For whom the bell Tols

Richard Tol has a strongly worded piece up at Klimazwiebel. His ire is directed at a statement by IPCC bigwig, Ottmar Edenhofer - this one:

I cannot understand, even if I try hard, the assertion that the IPCC would deliberately have omitted things, which would have been inconvenient, which would not have been consistent with the overall story.)

The response is forthright:

This assertion of the co-chair of Working Group III of the IPCC is at best peculiar if not outright false. In the following, I will back this statement in some detail, by demonstrating how specific conclusions from white publications, known to the IPCC lead authors, have been filtered out in support of a (false) claim of consensus in the Summary for Policymakers. At the time of his interview, Dr. Edenhofer was aware of these inconsistencies.

Ouch.

Comments

[Richard Tol]

The interview with Edenhofer was broadcast by ZDF (German public television). My response was published on Klimazwiebel only.

[Bishop Hill]

THanks Richard. I've amended the header post accordingly.

[BBD]

Along with Judith Curry, Richard Tol is another insider who has decided that the truth is more important than the Consensus. I note that Tol, like Curry, is no sceptic, but both are clearly provoked by the climate Establishment's misrepresentations.

Those interested in more specifics of Tol's criticisms of the IPCC can see his guest posts (and responses in comments) at Roger Pielke Jnr's blog eg:

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/03/summary-of-richard-tols-look-at-ipcc.html

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/03/bias-in-ipcc-ar4-wg-iii-guest-post-by.html

http://rogerpielkejr.blogspot.com/2010/05/richard-tols-draft-submission-to-iac.html

Bish - I hope you don't mind me posting links - please say if you do and I will of course stop.

Dominic

[harold]

Another Ouch quote from the post:

Writing the first-order draft, the authors of Chapter 11 were aware that there is no consensus (their words) on the effect of induced technological change on the costs of emission reduction. Writing the second-order draft, the authors claimed that there is a consensus. In the published chapter, there is not a sliver of doubt on the sign.

[martyn]

Someone at the House of Lord’s must be running up a hefty bar bill, or does the tab stretch all the way to the UN.

[SimonH]

Oh, ouch indeed. Where I come from, we call that "a bit of a kicking" :o)

[Patagon]

Misinformation by Jones to the Spanish press

Dear Bishop, sorry for the OT but your contact form does not seem to work

You may find interesting a telephonic interview to Jones that appears today in El Pais, in Spain.

Last question and answer are:

Q. An independent investigation concluded that the hockey stick graph, showing a temperature rise very sharply in the twentieth century, was misleading.

A. This diagram was not in any scientific work neither it is in the final report of the IPCC. It was for the annual report of the World Meteorological Organization, 1999. It was made for non-scientists, so it was relatively simple. Sometimes we are asked to write in simple terms for a broad audience, and sometimes it's hard to put warnings and that still remains interesting to the general public.

At least El Pais did not censor my comment (19):

Jones: "This diagram was not in any scientific work neither it is in the final report of the IPCC"

Mann's famous Hockey Stick appears on page. 134 of Chapter 2 of the 2001 IPCC TAR (AR3) http://www.grida.no/climate/ipcc_tar/wg1/pdf/TAR-02.pdf

Page 467 of the 2007 IPCC AR4 cites the work of Mann and others (MBH 1999) and reproduces its temperature reconstruction http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf

From these facts only two conclusions (not necessarily incompatible) can be drawn

1.- That Jones is lying.

2 .- That the IPCC reports are not scientific.

[DaveJR]

You jumped the gun on that one. Jones is referring to his own rendering of the Hockey sticks, the subject of his "hide the decline" email. This did not appear in the IPCC.

[Patagon]

Dave,

You mean the cover figure of the WMO report?
http://www.wmo.int/pages/prog/wcp/wcdmp/statemnt/wmo913.pdf

It is Jones, P. D., Briffa, K. R., Barnett, T. P. and Tett, S. F. B., 1998. which I presume is what figure of AR4, page 467 refers as JBB98 (http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg1/ar4-wg1-chapter6.pdf )

Or is it another hockey stick?

[Cameron Rose]

DaveJR wrote: "You jumped the gun on that one. Jones is referring to his own rendering of the Hockey sticks, the subject of his "hide the decline" email. This did not appear in the IPCC."

DaveJR, The context of the El Pais interview seems to refer to the hockey stick in general. Why do you say he is referring only to his version?

[Pharos]

Fred Pearce's view of competing Mann and Briffa hockeysticks

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/feb/02/hockey-stick-graph-climate-change

[Mailman]

Looking at the machine translation of the interview it's impossible to take the hockey stick as being anything other than THE Michael Mann jockey stock. If jones is confused then he should have sought to clatify this at the tine by explaining which hockey stick he meant. Yet smother example of poor work from the jones boy?

Mailman

[JohnH]

A Team of Hockeysticks ;)

[Patagon]

The journalist asks:

An independent investigation concluded that the hockey stick graph, showing a temperature rise very sharply in the twentieth century, was misleading.

There has been no "independent investigation" of unpublished Jone's hockey sticks, therefore it refers to THE Hockey Stick.

[Atomic Hairdryer]

Good comment from Prof Tol. Strange the way evidence from WG's can get altered and inverted by the time it's filtered through the levels and arguable biases of the IPCC. I like this comment..

However, this is not the end of the story. If smart people focus on improving clean energy technology, they will not research other issues. Climate policy will not make people smarter, so progress slows down for non-energy technologies.

This seems the greatest danger of adopting the wrong climate policy. Scotland seems to have realised the challenge-

http://www.scotsman.com/news/Climate-change-law-to-rip.6526829.jp

Officials have placed an £8bn price tag on achieving the target to reduce by 2020 emissions harmful to the environment by 42 per cent below 1990 levels. But the scheme comes as departmental budgets are set to be reduced by as much as 40 per cent between 2010 and 2014, putting unprecedented pressure on services.

So perhaps Scotland will be forced to reduce it's university funding, or cut some of it's health care services, or reduce it's general education budget. The whole UK has the same challenge, but with a higher price tag and has already announced cuts to research and university funding. For big science projects like the LHC or other high energy physics, that research won't be conducted in the UK if our energy costs are high. The Met Office recently got it's new super computer. Those consume large amounts of power. If research projects or international businesses need those for R&D, the UK won't be an attractive location. Yet we're supposedly going to become a 'knowledge economy'. Diverting money into modern follys that don't generate cheap, reliable power doesn't seem to help achieve that objective.