IPCC

IPCC Good News, Bad News.

October 14, 2010 | Michael Tobis

Good news: Pachauri is reappointed for another term as head of IPCC. Whether or not this would have been a good idea under ordinary circumstances, it was pretty much necessary. Anything else would have just encouraged the jackals squealing for blood.

Bad news: Andrew Sullivan quotes Jim Manzi quoting IPCC:

This is the crux of the problem with McKibben’s argument: According to the IPCC, the expected economic costs of global warming are about 3 percent of GDP more than 100 years from now. [more]

Who Watches the Watchmen?

February 19, 2010 | Michael Tobis

Tim Lambert asserts that the high profile article in the London Times claiming that former IPCC chairman, Prof. Robert Watson, says that IPCC has a warming bias, is flagrant and willful distortion:

Yes there is bias here, but the bias is in the media that only reports the errors that overstate the problem and also reports as errors things that are not errors at all. [more]

The Fundamentals Haven’t Changed

February 18, 2010 | Michael Tobis

There’s a transcript of a press briefing from Todd Stern, who was the US envoy to Copenhagen. Of course he’s trying to put a positive spin on it.

Naturally, some of the questions were about the new feature of weather weirding, the teapot tempest, of which there have been a few of late, especially on the east coast (burying Washington DC in several feet of thick fog) and in the UK. [more]

What about the other 11%?

April 6, 2007 | Michael Tobis

Commentary on the WGII SPM on Slashdot spans the usual gamut from snarky through self-importantly clueless to insightful, and as usual for nontechnical articles the comment moderation system is not especially helpful. My impression that the balance of Slashdot opinion was moving in the wrong direction is not confirmed this time; it seems to be about 25% informed and 75% ill-informed, with the ill-informed split evenly between worried, unworried, and more or less misguided difference splitting (a.k.a. [more]