jshore, thanks for your comments. My point was that support for the idea that IPCC = Science is by no means as widespread as you incorrectly claim. While you may not agree with Landsea’s motives or conclusions, it is quite clear that he does not support the idea that IPCC = science. In his letter, he explicitly condemns the political nature of the IPCC.
I note that you did not address the MER/PPP issue, nor the IPCC’s refusal to let Paul Reiter continue to serve with the IPCC because he disagreed with their conclusions.
I also note that you have not found even one other scientific organization that re-writes the science section of a report to match the politically influenced summary – all you have done is defend the practice. While it’s great that you approve of it, other scientific bodies don’t seem to.
In short, my conclusion stands. The IPCC is not scientific, it is political, and there are plenty of scientists out there who agree with that description of the IPCC.
So, as long as you can find a few scientists that think this, it is true, even if the vast majority view it as providing a good summary of the state of the science?
I can’t address every last person who has some issue with the IPCC or every last choice they make in their analysis. If you think you win if you in any way show that the IPCC is imperfect or that every scientist on the planet is not completely happy with how they run things, then indeed you will win. I am sure that you can find plenty of scientists who would complain about how any particular journal is run or how their particular scientific society is run or how a particular meeting is run. No organization is going to be run to what is simultaneously everybody’s standard of perfection!
You haven’t even been able to come up with an example of anything that has actually been rewritten in this way. There is no evidence yet presented that they are doing anything than making sure they use terminology in a consistent way or otherwise avoid confusion.
And, if other scientific bodies, like the NAS, found this to be very objectionable then one would expect them to speak out about it. Instead, they have been doing almost exactly the opposite…i.e., speaking out strongly in support of the IPCC’s conclusions.
Look, any organization that is chartered by a government (or, in this case, a collection of governments under the auspices of the UN) is going to have some political component to it. Hell, any institution period will have some political component. However, that doesn’t mean that their reports are not a good summary of the peer-reviewed science in the field. If their reports were widely seen by scientists as just being political, you would certainly see widespread criticism of them by organizations such as the NAS or AAAS or the AGU or the AMS. Instead, you see them (and the analogous organizations in most major countries) endorsing the conclusions.
While the IPCC is subject to some political influences, at least these political influences are pulling them in a lot of different directions, e.g., in the sessions that you are complaining about where governments get to give their input to the summary for policymakers, these governments include the U.S. and OPEC nations who are not exactly on the side of urging the scientists to be as alarmist as possible (to understate the point).
What it comes down to is who one wants to believe is most likely to be politically corrupted to the point of affecting their science, the IPCC and nearly every major scientific organization on the planet or a small group of dissenting scientists many of whom, coincidently enough, seem to have connections to very partisan political organizations (such as the Hudson Institute, the Cato Institute, or the George C. Marshall Institute, to name a few in the U.S.) or to industries that stand to lose if we curtail fossil fuel emissions? What you propose is really almost a sort of grand conspiracy theory.
And, by the way, there are some scientists who think that the IPCC reports, by going for consensus, may be erring on the conservative side because to get consensus, they necessarily discount some more severe but less likely consequences. See here for a recent discussion of this, as they note:
Yes, and by going for consensus, they also err by discounting some less severe but less “likely” consequences as well. The underlying problem is that we’re not talking about measurable probabilities here, just model results. As your citation says,
Or to put it more concisely, they have underestimated the uncertainty in their forecasts because the models ignore various factors and because they are not independent. You may recall that I mentioned this effect before, saying that in climate science “far too many times … the error bars are minimized” …
Your citation shows that this is true of the IPCC as well as for individual climate scientists. Minimizing error bars is not science, it is (as your citation points out) politics.
My apologies if my writing wasn’t clear. The procedure I described (write the summary first, then change the scientific sections to match) is the stated, written policy of the IPCC.
I know of no other scientific organization which has such a stated policy. Do you?
I think you are putting words in their mouth. I don’t see where the citation points out it is politics. I really think you are reaching to claim that they support your point-of-view. They say:
I don’t see where they suggest that the IPCC is downplaying less extreme possibilities. And, they certainly aren’t arguing, as you seem to be, that it is more likely that things will turn out to be less extreme than the IPCC predicts than that it will be more extreme.
Thanks for this clarification. However, if the policy is written down, as you claim, then why don’t you actually quote it directly rather than paraphrasing it in what I think is a quite biased way? I explained to you why the IPCC procedures do allow the nations of the world to give some feedback to the authors during the process since it is important for all nations to feel that they were a part of the process that produced the report in order to feel ownership over it rather than that they did not have any opportunity to comment or give any input.
And, if you think that the procedure caused them to make changes to the final report that made it dramatically more “alarmist” than the drafts of the report then surely you should be able to find examples of this.
