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CREDENTIALS_IPCC

                                             November 6, 2015
                                             
                                             CREDENTIALS
                                                                                       


The IPCC is of course the gold-standard for climate
change information, at least for us nominally
reality-based folks (strangely enough, our conservative
friends struggle with going along with the infamous 97%
consensus among climate experts...).

             [link]


 "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) assesses
  scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the
  understanding of climate change, its potential impacts and options for
  adaptation and mitigation. It is open to all Members of the United
  Nations and of the World Meteorological Organization (WMO)."


Cribbing from wikipedia one more time,
to get an idea of how it all works:        [link]

  "Historically, the IPCC has been organized into three
  working groups, a variety of task forces or special
  committees, and a small secretariat in Geneva."

This goes on to discuss in some detail how the IPCC uses peer
review:


    "The IPCC’s technical reports derive their credibility
    principally from an extensive, transparent, and
    iterative peer review process that ... is considered
    far more exhaustive than that associated with
    scientific journals. This is due to the number of
    reviewers, the breadth of their disciplinary
    backgrounds and scientific perspectives, and the
    inclusion of independent 'review editors' who certify
    that all comments have been fairly considered and
    appropriately resolved by the authors."

I think it's interesting that the IPCC operates without any
sort of "poster boy": there's no leading scientist associated
with what they do, and in fact I think most of use would be
hard-pressed to think of a single scientist that contributes to
the effort. The IPCC doesn't need the prestige of any one name
associated with it (though conversely, there is some cachet
with being associated with the IPCC... Benjamin Sovacool's bio
mentions that he's a contributing author, for example).

Another bit from that Rod Adams post, "Appealing to the
hearts and minds of the people at APIEL":
                                                               [link]
any power source except fossil fuels are excellent
ways of reducing GHG emissions.  An odd feature of
that graph though is it shows some estimates for what
can supposedly be done with fossil fuels plus carbon
sequestration, and the projected reduction in
emissions for fossil fuels look really
remarkable. Biopower+Sequestration is the big story
there, I'd say: hypothetically this could become a big
carbon sink.

Anyway, back at the "main subject", which is the evaluation
of a position based on credentials... the case that Rod Adams
describes does indeed seem like an excellent example of a
case where the greens trumpet statements by the IPCC when
they agree, but quietly slink away when they don't.
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