Dutch Agency Admits Mistakes In UN Climate Report 447
Hugh Pickens writes "The AP reports that the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency has taken the blame for one of the glaring errors that undermined the credibility of a seminal, 3,000-page UN report last year on climate change, and disclosed that it had discovered more small mistakes. However, the review by the agency also claims that none of the errors affected the fundamental conclusion by a UN panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is happening and is threatening the lives and well-being of millions of people. The Dutch agency reported in 2005 that 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level, when only 26 percent is. The second previously reported error claimed the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035, which the Dutch agency partly traced to a report on the likely shrinking of glaciers by the year 2350. The original report also said global warming will put 75 million to 250 million Africans at risk of severe water shortages in the next 10 years, but a recalculation showed that range should be 90 million to 220 million. The analysis said future IPCC reports should have a more robust review process, and should look more closely at where information comes from."
Re:"Redefine what peer review means" (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:2, Informative)
220 million people, not years.
It's not one small error (Score:2, Informative)
Fortunately WGI was put together significantly more reliably, and each section is typically written by the top scientists in their respective fields, and includes both scientists who are smeared as 'believers' and 'deniers.' I say it is fortunate because WGI is such a convenient way to educate yourself on the scientific issues surrounding global warming, it would be bad if it were similarly corrupted.
Re:truth still getting it's boots on (Score:4, Informative)
Erm I kinda like having my computer with its internet connection.
Ok, so you like your computer to be on all the time. Try to make allowances in other places in your life.
Oh wait. Wind and solar power cant produce enough power to keep them going? Bye bye internet. Do you realise how much power Google uses alone?
Google likely uses a lot of power. However, wind and solar do have lots of power capacity. Wind has 5x the current world capacity (theoretically). 20 seconds, Wikipedia. In a directed study, like the UK, they predicted about 50x their power demands. This doesn't even count solar, tidal, geothermal. Also, why you do think that a transition to renewable energy and improving efficiencies and standards (such as CCS) would suddenly cause existing power generation and infrastructure to blow up?
Remember that these idiots are wanting to ditch coal power, refuse to use nuclear (wtf?) and if everyone cant power their lives off a small pinwheel then your being wasteful.
Sounds like a bit of a hyperbole. From my experiences, nuclear has more proponents among environmentalists who see it as an appropriate measure to move towards renewables and away from coal than among the anti-AGW crowd.
If you want to make more legitimate criticisms, look towards energy density of storage and transportation mediums, as an example. Also, invest in companies that do battery research.
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:5, Informative)
Your analogy fails, to fix it there would be two sections to the college research paper, one that deals with scientific sources and the other that includes other sources such as the media reports and public opinion. Wikipedia turns out to be a pretty good jumping off point for the second section, though any good professor would still likely mock you for stopping at Wikipedia.
How about "more than 0.1%"? (Score:5, Informative)
The IPCC report contains over six thousand factual assertions. Only 3 or 4 have been shown to be inaccurate, and they're all to do with the implications of GW. Not one of the assertions supporting the causes of AGW have been demonstrated to be inaccurate.
The errors in your comment show a serious lack of quality in your own research, and it sounds more like you've been believing in someone rather than trusting and verifying.
Re:The greater problem (Score:4, Informative)
"Oh there's a far greater problem, it's people like you willing to whitewash inaccuracies and the inability for people to review the data used to reach the conclusion they claim is accurate."
Which. Fucking. Inaccuracies?
We're talking about several errors in a giant report. How do you imagine that they can change the very BASICS of the climate science?
Do you suggest that ALL climate scientists are members of a global conspiracy ring, spanning more than a century and more than 300 countries?
"If you can't peer review, it's not science. If you're theory cannot actually predict anything but the past, that's not a good theory and you need to go back to the drawing board."
It fucking can. IPCC predicitons from 1988 come true today, and they are statistically significant.
Hell, even Arrhenius' predictions from 1890-s are correct (within their margin of error).
Go on and study climate science before making stupid remarks.