I have already told you that some politics enters into any organization, scientific or otherwise. The goal is to minimize the extent to which politics can influence the science overall and, particularly, can influence things in one particular direction.
If you want to argue that unless a scientific organization has perfectly insulated itself from politics to the extent that you can find nothing about its procedures that you dislike then it is completely political and its conclusions can be ignored, then you “win” because you will be able to find this in any organization. In fact, you have already come up with excuses to discount what is said by the IPCC, the NAS, the Royal Society, the AMS, the AGU, …, and even by Shell Oil and BP.
You have set yourself up as the final arbiter of what is science and what is not. It is fine for you to do this in making your own decisions in deciding what you believe, but I am quite puzzled as to why you expect us to buy into your extreme views on this when they seem to be shared by almost noone else except a small number of scientists and (somewhat more) non-scientists who have a strong political beef with the policies that might be implied by the scientific conclusion that AGW is a real problem and are therefore engaged in fighting the science tooth-and-nail.
I must confess, jshore, you never cease to amaze me. Why should politicians have any input into a scientific document? Do you give your mayor a vote on a medical diagnosis from your doctor? Do we allow our elected representatives to vote on the calculation of the exact trajectory of a moon-bound rocket?
In fact, when the current US government has attempted to meddle in science, it is rightly called to task for it by people such as yourself.
But with the IPCC, suddenly it’s not only all right, but somehow required … that astounds me. Why should politicians have any say in the science, even in the Summary?
And even if they have a say in the summary, why should that then affect the science? The policy says:
Can’t change the science after it is accepted … except to make it agree with the Summary … this is why the Summary is published three months before the technical sections. I’m still waiting for you to come up with any other scientific organization that has a similar policy.
This has been the procedure since the first IPCC Report. A discussion of some of the problems this has caused in the past can be found here. I’m surprised you haven’t heard of some of these controversies, they were widely reported at the time.
Here, we agree 100%. Politics in science is bad, and should be minimized.
Now you just have to explain how inviting politicians to affect the IPCC Summary, and then changing the science to match the Summary, “minimizes the extent to which politics can influence the science.” How does that minimize the political effect, jshore?
Straw man. We are discussing politics in the IPCC. I’ve never commented about politics in any other scientific organization. Nice try, though.
I don’t “expect [you] to buy into my extreme views”. Buying into anything is foolish, whether it be my views or the IPCC’s views. I’m just trying to get people to take a hard look at the science themselves, rather than blindly follow the politicians.
intention, thanks for your response. The reason they have some input into the document is because these countries of the U.N. are the ones that requested it. Thus, it seems reasonable to allow them to say what thing are unclear to them (“What is meant by…?”), what they might want to have a little more explanation about (“Could you include more information about how you arrived at these uncertainty estimates?”), or how it is presented (“It would be useful if you labeled the difference curves in the graph in a legend in addition to having it explained in the figure caption.”)
You have presented no evidence that they are actually changing the scientific content. If they tried to do this, I am sure that the scientists who wrote it would be up in arms.
Well, let’s look at the case of Philip Cooney editting government reports on climate change in the Bush White House. There you had a guy who was making “mandatory edits” to scientific documents that significantly altered the scientific content. It was not that he was suggesting minor changes in how things were presented or discussing with scientists how they presented them. He was demanding that they be present certain studies and not others and say things in a certain way…a way so poor that the scientists felt it was better to just leave the section on climate change out of the report. (It’s also worth noting that, unlike the U.N. sessions to approve the IPCC summaries, this was all being done behind closed doors and the scientists were in the employ of the government…whereas with the IPCC the scientists involved are generously volunteering their time and there is no intimidation factor involved if they think the politicians are stepping over the line.)
I don’t think anybody during this whole affair was saying that the process should be set up so that the scientists prepare the document and then no political appointee is even allowed to make any comments, suggestions, or ask questions. It was understood that scientific documents prepared in the U.S. government would indeed be reviewed by political appointees (after all, even the head of the EPA is a political appointee). Where the line was overstepped was in the extent to which they tried to exert control over exactly what was said about the science.
Well, I thought you might actually have a recent well-documented example. Instead you dredge up a controversy some 12 years old that was raised by an industry group and where the authors involved backed the changes that were made.
First of all, if you are going to make statements that they are “changing the science to match the summary,” you are simply going to have to back it up with actual facts.
Second of all, you can’t create a process where the politicians aren’t even allowed to ask questions and ask for clarifications or what-not.
The point is that all the organizations that I mentioned are on record with agreeing with the conclusions of the IPCC. And, you find reasons to discount them all.
