Debunking climate change denialists on the IPCC

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has come under quite a bit of fire recently, thanks to numerous reports about sloppy science, poorly sourced articles, typos, and various other assorted “mistakes”. The recent pseudo-scandal of the hacked Climate Research Unit (CRU) emails, known as “Climategate” certainly didn’t help matters at all, serving only to fuel more conservative ire over the “lies”, “propaganda” and even the “hoax” of man-made Global Warming/Climate Change. Of course, the last thing any of these “Global Warming skeptics” (though “denialists” is a far more accurate label for most of these cranks) care about is the science, for anything that contradicts their ideological nonsense about how everything is just fine an’ dandy just has to be wrong, and those who push such news must all be dishonest charlatans or incompetent fools.

One thing that’s reliably consistent about these sorts of “scandals” and outbreaks of reports on supposed errors and sloppy science work is how they always end up refuted, sooner or later, by actual climate scientists (such as at the great Real Climate) who make a damn sight more sense than any of the so-called “skeptics”. And, once again, this pattern has come to repeat itself (as all good patterns do): rather than let yourself be taken in by all these accusations of bad science and mistakes and cover-ups and yadda yadda yadda, take the time to check out this excellent debunking of these crazed claims over at the SpeakEasy blog at AlterNet.

This headline, from Sunday’s Washington Post, is factually inaccurate:

Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda

You could read the entire article that follows and come away with no idea that there have in fact been zero errors identified in the UN climate change panel’s science.

[…]

What the reporters don’t tell their readers is that there have been no errors, no typos and certainly no “sloppy citations” in the panel’s reports on the science of climate change.

Here are the basic facts: the IPCC has three working groups. Working group one evaluates the science of climate change. They’ve found overwhelming evidence — irrefutable scientific evidence — of man-made warming.

Working group two is not made up of climatologists. It is an inter-disciplinary group evaluating the human impacts of climate change. Its members are drawn from biological and social scientists.

The social sciences simply don’t employ the same standards of citation as a physical science like climatology. It’s common for social scientists to use so-called “gray” literature — articles, news reports, reports put out by think-tanks — while climatologists rely only on peer-reviewed scientific literature.

There you have it. Yes, there were mistakes and some faulty research in the IPCC reports – but none of these were made by actual climate scientists. If anything, the climate scientists themselves are just as incensed by these mistakes and inaccuracies as is anyone else, seeing as how the fallacies in the Working Group 2 (WG2) report serve to undermine their own, irrefutable and faultless science and findings.

Is it really any surprise that social scientists, who are not bound by such rigorous and nearly foolproof fact-checking measures as are physical scientists, could have committed a few errors here and there, errors that weren’t caught until the reports were released? To put it quite plainly and simply: they’re only human, after all. And when you take the human factor and remove such things as the intensive fact-checking process of peer-review, well, some inaccuracies are always bound to slip through … to be caught, and brought into sharp and hysterical relief, by cranks and denialists.

I only quoted some relevant excerpts from the source article, above, for the sake of length. Read the full thing for a fuller and more detailed explanation of how all these cranks screeching “secrets and lies!” are either wrong or dishonest (though, of course, they tend to go for both).

(via @todayspolitics)