Bishop Hill Is AR5 finished before it begins?
Sep 5, 2011 Climate: IPCC Journals Roy Spencer has penned some further thoughts on the campaign being waged by the Team and he is worried:
We simply cannot compete with a good-ole-boy, group think, circle-the-wagons peer review process which has been rewarded with billions of research dollars to support certain policy outcomes.
It is obvious to many people what is going on behind the scenes. The next IPCC report (AR5) is now in preparation, and there is a bust-gut effort going on to make sure that either (1) no scientific papers get published which could get in the way of the IPCC’s politically-motivated goals, or (2) any critical papers that DO get published are discredited with any and all means available.
And it's hard to disagree with these ideas; the stench of corruption from climatology is quite overpowering. However, the conclusion that the battle is in danger of being lost, I'm not so sure about. I still wonder if the Team haven't gone too far this time.
I suggested on Twitter over the weekend that the Remote Sensing affair demonstrated that the peer review process in climatology is now so corrupt that even if the IPCC was staffed by angels there would be no chance of a balanced assessment of the science: even-handed reviews can't create balanced assessments of the sham that is climate science. Richard Betts begged to differ, saying that there was only a perception of bias, and one that didn't reflect reality.
It's a possibility I suppose. We might assume that:
- when the Team said they would get rid of von Storch and he subsequently resigned this was just a coincidence
- when the Team discussed getting rid of Saiers and he was subsequently removed from responsibility for the McIntyre/McKitrick paper, this was just a coincidence too
- the non-appearance of McKitrick and Michaels' paper in AR4 drafts was not connected to Jones' suggestion that he would keep it out of the review
- Wagner's resignation was a reasonable response to a blog post at Real Climate
- etc.
But, you know, I'm just not sure how many coincidences like this we can be expected to bear.
The thing is that even if Richard is right and there isn't much of a problem in the peer reviewed literature, there is still the problem that peer review and the IPCC not only need to be even-handed, but they need to be seen to be even-handed. With the Remote Sensing affair, that possibility is now long gone. Who is going to believe a word of AR5 now?
Reader Comments (75)
"Who is going to believe a word of AR5 now?"
BBD and Zed, I suspect.
Andrew
The politicians will want to believe AR5. They aren't prone to u-turns and admitting errors when all those green taxes are at stake and their relatives and cronies are making money.
Bad Andrew...Bad Boy..Don't feed or even encourage the trolls please.
Remember:
We don't need it,
It needs US
And if you encourage it, it wins!
Much water has passed under many bridges since AR4 was published and uncritically accepted by many credulous people and organisations.
AR5 will receive a far less adulatory reception and will be minutely and very publicly dissected before even a single word is allowed free passage.
The authors had better be prepared for a grilling.
Phillip Bratby, as he often does, puts his finger on the problem.
The politicians will want to believe AR5; the NGOs will move heaven and earth to make sure that only their version of things reaches the ears of the politicians through the Summary; the media will happily regurgitate the press releases.
Only when the observations diverge so far from the models that no-one can with any credibility use the models as an argument will there be any re-thinking.
Hi Latimer
Yes we are! I don't have a problem with that, goes with the territory.
This includes Hans von Storch by the way, he's a lead author on WG2.
threads tend to flare up and fizzle out too fast at BH. Don’t miss Robert Phelan’s comment (Sep 5, 2011 at 8:39 PM) at Critiques & responses, summarising Maurizio, Lucy and Les Johnson
Hi BH
The climatology literature is so vast and complex that it would be impossible for one small group of individuals to control it, even if they (allegedly) wanted to.
But you are absolutely right that the process must not only be even-handed, it must be seen to be so.
Hi Mike
If any NGO tries to twist what I write, I'll blow the whistle here...
Richard
I hope we won't be forced to hold you to that! :-)
Richard Betts
With the best will in the world it would be difficult to accept anything from the IPCC. In my opinion, that body has been completely discredited on numerous occasions. Please explain what has changed since AR4.
Same chairman
Many of the same players
Very little change(if anything) in the rules.
Vast majority of recommended changes ignored.
Grey literature acceptable (meaning great contributions from greenpeace).
No consensus.org has masses of information on many of the people who will play a part in AR5 and most of the information is detrimental to those participants.(e.g. conflict of interests)
Not really much reason to expect a balanced report really.
One really too many methinks
“If any NGO tries to twist what I write, I'll blow the whistle here...”