The world seems to be very black-and-white to you. Either a scientific organization is perfect or it is not science, either a paper is perfect or it is not science. And, then you are left feeling like the NAS report is schizophrenic because they admitted the Mann paper wasn’t perfect but then didn’t completely condemn it and say that it, and all the subsequent work, was completely wrong. Most people faced with this situation where such a vast array of reputable authorities disagree with them might actually start to rethink their own judgements and beliefs rather than conclude that nearly everyone is wrong but them.
In the real world of science, things are not always so black-and-white. There is seldom absolute perfection.
If a scientific organization says that there is a 90% probability that AGW theory is true, but its report is known to be flawed, then what is the true probability?
There is no way to tell without knowing how flawed, and in what way. It’s the same thing as asking, “If one number is supposed to be bigger than another, but it’s really not as big as everyone thinks it is, what is the ration of the first number to the second?”
Can you come up with an actual cite the we can work with that closely resembles your premise, or not? If not, we’ve got better things to do than to try to solve imaginary problems.
I agree, but in any event it casts some doubt on the estimate being made.
I recall people claiming that according to the most recent IPCC report, there is a 90% chance that AGW is “real.” Do you accept that? Or shall I try to find a link?
Do you accept that intention has made some valid criticisms of the most recent IPCC report?
“Some people”? Yeah, a link would be nice, so that we can determine if “some people” are anybody we should listen to, or just average joes that never actually read the report.
jshore, thanks for your comments. Let me clarify my position.
First, you asked for examples where the IPCC had let the politicians change the conclusions. I gave them to you. You discount them because they are too old … what, like facts have a “use by” date in your world? Scientists at the time were in an uproar because their conclusions were changed, I remember the furor well … but that doesn’t make any difference to you because it’s too old? It’s the same policy, and the same problem, today. I’m still waiting for you to supply the name of any other organization with the policy of writing the summary first and changing the science to match.
Second, you misunderstand my position vis-a-vis the IPCC. I do not discount what they say. I just think that anyone who believes something like “if the IPCC says it, it must be true” needs to take a deep breath and a hard look at the Hockeystick fraud. The IPCC presented that as science, when it was nothing of the sort. It was deceptive and dishonest, but the IPCC put it out there as gold.
So I neither believe nor disbelieve anything that the IPCC has to say, until I look at the underlying documents, read the relevant studies, and make up my own mind. The IPCC has proven that it does not care about the quality of the studies that it presents as science. So it is left you you and I to do so … or maybe it’s left to me to do so, and you just swallow it whole. I don’t know.
I do know that the IPCC does absolutely no fact checking, no attempt at replication, no auditing, no attempts to determine if the studies are valid, if the method is transparent, or if the data is archived. It just takes the studies as given, and summarizes them. Perhaps that’s what you call “science”.
I don’t.
w.
PS - there is an interesting article on “Forecasts by Scientists vs. Scientific Forecasting” located here.
And there is an example of how the IPCC evades the science by ignoring inconvenient truths located here.
Thanks for the reply, intention. Please let me clarify my position since there seems to have been a misunderstanding about it. My response to you was: “Well, I thought you might actually have a recent well-documented example. Instead you dredge up a controversy some 12 years old that was raised by an industry group and where the authors involved backed the changes that were made.”
What I was trying to say is that not only did you have to go back 12 years and 3 IPCC reports (i.e., back to the 2nd when we are now on the 4th) to find an example but that it was not in fact an example of what you claim. It was a case where the scientist who was the coordinating lead author made the changes to the report in response to various editorial suggestions (from scientists and from the various nations) and the other coordinating lead authors subsequently completely supported what he had done, as did a good number of his colleagues in the scientific community (see here). In fact, the scientists were “in an uproar” only because of the unfair attack on Ben Santer orchestrated by the industry consortium Global Climate Coalition. Since you say “Scientists at the time were in an uproar because their conclusions were changed”, I would like you to say which scientists who were actually involved in writing the report said that their conclusions were changed.
Well, you are entitled to your opinion about the hockeystick but it is not an opinion shared by most of the actual climate scientists, certainly not those who wrote the NAS report. (It is also worth noting that the two quantitative statements that came out of the third IPCC report based on the temperature reconstructions, namely that temperatures were likely warmer in the 2nd half of the twentieth century than at any time in the last millenium and then a similar statement about the rate of rise of temperatures over the last century in comparison to the last millenium, both had the statement “likely” which meant that it was their expert judgement that they had a 66-90% chance of being correct. While the truth value of neither of these statements is yet definitively known, most scientists in the field would still say that these statements are quite likely correct.)
The IPCC’s job is not to produce a body of independent science but rather to summarize the state of a body of science. As such, they do render scientific judgements but they do not replace the normal scientific process. Basically, you are complaining that the IPCC doesn’t do stuff that, for the most part, it is not supposed to do.
I am surprised that you haven’t found lots of holes in that paper as others have (problems that, if it were a paper on the other side, would certainly render it utterly invalid, if not a fraud, in your eyes).