“Only a few dozen” IPCC “experts” support their so-called consensus [update 3]

In his widely reported attack on climate change skeptics last week, John Key’s Chief Science Adviser Propagandist for Global Warming Zealotry Peter Gluckman conceded that he himself is “not a climate scientist…

But suffice to say that I accept the weight of evidence that anthropogenic climate change is real and at some time in the not too distant future there will be significant impacts. This is the consensus view reached by every credible scientific body that has examined the question.”

He went on to insist again yesterday, in response to further criticisms of his non-scientific tirade, that there is “an international scientific consensus that the world is warming,” so skeptics should essentially just go away and shut the hell up.

But as I asked last week after his outburst,  if the science is truly settled, then why has the IPCC felt the need to manufacture evidence, and the government scientists on which it relies felt the need to massage data and alter temperature records? To have departed from science so severely “that they have become advocates for one particular set of hypotheses, and have become militant fighters against all others”?

If the case is closed, then why has a cross examination of global warming science conducted by the University of Pennsylvania’s Institute for Law and Economics just concluded that virtually every claim advanced by global warming proponents fails to stand up to scrutiny?

If there is a scientific consensus, then why has Britain’s Royal Society of scientists, of which I believe Professor Gluckman is a member, just released a statement saying quite explicitly that “any public perception that science is somehow fully settled is wholly incorrect.”

In fact, in his own words Professor Gluckman places this so-called “consensus” above the scientific evidence itself—as you can see if you read his original speech—but even as he insists that politicians and the news media talk only about this so-called consensus, instead of those who point out its non-existence, he concedes that “the [consensus] conclusions are not universally accepted.”

So at the same time he submits the so-called consensus is his strongest argument, at the same time he agrees that the consensus itself is not universal.

In fact, as the Royal Society points out, the “consensus conclusions” are not even so widely accepted as Professor Gluckman would like us to think—not even by the IPCC, upon whose pronouncements he wishes us to rely. As a prominent IPCC insider has declared unequivocally in the last few days, the IPCC consensus on climate change is phoney.

The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider.  The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was ‘only a few dozen experts,’ he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.
    “‘Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,’ the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.’
    “Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia –  the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.
    “Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here.”

No wonder so many many once celebrated climate researchers are now feeling like the used-car salesmen of the science world—and that Professor Gluckman feels called upon to step in and defend them.

UPDATE 1 [9:52am, Tue]: If you’re near a radio, Leighton Smith at NewstalkZB will be interviewing the Pennsylvania law professor responsible for the cross-examination mentioned above at 10:30 this morning.  Listen in at the NewstalkZB website if you can’t get near a radio. (And I’ll try to get an audio link up as soon as I can.)

UPDATE 2: Here’s the audio link for Leighton’s interview with Jason Scott Johnston, Professor and Director of the Program on Law, Environment and Economy at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, who found in his cross-examination of global warming science that “on virtually every major issue in climate change science, the [reports of the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] and other summarizing work by leading climate establishment scientists have adopted various rhetorical strategies that seem to systematically conceal or minimize what appear to be fundamental scientific uncertainties or even disagreements.”  In short, that “it doesn’t withstand scrutiny.”

The interview starts at 35:20: “Interview with Professor Jason Scott Johnson”

UPDATE 3: A related point made by Andrew Bolt:

    “But this raises the question: how easy is it for such a small group [or a senior science adviser] to become slaves of group think - or, indeed, to become intoxicated with their enormous and flattering influence on …politics?
    “In 2006, Professor Edward Wegman raised this very fear in his report, commissioned by the United States House of Representatives Energy and Commerce Committee to examine the IPCC’s discredited “hockey stick”, devised by Michael Mann, which purported to show unprecedented warming last century:

One of the interesting questions associated with the ‚"hockey stick controversy’ are the relationships among the authors and consequently how confident one can be in the peer review process. In particular, if there is a tight relationship among the authors and there are not a large number of individuals engaged in a particular topic area, then one may suspect that the peer review process does not fully vet papers before they are published…
    ‘However, it is immediately clear that the Mann, Rutherford, Jones, Osborn,
                   Briffa, Bradley and Hughes form a clique, each interacting with all of the others. A     
                   clique is a fully connected subgraph, meaning everyone in the clique interacts
                   with every one else in the clique....
                   ‘Michael Mann is a co-author with every one of the other 42 [in his clique]. The
                   black squares on the diagonal [fig. 5.2] indicate that the investigators work
                   closely within their group, but not so extensively outside of their group.’

“Note those names again: Michael Mann, Scott Rutherford, Phil Jones, Tim Osborn, Keith Briffa, Ray Bradley and Malcolm Hughes are all climate scientists implicated in the Climategate scandal.”