Richard Betts (Sep 5, 2011 at 9:16 PM)
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/29/climate-change-scientists-4c-temperature
Damian Carrington: “A hellish vision of a world warmed by 4C within a lifetime .. millions of migrants seeking refuge as their food supplies collapse.. A rise of 4C could be seen as soon as 2060 in a worst case scenario, according to research ... led by the Met Office's Richard Betts..”
Is that really what you meant?
Richard Betts:
or how about this one?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/nov/28/cancun-climate-summit-weather
“Climate change will cost a billion people their homes, says report”
“British scientists will warn Cancún summit that entire nations could be flooded”
Robin McKie:
“Researchers such as Richard Betts, head of climate impacts at the Met Office, calculate that a 4C rise could occur in less than 50 years, with melting of ice sheets and rising sea levels”
or this?
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2009/sep/28/met-office-study-global-warming
“Met Office warns of catastrophic global warming in our lifetimes
• Study says 4C rise in temperature could happen by 2060
• Increase could threaten water supply of half world population”
David Adam:
"We've always talked about these very severe impacts only affecting future generations, but people alive today could live to see a 4C rise," said Richard Betts, the head of climate impacts at the Met Office Hadley Centre, who will announce the findings today at a conference at Oxford University. "People will say it's an extreme scenario, and it is an extreme scenario, but it's also a plausible scenario."
According to scientists, a 4C rise over pre-industrial levels could threaten the water supply of half the world's population, wipe out up to half of animal and plant species, and swamp low coasts.
Richard Betts:
By simple juxtaposition, your name, and that of the Met Office, has been associated with “a hellish vision” of millions of migrants, collapsing food supplies, billions of people losing their homes, threats to half the world’s water supply, the disappearance of half the world’s species, and the flooding of entire nations.
4°C in 50 years is 0.8°C per decade, starting yesterday. Where is it? Is the answer like that of Noel Coward in “Private Lives” concerning his honeymoon: “It hasn’t started yet” ?
To be honest I think AR5 will be the AGW proponents bitch, to put it mildly.
However that does not mean it will have any effect , as the political will which moves this particularly ship has gone out of these sails . I would expect a lot of grand sounding statements followed by the words , 'urgent need for further review' followed by nothing much at all for long time and for AR6 to never see the light of day.
There is fact at least two wars going on the one in the science and in the politics , the irony being the last is the most important and AGW proponents may have lost it by accident. With the economic downturn killing any real will to support costly ideas based on some 'precautionary principle ' while the public's stomach unable to eat the sort of 'flights of fancy' fine when the economic was good but total unpalatable when times are bad .
Now how funny would be the IPCC killers being bankers , amongst them some who looked to make vast money on various carbon scams .
geoffchambers
The coverage of my own talk, which can be heard here, is accurate. I didn't discuss impacts - that was done in the other talks. I don't agree with all of them, and some of that was discussed at the conference. I do agree that the impacts could be very serious, but you are right that I would not align myself to the phrase "a hellish vision".
For the sake of IPCC credibility, or whatever is left of it, one should hope that AR5 is not full of hyper-alarmistic screaming of the type been cited in some of the comments. Up to now, such alarmism has mostly backfired, both in informed circles, in public opinion and in policy agreements and decisions. Witness the sorry state of the Kyoto-Copenhagen process, the rise of skepticism in the public, and the increasing lack of political will to follow the "mitigation path" on the part of governments. It is not by screaming louder or announcing ever more disastrous possibilities that credibility will be regained.
Hector M.
I couldn't agree more.
Hector, Richard
The tone can be as moderate as you like, but it is still an assessment of literature that is biased by issues of gatekeeping and probably funding too.
What I am interested in seeing is if Mann08 or Mann09 will appear in AR5. We know Mann would be a bit vicious if they are left out. Yet if they are included, AMac may well end up testifying in Congress.
To this, I would add,
- that the Democrats knew about von Storch's resignation as editor-in-chief - and presented this news at the US Congressional hearing - when the Republicans did not.
- that this detail was repeated by Michael Mann in one of his emails
- that it is this very set of emails that his erstwhile University has fought tooth-and-nail to prevent disclosure of
- that Trenberth is the Chairman SSG of the organization GEWEX, whose cooperation is sought by the Vienna University of Technology for the International Soil Moisture Project of which Wolfgang Wagner is a part of
shub,
standard Team Tactics
move along, nothing controversial here
I posted that as a test , something is wrong here, anyone else having difficulty posting?
