Global Warming – IPCC and the Fourth Assessment Report

*REPORT ON THE IPCC: FIX IT OR NIX IT, so to speak. I have published a report through the UK Global Warming Policy Foundation that reviews the assessment procedures of the IPCC and makes a series of recommendations for reform. The report is available here. I have also published an op-ed in the Financial Post describing the report. The report would have been an important point of discussion in any case, but in light of the release today of the  Climategate II emails, it is even more timely. 


Chris Essex and I talk at length about the IPCC and its deficiencies in our book Taken By Storm. 

I also discussed specific criticisms of how the IPCC operates in the following presentations, one of which became a book chapter and the other appeared in the Canadian Journal of Agricultural Econonomics.

CONFERENCE ON RECONCILIATION IN CLIMATE CHANGE: During the last week of January 2011 I was at a conference in Lisbon on the theme of Reconciliation in the Climate Change Debate. We were each asked to submit a 2-page note ahead of time. I had no idea what to submit, nor did I know who would be there at the time I accepted the invitation and made my submission. The note I sent in is here. In the end, the conference discussion went off in other directions and little note was taken of what I said. Before submitting it I deleted the words Carthago delenda est from the end of the last paragraph, but as it turns out I probably wouldn't have had much argument on the point from most of the people there. 

IPCC FOURTH ASSESSMENT REPORT: I was an expert reviewer for the AR4. I found a lot of the report was fine and indeed well-done. But there are, so to speak, two IPCC reports. One is the large number of chapters and sections that describe the climate topic in all its complexity: limitations of models, ambiguity of data, difficulty of explaining changes, uncertainty over basic ideas, etc. Little of that material makes it into the widely-read summaries. The other IPCC Report is the AR4 material on surface temperature data, paleoclimate reconstructions and “attribution”. These sections are heavily spun and the Summary for Policy Makers then draws primarily on them. It seemed to me last year, in advance of the release of the IPCC Report, that there was a need for an Independent Summary for Policy Makers. Fortunately I was able to find a high quality group of contributors to work on it, and the Fraser Institute agreed to publish it. Our ISPM was reviewed by 65 experts, and unlike the IPCC we tabulated their responses. I remain convinced that if both the IPCC SPM and our ISPM were assessed by all the members of, say, the American Meteorological Society, ours would be given higher marks. I still use it as a reference guide to the IPCC Report.
During the preparation of the ISPM there were a number of topics we decided to explore in more detail since the IPCC ignored or downplayed them altogether. That led to the book:
It's an approachable but technical treatment of 8 important issues the IPCC either ignores or gets wrong.



At the time of the release of the IPCC Summary, Newsweek contacted me for an interview. By the end of it, the editor I spoke to decided they could not really fit what I had to say into a story, and they invited me to write a column instead.
In Fall 2007 I gave a talk at a conference sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research, where I was a respondent to a presentation by David Henderson entitled "Governments and Climate Change Issues: the Flawed Consensus." In my remarks I discuss a series of examples drawn from my observations acting as an IPCC reviewer which, in my view, establish a disturbing pattern of bias on the part of the IPCC. I also explain how I think it should be fixed.