They have to “check, recheck and check again all their work.”
FT Magazine reports:
In the wake of the “Climategate” and “Glaciergate” controversies four years ago, a raft of inquiries eventually found no evidence of serious wrongdoing, let alone anything to raise doubts about the IPCC’s conclusions. But the scientists remain the target of a vigorous group of critics sceptical about their work. They have been branded “criminals” (Britain’s Lord Monckton) guilty of “massive international scientific fraud” (US senator James Sensenbrenner) who should commit “hara-kiri” (US pundit Glenn Beck) for duping the world with “snake oil” (former Alaskan governor Sarah Palin).
This has had an impact on the people doing this latest IPCC assessment, according to several of the scientists interviewed for this article. “I see it in the tension in the author team,” as they check, recheck, then check again all their work, said David Vaughan. “I think there is a point at which that kind of stress can become difficult to manage,” he added, explaining it has made IPCC work “a very cumbersome, slow process”.
Pat, if you are a long time liberal who was trained as a scientist and you are as familiar as I am with the subject, you are exposed to extreme stress when you open your mouth in social situations, taken as some kind of leper and subjected to the worst sort of poisonous inventive such as “denier.” I liken these extreme environmentalists and their devoted followers as dangerous people on a level with communists and fascists of old and the religious fanatics of the Moslem and Christian worlds of today. They will stop at nothing to have their way.
Just one piece of “rot” among many in your tirade: “accelerated in recent decades,” Sorry, no acceleration. The “very likely” should have read, “conceivably but extremely unlikely.” When the final words are written on this subject, decades from now, it will be viewed as the biggest scandal in the history of science.
It’s a bit more than that, but the same in every industry or position where you can expect your work to be teased apart with a fine-toothed comb. People think that I’m crazy when I complain about EPA document retention requirements, until they learn that missing a single daily logsheet anytime in the past 5 years is an offense that can get you fined (at least it’s better now. The original RCRA requirement was that all operating records had to be kept for 20 years after the unit is shut down).
However, when you are calling for trillions of dollars of investment to avert the apokalypse, your work SHOULD be teased apart with a fine toothed comb. That’s too large an investment to not be certain
Wow, are they really complaining that they have to maintain accuracy and intellectual honesty?
I have long held that the fear mongers out there in the media and science communities have caused the average human a lot of unnecessary stress and that they should be held financially accountable.
Any stress they experience in the commission of their civil wrongs is on them.
Looks like he scratched off your “veneer” of civilization.
“OK, our facts were off and we insisted they were right even after we began to realize they weren’t. But the conclusions made it right.” They need to re-examine their sustainability.
What a load of rot you speak, these are not political words, they are scientists’ words, whereas those you speak of as ‘critiques’ are biased, manipulative, unscientific & foundless. There is no ‘falling apart’.
I’ve read each one. It’s quite a story. Too bad it tends to fall apart when you scratch beneath the scientific veneer on these political documents. If all you read are the IPCC reports and never read their many critiques, you’re not very well informed.
Ahh, those heady, glory years when they could publish all kinds of b***s*** without question, and their proclamations were absolute. But now, a new generation of climate scientists have to make sure their data says what they say it does, and are subjected to [gasp!] – scrutiny! Poor, over-pressured researcher/children. I think we all need a hug.
6 states, 18 air permits (16 Title V’s), 6 NPDES permits, sign as responsible official, environmental department fits in a Mazda Miata and those clowns worry about rechecking.
What, me worry?
The IPCC’s type of workplace…..
Well stated, Ronald
Did you read the article?
Checking your work to make sure that it is correct is stressful?
What kind of shoddy, slipshod, low quality workplaces are these people used to?
If the EPA was as nice as you guys on your worst days, My job would be a heck of a lot easier.
Good grief, you clearly love to twist the thrust of any article you read, don’t you? Contrarians indeed!
The main point of the article is to confirm that the process is rigorous, that “it relies on hundreds of mostly government-nominated scientists working for free for large parts of the several years it takes to produce the assessments for the IPCC’s 195 member countries”,
and that;
“If you sat down and read all the IPCC’s reports together, which few ordinary mortals ever do, you would read a story of growing scientific conviction that the Earth is warming and that it is probably because of the greenhouse gases humans have produced since they took to burning fossil fuels such as coal and gas in ever more prodigious quantities from the industrial revolution onwards.
The last assessment, in 2007, said average global surface temperatures had gone up 0.76C since 1850, had accelerated in recent decades, and were rising nearly twice as fast in the Arctic. The oceans were warming; glaciers were suffering “widespread mass loss”; and sea levels were rising. Global warming was therefore “unequivocal”, the report said, and most of the temperature rises seen since the mid-20th century were “very likely” due to the increase in human-made greenhouse gases, the most important of which is carbon dioxide.”
Until anyone credible and well-known for being a liberal speaks out, the main defense of the GW fanatics will be that the deniers are all right wingers. I am a total denier and not in any way a right winger, but, sadly, I am not powerful, rich, or famous. This is an issue of the corruption of science. It is true scientists and people who care about science who should be speaking out. Unfortunately most scientists are also liberal intellectuals, so that, outside their own specific fields, they give the benefit of the doubt to others who appear to be scientific or hold important positions within the scientific community. The environmental extremists have heavily infiltrated the scientific establishment in a way not dissimilar to the way communists infiltrated liberal and progressive organizations in the 1930’s. We are dealing with a belief system of a semi-religious nature. These people will not be moved by scientific data-supported arguments, and they will fight back against doubters with all the venom and dirty tactics employed in the past by all manner of religious fanatics and political fanatics like communists and fascists.
They have to “check, recheck and check again all their work.”
And it’s still garbage because it’s a political answer trying to pose as science.
The stress resulting from having to recheck your own work is NOTHING in comparison to the stress occasioned by a single empirical datum that contravenes a pet theory.
It is telling that they find it stressful to be required to behave like scientists.
The stress is from CYA. Every lie require two or three bigger ones to cover it up and each failed prediction leaves them scrambling for some kind of explanation. The pressure on them to tell the truth when they are unwilling to do so is stressful.
“…a raft of inquiries eventually found no evidence of serious wrongdoing, let alone anything to raise doubts about the IPCC’s conclusions.”
Well, except that the data had been fudged and the models were found to be without skill and refusal to comply with FOIA in both the UK and the US and then there’s the need adjust the climate sensitivity to CO2 and…
Gosh, imagine that people who plan to completely trash the current production systems of the planet are expect to justify their plans with actual data and useful models.
Sounds exactly like what private compaines have to do to comply with enivronmental regulations. Boo-hoo.
When your battle cry is “It’s worse than we thought” and mother nature refuses to cooperate with global circulation models, I’d say the source of the stress is due to the pressure to force a solution for a problem that’s clearly not well understood before the world realizes it’s not near as bad as predicted.
So previously the most important document about the most important subject in the history of the human race was just slapped together? Welcome to the real World guys where people from the shop floor to professionals can go to prison for making mistakes and often lose jobs because of them.