5. What procedural flaws do you believe lend to the IPCC’s errors? Do you agree with the IPCC’s reliance on grey literature?
In practice, “grey literature” – i.e. comments on climate science that are not peer reviewed – is all too often “green literature”: i.e., literature compiled by pressure-groups with a vested interest in advancing the narrow, extreme and scientifically-unjustifiable point of view that the IPCC, by its founding do ent, is required to reflect regardless of the objective scientific truth
“Peer review”, as it is generally understood in science today, is the process by which the authors of a scientific paper submit their work to a learned journal of standing, whose Editors, if the paper appears on its face to have merit in that it adds new knowledge to the corpus of scientific advance and contains no manifest errors, appoint appropriately-qualified scientific reviewers, who then read the paper and make comments and suggestions for correction or clarification. The authors and reviewers of a scientific paper published in a learned journal are usually, but not always, scientifically qualified in the field appropriate to the subject-matter of the paper.
The reviewers’ iden ies are, of course, known to the Editors, but are not necessarily known to the authors of the paper, to whom the Editors send the reviewers’ comments and suggestions. The authors then revise the paper to take account of what the reviewers have said. Provided that the reviewers and Editors are satisfied that the reviewers’ comments and suggestions have been fully and properly taken account in the authors’ revisions, and that the paper as revised has merit, the Editors publish the paper. Otherwise, either the paper is rejected or further rounds of revisions may be required of the authors. Only when all revisions have been successfully completed is the paper published. Customarily, journals also publish the date on which the paper was received, the dates on which each subsequent revised draft was received, and the date on which the paper was finally accepted for publication.
Once the paper is published in a learned journal, if a scientist who reads it wishes to rebut it, the custom is that he sends a draft of his proposed rebuttal both to the journal and to the lead author of the paper. The lead author is then given the opportunity to draft a refutation to the rebuttal. Thereupon, if the Editors consider that the rebuttal and any refutation deserve to be published, they are published simultaneously in a subsequent edition of the journal.
The IPCC’s four Assessment Reports (19990, 1885, 2001, and 2007) are the primary source relied upon by agencies of the US Government, such as the EPA, NRC, NAS, CCSP, etc. It is important to understand that, at least in the following respects, neither the IPCC’s Reports nor those of the various taxpayer-funded scientific bodies who rely so heavily upon the IPCC’s Reports are peer-reviewed in the accepted sense. In particular –
* The authors of the IPCC’s Reports are chosen and appointed not by any scientific process but by governments.
* The IPCC has been known to interfere in the appointment of authors by taking careful steps to exclude eminent authors whose views are known to be at variance with the political stance of the IPCC. For instance, Professor Paul Reiter of the Ins ut Pasteur in Paris, one of the world’s foremost experts on the epidemiology of malaria and yellow fever, was nominated to the IPCC by the United States Government to contribute to the sub-chapter of the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report on climate change and vector-borne diseases. Professor Reiter suspected that the IPCC would do its best to exclude him and, accordingly, he obtained four copies of his nomination papers and sent them by registered mail, with proof of delivery, to four separate senior officials of the IPCC. As he had anticipated, the IPCC denied having received his nomination papers and refused to appoint him. However, he applied pressure and was eventually appointed a reviewer of the sub-chapter in question, discovering that the two lead authors were not malaria scientists. He later told the story to an investigating committee of the House of Lords in the United Kingdom.
* Authors who wish to contribute to the IPCC’s scientific discussions are often excluded if the IPCC considers that they are likely to disagree with its political stance. When I wished to attend the Hawaii “scoping meeting” for the IPCC’s 2013 Fifth Assessment Report early in 2009 to draw the IPCC’s attention to some serious defects in its methodology that I had published in the scientific literature, I was peremptorily told that I should not be welcome because I “disagreed with the IPCC’s position”.
* The reviewers are appointed by the IPCC itself. Many of their comments and suggestions, therefore, tend to reflect the IPCC’s political stance.
* The IPCC’s authors are generally not permitted to work in their own environment and in their own way, free from political pressure or interference. Much of the drafting of the IPCC’s reports is done by groups of authors at sessions held in exotic locations around the world. Some authors have reported that staff of the IPCC had intruded into scientific discussions and had pressured scientists into accepting various aspects of the IPCC’s political stance. For instance, Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT testified before Congress to the effect that in IPCC sessions that he had attended the IPCC’s staff had frequently applied pressure on participating scientists to accept the IPCC’s contention that numerical modeling of the climate by complex (but error-prone) computer programs was a permissible alternative to observation, measurement, and calculation. The pressures to conform to the IPCC’s political stance are real and considerable.
* The authors are permitted to ignore – and generally do ignore – the comments and suggestions made by the reviewers, particularly where what the reviewers say runs counter to the IPCC’s political stance. This departure from the process generally recognized as peer review is particularly serious. For instance, in the sub-chapter on glaciers in the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report, a scientifically-unqualified environmental campaigner whom a government had nominated to the IPCC wrote that the Himalayan glaciers would all have melted away by 2035. Various reviewers pointed out that the campaigner’s absurd but alarming claim had no scientific foundation, but the campaigner simply overrode the reviewers and his draft was retained. When this error was exposed, the IPCC admitted that the correct year should have been not 2035 but 2350. The lead author of the sub-chapter in question also admitted that he had known the campaigner’s statement to be scientifically unfounded, but that he had deliberately left the incorrect date in the published final version of the IPCC’s 2007 report because, he said, it was the intention of the IPCC politically to influence governments.
