2006-02-10

Tripe on TCS

Warning! Don't read on if you've already seen enough septic tripe demolished. But if not... JF points me to The End Is Not Nigh? Johns eagle eye had spotted:
Ironically, just as global warming scare-mongering reaches new heights, the global cooling hypothesis is making a come back. It should be recalled that the frightening images of imminent global warming disaster are of fairly recent vintage. After all, in the 1960s and 1970s various prominent climatologists held the view that it was not global warming that formed a mortal threat to humanity but global cooling.
This is traditional septic tripe, there is probably a plug-in for Word to auto-generate it. The traditional answer is http://www.wmconnolley.org.uk/sci/iceage/. More recently, a novel answer of http://www.realclimate.org/index.php?p=94 has become available. Who is writing this tripe? Hans Labohm, co-author of Man-Made Global Warming: Unravelling a Dogma, recently became an expert reviewer for the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Aha! He has become an expert reviewer for IPCC! Obviously a man of some status (isn't it funny how even the septics still cling to IPCC as the gold standard?). However, IPCC expert reviewer means little. I'm one too (err...). All you have to do is nominate yourself. It implies no great expertise. Though of course people of expertise do become reviewers... Why is he writing it? Probably because he has just written Man-Made Global Warming: Unravelling a Dogma. Published by... Multi-Science Publishing Co., Ltd, UK. And where have we heard of them before? Aha, yes: E&E. Sigh. As for the rest of it, there's nothing much worth noting, except that he asserts that "various renowned scientists have distanced themselves from the IPCC", and puts Hans Oerlemans in this category. This is odd; Hans was a lead author for FAR, SAR, TAR and even that bogey-man of the septics, ACIA (see his page). And given his recent Science paper the assertion seems even more odd. Probably septic desperation.

2020 update: the IPCC has finally put out a note, including "because the review is essentially open to all through a self-declaration of expertise, it follows that having been a registered expert reviewer does not by itself serve as a qualification of the expert or support their credibility in a different context" (h/t PT).

6 comments:

William M. Connolley said...

Commenting my own post. Anyway, I mailed Hans, and he said the article was "Pure nonsense" (the TCS one, not mine :-))))

Anonymous said...

William, wrt Oerlemans and the IPCC, I imagine the TCS author might have been looking at a few complaints from: http://www.vn.nl/vn/show/id=45983
(in Dutch so you might need to babelfish translate like I did)

Anonymous said...

(I should have warned you though that the translation leaves a bit to be desired)

Anonymous said...

You might have overdone "septic." All your Google ads are for various septic system services. Maybe you should stick to the more traditional "nazi."

William M. Connolley said...

Csea: I think I've seen that page mentioned elsewhere; though as I recall his remarks were ambiguous. I couldn't get babelfish to translate the page, even badly: perhaps you could post a translated URL? Anyway, Landsea has definitely walked out in a very public huff, so HO hasn't done anything comparable.

Meanwhile, yes, I do seem to have a lot of ads for Septic Tanks. Sadly, google tells me that no-one has felt tempted to click them :-(

Anonymous said...

I had the same problem trying to translate the url, so just copied and pasted it's text into babelfish. Here are the complaints I was referring too: (again, the translation isn't great but you can get the idea)
(snip)
"To the Intergovernmental panel on Climate Change (IPCC) that once in the four years with a report comes that dé standard for everyone who be absorbeds in climate change are no longer participate he. THE IPCC ` have become, find too political he. Also with the report Arctic Climate Impact Assessment (ACIA), concerning the state of the arctic area, is Oerlemans not satisfied. He made the chapters concerning hydrology and glaciers, but that was also immediately the last time. ` as lot of have been manipulated. He shows two satellite photographs satellite photograph of greenness country, made in 1992, and in 2002nd ` these blades say nothing. It are two moment prerecordings. A cold and warm winter, which lies occasional ten years from each other. From that you cannot conclude that the temperature increases. But I know people who say on the basis of that satellite photograph: over thirty years the ijskap is gone"
(snip)