The eminent social analyst Walter Russell Mead has a few choice observations about the melting of the global warming mania, including comments about the latest amateurish goof found in the IPCC's highly-touted Synthesis Report.So: the Synthesis Report contains a major scare prediction — 50% shortfall in North African food production just ten years from now — and there is no serious, peer-reviewed evidence that the prediction is true.
But there’s more. Much, much more. Readers of the Times and the Telegraph are watching the IPCC’s credibility disappear before their eyes...
The Dutch government has demanded that the IPCC correct its erroneous assertion that half of the Netherlands is below sea level. Actually, it’s only about a quarter. A prediction about the impact of sea level increases on people living in the Nile Delta was taken from an unpublished student dissertation. The report contained inaccurate data about generating energy from waves and about the cost of nuclear power (this information was apparently taken without being checked directly from a website supported by the nuclear power industry)...
In my February 1 post on The Death of Global Warming, I said that the movement had been killed by two things: bad science and bad politics. The Guardian hopes that the parrot isn’t dead yet, but it seems to agree with my basic diagnosis: “It is bad science and bad politics to counter scepticism with righteous indignation. In the long run, public confidence will be inspired more by frankness about what science cannot explain,” write the editors.
The editors pick up another theme that is familiar to readers of this blog: "In trying to avert dangerous climate change, governments are aiming for something extraordinary. They want to transform the global economy because of a hypothesis for which the evidence is mostly inaccessible to the layman. It is the biggest pre-emption in history, and it relies on collective trust in science."
When the IPCC has its former chief, the Guardian newspaper and the Dutch government demanding change, something has got to give.
I just wish all these stories were a little easier to find in the US press. These stories have been and continue to be on the front pages of UK newspapers; American newspapers by and large aren’t, yet, taking them as seriously and the growing numbers of Americans who are following the scandals are mostly tracking them from internet reports like this one or directly in the British press. This too needs to change, and the sooner the better.
