Living on Earth: Climate Confusion

[OKIsItJustMe]

http://www.loe.org/shows/segments.htm?programID=10-P13-00010&segmentID=1

Climate Confusion

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For climate scientists, now is the winter of their discontent. Their major work, the 2007 report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC, which won the Nobel Peace Prize, is now under attack. A sloppy paragraph wrongly projected how soon Himalayan glaciers might melt. Another section overestimated flood-prone areas in the Netherlands. Scientists say the mistakes are minor. But the errors came to light just as the heat was building around another matter: embarrassing revelations in thousands of emails by climate scientists that were hacked.

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YOUNG: Well, now scientists are pushing back. The IPCC announced an independent panel to further review research. And leading figures – including the president's science advisor and the head of the National Academy of Sciences – have launched a full court press to defend the integrity of climate studies.

We spoke with Penn State University Geosciences Professor Richard Alley, who helped write a section of the IPCC report.

ALLEY: There's no question that there's a paragraph in (sigh) buried in the thousand pages of the second working group report of the fourth assessment report of the IPCC that's wrong. Scientifically it is not a big deal. The difficulty is that it's shaken the confidence of some people in the public who have heard a lot of excitement about a bad paragraph and who may possibly think that because there's one bad paragraph, it's all bad, uh, I...(draws breath) no (laughs). It's completely absurd. The effort that the authors put in, the quality of the science is very, very high.

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(Full transcript and audio at the link.)

[Vincardog]

1. the quality of the science is very, very high. K & R