Richard Betts (Sep 5, 2011 at 10:30 PM)
Thanks for your clarification. When the Guardian similarly traduced His Grace’s position, he asked for and received a right of reply. Since the Guardian has, in three separate articles, associated your name with a number of lurid unlikely predictions, I’m sure they’d be only too willing to afford you the space to correct their exaggerations.
BH
I disagree. You overestimate the potential to influence a vast literature - do the maths, there are dozens of journals and hundreds of papers coming out all the time, anyone seriously trying to influence a significant fraction would have a full-time job and hence rapidly cease to maintain their own scientific profile.
AGW science is based on coincidences. What else would we expect?
And I have my very own personal experience with "peer review" for climate science: a paper submitted to Nature, approved by both peer reviewers and then discarded by an Editor. No, I won't ever bother again.
Richard Betts Sep 5, 2011 at 11:34 PM
"and hence rapidly cease to maintain their own scientific profile."
With all due respect I think that later in life you may reflect upon that comment and its relationship to "the greatest threat ever to mankind" at the time at which you made it.
Sep 5, 2011 at 11:34 PM | Richard Betts
Richard, I usually appreciate your contributions here and your willingness to engage, and I do learn (OK, maybe glacially, if you'll pardon the allusion) but your argument here is the first step in a logical chain that ends with "...and only kooks believe in vast conspiracies". It would be more than a full-time job for one, but it really is more than one, isn't it? For you, climate research may be just science, an immensely satisfying way to earn a living and make a contribution, but for many, many others CAGW is a social movement. Has it never bothered you that the solutions hyped by people like Paul Ehrlich and John Holdren are the same solutions to problems they were proposing before warming became an issue?
I have stood outside the doors of a classroom waiting to teach my class and listened to the professor preceding me denounce climate change deniers and warn that New England autumns were soon to be a thing of the past. There are willing tools everywhere. It is a social movement and controlling the literature is a lot easier than you think.
Maurizio Morabito
You did well to get as far as it actually being reviewed - most Nature submissions don't even make it past the initial editorial sift. (No conspiracy there - they are just vastly over-subscribed and only pick the most exciting papers!)
Given that the Nature editors thought it noteworthy enough to send to reviewers, you should have done the usual thing on rejection and tried Science, then GRL or PNAS.... :-)
Richard - not everybody is paid to try and try submissions around during working hours.
I do not believe in conspiracies. But the fact that at my one and only attempt (in this field - I have published research in other fields) I pass both reviews and stumble against an unwilling editor, doesn't signal anything good for trying to publish elsewhere either.
To be 100% clear...if the paper is reviewed by Nature, and both reviewers agree it should be published - after some changes, of course - then my science is good. I can be sure of that, I do not need any additional evidence.
If the paper is then rejected by the editor despite of that (because of "limited interest" to the readers even if one of the reviewers said otherwise, and we were sending a brief communication responding to a prominent article that nobody else has ever responded to) - then I know I am not fighting in a scientific field no more.
It's a matter of editorial bias and if it's there at Nature, it's likely to be there at Science, GRL, PNAS and many other places.
And nowadays at Remote Sensing too ;-)
Richard Betts
The IAC made several recommendations to the IPCC.
A descrete invitation to Dr Pachauri to withdraw before AR5 was concluded, which he totally ignored.
They recommended that non peer reviewed material should be highlighted in AR5, a proposal which has been quietly shelved.
They recommended that an executive committee be formed with three independent members from outside the climate community. The committee was duly formed and the positions filled by the usual suspects.
How can we have any faith in such a body which makes up the rules as it goes along and is indifferent to any external scrutiny.
If I'm not mistaken, AR5 is still a couple of years away. There are a lot of elections between now and then with pretty serious changes in US government political control not unlikely. There have already been moves afoot in the US House to stop funding for the UN's environmental programs that control the IPCC process because its seen as a rigged game. The standing of the IPCC is substantially degraded already and any veil of impartiality is absolutely gone. There are grass roots movements in several countries that have arisen because of proposed climate legislation. (Recall the angry town hall meetings in the summer of 2009 just one month after the passage of the Waxman-Markey bill in the US and the convoy of no confidence in Australia.) When AR4 came out it had gravitas. When AR5 emerges, it's conclusions and recommendations will be predictable and likely ignored.
