Friday, April 16, 2010

Sure, let's talk IPCC.


Over at Dr. Dawg's, his co-blogger John Cross brings the smarts:

The latest attempt to discredit climate science takes the form of another assault on the IPCC Assessment Reports. A group of people have gone over the IPCC references and have found that there are a number of non-peer reviewed references in the document.

Some of these provide a good example of why context matters, for example they identify one of the non-peer reviewed documents as an article from Newsweek written by Peter Gwynne. How does the IPCC use this document? They use it as an example of early work published in the media which later turns out to be wrong...

... while it would be amusing to look at the the details of the assessment, it is all moot. The key point is that the IPCC does not claim to use only peer reviewed literature. This is clear from the document Procedures for the Preparation, Review, Accpetance, Adoption Approval and Publication of IPCC Reports in which Annex 2 specifically deals with how to use non-peer reviewed material.

And then you have the truly stupid people, for whom actual reading and comprehension will always be someone else's burden.

Stephen Taylor must be so fucking proud.

1 comment:

Metro said...

Even were they capable of comprehending the difference, this revelation wouldn't stop them from presenting non-peer-reviewed "evidence" as "proof."

I feel strangely confident in writing that.