49 Comments

120 years ago, Roald Amundsen sailed through the NorthWest Passage in a 50 ton wooden ship.

He knew he would make it when he met a ship coming from the opposite direction.

With all the hype about rapidly disappearing Arctic ice, kinda hard to believe! :)

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I believe this is more of a journalism scandal (shocker) but I have repeatedly ask the Guardian to clarify this article and they will not answer me.

I hear people quote the lie that 100 companies are responsible for 71% of emmissions when they are only responsible for 71% of *industrial* emissions.

Drives me insane.

https://www.theguardian.com/sustainable-business/2017/jul/10/100-fossil-fuel-companies-investors-responsible-71-global-emissions-cdp-study-climate-change

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Bravo on getting through that without once mentioning Piltdown Mann by name.

In the interest of honest brokery and transparency I will suggest the folllowing edit;

“Long time readers here at THB will know that I BELIEVE THAT AGW climate change is real and poses risks.”.

If your many posts about the WG1 data are correct and there is no signal outside normal variation as of today, all such statements above are opinion based on theory or belief, ie faith.

Everybody has some sort of faith, we just don’t all agree.

Doesn’t mean I don’t respect your opinion, I just don’t agree with all of them.

Or, as I was question once after an IEEE paper I wrote and presented, a person vehemently disagreed with a point I made, and I responded that it’s not that I think you are wrong, it’s that I just don’t agree with you.

Other than that, agree with all

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And people wonder why climate change is ridiculed as nonsense or fake news. With a list like that it's easy to dismiss the entire field as corrupt.

Of course that is not true but the "climate change community" has no one to blame but themselves if they refuse to police their own colleagues and act like cowards. Why should the public take them seriously?

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I would say that only 97% of it is corrupt.

Nothing is absolute.

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Thank you, Roger. This reminder of past "errors" within the IPCC is very useful, but we should remember that this is a list of scandals within Roger's field of expertise.

There are similar lists for quite a few other fields of expertise, and this is what we get when we mix politics with science. We end up with only the politically correct science acceptable to certain politicians.

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Should be RCP11 because, like the amps in “This Is Spinal Tap”, our climate scenarios should go up to eleven.

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We do know that C02 is greening the deserts, and we do know C02 is the primary plant sustenance, we do know that warmer climates produce more food than colder climates, and we do know that World Agricultural Production is increasing dramatically in the last few years.

The rest is speculation, and in the last 30 years such speculations, silent springs, population bombs, food shortages, ice free North Pole, fossil fuels depleted by the year 2,000, and so on, has proven to be just that, speculation, but for some unscientific reason, always negative speculation.

Odd that! 😀

The problem is not the scientists.

It's not the scientists who are saying we have only 5/10/15 years to save the planet.

It's the left wing politicians and their pals in the left wing media, like, Algore, Kerry, Biden, Greta, et al. and "journalists", who lie about what the scientists actually are saying. They leave out all the qualifiers like "if", "then", "could", with "nth degree of confidence"

Why do they do this?

It's become solely about politics and money!

In order to get the 50 to 100, to 275 trillion dollars they say will fine tune the Earth's temperature within one or two degrees, in 50 or 100 years from now. (and refusing to acknowledge any benefits from a slightly warming world.) the only weapon they have is fear!

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As Roger has pointed out, WG1 (data) is still “science” for the moment.

WG2, (effects) is entirely politicized and is the source of the BS you refer to as it is where the synthesis report comes from.

Synthesis is a great word by the way, openly acknowledges the way this garbage is manufactured. In plain sight, as it contradicts the data.

As I have mentioned, if the data collected by WG1 shows no trends outside normal variation then EVERYTHING coming out of WG2 is fraud.

Whom do I sue?

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I can’t get as worked up as the readership seems to be over this list. Here’s my admittedly glib “hot take” on these “scandals”.

The Interns made a “Dataset”…: perhaps a scandal in economic science and scientific publishing circles but not climate science.

Alimonti Retraction…: Roger admits that the “paper broke no new ground”. Probably another failure of journal editorship but not climate science.

Major Error in the IPCC: Roger admits it was one of confusion and misunderstanding. Not so sure about it being a “major” error. Would the thrust of the report be different if the issue were addressed?

Billion Dollar Disasters…: Roger’s correction has been published so this is a case where normal science is self-correcting as it should be.

A Love Affair with Extreme Emissions Scenarios: This is the most serious scandal on the list. But the root cause is a failure of economic science, not climate science.

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You surprise me, but at the same time your comment shows how they get away with such things.

“Alimonti Retraction…: Roger admits that the “paper broke no new ground”.