Re:26% below sea level (Score:5, Informative)
Basically most of it was salt water marshes and lakes that we drained. Fortunately we are not living anywhere near a geological active region, nor do we have a rainy season or trouble with hurricanes. A lot of the world is not as lucky. We've spend oodles of money and time into building dikes and such. We are a highly organized, rich country. You cannot just take our solution and implement it anywhere else.
You won't even believe what we have to do to be safe from newer threats that come from the changes in climate. Basically we have to make all the dikes a lot higher. The chances of floods from rivers is much higher and the sea dikes were not build with higher water levels either.
BTW, fun fact, Schiphol was a lake, so when you land, don't forget that the runway already is 3m below sea level - and the train station is much lower than that :)
Just for reference-- this is not physics (Score:5, Informative)
Just as a quick reminder, this report is talking about errors in the Working Group II report (the effects of climate change), and not the Working Group I report (the physical basis of climate change).
The errors discussed here don't call into question the physical basis of the fact that adding carbon dioxide to the atmosphere increases the greenhouse effect; they have to do with the question of what the effects of the warming will. (And even there, I'll point out that the WG-II errors in question are from misquoting the research, or in quoting sources that don't refer to actual research at all-- they don't seem to be errors in the original science sources.)
It's easy enough to get this confused, since most of the media reports don't distinguish the reports-- don't even seem to know that there is not just one report being discussed.
Re:lol (Score:5, Informative)
The changes aren't just not driving an SUV. It is things like not driving at all. Not being able to buy food in plastic packaging and only buy food that is grown within 100 miles or so of where you live. Things like starting to put people to work demolishing freeways in California so the space can be used to move people closer to where they work - no more driving, no more freeways, etc.
Do you begin to understand the magnitude of the changes that are actually required?
How about a simple one? Assuming the immigration influx into the US continues and the building of new powerplants continues on the rapid pace it has for the last 40 years (like none at all), you can expect that we will be running out of electricity commonly. We have to make some hard decisions about offices and homes - and telecommunity isn't a solution. If your refrigerator won't keep food cold for a day without electricity better think about getting a new one. If your pets can't live without air conditioning, time to start thinking about an aquarium instead.
Sure, we could supply the entire country's electrical needs from solar cells in Arizona and Nevada. Except, who is going to keep the protesters out of the meetings where the new transmission lines get decided on? Nobody? It is their right? Well, then you can forget about new transmission lines because way, way too many people "know" they cause cancer, impotence and all sorts of other bad things. So they will not be built and solar cell farms in Arizona and Nevada will never be built, just like the huge wind farms in Texas - because the electricity cannot be transferred from there to the cities where it is needed.
Re:Before people scream consistency... (Score:5, Informative)
> Well actually, overstating by 200% the amount of land underwater in a small country is not really a "small" error.
yeah, it's about as serious as overstating the difference between 26% and 55% by about 100%.
hint: 55% is just over double 26%, not triple. so it would be an ~ 110% overstatement, not 200%.
hint2: anyone can make simple mistakes.
> Some of the other errors are small, true. But it's hard to put a lot of faith the conclusion is correct when so many other little things are wrong.
see, that's the thing. you don't put "faith" into the report. science is not about faith, it's about evidence and reason. faith is belief despite evidence or even despite the evidence. instead, you examine the evidence and analyse the rationale and the conclusions and decide a) whether they are consistent, logical, and rigorous, b) whether they match observed reality, and c) whether, over time, they are shown to be a good predictive tool for future observations of reality.
Re:New Campaign! Stop cretinous fools! (Score:4, Informative)
The CRU methodology has been completely cleared by three independent inquiries comprised of experts in the field, and their data fully vindicated.
Claims that the integrity of the data has been "lost somehow" show a lack of understanding of the statistical analysis methods used throughout the physical sciences. Claims that are all the more ironic when coming from the denialist crowd, whose accusations of "faked science" are riddled with obvious selection bias (exhibit A: the "cooling decade" argument referenced by the GP).
