The IPCC's Really, Really Bad Week

In a second revelation of IPCC misconduct, the connection made between global warming and bad weather related costs has been found to be not merely taken from non-peer-reviewed literature, but to be false. According to the Times On-Line,

"The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC's 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had "suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s".

It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: "One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalised for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend."

The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.

When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and disaster impacts — but were ignored.

Roger Pielke Jr. has been protesting this since 2006. Apparently the IPCC has no taste for dissent, especially dissent that threatens their chosen narrative. According to Pielke,

"So to summarize: Contrary to its procedures the IPCC chose to emphasize a paper that was not peer reviewed to support claims that were contrary to all of the peer reviewed literature on this topic. The IPCC created (or had others create) a graph that appeared nowhere in the literature and was highly misleading. When the paper was eventually published several years later as a book chapter, it was revised in such a substantial fashion so as to eliminate unambiguously any basis for the claims that had been made by the IPCC justified by the earlier version of the paper.

The claims made by the IPCC about the relationship of disasters and climate change, expressed most clearly in the figure above, were not simply made in violation of IPCC procedures. The claims were not just wrong. The claims were based on knowledge that just doesn't exist. Again, not good."

Within one week, two of the foundational claims made by the IPCC to support their AGW activism have been shown not only to be outside the auspices of respectable science, but to be patently false. Plus there are now calls for the resignation of IPCC head, Raj Pachauri, who is now considered an embarrassment by his own government, in India. Not a good week, IPCC-wise.