Saturday
Jan232010
by 
Bishop Hill
Bishop Hill Pachauri says he's staying
Jan 23, 2010 Climate: IPCC Climate: Pachauri Climate: WG2 IBN LIVE: Rajendra Pachauri, president of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), on Saturday said he would not quit over the IPCC blunder of saying that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035.
Reader Comments (55)
Dave Salk:
Anand, I promise I will reply to the intelligent responses when they come up. You know hat I mean, comments that are logic based and/or substantiated. The 4AR has been out for three years. In all that time critics have only beem able to dig up one passage that is demonstrably unsubstantiated. One passage in approx. 3000 pages.
Use your God given brain, Anand - assuming 10 paragraphs to a page, there are around 30,000 paragraphs in the 4AR. With an inaccuracy rate of 1 in 30,000 after three years of vigorous analysis by professional sceptics (scientists themselves) and agenda-driven critics, one that did not make it into the WG2 summary, or the Summary for Policy Makers, therefore any calls for the head of the IPCC over the inclusion are disingenuous at best, and betray an anti-intellectual, scientific-denialist agenda at worst.
Or unadulterated laziness in seeking to pounce on anything to shore up an ideological world-view. Shame it is so easily shot-up, but that is what laziness gets you.
So Anand, why don't YOU address my comment now... why should the IPCC resign over one inaccurate passage in 30,000? Pachauri is a Himalayan glaciologist who should have known better, is he?
Wadard
"Now you are getting desperate mate"
Are you Australian?
"extremist deniers do not even have a scientific theory from which to contest AGW"
A counter-theory is not required to be sceptical. Your hypothesis needs some real, empirical, reproducible evidence even to be considered a theory!
Wadard, Pachauri should resign not because of a simple error about when the glaciers may disappear, he should resign because this "fact" should never have been in the report to begin with. That it appeared demonstrates a fundamental flaw in the process the IPCC claims to follow.
The IPCC does not do original science, what it does is to survey the peer reviewed literature and tries to determine what all of it means in order to help the lay public determine policy. The IPCC failed miserably at this. Not only did they publish an error, but this error was merely hearsay, it was based on an interview, not on a published paper (and was an eight year old interview at that). The Glacier story is merely one example of this. The Telegraph has a list of articles from the WWF, a specifically non-scientific organization, that does not do peer-reviewed work. The IPCC should never have allowed this articles into the final work, that they did undermines the credibility of the entire organization. In that this HAS occurred, whom do you suggest should be held responsible?
Wadard one additional point. We do not need to "debunk" AGW. You need to prove it. Something, it should be noted, you have done a very poor job at doing. After all, this is the second time the IPCC's "smoking gun" (in the 3rd Assessment it was the Hockey Stick, in the 4th it was the Glaciers) has been proven to be not only inaccurate, but revealed an extremely poor understanding of the scientific method. You, in your own small way, also show a similar lack of understanding of it.