Patently silly data on climate change

You don't have to be a climate change denier to have doubts about some of the output from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which is about to gush forth with another report. A couple of interesting bloggers have found some hilarious graphs in the IPCC's output.

Over on Prometheus there is a hatchet job on numbers showing a correlation between climate change and losses due to natural disasters. Roger Pielke Jr writes "I have generally been a supporter of the IPCC, but I do have to admit that if it is this sloppy and irresponsible in an area of climate change where I have expertise, why should I have confidence in the areas where I am not an expert?"

Even more hilarious is the message on Random Thoughts dismembering another graph from the IPCC which shows that U.S. patents cause global weather-related disasters!.

As the author comments " It's obvious that increasing the number of U.S. patents issued causes normalized global weather-related losses to increase. When will the U.S. Patent Office start behaving responsibly, and stop issuing patents???!"

Er, maybe not, when asked for the page reference, Mark Bahner, the man behind the thing, reveals that the graph in question "only appear on dates that have April 1 in them".

Damn, there goes another good story. Then again, maybe someone could sell it to the Daily Mail. They'd certainly buy a piece on the impact of climate change on house prices.

Royal let down on climate change

Anyone who was hoping for something substantial in the way of a response from the Royal Society on today's IPCC report on climate change is in for a disappointment. We mention this only because they trailed their response earlier today in the puzzlingly content free press release we've already mentioned. Now that we have it, we find that despite the title, A time for action on climate change, it is actually less outspoken than the statements made by the Government's Chief Scientific Adviser, Professor Sir David King.

The bottom line is that "We need both to reduce our emissions of greenhouse gases and to prepare for the impacts of climate change. Those who would claim otherwise can no longer use science as a basis for their argument." Well, I never.

tag: Royal Society, press releases, climate change, IPCC

Royal Society winds up the excitement

The poor old Royal Society has sunk to new depths of pointlessness in its latest "press release". Like everyone they are keen to climb on the bandwagon shoved down the hill today by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. So we get to read the Royal Society pre IPCC report statement.

They have persuaded Martin Rees, President of the Royal Society, to say: "The IPCC is the world's leading authority on climate change and its latest report will provide a comprehensive picture of the latest scientific understanding on the issue."

Er, yes. Maybe the point of this exercise is to alert all those slavering hacks to the fact that "The Royal Society will be issuing a short statement in reaction to the report on Friday".

Most of the writers who will cover the report are clearly desperately short of people they can talk to.

tag: Royal Society, climate change, IPCC, press releases