An Army of Climate Davids

An Army of Climate Davids is an interesting article at TCS Daily about a request for input from the public on the fourth report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to be released next year. This agency is rather pompously represented as THE authority on climate change, even though most of the scientists involved are not climatologists, and many don’t agree with their predictions and forecasts. It is this agency that is referenced in the press when claims are made of an ironclad consensus among leading scientists about the causes of global warming.

In the past, their reports have been kept top secret until released at a frenzied media event where everyone sees the report for the first time, and no input has been given by anyone other than the “experts” involved.

….the scientists (and the rather more political creatures who write the summaries) want to be able to work in peace and deliver the report at once in a blaze of publicity. So what has the US Government gone and done? Posted a draft of it on the Internet! (Right here).

….

However, I think there's a much greater reason for this request for help. We take it as a truism that on any specific subject there are experts, something which is obviously true. But it isn't similarly obvious that all of the experts on a subject are actually writing a specific report. There are those (vastly more competent to comment than I) on the scientific aspects of climate change who are not actually part of the IPCC process. The US Government is thus asking these people to aid it in preparing a response to the draft report. Unlike last time, of course, when anyone who critiqued the final report was simply told, Uh, this is the considered view of all of the experts — now shut up.

…..

One comment in The Times really rather amused me:

Roger Pielke Jr, of the University of Colorado, told Nature: "If the report is already out there in circulation, then the 'news' value is likely to be much diminished when the official report is finally released.

Really? We should not have peer review (even if of the most citizen journalist based kind) simply because it will diminish the news value? Is this science or propaganda? The following is even more puzzling:

Friends of the Earth said that the US Government had repeatedly tried to undermine the IPCC in the past.

Difficult not to snigger at that really: asking people to comment upon and possibly correct a draft is "undermining"?