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From the Report
The upshot? The IPCC isn't dealing in science, it's channelling Jeane Dixon, and making vague statements that are almost certainly going to happen someday. It appears, from the IPCC report, that Europe is going to meet a tall dark handsome stranger. Which means, for all anyone can tell, that a black giraffe is going to be born in the Paris zoo. Other statements say that bad weather might cause some damage somewhere.
Oh, really? Who could have guessed that one?
The IAC said the IPCC did some good. But they didn't mention that only with the stand up comics in search of new material.
Another issue is whether it is appropriate to use quantitative subjective probabilities when
statements are qualitative in nature or imprecisely stated. Many of the 71 conclusions in the
“Current Knowledge about Future Impacts” section of the Working Group II Summary for
Policy Makers are imprecise statements made without reference to the time period under
consideration or to a climate scenario under which the conclusions would be true. Consider, for
example, the statement:
Prepublication Copy—Subject to Further Editorial Revision
34
In Central and Eastern Europe, summer precipitation is projected to decrease, causing higher water
stress. Health risks due to heatwaves are projected to increase. Forest productivity is expected to
decline and the frequency of peatland fires to increase. (High confidence; IPCC, 2007b, p. 14)
There is no indication about when these events are expected to occur or under what conditions.
What changes in climate would give rise to these results? What is assumed about adaptation? It
could be argued that, given the imprecision of the statement, it has an 80 percent chance of being
true under some set of circumstances.
In the Committee’s view, assigning probabilities to imprecise statements is not an appropriate
way to characterize uncertainty. If the confidence scale is used in this way, conclusions will
likely be stated so vaguely as to make them impossible to refute, and therefore statements of
“very high confidence” will have little substantive value.11 More importantly, the use of
probabilities to characterize uncertainty is most appropriate when applied to empirical quantities
(Morgan et al., 2009). The following statement may be true but should not be assigned a
probability of occurrence:
Nearly all European regions are anticipated to be negatively affected by some future impacts of
climate change, and these will pose challenges to many economic sectors. (Very high confidence;
IPCC, 2007b, p. 14)
The upshot? The IPCC isn't dealing in science, it's channelling Jeane Dixon, and making vague statements that are almost certainly going to happen someday. It appears, from the IPCC report, that Europe is going to meet a tall dark handsome stranger. Which means, for all anyone can tell, that a black giraffe is going to be born in the Paris zoo. Other statements say that bad weather might cause some damage somewhere.
Oh, really? Who could have guessed that one?
The IAC said the IPCC did some good. But they didn't mention that only with the stand up comics in search of new material.