* If the final draft of one of the IPCC’s reports is not acceptable to the IPCC’s staff in that it does not accord with the IPCC’s political stance, the IPCC’s procedures permit a single author to rewrite the final draft on his own so as to make the Report “politically correct”. This, too, is a very serious defect in the IPCC’s process. For instance, the 1995 Second Assessment Report concluded, and stated on five separate occasions, that there was no discernible human influence on global temperature and that it was not clear when any such influence would become discernible. The IPCC’s staff did not find this conclusion congenial. Accordingly a single author whose conformity to the IPCC’s political stance – Dr. Ben Santer of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory – rewrote, and subsequently admitted that he rewrote, the final draft to remove all five “politically-incorrect” statement and to replace them with a single statement to the effect that a discernible human influence on global climate was now evident. To prevent this statement from appearing incongruous, Dr. Santer also found it necessary to make several hundred consequential amendments. The result was that the 1995 Report came to a conclusion precisely opposite to that which the scientists’ final draft had drawn. This conclusion – the opinion of one man – has been the official conclusion of the IPCC ever since. Yet only a small minority of the 1995 Report’s authors were told of Dr. Santer’s revisions before the Report was published, and the final draft as revised by him was not subjected even to the attenuated and defective process of “review” normally followed by the IPCC.
* The IPCC’s personnel, whether or not they have any scientific qualifications, are also permitted to tamper with the scientists’ final drafts of the IPCC’s reports. For instance, the final draft of the IPCC’s 2007 Fourth Assessment Report was leaked to the Sunday Telegraph, a major Sunday newspaper in the United Kingdom, before publication. The newspaper revealed that the IPCC had revised its estimate of maximum global sea-level rise over the 21st century from 3 feet to less than 2 feet, with a central estimate of little more than 1 foot. This welcome news was widely reported around the world, but did not accord with the IPCC’s political stance. Accordingly, the IPCC’s staff altered the scientists’ final draft of the IPCC’s 2007 Report by inserting a new table of figures that had not appeared in the final draft. By the redeployment of four separate decimal points, it was made to appear that the observed contribution of the Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets to sea-level rise over the past 40 years had been ten times greater than that which had actually been measured. Whether or not this error was deliberate, the offending table was published in the final draft of the 2007 Report. On the day of publication, I noticed the error, reported it to four separate IPCC officials, and insisted that the table be removed or corrected. The IPCC’s staff thereupon hastily corrected the error themselves, changed the units in which the table was denominated, re led the table, moved it, and quietly posted up the corrected version on the IPCC’s website, without openly declaring – as is the correct academic practice – that any change at all had been made.
* The final decisions on the principal conclusions in the IPCC’s Reports, which are incorporated into a Summary for Policymakers in each Report, are taken not by scientific authors or reviewers but by political representatives of governments. This is a very serious defect of scientific process. For instance, the IPCC reached its decision in its 2007 Fourth Assessment Report to assign at least 90% confidence to its finding that most of the “global warming” that has occurred since 1950 was anthropogenic not by any scientific process of measurement, observation, or calculation conducted by scientists, but by a show of hands on the part of political representatives.
* Climate scientists, whether part of the IPCC process or not, are subjected to enormous pressures to agree to the IPCC’s politicized, pseudo-scientific viewpoint. For instance, when Dr. Garth Paltridge, an eminent climatologist in Australia, first said publicly that he disagreed with the IPCC’s central findings, within 24 hours the IPCC had contacted its point of contact in the Australian Government, which had in turn contacted the official body responsible for funding scientific research in Australia, which in turn contacted Dr. Paltridge and told him that if he ever again went public and expressed disagreement with any of the IPCC’s conclusions he would never again receive any funding for scientific research.
For these reasons, the IPCC’s Reports are in no way peer-reviewed in the generally-accepted sense of that term. In like manner and degree, the reports of the various scientific ins utions upon which the US Government relies are also not peer-reviewed. The leading scientific ins utions in the United States have substantially or absolutely relied upon the IPCC. In particular, they have appealed to the IPCC’s “authority” in that they have adopted its principal conclusions in an insufficiently critical manner.
Key decisions of the IPCC were taken not by scientists but by scientifically-unqualified representatives of governments, or by environmental campaigners, or by campaigning journalists with no scientific qualifications. On any view, these government representatives and campaigners – however noble their reputations in their fields – have no reputations in the field of science, and, scientifically speaking, the IPCC should not have founded its position upon their decisions on the basis of their reputations. Even where the conclusions upon which the IPCC relies were drawn by scientists, the scientific method – whose essence is verification and scrutiny of scientific results, and not mere belief or acquiescence in those scientific results that are found politically expedient, socially congenial, or financially profitable – demands that the IPCC should take careful steps independently to verify that the scientific conclusions on which it relies are justifiable, particularly where it is evident – or has become evident from comments received – that the conclusions in question are questionable.
The United States should withhold all further funding from the IPCC until it ins utes a rigorous process of proper peer review of its own past as well as future work by independent scientists, and until it gives an undertaking that it will never again rely upon any sources other than peer-reviewed papers in the learned journals.
Not the least of the reasons why the IPCC is not functional is that the current chairman of its climate science panel is a railroad engineer now under investigation by the UK Charity Commission for having filed false accounts three years in a row for a charity of which he is the trustee. His defense is that he is financially inexperienced: yet he runs an 800-strong NGO in India. Key IPCC personnel should in future be appropriately qualified, and of unquestionable probity, and should not have any financial conflicts of interest.
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