Thursday, February 01, 2007

Whoops!

Looks like the very first industry-funded attack on the IPCC report just got leaked, courtesy of DeSmogBlog.

Only read a bit, but it seems like it's the same old, same old. "Too complex to really understand", "the sun is getting hotter", "all the data is taken in urban heat islands", etc. There are some new ones (I personally liked "climate scientists aren't using proper econometric methods and it invalidates their findings, but we won't say how or why"), but for the most part it seems like the same crap that has been rebutted on RealClimate.org over and over again.

Still, it IS pretty detailed for a rebuttal of a report that hasn't come out yet. Which makes sense, because they've actually been writing this for a year now:

Finally, Weaver pointed out that the whole Fraser Institute analysis is based on a document that is almost a year out of date. “I was most surprised that this analysis was written based on our second draft” (released in Spring 2006), said Weaver. “We incorporated changes in response to well over 1,000 reviewrs' comments before preparing a final draft last fall.”
Unfortunately (or fortunately), it's very likely that anything that these guys have cooked up that might seriously damage the science of global warming has already been raised and responded to. That makes it really unlikely that this is going to sway any scientists.

Of course, it's not supposed to. It's supposed to provide academic cover for business to continue doing what they're doing and ideologically biased legislators to support them. That's no surprise; that's what the Frasier Institute is for.

What I'm concerned about isn't that, but whether the media is going to portray this as he said/she said. Considering they likely have little idea what the science is and are still (at least somewhat) cowed by loud conservative mouthpieces, I'd say the odds are pretty good.

Pity.

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