--------------------
The difference now, since AR4 was issued, indeed is that "it is obvious to many people what is going on behind the scenes"; to many many more people; to very outspoken and personally motivated people. For broad segments of modern culture there is no longer a sufficient reason for a benefit of doubt attitude toward AR5 or the IPCC.
With all due respect, Richard Betts, neither your word nor climategate involved Tim Osborn’s (now lead author AR5) word is sufficient to provide any confidence in the IPCC; given the scientific, structural and institutionalized flaws shown by both the recent and long history of the IPCC.
AR5 is already still born wrt to scientific objectivity and integrity. It never had a chance at representing an open and transparent product of the scientific process. Business as usual for the IPCC is AR5’s obituary.
In typical bureaucratic fashion, the IPCC chugs on not realizing it is an organization that is like the proverbial ‘dead-man-walking’.
John
The example worth examining in the light of this current fight is Lindzen & Choi 2011, as documented by Dr Curry here.
In that case PNAS chose to throw out its well established peer review policy for just that paper. When the initial reviewers were not to their liking they imposed two more reviewers which were not approved of by Dr Lindzen, in flagrant and, as far as I understand it, unique breach of their own policy.
Drs Lindzen and Choi did not wait to be given the run around, but published their paper in another peer reviewed journal.
It is worthwhile considering this in respect to AR5. If the paper was rejected or delayed by PNAS then the IPCC could have ignored it. Because of the PNAS strange behaviour and that the paper has been published in a timely manner by a peer reviewed journal the IPCC cannot now ignore it. Yet Dr Lindzen has shown to all the world the unjustifiable bias of the PNAS. If the IPCC does ignore it then the IPCC will be shown likewise: how could they not consider L&C 2011 yet embrace Greenpeace produced grey literature?
This is why the arguments are so painful now - if both S&B 2011 and L&C 2011 must be addressed in AR5 then that is all she wrote for the giant CAGW edifice.
No one is likely to take AR5 seriously. Not even the political thugs who will screech and scream that it means the end of the earth is nigh. The IPCC is thoroughly corrupt and beyond redemption and everyone knows it.
The UN which sponsors it is the most corrupt institution on the planet. The procedures used by the IPCC are corrupt. No one interested in legitimate communication of science would issue the policy summary months before the actual science assessment. That the IPCC does tells you all you need to know about the lack of seriousness about the science and the extent of the commitment to the politics.
The failure of the IPCC to enforce its own rules on transparency demonstrates how corrupt it is. The absence of a conflicts of interest policy does. The refusal to adopt one after being publicly embarassed about it by the IAC speaks volumes.
Everything the IPCC chair has told us about it turned out to be false.
And now we know that scientists who have been exposed as dishonest and corrupt will continue to play major roles in the next assessment.
No serious person charged with the responsibility to assess the state of the science on a given topic would proceed in the manner with which the IPCC approaches climate science. From the formulation of the question in the beginning, the IPCC has been on path to failure. Now that everyone has figured it out, let's just bury it and move on. Pretending it's not dead is less entertaining than a bad movie and wastes a hell of a lot more time.
@Richard Betts
"anyone seriously trying to influence a significant fraction would have a full-time job and hence rapidly cease to maintain their own scientific profile."
It does seem a large undertaking, but we do know there are people working close enough to full time editing Wikipedia pages for goodness sake. There is a full time information offensive in progress on climate topics, why wouldn't it be extended to journals? Especially as all that is really required is the "right people" editing.
From the Ecclesiastical Uncle, an old retired bureaucrat in a field only remotely related to climate, with minimal qualifications and only half a mind.
Richard Betts I am sorry, your stance looks increasingly Nelsonian to me. Telescopes and no ships seen, I fear.
Stan. Potted history. For all realistic purposes, it is not the UN that sponsors the IPCC and is responsible for its corruption. It is governments. They adopted the green religion to replace leftist ideologies that had occupied the moral high ground from the great war until the 1980s. It served them well – irrespective of old style politics, all of them found they could climb up there. They wanted policy based on the religion to be solid and well founded, of course, so created the IPCC to help them clothe it in science. Aspiring to be good managers, they wanted to make sure they get value for money from the IPCC and so ensured they see its reports before publication. So they get what THEY want. And so far scientific closure has not been achieved, and, if my estimation of the traffic on this blog is right, does not look like being achieved soon. So the IPCC has had to resort to giving out crude polemics dressed up as science and will probably have to continue to do so.