It was retracted because people complained about the optics. How can you not see that is a major, earthshattering issue?

Retracting a paper with no factual errors because it contradicts the narrative.

“Major Error in the IPCC: Roger admits it was one of confusion and misunderstanding. Not so sure about it being a “major” error. Would the thrust of the report be different if the issue were addressed?”

The entire is issue is it has not been corrected, and it would change the entire report.

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I have to say that your comment is a glaring example of complete lack of understanding of what the scientific process is supposed to be. Please tell us how many papers in the climate catastrophism category have been retracted (by the publisher!) for “not breaking new ground”, let alone for coming to absurd conclusions?

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Right?

🙄

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Roger, this is a very depressing article. When scientists have no real interest in truth, we are indeed in a heap of trouble. We NEED guys like you and Steven Koonin to speak the truth despite the attacks and falsehoods. If you guys don't champion the truth, who will??? My belief in science as a self-correcting endeavor where ultimately the truth comes out has been badly shaken over the last few years. Keep up the good work!

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Roger, it's time to start your own online scientific paper magazine, with the high standards and integrity you would expect, and then 'real' scientists will have a way of getting the truth out. Eventually your magazine will come to be respected and valued, and then the others will have to change or die. The only reason the Springers of this world can do what they do is because they have no relevant competition. Think of it - you have no need for a physical printing plant, you have access to the best scientific talent in the world, and your substack will only grow if it becomes the locus for high-quality research papers.

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Surely a supreme contender for the most important scandal would be the hockey stick, a clear case of proven fraud with the substitution of temperature readings for the period when the tree rings had begun showing an opposite trend (not to mention the slanted statistics giving a hockey stick shape about 300 times the weight of any other shape, as found by Steve McIntyre.

There is also the imaginary "hot spot", with a figure in every IPCC report showing the heat in a ring surrounding the planet at 20 or 30 km up. (Not sure about the actual numbers here). Some millions of weather balloon, airplane, and satellite measurements show no hot spot. As one of my professors at Caltech used to say, "It doesn't matter how many people believe a theory--if it does not match observations, then the theory is wrong."

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The theory says they will be a lower troposphere hotspot, and yes it doesn’t exist.

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founding

The duplicity (my word not yours) of Kerry Emanuel and Zeke Hausfether came out loud and clear in a couple of these scandals. It doesn't appear that either of them has taken umbrage at being called out at THB. On the other hand neither has attempted to correct the record.

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Roger, I would nominate the transition from the Working Group reports to the IPCC Summary for Policymakers as a top scandal, compounded by the silence of the Working Group participants regarding that transition.

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I think they addressed that by changing the word “summary” to “synthesis” to indication it’s manufactured nature in support of the narrative.

With so many western governments proposing and implementing laws about misinformation, Antonio Gutierrez is going to have to arrange an escape to Russia or China to avoid an eventually jail sentence, that guy is a walking font of nonsense.

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Al Gore's movie An Inconvenient Truth deserves an award for displacing reason with fear porn in this debate. The movie set an emotional, anti-reason tone that fertilized the ground that grew the scandals.

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My vote for Worst Scandal is #4. If you’re a “Scientist” like Michael Mann and you see some peer-reviewed research in a scientific journal that you don’t like, you go to the editor and post a Comment, using facts and reasoning to make your point. Then the authors of the original paper might do a Reply, you write a Rejoinder, etc. what you don’t do is go out and get the original paper retracted! After all, Mann et al. are forever telling us that “The Science Is Settled” and that they have “mountains” of evidence to support their Catastrophe claims. OK, then, why not marshall all this evidence and write a truly devastating piece that would bury Alimonti et al. (and any other “deniers”) once and for all in full Public View? Surely the MSM would back you up to the hilt. But no, far easier to just get the original paper retracted and just eliminate scientific debate instead of engaging in it. Truly disgraceful. Mann’s done stuff like this before and is more and more emboldened to do it again.

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Because there is no data and everytime there is a public debate the alarmists lose, the realists always win because data is on their side.

So instead they have to gatekeep at the journals and attack when something slips through, they push for censorship and now for laws to make it a crime to deny their fantasies.

As per the old lawyer joke, if you have nothing, pound the table and scream.

These guys all have sore hands and hoarse voices.

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I nominate, for Honorable Mention, the Himalayas glacier disappearance scandal. This false narrative spread fear and despair throughout the Indian subcontinent with its prediction that the major rivers which these glaciers feed, and on which Indian life depends, would soon disappear due to climate change. Utterly irresponsible.

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Beg Pardon, that should be Dishonorable Mention.

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