I am just listening to the IPCC spokesman.
There is a simple rule most of us use. If you are caught making a big lie, then we don’t trust anything else being said. He has just said that the models were “policy relevant”. This is entirely at odds with the lack of confidence amongst leading climate modellers at the Royal Society meeting in October last year.
The IPCC have just lost all credibility as a body advising governments.
That doesn’t mean everything they say is a lie. Nor does it mean that we cannot trust any individual. But it does mean that as a group this body is delusional about their ability to understand or predict the climate.
I listened to Peter Stott on the iPlayer recording of today’s World at One. On the one hand he seemed to regard it as a badge of honour that so many people worked on the Summary and the Final Report with very little sleep and on the other is dogmatic that every sentence was thoroughly tested before inclusion. If it is the test of a first class intelligence to hold two contradictory ideas simultaneously then he passed, but I think that his robust defence of the conclusions of the Summary will come back to haunt him if the hours without sleep have left errors for others to pick over and illuminate.
They cannot see the wood for the trees. They have been concentrating on getting the details right and as a consequence can’t see that most ordinary people now accept the idea of the “pause” and as this is not warming they expect them to be more humble.
Even if they could justify their increased confidence scientifically (which they can’t) the average person won’t accept a higher confidence when their models have failed.
Ordinary people just understand it intuitively without any maths:
FAILURE => LESS CONFIDENCE.
the simple rule is: ‘if one keeps telling a lie; after sometime he starts to believe in it – especially if others believe in it