Discussion about this post

User's avatar
Jerome Ravetz's avatar

Two comments.

First, the IPCC's style of argument, stressing quality and confidence, is a great advance on previous public scientific discourse, which always assumed the existence of a basis in scientific facts that are certain.

Second, there was a very important discussion of methodology in history, introduced in the trial involving David Irving, a prominent holocaust denier. Could this be relevant to policy-related science? The reference is: Thank Evans, by Allon Lee, in Australia/Israel Review, Sept.1 2007, https://aijac.org.au/.

"“There is a kind of interplay between the historian and the documents, which I think is the essence of writing history. If you simply go to history with a thesis and you look up the documents to try to prove it, then you are not really being a historian, you are being a propagandist because that will then involve you ignoring or trying to bypass the records. That’s why we have footnotes. We have to provide our critics with the means of disproving what we are saying."

Expand full comment
Stevec's avatar

I’ve been through a decent part of chapter 11 of AR6 (extreme weather). If there’s bad news it makes it to the summary. If there’s good news it doesn’t make it to the summary, or is obscured:

https://scienceofdoom.substack.com/p/summary-on-trends-in-tropical-cyclones

Long term decline in severe tropical cyclones - **good news** - doesn’t get a mention (caveat that we don’t have global data, but this doesn’t prevent bad news getting in where there isn’t global data). A 30-40 decline in accumulated cyclone energy - **good news** - makes it in as "intensifying tropical cyclones". See the article for details.

https://scienceofdoom.substack.com/p/summary-on-trends-in-extreme-rainfall

We don’t have data on global trends in floods - that doesn’t make it in. You’d think that would be important to stress.

We do have trends in heavy rainfall - up in some places, down in others, overall up - **bad news**. This makes it into the summary as "increasing heavy rainfall".

We do have trends in peak streamflow (think, risk of floods from rivers and waterways) - down in some places, up in others, overall down - ** good news**. This only makes it into the summary as "increasing in many places, decreasing in others". So no one learns about the good news unless they read the detail of the chapter.

The executive summary for chapter 11 says "Significant trends in peak streamflow have been observed in some regions over the past decades".

So, preliminary conclusion: safe pairs of hands are appointed to guide the flow of the report.

Expand full comment
33 more comments...

No posts