It doesn’t require much precience (or a degree in social psycology) to predict that legions of frenzied AGW believers will point to this “method” of verification as the pinnacle of scientific objevtivity. Does it seem to anyone else that this is a rather Post-Modern approach to forming conclusions?

It opened the door to anxiety driven bad decisions based on the flawed premise that Man was on the verge of various “tipping points” – population, oil, nuclear war, climate, etc. This then led to anxiety driven rather than anticipation driven views regarding the future.

Take for example the Space Shuttle debacle. That was an expression of the notion that the space program must abandon manned exploration in favor of a LEO based program to create near Earth “space industry” which was touted to be “for the benefit of the masses” and somehow more morally correct than manned explortation, which by 1968 had become very uncool – very “imperialistic” and very tied into the so called “military industrial complex.” So now, we have a lemon which is a roll of the dice of the astronaut’s lives every time it is launched. Imagine if instead we’d continued doing what we were doing and never stopped following the original 1960-61 plan? We never would have lost the 30 plus years we’ve lost, not to mention all those valuable talented people who’ve perished needlessly owing to O-rings and perforated heat shields.

I’m not so sure. Bearing in mind how the IPCC has mutated over the past twenty years, and how it operates, it may just be that the IPCC is a text book case of group think.

A quote from the article’s header:
“No matter how free-thinking you believe yourself to be, says Michael Bond, being part of a group can make you do stupid or even despicable things”.

Does that sound familiar?

RomanM

I can just see this handful of people sitting around a table voting on the motion that “a likelihood of 92% be assigned to statement X.” In this group of zealous advocates of AGW, you know how the vote will turn out.

Since the IPCC has not revealed the working groups/chapters methods of determining likelihood, one could hypothetically conjecture a situation where 5 scientists voted for a likelihood of 95% for an event and 4 scientists voted against that level and so the reported likelihood gets a worded version of 95%. What if the 4 dissenting scientists thought the likelihood for that event was 50% — or less?

JohnA, you are quite correct. This IS really an indication of the level of personal confidence (in a non-statistical sense) with which an opinion is held. There might not be an issue if the numbers were phrased as “On a scale of 0 to 100, how strongly do you feel that statement X is true?” since this could obviously be understood as an opinion of an opinion. As it is presented in the IPCC document, it is purported to be a scientific numerical summary about the truth of the statement itself. When it is put into such probabilistic language, the reader views statement X as the outcome of some sort of random experiment and we all know how often events with a 99% probability occur! Manipulation of the finest quality. On the other hand, if the people at IPCC genuinely believe that these are meaningful “probabilities” or “confidence levels”, with their interpretation of them, they are demonstrating the same statistical naivety of those who believe that a 95% confidence interval means “the probability that the parameter you are estimating is actually in the interval you just calculated is 95%” as opposed to “the random procedure that leads to the interval is correct about 95% of the time.” There are obviously no such random procedures involved in the conclusions they put forward and their “likelihoods” are spurious.

What makes this more dangerous is that, with the apparent lack of some sort of general procedures, the actually “consensus” decisions about the “likelihoods” would be made by a relatively small group of people ‘€” the committee of authors of the actual report. I can just see this handful of people sitting around a table voting on the motion that “a likelihood of 92% be assigned to statement X.” In this group of zealous advocates of AGW, you know how the vote will turn out.

RomanM

So where is the instrument calibration record traceable to NIST?

I would guess that it would be more a measure of the “expert reviewers” confidence in his or herself. I think its pernicious and dangerous for reviewers to be making expressions of statistical confidence and likelihood about things other than the results of experiments.

I would guess that the IPCC considers it a good marketing strategy whereby they can impart a show of more objectivity mixed with a wider spread of expert opinion than might actually exist in the eyes of a beholder of all the details of how the methodology was really applied.

I am surprised that there have not been at least a few leaks from people exposed to the process on how it actually worked. They could not all be true believers — could they?