"With the ongoing media coverage of a well-known scientist lying to get confidential documents from the Heartland Institute regarding global warming, there’s been consistent reporting in the media about the “scientific consensus” that climate change is manmade.
Numerous articles on blogs and news sites cite that scientific “consensus” of man-made global warming without citing any reference.
The phrase may be a reference to the body of work done over the years by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which involves work done by thousands of scientists from more than 120 governments.
John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center and a climatologist from the University of Alabama-Huntsville, says the IPCC’s process does not promote a disparity of opinion on global warming and is more political than scientific. Christy says the problem is the degree of warming. He thinks 90 percent would agree that mankind has some impact on the climate. “But a lower percentage would say it was a dangerous impact. You really can't get a good answer to this,” Christy said.
Christy has served as a “lead author” for a report done by the IPCC.
He said he believes a problem is that the scientists selected to be considered by the IPCC are nominated by governments that
- for the most part have a man-made global warming bias.
"The selection of lead authors through a two-step political process is a problem,” Christy wrote. “Presently, national governments nominate to the IPCC those who over the years, they can generally count on to be consistent with national policy. From this pool, the IPCC itself selects those it wants to be lead authors."
Christy said he believes IPCC-selected authors have significant authority over what they accept and reject when determining a paper’s conclusions, adding that lead authors are allowed to judge their own work against their critics. “This has led to biased information in the assessments and thus raises questions about a catastrophic view of climate change because the
- full range of evidence is not represented.”
One example Christy cited the work of Penn State University’s Michael Mann, who was a lead author on a report for a chapter of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
In the email scandal known as “Climategate,” Mann wrote an email to members of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit about how to deal with research that countered their own theories on global warming.
“… I believed our only choice was to ignore this paper,” Mann’s email read. “ … The last thing we want to do is bring attention to this paper…” Mann later wrote they should “encourage our colleagues in the climate research community to no longer submit to, or cite papers in, this journal.”
A Penn State University investigation cleared Mann of any scientific misconduct.
“The term ‘consensus science’ will often be appealed to in arguments about climate change. This is a form of ‘argument from authority,’ ” Christy wrote. “Consensus, however, is a political notion, not a scientific notion. … the IPCC and other similar assessments do not represent for me a consensus of much more than the consensus of those who already agree with a particular consensus. The content of these reports is actually under the control of a relatively small number of individuals — I often refer to them as the ‘climate establishment’ — who through the years, in my opinion, came to act as gatekeepers of scientific opinion and information, rather than brokers. The voices of those of us who object to various statements and emphases in these assessments
- are by-in-large
- dismissed rather than acknowledged.”"
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6/2/2011, Europe's governments count on carbon trading profits to fatten their treasuries
via Tom Nelson
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