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:3, Informative)
Your apocryphal story about Winston Churchill is a retelling of an actual occurrence...but George Bernard Shaw was the man asking the question of the lady.
Re:New Campaign! Stop cretinous fools! (Score:5, Informative)
Actually, you are correct. But that doesn't mean what you hope it means.
For political reasons the actual projections were toned down and made milder, largely by excluding models that projected faster or more extreme warming. Then they averaged the remaining projections.
Now one can argue that this makes the report invalid, but I don't see how one can say it makes it overly dramatic.
One could argue that the models are invalid. I hope you are correct. But they have been validated by predicting past results in order to obtain some estimate of how accurate they are. All current models suffer from two kinds of error:
1) We don't have enough data, and
2) The models have been oversimplified to make it possible to run projections on available computers. Using all the factors and data we have available would result in models that ran in much slower than real time.
So ALL of the models are oversimplified, and known to be so. Sorry, that's the best we can do.
P.S.: I am not associated with any author of the report or any of the models used in the report. This post is a synopsis of things that I have read in the popular scientific press.
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:5, Informative)
There are four volumes in the report [www.ipcc.ch], the report of which you speak uses "grey material" from goverment, industry and private sources that cannot be found anywhere else. In this case they used a government source for the percentage of land below sea level, unfortunately the Dutch govt got it wrong but that is about impacts and has nothing to do with the science. The scientific volume (WG1) only uses peer-reviewed sources and nobody has yet pointed out any errors in WG1, in fact the people who pointed out the 2035 error were contributors to WG1.
Note the prominent link directly above the reports to their statement about the 2035 mistake. The IPCC is widely recognised by scientific institutions as one of the most robust peer-review exercises ever conducted and it has been forthright about recognsing it's mistake but if your expecting perfection from a large bunch of humans over a 20yr period you will be dissapointed.
Re:"Redefine what peer review means" (Score:5, Informative)
As many posters have said about the IPCC, you should try checking the primary source to find out if your adopted claims are factual or political.
Re:And if you go back... (Score:2, Informative)
it's about putting the numbers in relevant context and the rate of change in the system.
looking at the temperature since the big bang is just as foolish as looking only at 1998+.
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:2, Informative)
The scientific paper (WG1) is different than this paper. The scientific paper discussing potential changes in temperature and sea level have been peer reviewed and HAVE NOT been found in error in any way.
The paper that is referenced is a different one, trying to understand the POLITICAL consequences of the concluded changes. These errors were made in this document, which by it's stated purpose, would use "grey" material from non-reviewed sources in order to try to build a broader picture.
The conclusions ARE NOT in question here, merely the potential political consequences.
Make sure you understand the difference.
Re:Redefine what selection bias means (Score:3, Informative)
Global air and sea temperatures are on average going up, and have been doing so for decades.
On geological time scales, pointing to "decades" is just as misleading as pointing to "decade".
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:5, Informative)
Again, the paper in question was not investigating the scientific basis of the climate change, that paper has never been found to have significant errors.
This is a DIFFERENT section of the report, which is designed to use "non-scientific" input in order to ascertain a POLITICAL impact of potential changes that were concluded in the scientific paper, separately.
Try to keep them separate, because they are.
Re:New Campaign! Stop cretinous fools! (Score:3, Informative)
Here is the raw data [noaa.gov], go and do some calculations and get back to us if you find a trend that significantly deviates from the accepted 0.14degC/decade.
Re:The greater problem (Score:2, Informative)
Wow, that's amazing. Except for the "right wing bloggers" part, you did exactly what he said. Because of inaccuracies in some calculations in the IPCC report (aka non-base science) and inappropriate quoting from a non-report, you're attacking the underlying (aka base science) reports. At best what can be proven is that those who worked on the IPCC report either failed in their duties in writing the report or had some underlying intent to deceive. Either way, the base science stands.
I'm not sure how pandering to us about our "very level-headed about technical matters" really matters in this discussion. Or are you simply trying to imply that /. is just as crazy as all the anti-AGW groups? That sort of gross guilt-by-association (or praise-by-association) is personally bullshit to me.
