I suggest going through and reading at least the first few pages of the paper I linked to. It talks about some of the policy decisions that were made in terms of how the IPCC reports on the scientific reports and this basically is breaking one of their own rules in how they report things.
The only policy decision I can recall is the Kyoto Protocol, which was windbaggery. I'm not at all convinced that the IPCC broke its own rules, despite this guy's assertions (who was it again? I've been a bit absent recently).
See
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/sci/tech/7082088.stm for a description of how the IPCC produces its reports.
"The IPCC is not, as some believe, a group of scientists, but a panel set up by the United Nations comprising representatives from about 140 governments to consider what we currently know about climate change.
The panel decides whether an assessment is needed, and then engages scientists to conduct it.
Since its establishment in 1987, there have been four such major assessments, published roughly every five years (1990, 1995, 2001 and 2007), sprinkled with occasional special reports on specific topics. Why this government role? The reason is because governments need a sound summary of knowledge which, once commissioned and adopted, becomes accepted by them."
If rules were broken governments have enough lawyers available to spot it, without needing to be told after the fact. It's not as if governments are hearing what they want to hear, after all. AGW is very unwelcome to governments, but they have come to accept its reality - even the current White House.
Yes, I have considered that actually. From what I can tell, the story told by McIntyre and others is far more logical than doing things like citing unpublished papers in order to back up the Mann et al reconstruction.
On the one hand a story (full of sound and fury), on the other pre-publication papers amid lots of
post-publication papers.
I think that's been soundly kicked to death.
Have I EVER referenced Fox News or a WSJ editorial? No.
Did I ever claim you had? No. The
message that you claim has been muffled does get covered by them (amongst others), which is counter-evidence to muffling.
I've cited peer-reviewed papers and documents from people that have been actively correcting mistakes made in the climate science field.
Yet you claim they've been muffled.
You missed the point of that comment completely... it was a joke because you said (probably off the cuff):
I was joking about nit-picking it because I know you didn't mean it like that... I guess jokes don't fly to well here.
That rather depends on the joke.
I meant that you must have changed your position. I seem to recall you arguing that IPCC was a scientific organization and therefore we could trust it.
You seem to recall wrong. The IPCC was set up by governments, under the auspices of the UN, to collate the research done by scientific institutions and present it to said governments. It does not do research itself.
I'm a bugger for consistency. (Brit idiom
)
But we agree that the IPCC is a political organization then (regardless of the correctness of what they report)?
Yes. It's an interface between the scientific world and the political world, and so has some politics in it. It's not the
only interface - all major governments have their own scientific advisory bodies that they can call on to assess the IPCC reports. Those (let alone the lawyers) are probably
more politicised than the IPCC. That's a lot of oversight, but governments still accept the IPCC reports. McIntyre is apparently less influential, even though freely available to said governments.
You keep on going back to this red herring, I am not arguing that it's not gotten warmer. That's a pointless statement that has no relevance to what I was saying.
It's still worth pointing out. For all the flaws of the first three IPCC reports - and they have been picked over obsessively - nothing has happened to invalidate them. It seems the IPCC has been doing
something right. It could be luck, but there's an old saying : "Once is happenstance, twice is coincidence, three times is enemy action". (Also there's "the third time's the charm", whatever that means.)
