Tuesday, September 24, 2013

Politicians 0, Climate Scientists 1

Even when the Press is acting like a home town sports reporter, the truth still comes out:
Germany's Federal Ministry of Research would prefer to leave any discussion of the global warming hiatus entirely out of the new IPCC report summary. [I'll bet they would. - Borepatch] "In climate research, changes don't count until they've been observed on a timescale of 30 years," claims one delegate participating in the negotiations on behalf of German Research Minister Johanna Wanka of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU). The Ministry for the Environment's identical stance: "Climate fluctuations that don't last very long are not scientifically relevant."
Remember when it was 15 years?  The noise you hear is the sound of goalposts being moved.  It's so bad that even scientists aren't taking it anymore:
Germany's highest-ranking climate researcher, physicist Jochem Marotzke, director of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology, in Hamburg, is fighting back against this refusal to face facts. Marotzke, who is also president of the German Climate Consortium and Germany's top scientific representative in Stockholm, promises, "We will address this subject head-on." The IPCC, he says, must engage in discussion about the standstill in temperature rise.

Marotzke calls the claim that a temperature plateau isn't significant until it has lasted for over 30 years unscientific. "Thirty years is an arbitrarily selected number," he says. "Some climate phenomena occur on a shorter timescale, some on a longer one." Climate researchers, Marotzke adds, have an obligation not to environmental policy but to the truth. "That obligates us to clearly state the uncertainties in our predictions as well," he says.
Who you going to believe, a political flack or a climate scientist?  Hey, what would the head of the Max Planck Institute for Meteorology know about climate, anyway?  Has he ever published in the peer-reviewed journals?  Oh, wait ...

And this bit is delicious:
Climate researchers, Marotzke adds, have an obligation not to environmental policy but to the truth.
That noise you hear is the sound of "consensus" shattering into a million pieces.  The response of the Climate Establishment?
Environmental policymakers within the IPCC fear, though, that climate skeptics and industry lobbyists could exploit these scientific uncertainties for their own purposes. The IPCC's response has been to circle the wagons. To ensure it remains the sole authority on climate predictions, the panel plans not to publish the complete report for some time after the release of the summary and not even release transcripts from the negotiations in Stockholm.
I'm sure that rolling back transparency is exactly the way to deal with things. Nothing builds trust like a good stonewalling.  And this is the sort of thing I never thought I'd see in the MSM:

This despite the IPCC's promise for more transparency after hair-raising mistakes in the last assessment report -- from 2007 -- emerged three years ago and tarnished the panel's credibility. One result of that scandal was a commitment to avoiding future conflicts of interest. Yet scientists who previously worked for environmental organizations still hold leading roles in the creation of the IPCC report. This includes at least two "coordinating lead authors" who are responsible for individual chapters of the report.
Despite the rear guard effort, the truth is finally coming out.  The article is so brutal as to include this diagram, comparing the climate model's predictions to the observed temperatures.  Never thought I'd see this in the Press.



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