Hi!,
Some time ago I posted a criticism by two world class statisticians of a forecast by the IPCC. One of them also suggested that the in house nature of the IPCC was a problem. - He thought they should get outside scientists to peer review.
I didn't follow it up, although it elicited some of the usual ad hominems, The Economist has just published an editorial, which should be of interest to Futurists. You'll recall my fear was not about Global Warming, but about these monstrous global entities that lose focus and place survival of the organization above their presumed goal.
Note the ad hominems thrown at the two scientists. That should tell us something. The URL for subscribers is:
HYPERLINK http://tinyurl.com/ufml http://tinyurl.com/ufml
Try it first - I hope the long editorial will get through. It should be read.
Harry
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Hot potato revisited
Nov 6th 2003 From The Economist print edition
A LACK-OF-PROGRESS REPORT ON THE INTERGOVERNMENTAL PANEL ON
CLIMATE CHANGE
YOU might think that a policy issue which puts at stake hundreds
of billions of dollars' worth of global output would arouse at
least the casual interest of the world's economics and finance
ministries. You would be wrong. Global warming and the actions
contemplated to mitigate it could well involve costs of that
order. Assessing the possible scale of future greenhouse-gas
emissions, and hence of man-made global warming, involves
economic forecasts and economic calculations. Those forecasts and
calculations will in turn provide the basis for policy on the
issue. Yet governments have been content to leave these questions
to a body—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
(IPCC)—which appears to lack the necessary expertise. The result
is all too likely to be bad policy, at potentially heavy cost to
the world economy.
In our Economics focus of February 15th this year, we drew
attention to (and posted on our website) telling criticisms of
the IPCC's work made by two independent commentators, Ian
Castles, a former head of Australia's Bureau of Statistics, and
David Henderson, formerly the chief economist of the Organisation
for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) and now visiting
professor at Westminster Business School. Their criticisms of the
IPCC were wide-ranging, but focused on the panel's forecasts of
greenhouse-gas emissions. The method employed, the critics
argued, had given an upward bias to the projections.
The IPCC's procedure relied, first, on measuring gaps between
incomes in poor countries and incomes in rich countries, and,
second, on supposing that those gaps would be substantially
narrowed, or entirely closed, by the end of this century.
Contrary to standard practice, the IPCC measured the initial gaps
using market-based exchange rates rather than rates adjusted for
differences in purchasing power. This error makes the initial
income gaps seem far larger than they really are, so the
subsequent catching-up is correspondingly faster. The developing-
country growth rates yielded by this method are historically
implausible, to put it mildly. The emissions forecasts based on
those implausibly high growth rates are accordingly unsound.
The Lavoisier Group, an Australian governmental body, posts
“Economics, Emissions Scenarios and the Work of the IPCC” by Ian
Castles and David Henderson. See also the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change.
The Castles-Henderson critique was subsequently published in the
journal Energy and Environment (volume 14, number 2-3). A
response by 15 authors associated with the IPCC purporting to
defend the panel's projections was published in the same issue.
It accused the two critics of bias, bad faith, peddling
“deplorable misinformation” and neglecting what the 15 regard as
proper procedure. Alas, it fails to answer the case Mr Castles
and Mr Henderson had laid out—namely, that the IPCC's low-case
scenarios are patently not low-case scenarios, and that the panel
has therefore failed to give a true account of the range of
possibilities. If anything, as the two critics argue in an
article in the subsequent issue of Energy and Environment, the
reply of the 15 authors gives new grounds for concern. This week
the IPCC is preparing to embark on its next global-warming
“assessment review”—and if the tone of its reply to the critics
is any guide, it is intent on business as usual.
It is true, as the IPCC says in its defence, that the panel
presents a range of scenarios. But, as we pointed out before,
even the scenarios that give the lowest cumulative emissions
assume that incomes in the developing countries will increase at
a much faster rate over the course of the century than they have
ever done before. Disaggregated projections published by the IPCC
say that—even in the lowest-emission scenarios—growth in poor
countries will be so fast that by the end of the century
Americans will be poorer on average than South Africans,
Algerians, Argentines, Libyans, Turks and North Koreans. Mr
Castles and Mr Henderson can hardly be alone in finding that odd.
Tunnel vision
The fact that the IPCC mobilised as many as 15 authors to supply
its response is interesting. The panel's watchword is strength in
numbers (lacking though it may be in strength at numbers). The
exercise criticised by Mr Castles and Mr Henderson involved 53
authors, plus 89 expert reviewers and many others besides. Can so
many experts get it wrong? The experts themselves may doubt it,
but the answer is yes. The problem is that this horde of
authorities is drawn from a narrow professional milieu. Economic
and statistical expertise is not among their strengths. Making
matters worse, the panel's approach lays great emphasis on peer
review of submissions. When the peers in question are drawn from
a restricted professional domain—whereas the issues under
consideration make demands upon a wide range of professional
skills—peer review is not a way to assure the highest standards
of work by exposing research to scepticism. It is just the
opposite: a kind of intellectual restrictive practice, which
allows flawed or downright shoddy work to acquire a standing it
does not deserve.
Part of the remedy proposed by Mr Castles and Mr Henderson in
their new article is to get officials from finance and economics
ministries into the long-range emissions-forecasting business.
The Australian Treasury is now starting to take an active
interest in IPCC-related issues, and a letter to the British
Treasury drawing attention to Castles-Henderson (evidently it
failed to notice unassisted) has just received a positive, if
long delayed, response. More must be done, and soon. Work on a
question of this sort would sit well with Mr Henderson's former
employer, the OECD. The organisation's economic policy
committee—a panel of top economic officials from national
ministries—will next week install Gregory Mankiw, head of
America's Council of Economic Advisers, as its new chairman. If
Mr Mankiw is asking himself what new work that body ought to take
on under his leadership, he need look no further than the
dangerous economic incompetence of the IPCC.
Copyright © The Economist Newspaper Limited 2003. All rights
reserved.
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