1 Boring Old Man

Series of missteps by climate scientists threatens climate-change agenda
Washington Post
By Juliet Eilperin and David A. Fahrenthold
February 15, 2010

With its 2007 report declaring that the "warming of the climate system is unequivocal," the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change won a Nobel Prize – and a new degree of public trust in the controversial science of global warming. But recent revelations about flaws in that seminal report, ranging from typos in key dates to sloppy sourcing, are undermining confidence not only in the panel’s work but also in projections about climate change. Scientists who have pointed out problems in the report say the panel’s methods and mistakes — including admitting Saturday that it had overstated how much of the Netherlands was below sea level — give doubters an opening.

It wasn’t the first one. There is still a scientific consensus that humans are causing climate change. But in the past year, a cache of stolen e-mails, revealing that prominent climate scientists sought to prevent the publication of works by their detractors, has sullied their image as impartial academics. The errors in the U.N. report – a document intended to be the last nail in the coffin of climate doubt – are a serious problem that could end up forcing environmentalists to focus more on the old question of proving that climate change is a threat, instead of the new question of how to stop it.

Two Republican senators who have long opposed a cap on carbon emissions, James M. Inhofe [Okla.] and John Barrasso [Wyo.], are citing the errors as further reasons to block mandatory limits on greenhouse gas emissions. Last week, Barrasso called for an independent probe into the IPCC, suggesting that the United States should halt any action on climate until it verifies the panel’s scientific conclusions.

Inhofe said Thursday in the Senate that the Environmental Protection Agency’s efforts to curb greenhouse gases should be reexamined, since the U.N. panel’s conclusions influenced the agency’s finding that climate change poses a public threat. "The ramifications of the IPCC spread far and wide, most notably to the Environmental Protection Agency’s finding that greenhouse gases from mobile sources endanger public health and welfare," Inhofe said. On Friday, a coalition of conservative groups filed a petition to overturn the EPA’s finding on the same grounds…

^{Mount Kilimanjaro, Tanzania, 1984 and 1998}

"If there’s a 1% chance that Pakistani scientists are helping al-Qaeda build or develop a nuclear weapon, we have to treat it as a certainty in terms of our response. It’s not about our analysis … It’s about our response."

Dick Cheney