There is no point in grumbling at the IPCC - they really do not understand what a complaint about a report can be about. If it pleases governments that is the end of it.
Bang away at governments!
Richard
This is an interesting point about whether there really is control of the journals. Obviously most sceptic authors think so and as I pointed out elsewhere, the authors of the Climategate emails think so too.
Why do you think that Jones et al believe that the literature is closed to sceptics? Why do you think there is not a problem.
I take a different view from Richard Betts (you surely didn`t utter the drivel quoted by geoff chamberlain, surely you must have a green evil twin) about the IPCC and so do some eminent scientist in the field. It has been high-jacked by green activist scientists. There doesn`t have to be a conspiracy if everyone has the same politico/religious beliefs, because everything that is done for the "cause" looks eminently sensible to the "believers", you know people like our own Richard`s evil green twin.
The first stage is the selection of papers for consideration. There are two approaches that we have evidenced to this. (1) Papers that cast doubt on the orthodoxy are simply ignored. This is relatively easy to do as the doubters are known by name, so their papers can be scrutinized to assess whether they will damage the cause and discarded accordingly. (2) Where papers are accurate and high profile so that ignoring them will cause a controversy a second paper is produced which all agree refutes the findings of the first paper and so it is "legitimately" rejected. Amman and Wahl 2006/7 anyone?
http://pielkeclimatesci.wordpress.com/2010/04/29/documentation-of-bias-in-the-2007-ipcc-wg1-report-part-i/
Have a look at the above.
Once selected the IPCC then sets about reading the papers and producing a synthesis report on the papers, and I would be the first to admit that in this respect WG1 at least is a tour-de-force, notwithstanding the exclusion of papers that might cast doubt on the orthodoxy, there are many honest scientists working hard to understand the climate and produce a good report telling how bad it will be. The thousands of scientists involved work very hard and I mean that and are, and I`ll repeat this, just trying to do a good job. Moreover, in the spirit of the times they try to avoid using up energy and emitting CO2 into the atmosphere by having long conference calls and email debates and are forced to fly to Tahiti, Bali, Tanzania, Hawaii and the like to slog away t preparing the reports in stuffy air-conditioned hotels with miles of milky white sandy beaches in clear view from the conference rooms.
When the reports are finished they are bound up in a 3000 page document that will remain unread by 99.99999999% of the human population, so a Summary for Policymakers is Produced by the inner circle of each WG. This lays out in gory detail all the things that are going wrong with the climate and how it is all the fault of humans. In it scenarios are described that would make the Four Horsemen of the Apocolypse decide to return to the stables and unsaddle their steads because their work has been done. Ice sheets that are in, and will remain in, temperatures of -40C are described as melting. Arid deserts will spread worldwide. Famine and pestilence wllll stalk the world unhindered by any human intervention. Vast tracts of the earth`s surface will disappear under the melting ice sheets, species will die out (have they not read Darwin?) and won`t be replaced. Nothing will go right, and the only thing that will stop the rot is the dismantling of the western industrial civilisation and the imposition of swingeing taxes on energy consumption.
Of course the policy makers don`t read the SPM, they call in the experts to tell them what it says. So these completely unbiassed green activists tool along to Whitehall and translate the SPM for the policy makers. "It means reducing carbon footprints." (Scientific experts unable to detect the difference between C02 and C. Why don`t they call water, oxygen, it`s the same logic of removing two atoms from the molecule). "And become vegetarians, of course. Maybe a suspension in democracy because the mob won`t accept our claim for authority over the way they live their lives."
The hapless Jim Hackers sit in despair and then out of the fog of gloom and doom they hear six little words that clear the fog and bring out the sunshine, put a spring in their step, a song in their heart and a bloom on their cheeks. "You will have to raise taxes".
These six little words instantly put the budget aside for the next round of scientific exploration, what more could a government want from the scientific community than a perfect excuse to raise taxes. The circle is complete and we move on to AR6.
There is a conspiracy, conspiracies don`t necessarily involve secreet meetings and plans, they just need like minded people to take over an institution and the rest follows automatically. In this case the key issues are the selection of the papers and what goes into the SPM. Both depend on a very small number of people.
There is the output of tens of billions of Dollars and Euro of taxpayer' money, in that respect you are correct.
That hardly make it a robust structure, but the most elaborate house of cards, built by a small unionised nepotistic workforce.
Just some timely grist for the mill in the context of Richards Betts comments about the amazing weight and diversity of research that makes it so difficult to get papers published in climate science.
