http://www.wanderingeducators.com/best/traveling/crying-himalayan-meltdown.html

Sean’s required reading

Apparently Sean also failed to grasp the irony of Milton’s statement, which directly preceded his. Oh, and he missed that the issue he’s trying to dredge up has already been settled….and he lost.

Instead, he’ll stay on in disgrace and will further taint the IPCC’s future reports.

It’s a pickle no doubt about it.

In the end, this is a very traditional European manner of governance that US people find very unpalatable. It’d downright: monarchlike, top down, obscure, arrogant, distasteful, non democratic and just plain corrupt.

Keep at it UN, every day we find more problems on why the UN should NEVER assume the role of global governance:

- oil for food corruption
- WHO corruption (with the whole H1N1 fiasco)
- World bank corruption

and now

- IPCC corruption

We the people are watching

You’ve got the original statement by Hasnain, the science journalist repeating it, the WWF repeating that, the IPCC making the statement, the IPCC using WWF as a source, the IPCC not tracing the source to its origin, the IPCC not checking the primary literature, or indeed looking at some numbers on glacier sizes and recession rates and doing a bit of basic arithmetic, you’ve got the the lead authors who are collating the works of authors, and indeed authors generally checking one another’s work, you’ve got the – thousands? – of reviewers who were all given the entire document in several drafts, and all supposed to check all of it, and when a couple of reviewers did query it (the Japanese did) the author team was supposed to respond to those comments and should have checked it, and the lead author should have checked that all review comments had been properly responded to, and then when published, glaciologists and other scientists, relying on it for grant proposals and public outreach, should have noticed it, and the error evaded all these multiple layers of checks for *years*.

For the simple reason that the process above – what was *supposed* to happen and what everybody says did happen, was not what happened.

People trust the experts. And a scientist in a different field will trust the expertise of the specialists. So what was happening was everybody was skimming over the bits they weren’t sure on and thinking it was OK because somebody else surely had already checked it. Surely nobody would put such a dramatic and startling headline statement in unless there was good evidence for it, so it got a pass. Every single time. And each time it was missed was a separate mistake.

The problem is not that one single mistake. The glaciers issue is important and politically very significant, but not in this case critical to the edifice. (Although it *is* possible for even a single error to invalidate an entire theory.) The problem is what it tells you about the IPCC process. It is telling you that some, and for all you know most of the document is effectively unchecked.

Which is fine until you start taking it as an authority on the grounds of its thorough peer-review standards and checking procedures – as being a consensus of thousands of scientists. One guy can miss it. But how can those thousands *all* make the *same* mistake, one after another?

That’s why arguments from authority, and consensus, are foreign to real science.

The quote appears no where on this blog excpet in your comment “quoting” the previous comment.

Except,t here is no previous comment. It doesn’t exist. You made it up.

Here it is, just as you drafted it and “quoted” it:

“Stop your selfrighteous preaching, bilbo. The tobacco industry has been just as demonized by ’scientists’ as the fossil fuel industry with these ’scientists’ false allegations about smoking causing cancer. There’s a lot of money available if you’re a scientist perpetrating a hoax in either field.”

If you want to try to defend yourself from the charge of fabrication, all you would have to do is provide a link showing where the “comment” appeared.

But you won’t because you can’t.

If the only way you can convince people you’ve won an argument is to tell them you have at the top of your lungs….then you probably didn’t win it to begin with.

There are more than a couple regulars on this site who might benefit from that little nugget of wisdom, Milton.

You are one to be respected! You have begun to see the light!

No further coment but to leave my fellow posters with this..

http://igloo.atmos.uiuc.edu/cgi-bin/test/print.sh?fm=01&fd=27&fy=1980&sm=01&sd=27&sy=2009