“IPCC AR4 also gets a failing grade on 21 chapters“. Anthony Watts wants you to know that Donna Laframboise (blogger) and a team of denialist “citizen auditors” have performed a grade school (literally) evaluation of the IPCC’s 2007 Assessment Report’s (“AR4”) references. The report, which Donna refers to as “the United Nations’ Nobel-winning climate bible“, gets an “F” for 21 of the 44 chapters, based on their personal assessment of the references.
“We’ve been told it’s 100 percent peer-reviewed science.” Um, no you haven’t. And the bulk of the claimed low-quality references are in the “Impacts” and “Mitigation” sections, not in the far more important “Climate Science” section.
Nothing is said about the physical science or historical evidence, of course. Funny how often “citizen” gets used as a descriptive badge among denialists.
Anthony finishes optimistically: people are beginning to laugh at the “robustness” oft touted in climate science. You’d better unplug your iPod, Anthony…
Oh Donna, you get an “F” too.
Wott's Up With That? 
Take a look at the “non-peer-reviewed” refs highlighted in http://www.noconsensus.org/ipcc-audit/2007/WG1chapter1-A.html
They include refs to Isaac Newton, Karl Popper & Louis Agassiz. Also a pile of texts from scientific publishers. I’d have thought these were peer-reviewed but I’m not a citizen auditor.
[You can get your “Citizen Auditor” diploma, with full credit given for life experience, by mail. :-) – Ben]
Yes, I noticed that too about the references to the works of people like Agassiz, who performed scientific research before the concept of peer review existed.
If one actually reads the IPCC report (something I suspect Laframboise did not do), one will see that many references like this are merely used as historical background to contemporary research. It’s a non-peer reviewed reference all right, but it is not used as a basis for scientific findings.
Laframboise is clearly dishonest.
Apparently, they weren’t peer reviewed because peer review didn’t exist back then. From what I heard, self-cites (to other sections of the AR4) were also counted as non-peer-reviewed.
It’s quite farcical really – this is probably as close as most of these people have come to ‘research’ on climate change, and it’s basically just tallying numbers which are almost meaningless, to take down a pathetic strawman.
I also note a lack of comment from any of the denialists that WG1, the section supporting climate science, scored very highly…
Do the IPCC reports contain citations to the nonsense by the Heartland Institute? It wonder if Laframboise treats that as peer reviewed or non-peer reviewed.
These are the people that are going to *audit* the science? lol
I particularly like this one on the list:
84. Gwynne, P., 1975: The cooling world. Newsweek, April 28, 64.
Since they acknowledge this wasn’t a peer reviewed piece, are they going to promise never to use it again to claim that most climate scientists said we were heading for an impending ice age in the 70’s?
I won’t bet on it.
I wouldn’t bet on it either. The deniers’ mantra is that the IPCC is full of liars because it claims to only uses peer reviewed sources (which we know is not correct, yet they keep repeating it), but they (the deniers) are free to cite any source that contradicts the scientific community because of that massive conspiracy among the world’s scientists.
Yet, I’m certain we wil hear references to Laframboise’s “report” over the coming months from the likes of Inhofe and Morano as the Senate gears up for debate on a climate bill.
I skimmed the comments on this thread.
Agh, the stupid, it hurts.
One person has had a preliminary look at their list. All the non-peer reviewed references are legitimate and from reputable sources. It’s stuff like World Meteorological Organisation data, UN reports, various government agencies etc and relates to WG2 and WG3, not the science.
They are truly getting desperate. Particularly when it’s getting even hotter:
http://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/?report=global
I’m hoping that soon one or more of the core people from the denier coordination group, Manipulation Control Head Office, will be formally called to account for their sins.
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