Sunday, October 13, 2013

Anthony Watts can't tell the difference between international policy and climate science


There's not much happening at WUWT apart from the 750 plus comments to Wondering "I'm Wonderful" Willis Eschenbach's dummy spitting thunderstorm.

Anthony has just posted a couple of emails showing he doesn't know the difference between science and policy (archived here).  I expect the title of the IPCC "Summary for Policy Makers" got him all confused.  He read the word "policy" and ignored the word "summary".  And he didn't bother to read the report itself. Or if he did he couldn't understand it.

He's also surprisingly unfamiliar with the process at the IPCC, despite the fact that it's written quite clearly on the IPCC website.  It's even got a picture:

Source: IPCC
Given that Anthony decided to reject science on the grounds that he might have to pay tax, it's not really surprising to find out that he can't tell science from climate policy.

The IPCC has prepared a document listing all the changes to be made to the full report to ensure it is consistent with the Summary for Policy Makers.  It includes things like making sure the time periods are consistent.  I didn't read anything that could be confused with climate policy, unless you're a conspiracy theorising scientific illiterati from WUWT.

There's just the usual echo coming from Anthony's echo chamber.  So far not a single person has picked up on how the process works.  They probably don't know what "Final Draft" means.  I doubt anyone of them has been anywhere near government policy making, let alone intergovernmental gatherings at an international level.

(On the other hand - the good people in the USA elected a bunch of cowboys who are busy messing with the global economy, putting loads of people out of work in the USA, stopping services that could be crucial in the medium term and letting the bottom fall out of all our investments and superannuation.  So maybe I'm mistaken about what the denialiti get up to.)

3 comments:

  1. I've yet to encounter a Denier that did have any grasp - or have any active interest in forming a grasp - of the IPCC process. Basically, much like the EU, it's Comintern, and a tedious commitment to nit-picking detail might tarnish this brilliant truth.

    Oh, and the Raspberry Woman said it was all run by teenagers...

    ReplyDelete
  2. I'm an "informed layperson", I suppose. My first degree was in science, but I've never held a "science" job.

    Question - over the last few years, it seems to me that climate change deniers have moved from what could charitably be called misunderstandings or poor interpretations or relying on poor sources to just about 100% blatant lying. There seems to be less room for waffling and less excuse for being uninformed every year.

    In a warped sense, I suppose this is a good thing. Credit goes to the IPCC, various other bodies and institutions/individuals, and some (but nothing close to all) of the media.

    Is this a reasonable overall comment?

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I don't know, Scott. Deniers don't seem to have changed much over the past five or six years. Before that time I didn't take any notice of them. They keep recycling old memes, jumping from one to the other and then back to older memes.

      I've got my own categories, modeled on cognitive science :)

      Some deniers are not unintelligent, so it's not always easy to tell if a particular person really doesn't understand what they are saying (suffering world view disorder), or if they do understand and are deliberately telling fibs to keep the meme going (a disinformer).

      (Some of them are just plain thick. They are fairly easy to pick after a couple of exchanges, tho to test it out you sometimes need to move onto another topic. World view disorder is not always easy to separate from "plain dumb".)

      Delete

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