6 weeks from conception to actual publication.
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2011/09/06/hot-off-the-press-desslers-record-turnaround-time-grl-rebuttal-paper-to-spencer-and-braswell/
DOesn't seem so hard after all, does it. ;)
A small observation.. Richard
Damian Carrington went to the Walker Institute
(part of AVOID, Hadley Centre, Grantham, Walker Institute @ Tyndall, who advise DECC, and others) at Reading University to give climate scientists advice about 'communicating science' I did ask to go but it was full....(i did ask very short notice)
26th Jan 2011 Damian Carrington, Guardian and Observer Why scientists must talk to the media!
http://www.walker-institute.ac.uk/events/seminars/index.htm
Maybe the scientists should Tell the MEDIA - Carrington, etc, Guardian, not to equate climate scientists with 'visions of hell' that they do not support..
or is the 'silence of the lambs' tacit support, as it is perceived to be seen, well it will help persuade policymakers make a decision..
That's how the 2035 'glacier mistake' got left in, known to be wrong, but for that reason.
Richard Betts
It seems incredibly naive to imply that no matter what the claims of alarmist influence on climate science that this is counteracted by the fact the great mass of publications is too great to control. The only reason to say this seems to create some tacit assumtion that this means the great mass of "vast literature" somehow symbiotically self communicates and drives policies without human intervention!
How is a reasonable chap like me supposed to take that with a straight face when we often see the clear evidence of a way to undermine that ideal with, for example, the prima-donna displays from Wagner and Trenberth?
The corruption of the peer review process is not the only way in which attempts are made to silence sceptical voices. Remember how Bjørn Lomborg, author of The Skeptical Environmentalist, was reported to the Danish Committees on Scientific Dishonesty?
Galileo would have recognised the tactics of "the Consensus."
@ Richard Betts
The climatology literature is so vast and complex that it would be impossible for one small group of individuals to control it, even if they (allegedly) wanted to.
Oooh, I don't know. Think of how many - or rather how few - people control the contents of the Bible, the Koran, the Book of Mormon. What these all have in common with climate psyence is that they have dogma, heresy, and a priesthood to decide the one and detect the other.
Climatology is far better understood as a religion than any other way. This approach also completely explains why so few associations of anthropologists are signed up to CAGW.
Richard Betts
There are a number of routes through which pressure might be exerted on what I'll call a "marginal sceptical scientist". This is someone who has not yet chosen their field of specialisation, perhaps is
not tenured, and doesn't have a "brand name" of significant publications.
1. Funding. It is suspected that funding for research likely to be unhelpful to the AGW hypothesis is hard to come by. Our marginal sceptical scientist might not get his work funded.
2. Academic politics. Having seen the way Abrahams went after Monckton, or the pursuit of Wegman, I think it's clear that there are a minority within academia which view sceptics as vermin to be eliminated. This might well have a chilling effect on the MSS.
3. Publication delays. It's clear that sceptical papers get the run-around in peer review relative to AGW papers. This means that each scientist man-hour on pro-AGW science is possibly 10 times as productive in producing published papers. Since it is a maxim that scientists must "publish or perish", the MSS might be deterred simply by the prospect of publication delays destroying his/her career.
All these forces skew the peer-reviewed literature.
This is all aside from biased peer-reivew publication recommendations.. Do you accept any of these points?
And only a fraction of the total literature is devoted to core issues. The rest of it is calculated from that basis - which includes the IPCC's just-so stories on 20th C temperature variation.
We all know how the IPCC works and that, it is part of the most corrupt, venal, fraudulent bunch of kleptocrats on the planet, probably in the firmament....you know who I mean...... yes! I give you: the UN.
One world government, agenda 21, etc etc.
So, to AGW - in it's original design a political agenda in its entirety, ring Jim at GISS and throw Billions of dollars at it and at the IPCC. Where you get together a bunch of 'on message' ads and lasses, thus with the agenda preset , "we set out on our scientific odyssey" and [of course!] filter out any
background noisenay sayers and real investigative science.Lemon Squeezee peasy as Easy, as peer review.......Jonesy, Mickey - all your mates work at it, then run it by - Romm, Connolley, Wiki and Al Goracle et al just to make sure too.
Wow and Bobs your uncle at Grantham Institute, if Jeremy and the EU approve, then wake Pachi up and get him to sign off and: send off to the printers.
Hey Presto AR5!