairing the IPCC. The average monthly income for...

Independent Police Complaints Commission called in as Sussex police admit to 'limited contact' with family before murdersThe Independent Police Complaints Commission (IPCC) is considering launching an investigation into whether police could have helped prevent the murder of two young children found dead in Sussex last week after it emerged they were aware of family concerns about the children's safety.Sussex police admitted today that they had "limited contact" with the family before the double murder. The force has referred part of its inquiry to the IPCC, which is considering its response.The children, three-year-old Harry and his two-year-old sister, Elise, were found dead in the boot of car last Wednesday in Heathfield, East Sussex, after their mother, Fiona Donnison, contacted the...

Evidence is building that IPCC claim that Himalayan glaciers were going to melt by 2035 was not only a deliberate fraud, but efforts were made to cover it up when the figure was challenged.Some of the pieces of the jigsaw are already there in the public domain, starting with Ben Webster's piece in The Times on Saturday – which we analysed in this post. This made it clear that Rajendra Pachauri was appraised of what he now claims was a "mistake" by an Indian science journalist, last November. But the story is taken further by Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times today, under the heading: "Panel ignored warnings on glacier error". There, he reports that the leaders of the IPCC had known for weeks and probably months about the "error" and had even convened private conferences to discuss it....

2010 has not been kind to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).  This U.N. sanctioned body is supposed to issue periodic reports that summarize the state of the science of global climate change based upon a comprehensive review and synthesis of the relevant peer-reviewed scientific literature.  In the past few weeks, however, it has been revealed that the IPCC’s 2007 Working Group II report on “Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability” contains claims about the projected impacts of climate change that are completely unfounded, based upon non-scientific (let alone peer reviewed) sources, or misrepresent the underlying scientific literature. The first revelation was that there was no scientific basis for the IPCC’s widely-hyped claim that Himalayan glaciers could...

IPCC Based Claims On Student Dissertation And Magazine Article Before our eyes we see real peer review happening, not cosy logrolling. It is not nearly so comfortable, but much more...

Dear readers, I can barely keep up with the number of humiliating incidents for the IPCC at the moment.  As if Climategate and the revelations about manipulated data, destroying data and ‘losing’ data wasn’t bad enough, Rajendra Pachauri’s position as Head of the IPCC now appears untenable after it was found that yet more of their ‘evidence’ is based on nothing more than anecdotes. From the Telegraph: The United Nations’ expert panel on climate change based claims about ice disappearing from the world’s mountain tops on a student’s dissertation and an article in a mountaineering magazine.  The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating...

From Jonathan Leake in The Sunday Times we get an article headed: "UN climate panel shamed by bogus rainforest claim," - one of several on climate change in today's edition It tells us that a "startling report" in the IPCC report claiming that that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest "was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise."This is "Amazongate" writ large, where the IPCC launched the scare story that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland – and the source turns out to be a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their "research" (Leake's quotations) on a study published in...

The Booker column is up, with the headline: "Amazongate: new evidence of the IPCC's failures". This is the start of the final phase of the IPCC's meltdown.Actually, the Amazon story only occupies one paragraph of the column, with the newspaper reacting to the building publicity by hyping it up in the headline. Booker actually addresses the wide-ranging failures of the IPCC, including a reference to Montford (of Bishop Hill fame) and his brilliant book The Hockey Stick Illusion. Buy it.Booker concludes, of the IPCC that: "Bereft of scientific or moral authority, the most expensive show the world has ever seen may soon be nearing its end." However, the BBC's Roger Harrabin is already swinging into damage-limitation mode on "Amazongate", quoting "Euro-sceptic blogger Richard North".The...

Less than a week after he claimed the IPCC's credibility had increased as a result of its handling of the "Glaciergate" scandal, Pachauri's own personal credibility lies in tatters as The Times accuses him of a direct lie.This is about when he first became aware of the false claim over the melting glaciers, Pachauri's version on 22 January being that he had only known about it "for a few days" – i.e., after it had appeared in The Sunday Times. However, Ben Webster writes that a prominent science journalist, Pallava Bagla – who works for the Science journal (and NDTV as its science correspondent) - claims that last November he had informed Pachauri that Graham Cogley, a professor at Ontario Trent University and a leading glaciologist, had dismissed the 2035 date as being wrong by at...

Joining president Obama, Gordon Brown, David Cameron and, of course, the EU, R K Pachauri, Uncle Tom Cobbley and all, warning of the dangers of climate change, is that star of stage and screen ... bring on the one and only Osama bin Laden.In his latest video to the world, he has made a plea for "drastic solutions" to global warming, and "not solutions that partially reduce the effect of climate change."He blames Western industrialised nations for hunger, desertification and floods across the globe and, needless to say, the al Qaida leader has called for the world to boycott US goods, blaming industrialised countries for global warming, saying the way to stop it was to bring "the wheels of the American economy" to a halt.In that, at least, Obama is ahead of the game, and needs no advice...