Um, it was peer reviewed. Perhaps you don't understand what peer review means? Peer reviews is review done by peers (think something like "jury of one's peers). Ie, it is presumed that what data is reported is accurate to the best abilities of the submitter, the testing methodology was followed, and the only issue is things like verifying the correctness of equations and the conclusion (as well as possibly duplicate testing to see if there were failings in the methodology such as too small of samples, the environment, faulty equipment, etc). So, the only reasonable basis that there'd be such consistent data and conclusions between various peers while the data and conclusions are actually wrong are either (a) a grand conspiracy to deceive, (b) consistently faulty equipment, (c) not enough samples, or (d) a fundamental lack of understanding of the methodology and how it would produce results of the kind seen. None of the above mentioned seem very probably because work has been done for decades to try to see if any hold true, and there have consistently failed to be any remotely strong leads to suggest any hold true. The only thing really left much is (a) and that seems more based in those with an agenda than any real search for truth (with claims that data is manipulated yet without giving a reason why everyone in the field would either not notice it (perhaps they're all idiot savants) or would willfully conspire to achieve it (odd why we should believe from one group with an agenda and no actual evidence how the other group has an agenda too, but they're the wrong ones (because no matter what evidence they provide, it's still not enough to clear them that they're not somehow hiding something))).
True enough. And, oddly enough, global warming does and has predicted the future. Global warming suggests a simple point: more greenhouse gases, all other things been equal, results in an overall rise in temperature of the planet. And the data bears that out.
Beware the mirror-image projection (Score:3, Informative)
So sad. So pointless.
We will destroy this world, because of our ignorance.
Re:Insult (Score:1, Informative)
The priests don't mind being insulted. It's when they're being insulted for either entirely bogus or painfully trivial reasons that they get irked. For example, complaining about part of a report not using primary scientific sources when ... that part wasn't supposed to use only primary scientific sources and it specifically said so.
Putting it more bluntly, the "priests" will chuckle over a good, deserved insult as much as anyone, but these ones are just pathetic. No cookie.
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:2, Informative)
Re:And if you go back... (Score:1, Informative)
Yes. And as you're going down a ski slope covered with moguls you'll find that you might be going up or down at any one instant, but on average you're going down. Likewise if you ski off a cliff or into a wall. It's all just up or down. If you've skied on moguls, it's no big deal to go up or down, right?
The point is: scale and rate matters, not merely the direction of change.
People on all sides of the global warming debate have been known to abuse the vagueness of providing only a direction of change, or a magnitude without a time interval.
So the question remains: are we skiing up the slope of a gentle mogul or into a wall?
I'm fairly familiar with the geological history of climate change. The rates we have experienced over the last century are pretty impressive on a scale that considers other events over the last 60 million years or so. It's Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum [wikipedia.org] fast (6 degrees C rise in ~20k years) or worse than than those numbers. Even if you lowball 0.5C/100 years for the last century that's a lot faster than 6C/20000years, and the upper extreme on the IPCC report projections is the whole 6C comparable to the PETM in the next century. It's freaking scary if the rates over the last century were sustained for another century or so. The only consolation as a geologist is that I know it won't be the end of the Earth or life on it even if it is that bad (some life thrived during the PETM). Unfortunately this says nothing about how human agricultural and other systems will manage that kind of climate change. Many human civilizations were historically pretty fragile when it came to more modest climatic changes. It could be interesting.
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:5, Informative)
Sorry, that myth has been comprehensively debunked. Here is one of many debunkings written by climate scientists:
climate-myths-we-cant-trust-computer-models [newscientist.com]
The climate models I am running on climateprediction.net [climateprediction.net] begin in 1820. They do that to correlate the various models with the climate record since 1820. Only models that show a good correlation are used to predict the future. There are plenty of links on the site showing this correlation, take a peek.
Re:So true! (Score:2, Informative)
Source [pnas.org] (via wikipedia [wikipedia.org]).
You're right, it appears I was exaggerating. The actual consensus seems to be closer to 97-98%.
