EXCERPTED
An unofficial, "Independent Summary for Policymakers" (ISPM) of the IPCC Fourth Assessment report has been delivered by the Fraser Institute.
The Fraser Institute has assembled an awesome team of 10 authors, including such RC favorites as tilter-against-windmills-and-hockey-sticks Ross McKitrick, and other luminaries such as William Kininmonth, MSc, M.Admin. The London kickoff event will be graced by the presence of "noted environmentalist" David Bellamy (the world's glaciers are advancing.)
1) FRASER SAYS: "A further problem is that the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM) attached to the IPCC Report is produced, not by the scientific writers and reviewers, but by a process of negotiation among unnamed bureaucratic delegates from sponsoring governments."
......This statement (charitably) shows that the Fraser Institute authors are profoundly ignorant of the IPCC process. In fact, the actual authors of the official SPM are virtually all scientists. A common accusation at the time of the Third Report was that the SPM didn't reflect the science in the rest of the report. A special National Academy panel was convened at the request of President GW Bush, to consider this and other issues. The Panel found no significant disconnect between the SPM and the body of the report. The procedure followed this time is not in essence any different from that which has been used for previous IPCC reports.
2) One of the strangest sections of the Fraser Institute report is the one in which the authors attempt to throw dirt on the general concept of radiative forcing. We have never before heard people who purport to be scientists write off the whole utility of "Conservation of Energy." ......Radiative forcing is nothing more than an application of the principle of conservation of energy, looking at the way a greenhouse gas alters the energy balance of a planet. From what is written in the Fraser report, it is not even clear that the authors understand the first thing about how radiative transfer calculations are done.
3) On climate of the past millennium, the Fraser report misrepresents the recent National Research Council report , which concluded quite the opposite of what the Fraser report claims it concluded: The National Research Council, like the official SPM, affirms that recent warming really does appear anomalous in light of the past millennium. The Fraser report obscures this point by cleansing the recent period of warming from their graphs.
4) The Fraser Institute authors also raise the curious objection that models have not been "formally proven" to be suitable for predicting the future. We are not sure what it would mean to "formally prove" such a thing (Kurt Gödel, are you listening?), but the specific objection raised in the Fraser report makes no sense: the authors suggest that the number of tunable parameters in models is so great that it may exceed the degrees of freedom in the data being "fit."
5) The Fraser report states that "The IPCC gives limited consideration to aerosols ..." whereas aerosols have been a key part of the scenarios since the Second Assessment Report, were the key to explaining the interrupted mid-century warming, and cannot in any way be mangled so as to spuriously give the warming of the past decades.
6) We'll leave off with a quote. "most places have observed slight increases in rain and/or snow cover" ......Actually, consulting the draft of Chapter 4, snow cover kinda looks likes it's been decreasing, not increasing. But take a look at the artful use of "and/or". The sentence is not "formally" wrong. Superb!
Stumble It!
That endless cornucopia of spin intended to make the "rape, pillage, and plunder" dogmas of the scientifically illiterate business class the accepted mindset of all REAL Canadians.
Seriously, based on the amount of spin these guys generate you should be able to hook them up to a generator and get virtually limitless amounts of power.
---
"and the knowledge they fear is a weapon to be used against them"
"The Weapon" - Rush