BBC Newsnight on IPCC - Roger Pielke

Roger Pielke is a professor of environmental studies at the Center for Science and Technology Policy Research at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He also has an appointment as a Senior Visiting Fellow at the Consortium for Science, Policy and Outcomes at Arizona State University and is a Senior Fellow of The Breakthrough Institute, a progressive think tank.

Tonite I was on BBC Newsnight  with Professor Chris Field, the (new) head of IPCC Working Group II. I knew that the interview was not going to go well when Professor Field explained, not-so-accurately, that as soon as the IPCC heard about the glacier error it quickly came out with a statement clarifying the matter. No mention of "voodoo science" or "schoolboy science" or the extended period of denial of error by the IPCC leadership.

I had a chance to summarize the problems in the IPCC associated with its creation of the "mystery graph" and the outright falsification of my views in the IPCC review comments. Professor Fields completely ignored these issues and instead chose to obfuscate and deny any problem whatsoever. This is remarkable because all Professor Field would have had to say was something like the following, "These are serious allegations, especially about the misrepresentations of Roger's views in the review process. We should tighten up our procedures to make sure this sort of thing does not happen again." And then the IPCC should follow it up with some improvements to the process.

Instead, Professor Field tried to talk over me and deny, deny, deny. As I said in the interview, this issue is not ambiguous. The studies are not equivocal. There is no signal of rising temperatures in the disaster record. Period. Maybe there will be in the future, but there wasn't in 2006, when the IPCC deadline for publication occurred and there is not now. Further, both the "mystery graph" and the falsification of my views are unambiguous failures of the IPCC process to ensure that accurate information is included in its reports. How can this be denied? Read more.