Dr Vicky Pope, head of climate change advice at the Met Office, writes in The Times today, of the "Glaciergate" scandal, that:The more substantive mistake in the IPCC report that Himalayan glaciers were melting so fast that they would vanish by 2035 has been dealt with swiftly and clearly by the IPCC.The "dealt with swiftly" line is clearly part of the warmist's damage limitation strategy – but it is also a lie. As we record in our previous piece a UNEP-sponsored meeting on 28/29 December had agreed that "The upshot is that the critics are correct ... there appears to be no scientific foundation for the IPCC's prediction for the year 2035."Yet it was not until 20 January – over three weeks later – that the IPCC took any action, and then only after it had been "outed" by Johanthan...

So asks the French blog Objectif Liberté, a question effectively answered in the affirmative by the Indian news agency DNA.Previously a Pachauri supporter, it retails how the Indian government is distancing itself from one of its erstwhile favourite sons, with the news that the government is thinking again about appointing the good doctor to the prestige position of head of the prime minister's national solar mission.This is the national programme which is leading the drive to produce 20,000 MW of solar electricity by 2022 and one that would have cemented Pachauri even more firmly in the halls of power – with plenty of opportunities to drive some lucrative consultancy business in the direction of his institute, TERI.But "sources" are now saying that the embarrassment over Pachauri is...

I've always liked Andrew Neil and today he has impressed me even more with a great post on his Blog:The bloggers are all over the UN IPCC 2007 report, the bible of global warming, which predicted all manner of dire outcomes for our planet unless we got a grip on rising temperatures -- and it seems to be crumbling in some pretty significant areas.The dam began to crack towards the end of last year when leaked e-mails from one of the temples of global warming, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia, suggested that a few sleights of hand were being deployed to hide facts inconvenient to the global warming case. An official investigation into these e-mails is on-going.But the flood gates really opened after the IPCC had to withdraw its claim that the Himalayan glaciers...

"We are trying to do the best job we can in assessing the quality information about climate change issues in all its dimensions and some do not like the conclusions of our work. Now it is true we made a mistake around the glacier issue, it is one mistake on one issue in a 3,000 page report. We are going to reinforce the procedures to try this does not happen again."So says Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, vice chairman of the IPCC - as retailed by the famous Louise Gray, purveyor extraordinare of WWF press releases – in The Daily Telegraph today. It was simply a "human mistake", he adds. "Aren't mistakes human? Even the IPCC is a human institution and I do not know of any human institution that does not make mistakes, so of course it is a regrettable incident that we published that wrong...

Having barely covered the ebb and flow of the controversy over "Glaciergate", The Daily Telegraph today weighs in with a lead editorial demanding: "Climate change: give us science we can trust".Nonetheless, the trigger for this sudden concern is indeed the Himalayan glacier story, on the back of which we are blithely informed that: "The IPCC quickly admitted the error ... ".The temptation, at this point is to stop reading. This is not information – it is disinformation. Followers of the saga know well that, through the whole process of constructing the passage on melting glaciers, the IPCC ignored reviewers' comments and we are all aware of Pachauri's arrogant dismissal of Raina's contrary view last December as "voodoo science".Only after the "mistake" had been comprehensively outed...

The IPCC also made false predictions on the Amazon rain forests, referenced to a non peer-reviewed paper produced by an advocacy group working with the WWF. This time though, the claim made is not even supported by the report and seems to be a complete fabricationThus, following on from "Glaciergate", where the IPCC grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on Himalayan glaciers – backed by a reference to a WWF report - we now have "Amazongate", where the IPCC has grossly exaggerated the effects of global warming on the Amazon rain forest.This is to be found in Chapter 13 of the Working Group II report, the same part of the IPCC fourth assessment report in which the "Glaciergate" claims are made. There, is the startling claim that:At first sight, the reference looks kosher...

The Devil's Kitchen: More hits on the IPCC's credibility There is No Frakking "Scientific Consensus"; on Global Warming: More Dodgy Citations in the Nobel-Winning IPCC Report EU Referendum: Not one, but two ... and counting Roger Pielke Jr.'s Blog: What a Tangled Web We Weave... the numbers presented by Stern just do not add up. GWPF- New Documents Show IPCC Ignored Doubts About Himalayan Glacier Scare And that is only the tip of an iceberg that isn't melting as fast as Dr Rajendra would...