If everything seems under control, you're not going fast enough. - Mario Andretti

Saturday, February 06, 2010

This is interesting:

The head of the UN’s climate change body is under pressure to resign after one of his strongest allies in the environmental movement said his judgment was flawed and called for a new leader to restore confidence in climatic science.

Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has insisted that he will remain in post for another four years despite having failed to act on a serious error in the body’s 2007 report.

John Sauven, director of Greenpeace UK , said that Dr Pachauri 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.

It may surprise you—in more ways than one—but I agree with Greenpeace here.  It’s becoming increasingly clear that the IPCC report was sloppy, poorly referenced and pitifully supervised.  The flaws uncovered in the IPCC report do not disprove the idea of global warming nor prove a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy.  Uninformed speculation about Himalayas glacier melt thirty years in the future and strange references to half of the Netherlands being below sea level don’t alter temperature records or basic science.  They do, however, show, once again, that the doomsday scenarios being flogged by the Left are even less likely.  They do show the extreme lack of skepticism many on the Left have toward wild claims of global disaster.  It’s yet another reason to get their hands of the wheel of environmental policy.

I once assisted an advisor in writing a review article on an astronomy topic.  One of my assignments was to go through all the references and make sure they said what we thought they said.  It was mind-numbing work but I did find a few flawed references.  That’s actually not that unusual because references tend to be passed on from article to article with few investigators going to the original source to be sure of the claim.  But when you’re talking climate science, with trillions of dollars and, supposedly, the fate of the planet at stake, I think it behooves you to aim for a higher standard than that used in the East Yachupitsville Geology Bulletin.  Pachuri didn’t.  And he need to take responsibility for that.  No one will trust the science if such sloppy work is not only ignored but rewarded.

Pachauri’s defense is hilarious:

Dr Pachauri did not return calls yesterday but he told Indian television at the weekend that he believed attacks on him were being orchestrated by companies facing lower profits because of actions against climate change recommended by the IPCC.He added: “My credibility has been established because I was re-elected chairman in 2008 by all the countries of the world. They must have been satisfied with what I did in terms of the fourth assessment report [published in 2007] because they have given me the mandate of completing the fifth assessment report [[to be released over 2013 and 2014] which I intend doing.

In other words, they liked him before the knew that he was more interested in glad-handing and grand-standing than in doing rigorous science.  This is the equivalent of Clinton’s defenders saying he shouldn’t have been impeached because he was elected.

This will never happen, but the IPCC would be very wise to replace Pachauri with a climate skeptic.  Someone like Bjorn Lonborg or Pat Michaels.  I guarantee you they would make sure every part of the next report was scrutinized.  And it would have a lot more credibility with a skeptic at the helm.