Re:And if you go back... (Score:1, Informative)
If you pick 1998 as the year to start, then yes, temperatures have declined from that extraordinary El Nino weather pattern.
And, if you go back to the end of the last ice age, you'll also see a warming trend. Long before the industrial age and man-made CO2 emissions.
And again, if you go back to the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch, you'll find that the Earth has cooled since then.
What's your point?
The point is the earlier changes were of natural causes. Natural causes do not seem, by all our best investigations, to be the cause of recent rapid warming.
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:3, Informative)
Re:So true! (Score:1, Informative)
How is it rational to instead believe the only possible alternative conclusion; that 98.5% of climatologists must be deliberately falsifying their conclusions in a global conspiracy to mislead the public for nefarious but unstated purposes?
Regardless of the science, this argument is akin to saying "Millions of Elvis fans can't be wrong." The fact that an overwhelming majority agrees doesn't make something automatically right; it just means that the overwhelming majority agrees. Or are we going to say that God automatically exists because the majority of Americans believe he does?
One person with the correct data can come to a better conclusion than millions with incorrect data.
(And before my point gets lost, this applies to virtually everything, not just global warming.)
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:3, Informative)
The error was not in percentages, but in what to include.
55 percent is at risk of flooding, but more than half that because of rivers. 26 percent is at risk from flooding by sealevel-rises alone.
Re:It's not one small error (Score:3, Informative)
If only you understood the things you took such trouble to comment on.
Your complaint is that the WGII contains non-peer reviewed non-scientific materiel. That is its goal and its charter.
Sky blue today. Film at 11.
Re:And if you go back... (Score:3, Informative)
If you pick 1998 as the year to start, then yes, temperatures have declined from that extraordinary El Nino weather pattern.
And, if you go back to the end of the last ice age, you'll also see a warming trend. Long before the industrial age and man-made CO2 emissions.
And again, if you go back to the beginning of the Pliocene Epoch, you'll find that the Earth has cooled since then.
What's your point?
The point is that picking a window at a precise point in the past 10 years does not have any predictive power on the time scale we need answers on. Your other bogus examples are similar: We do not need predictions about what will happen at the end of the Eocene or the end of the next glacial period. We need them for the next 50-100 years, so we look at time scales that are 1-2 order of magnitude larger. More importantly, we want results that do not depend on carefully chosen endpoints (like 1998). You can vary the starting point of any of the observed temperature records of the last 500 years and find that the vast majority of the trends are nearly identical and do not match the 1998 "trend". This is called "statistics" Go read up on it.
Re:Before People Scream Conspiracy... (Score:3, Informative)
The reason I have bolded Antartic is because the seasonal sea ice there is totally different in it's behaviour to that of the Artic sea ice (except for the coastal areas around Greenland).
Now back to the list. To quote your lobbyist site's own list we have "Himalayan glaciers, African agriculture, Amazon rainforests, Dutch geography, and attribution of damages from extreme weather events" = five, six if you accept the drivel about Antartica in the article. According to WP - "As of October 2001, Knuth reports having written more than 2,000 checks".
Some examples of what I would consider "credible" in this context...
1. The journals Nature, Science, Physical reviwew letters, or some other scientific journal of international repute.
2 An internationally regconised scientific organisation such as NASA, NOAA, Royal societey, CSIRO, WMO, National Academies of science, or simalar.
3, A tier1 university that has published in the field. And I mean the university itself not just one crackpot with tenure.
A blog from a well known industry shill [wikipedia.org] is not even in the same game, let alone the same leauge as any of the above.
At the risk of repeating myself, linking to Pat Michaels, climateaudit, wuwt, etc on the subject of AGW is analogous to linking to the Discovery Institute site on the subject of evolution. You need to apply some of that admirable skepticisim to the claims, motivations, logic and citations of your own sources and figure out what it is that convinces you that blogs run by, (or closely associated with), known lobbyists are a credible source of scientific information when every single one of these very credible scientific organizations [wikipedia.org] clearly disagree.