You'd think that with billions of dollars in grant money at their disposal, climate researchers could do some actual scientific research. Instead, it's been discovered that they've been basing some of their most alarmist statements about global warming on magazine stories from mountain climbers and student reports on stories from mountain climbers -- none of which were scientifically gathered nor peer reviewed. And since those anecdotes do not even date back to the 1900s, the results are scientifically useless. The Telegraph reports:
The revelation will cause fresh embarrassment for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which had to issue a humiliating apology earlier this month over inaccurate statements about global warming.
The IPCC's remit is to provide an authoritative assessment of scientific evidence on climate change.
In its most recent report, it stated that observed reductions in mountain ice in the Andes, Alps and Africa was being caused by global warming, citing two papers as the source of the information.
However, it can be revealed that one of the sources quoted was a feature article published in a popular magazine for climbers which was based on anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them.
The other was a dissertation written by a geography student, studying for the equivalent of a master's degree, at the University of Berne in Switzerland that quoted interviews with mountain guides in the Alps.
The revelations, uncovered by The Sunday Telegraph, have raised fresh questions about the quality of the information contained in the report, which was published in 2007.
It comes after officials for the panel were forced earlier this month to retract inaccurate claims in the IPCC's report about the melting of Himalayan glaciers.
What's the problem with the sources used by the IPCC? The problem is that no scientific method nor scientific review process was involved in gathering the "data":
Professor Richard Tol, one of the report's authors who is based at the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland, said: "These are essentially a collection of anecdotes.
"Why did they do this? It is quite astounding. Although there have probably been no policy decisions made on the basis of this, it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.
"There is no way current climbers and mountain guides can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is complete nonsense."
The IPCC report, which is published every six years, is used by government's worldwide to inform policy decisions that affect billions of people.
The claims about disappearing mountain ice were contained within a table entitled "Selected observed effects due to changes in the cryosphere produced by warming".
It states that reductions in mountain ice have been observed from the loss of ice climbs in the Andes, Alps and in Africa between 1900 and 2000.
The report also states that the section is intended to "assess studies that have been published since the TAR (Third Assessment Report) of observed changes and their effects".
But neither the dissertation or the magazine article cited as sources for this information were ever subject to the rigorous scientific review process that research published in scientific journals must undergo.
What's wrong with using anecdotal evidence? A simple review:
Anecdotal evidence is often unscientific or pseudoscientific because various forms of cognitive bias may affect the collection or presentation of evidence. . . . .
Anecdotal evidence is also frequently misinterpreted via the availability heuristic, which leads to an overestimation of prevalence. Where a cause can be easily linked to an effect, people overestimate the likelihood of the cause having that effect (availability). In particular, vivid, emotionally-charged anecdotes seem more plausible, and are given greater weight. A related issue is that it is usually impossible to assess for every piece of anecdotal evidence, the rate of people not reporting that anecdotal evidence in the population.
A common way anecdotal evidence becomes unscientific is through fallacious reasoning such as the Post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy, the human tendency to assume that if one event happens after another, then the first must be the cause of the second. Another fallacy involves inductive reasoning. For instance, if an anecdote illustrates a desired conclusion rather than a logical conclusion, it is considered a faulty or hasty generalization.[9] . . . . Anecdotes often refer to the exception, rather than the rule: "Anecdotes are useless precisely because they may point to idiosyncratic responses."[11]Even when many anecdotes are collected to prove a point, "The plural of anecdote is not data." (Roger Brinner)
More generally, a statistical correlation between things does not in itself prove that one causes the other (a causal link). A study found that television viewing was strongly correlated with sugar consumption, but this does not prove that viewing causes sugar intake (or vice versa).
. . . .
By contrast, in science and logic, the "relative strength of an explanation" is based upon its ability to be tested, proven to be due to the stated cause, and verified under neutral conditions in a manner that other researchers will agree has been performed competently, and can check for themselves.
When prominent climate "scientists" keep resorting to junk "science" to support their hypotheses, one begins to suspect that this is no accident.
Is junk "science" actually the strongest support available for the theory of anthropogenic global warming? If not, why do the proponents of the "settled science" find it necessary, again and again, to manipulate temperature charts, cite magazine anecdotes, rely on incomplete data, and crib from student papers?
Are climate researchers, desperate to hold onto billions in funding, grasping at straws?
Update: More at Hot Air: "Neither the article nor the dissertation was subject to peer review. Moreover, the Sunday Telegraph notes that the latest IPCC report made use of 16 non-peer reviewed reports from the World Wildlife Fund."
Not that the World Wildlife Fund would have any predisposition of any kind.
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