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Dessler's Grist to the Sceptics' Mill |
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Written by Climate Resistance
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Sunday, 17 February 2008 |
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Page 1 of 2
On Gristmill, Andrew Dessler provides us with an excuse for a self-indulgent recap:
I
was at a meeting earlier this week and was talking to one of the
coordinating lead authors of the recent IPCC working group 1 report on
the physical science of climate change. He remarked that he was quite
surprised that how little substantive criticism the IPCC Fourth
Assessment Report had received since its release just about one year
ago.
Reflecting on why this might be the case, he says:
the
scientists writing the report knew that the denial machine would go
over the report with a fine tooth comb looking for any "gotcha"
mistakes to use to discredit the IPCC. Because of that, the IPCC report
was extremely carefully worded so as to make virtually every statement
in the report bulletproof.
That may be so. But as we've reported before, the 'denial machine' is way behind the warmers - media, politicians and the IPCC
itself - when it comes to misrepresenting what the IPCC reports have to
say. Writing about AR4, for example, the BBC's Richard Black claimed
that 'The IPCC states that climate change is "unequivocal" and may
bring "abrupt and irreversible' impacts"'. When we looked at the
report, however, it was clear that Black had simply taken words from
the report and reassembled them to mean something entirely different.
The report itself only used the word 'abrupt' once: 'The MOC is very
unlikely to undergo a large abrupt transition during the 21st century'.
'Very unlikely' becomes 'may'.
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