Climate Change Minister Penny Wong told The Australian there was little point doing anything about Australia

I wonder why that should be?

No, blogging is about every single citizen on this small planet having a voice that cannot be censored or silenced. It is about meritocracy. Write shit and get no visitors.

No wonder they hate us so much. I’m off to eat a dolphin.

IPCC 2007 WG#2 Report, Chapter 10, ‘Asia’, page 493 (of the entire report), pdf available at http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/assessment-report/ar4/wg2/ar4-wg2-chapter10.pdf:

“Glaciers in the Himalaya are receding faster than in any other part of the world (see Table 10.9) and, if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the current rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present
500,000 to 100,000 km2 by the year 2035 (WWF, 2005).”

I wonder how many of you know that at the top of the immediately following page is a table with figures that demonstrate that the 2035 figure is badly off target. That table does, though, show that the glaciers are receding, which is itself, coupled with the fact most glaciers in other areas of the world are also receding, evidence of global warming. I’ve never seen one of the denialists mention that table (perhaps some do somewhere), which is kind of peculiar except that they’d rather pretend the 2035 is part of some conspiracy rather than an error in the editing process.

As to any intent to deceive, well, if the IPCC wanted to deceive people into thinking the Himalayan glaciers were going to disappear by 2035, putting on the next page a table that demonstrates they won’t would not be the first thing they’d do. Someone didn’t catch the mistake. A mistake, BTW, which doesn’t make it into the summary for policy leaders or the technical summary.

Typically, denialists work by claiming that any error on the part of a scientific enterprise or theory means the whole thing is wrong. They pick at nits because any major scientific enterprise will be big and scientists are not infallible so there’ll be errors and things that they change their minds on later. As Dara O’briain says ‘Of course, science knows it doesn’t know everything. If it did, it’d stop.’ However, where there is a huge amount of evidence for a theory, like evolution or AGW, it takes more than nitpicking to bring it down.

Blogging is excellent for a lot of things, but one of the things it is best for is nitpicking, taking things out of context, preaching to the like-minded and self-congratulation. Like all sorts of things, it has its good and bad points and it comes down to how it is used. Its use to promote AGW denialism isn’t the bright shining moment of blogging.

Genuine debate over the validity of data or the correctness of methods is a essential part of science, so those don’t count. (And mindless repetition of Climate Audit’s false accusations against Michael Mann going back to ca 2003 should also be excluded.)

The IPCC does not do research. If you want to see the real science, you should go to the literature, as scientists do.

The IPCC attempts to summarise the results of the ever-growing body of climate research. Its reports involve papers by thousands of authors and anyone can contribute a review. It’s not surprising that errors can creep in. The Himalaya glaciers business has attracted attention only because it was an error – it was a minor part of the report of Working Group 2. The fact that this small thing has been blown up is a striking demonstration of the lack of evidence on the part of the ‘sceptics’.

When it comes down to it, the science deals with the hard reality of the physical properties of matter and radiation. These don’t pay any attention to the self-absorbed ramblings of political bloggers.

The Prison Reform Trust put out its press release and issued its briefing and what Jamie Doward has done is plough way the bullshit to get to the heart of the story.

It’s the story of the next general election. Prisoners have taken the fight to Parliament. Votes or else! It will cost the taxpayers

Want d’you want us to do? Go and put a match under the glaciers to speed them up a bit and prove your point?

This shows starkly the difference between the trivial, superficial, reality-avoiding, gossip-driven world of political blogging and the reality of science. Science does not depend on “iconic statements”, it depends on a long, hard slog of finding data and testing theories, through the work of thousands of people and exposing your work through publication. The anti-AGW bloggers have never engaged in real science. They are political bloggers looking for “icons” to dismiss.

The vast amount of published research that was sampled by the IPCC – and has continued since the last IPCC report – is unambiguous: human-created global warming through the generation of CO2 is real and is continuing.

David, it is clear to me that the number of gatekeepers who control the data sets on which all other scientists base their research is small enough, with a sufficiently large vested interest in the acceptance of AGW and with a very biased position that makes it possible that even if there was not an active conspiracy to falsify the data, there was at least a motivation to ignore data that they didn’t like and to massage the data that supported their theory to support it even more. There have been a number of reports of CRU ignoring data sets from colder regions to reduce their effect on global average temperatures. Having trawled through the leaked files myself, there are a number of things that could certainly be interpreted as at best, inappropriate comment and at worst, a conspiracy to prevent their theory (because that’s all it is) from being challenged. If there was nothing to worry about, they would simply release the raw data (not the “corrected” data that the Met Office has released) and people could apply the code to the data themselves and it would all be proven, conspiracy theorists like myself would be shut up and we could then move on to the discussion about what would be the best way of addressing the situation.

But when you cannot even clearly show a rise in temperature without “correcting” the data, then I don’t really care what you think of me, I do not trust what I am being told.

Competitiveness has been an element of science ever since Newton & Leibnitz quarrelled about the invention of calculus. It may (hard to say) have got worse as a result of idiotic numerical ‘productivity’ targets imposed by politicians and vice-chancellors. I thing that the vice0chancellor of UEA should resign immediately for his mis-handling of events there, None of that alters the facts that hundreds of labs throughout the world are really not very likely to have got together to deceive the populace.

The people who who seem to doubt the basic facts or warming remind me of so many homeopaths or reflexologists who, every time someone points out that they are talking gobbledygook, invoke a great conspiracy to stop their brave attempts to persuade the world that you can cure malaria with a drop of water.

Statements like that made in this post

“The iconic statements fell like dominoes, the Amazonian forests, the Himalayan glaciers, the Polar Bears, . . .”

represent the worst sort of unchecked irresponsible tabloid journalism.