Scientific Rigour: The IPCC on Climate Change
The latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change publicly published science based conclusion is that there is no statistically significant indication that anthropogenic global warming is the main or a statistically significant contributor to climate change**.
A Summary:
Standard scientific procedure for peer reviewed papers, scientific research, thesis data, ... ie anything that is meant to be scientifically credible, is that for results to be taken as indicative that something is indeed happening, they meed to be statistically significant. Statistical Significance for a normally distributed population is deemed to occur when the area in the tail of the curve "to the right" of the observed result is smaller than 0.05 of the whole tail area. This is stated as P=0.05 or less.
If the result is P=0.1 then the conclusion would be something like "indications of significance" or "trending towards significance" etc. ie the data does NOT support the premise, and Murphy and reality says that it may very well be just one of those things, but there are strong clues that something may be going on. But if the next time around you found that the P value had increased you wouldn't be at all surprised. As anyone tossing coins will tell you.
The difference between P=0.1 and P=0.05 may seem close (only 2:1) but that can be a vast gulf in the real world. Crawling down the probability tail starts to get really hard as the numbers get small.
Now, the IPCC are *the* international body most interested in finding that anthropogenic* climate change is a reality. (* ie caused by people's activities). ***
To this end they employ scientists who KNOW that this is so and who set out to prove it. That's not of itself wrong, but it's risky. A snowball in hell would have a cushy ride compared to a Global Warming doubter working for the IPVBV. ie ALL IPCC scientists are highly persuaded of the outcome of what they are investigating. That's not wrong per se but ...
And, when IPCC look at data they reject data which is obviously wrong. They correct figures which are biased due to factors which may make the data show the incorrect results. That also is not wrong per se. That happens all the time all over. But there is the grave risk of 'confirmation bias' - that which you know is the truth becomes that which you see.
So, with the best will in the world you can expect that IPCC scientists will be somewhat biased towards a GW outcome and the data that they use will have a degree of bias towards a GW conclusion. That's life - it doesn't mean they are crooked or liars or data manipulators or whatever - although it's highly probable that some are, as that's how things usually go in any large system.
AND the IPCC in the last year or so published their latest conclusions from a several year study of all the latest (vast) data available and research done and all.
Their conclusion was, and is, that the premise that global warming is principally caused by anthropogenic causes had a P value of 0.1 ie - at this confidence level you wouldn't get your thesis past the examiners, your results would fail peer review checking, the experiment would be interesting but inconclusive etc.
AND that's with the very very very best efforts that they can get away with to try and come to the conclusion that all the populist media say that they have come to. But they haven't.
This is NOT to say that anthropogenic causes are NOT the major reason for climate change. That is NOT to say that we should burn hydrocarbons as if there was no tomorrow. That is NOT to say all sorts of things. What it IS to say is that the emperor has no clothes on. The vast majority of the worlds climate scientists have abandoned their scientific positions and thrown their lot in on a hunch. They are saying that they think that in this situation it's more important to ignore the data and the experimental results and go with what they think is happening than they would in almost any other situation. Populist desire has won out over scientific rigour. In the long term it may be that ongoing research will prove that the researchers were right - their hunch was correct and the science was wrong. The methods that they demand for peer review, tenure, papers, theses and the rest were found wanting and 'this is how we think it will turn out' proved correct.
BUT I suspect, and that's all that I can do, that in about 30 years time the results we see are going to make a whole generation of scientists look like a pack of lying idiots who sold their birth right for a mess of pottage (ah - wrong religious theme, change back ... ;-) ). About then we will descend from near the peak of a sunspot cycle to near the bottom of a sunspot cycle. And we can expect, but not be certain, that things will look quite different then. Come back in 30 years... :-) . [[[Global cooling. Climate change. Man made disaster is upon us. Doom Doom ... ! :-) ]]]
FWIW the world's (arguably) leading expert on sea-level, and the large majority of the world's top sea level specialists, think that the IPCC are way way way out in their conclusions.
Some people get really really really annoyed when they see it laid out this way. If anyone wants to explain in simple terms why I'm utterly wrong in what I say, or any errors with any part of it, I'll consider it carefully and genuinely happily modify anything I say in future that is obviously in error.
Until then, the emperor has no clothes on.
Russell
** IPCC
*** {{Comment only: IPCC was set up as a supra government organisation by a man who got the ear of a head of state and they together set out to get buy in from heads of state for an organisation that was outside/above rather than under international government control. Which head of state, and what his vested interest was, you can find out without much effort}}
The scientific results are clear. It's just that the heat from all the warming obscures the interpretation :-) .