New publication: NIPCC vs. IPCC
A new publication by S. Fred Singer, Professor Emeritus at the University of Virginia, came out last week. Its title: NIPCC vs. IPCC – Adressing the Disparity between Climate Models and Observations: Testing the Hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming. It is meant to be an interim science update of the 2008-NIPCC-report. The base of the 28-pages-booklet was the author’s presentation at the Majorana conference in Erice, Sicily, in August 2011.
What is it about? Whether global warming is natural or manmade is of crucial importance for both climate science and climate policy. Hence the the update on this issue. Besides, the author, an expert in atmospheric and space physics and founding director of the US Weather Satellite Service, discusses chaotic uncertainties of climate models and how to overcome them, Climategate and the Hockeystick graph – and shows “what we can say about the absence of post-1979 warming in the temperature data of the 20th century.”
The brochure has been/is presented by Prof. Singer during his (ongoing) lecture tour in Europe. Editions in German, French, Spanish and other languages are in preparation (German will be next). The book has been published with the support of the European Institute for Climate and Energy.
NIPCC vs. IPCC, Addressing the Disparity between Climate Models and Observations: Testing the Hypothesis of Anthropogenic Global Warming, Interim Science Update, Presented at Majorana Conference in Erice, Sicily, August 2011, ISBN 978-3-940431-28-8, TvR 2011, 28 p. (29×21,5 cm). 27 illustrations and graphs (19 in color). 10,00 EUR.
Filed Under: Books • CFACT EU • CFACT Europe • Climate • Development • Environmentalism • Featured • Issues
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I started to read this but didn’t get far before running into a serious problem with this report. In the Foreword, on page vii, under the section title “New Survey of Climate Scientists”, there are several paragraphs describing responses to a survey from a few years back. The characterization of those paragraphs is that there is significant doubt among climate scientists regarding ACC. The phrasings used are rather tortuous — and that set my nose twitching. Whenever somebody presents tricky phrasing to describe the results of a paper, I suspect intellectual hanky-panky, so I dug up the original results as reported by the authors of the study. The “money quotes” come from question #21 of their survey, which asks “How convinced are you that most of recent or near future climate change is, or will be, a result of anthropogenic causes?” The respondents are asked to respond on a seven-point scale:
not at all 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 very much
The results are presented in a bar chart, from which the authors calculate a mean of 5.68, and a standard deviation of 1.434. These numbers clearly show that the 370 respondents are strongly convinced that climate change is the result of anthropogenic causes. (Strictly speaking, mean and standard deviation are appropriate only with normally distributed variables, which does not apply to this dataset, but the numbers are nevertheless indicative of strong support among scientists.)
Question #22 is also telling: it asks “How convinced are you that climate change poses a very serious and dangerous threat to humanity?” using the same scale of responses, and the results have a mean of 5.573 and a std dev of 1.52, once again showing that these respondents believe that we should be taking ACC very seriously indeed.
Yet the statements on page vii of the NIPCC report give the gullible reader the completely opposite impression. The statements are cleverly worded to give an impression opposite to the truth, yet do not contain outright lies. Such a lack of intellectual integrity completely discredits this report, in my mind. If you catch them red-handed in one intellectual sin, their credibility is shattered. However, this is only in the Foreward, not the report itself, and so I shall continue reading the report itself in the hope that the authors (who are not the same as the signers of the Foreward) are more trustworthy.
As always, I’m happy to provide links to the relevant information.
You seem to have never seen the new “NIPCC vs. IPCC” book.
I started digging into the contents of the NIPCC report and I’m sad to say that it engages in the same kind of intellectual dishonesty that I found in the Foreword. It started off well by quoting some statements from two well-respected scientists acknowledging the limitations of climate models. However, my jaw dropped when I saw Figure 1.1: a graph of reconstructed global temperature anomalies over the last 2,000 years, taken from a paper by Loehle and McCulloch appearing in Energy & Environment.
That last part — the publication in which it appears — is the kicker. E&E has been around for a long time and has, shall we say, charitable standards of peer review. Its editor, Sonja Boehmer-Christiansen, is openly political in her editorial policy: “My political agenda for E&E is not party political but relates to academic and intellectual freedom. I am an geographer turned international relations specialist (environment as special field) and as such have long been critical of environmentalist exaggerations.” More telling is the reference record for papers published in E&E: few of its papers garner references from other researchers. This is the gold standard of scientific quality, by which standard the simplest conclusion we can draw is “E&E sucks”.
If you would but compare Figure 1.1 from the NIPCC report with Figure 6.10 of IPCC AR4 WG1, you will see a huge difference: the former exaggerates the MWP while the latter shows the MWP to be quite shallow. More revealingly, the Loehle and McCulloch graph presents a single result, while the IPCC graph shows the results of twelve different studies, showing plainly the disagreements as well as the agreements. In other words, Figure 6.10 from IPCC is more scientifically candid that Figure 1.1 of NIPCC.
An obviously deceptive presentation of such magnitude shatters any scientific credibility in the NIPCC report.