Professor: IPCC not a reliable source of information

September 15, 2010 by Walter Schneider.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a UN organization, is not a reliable source of information, and the science concerning the current concerns about climate change is not sound.

Those are findings by Ross McKitrick, Ph.D., Professor of Environmental Economics, University of Guelph, Canada, in an assessment he made of the veracities of a total of five inquiries of the long-standing actions of the key players that surfaced through the e-mails that came to light November 2009 and were subsequently dubbed the  climategate scandal.

Professor McKitrick published the findings of his assessment in a 50-page report, Understanding the Climategate Inquiries, released September 2010 (PDF file, 322kB).

If you read the short introduction to the report, you will quite likely become sufficiently interested in reading much more of it.

Professor McKitrick explains that at the very least some of the panelists in some of the reviews he reports on were neither impartial nor reasonably to be expected to be objective, and that they moreover on occasions had publicly prejudged issues that the reviews they participated in should have objectively examined.  Still there were many other issues that put the reviews into a bad light, such as this:

It is noteworthy that the first item in the terms of reference called for examination of all relevant email exchanges, and that the Inquiry noted that the emails released on the internet made up only a small fraction of the total volume of CRU correspondence. The Report noted (p. 33)

The presumption is that e-mails were selected to support a particular viewpoint. Recognising that they were a tiny fraction of those archived, the Review Team sought to learn more about the full contents of the back-up server. This attempt, summarised in Appendix 6, was largely unsuccessful due to the sheer scale of the task and ongoing police investigation.

The Inquiry made only a hesitant and disorganized effort to examine the CRU backup server, allowing itself to be dissuaded by the UEA itself. As outlined in Appendix 6 to the report, the Inquiry accepted a proposal to have the UEA hire a computing consultant to access the backup server, who would then work with the police computer analyst to identify other emails and materials pertinent to the Inquiry, which would then be redacted by the university before submitting to the Review panel. But by the time this protocol was worked out, too much time had elapsed to actually do it, so the whole matter was dropped.

There appears to be little doubt that the whitewashing the various reviews produced and were accused of was in fact just that.  It comes as no surprise that the examination undertaken by Professor McKitrick concludes with:

The world still awaits a proper inquiry into climategate: one that is not stacked with global warming advocates, and one that is prepared to cross-examine evidence, interview critics as well as supporters of the CRU and other IPCC players, and follow the evidence where it leads.

Given that I spent hundreds of hours following the discussions of the IPCC’s brand of climate science since long before and after the climategate scandal first emerged, there is no doubt in my mind that Professor McKitrick’s conclusion is correct.  It is a sad state of affairs that hundreds of billions and even trillions of dollars are being spent in remedies for alarmist concerns that are at best based on shoddy science and at worst on apparently deliberate misrepresentation — no matter how much whitewashing of it has been attempted.

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You may be tempted (and should be) to read authoritative comments by climate scientists on all of this.  For that check Steve McIntyre’s blog entry Climategate Inquiries.

Update 2010 09 16: See also The Climategate Inquiries, by Andrew Montford

Andrew Montford is an English writer and editor, the author of The Hockey Stick Illusion: Climategate and the Corruption of Science (2008), a history of some of the events leading up to the release of emails and data from the Climatic Research Unit at the University of East Anglia. He writes a blog specialising in climate change issues at http://bishop-hill.net and has made many media appearances discussing global warming from a sceptic perspective.

While the Montford assessment examined only the three U.K. reviews and the Penn State review of the climategate scandal, it clearly and irrevocably identifies that, rather than clearing the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia or Michael Mann of Penn State of any wrongdoings — which the reviews all claimed they had adequately done, the reviews themselves without a doubt were scandalous in their blatant and deliberate exclusion of any and all evidence of the misrepresentations and fabricated facts produced for the IPCC reports.  In short, the reviews quite literally made certain that they saw no evil, heard no evil and spoke no evil.  The conclusion is inevitable, the hockey stick remains broken, and the IPCC reports do not deserve to be trusted.

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