The science is worse than we thought!

There was a link from a recent article in the Independent (about the met offices abysmal prediction record) that showed some of the arithmetic trickiness employed by the IPCC to present the case that climate change is worse than we thought.
http://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/ipcc

Now i'd noticed before the inability of the IPCC to properly add up error bounds, ie it is impossible for individual components to a total to have a larger error bound than the total. And I'd noticed the IPCC got the 20% deforestation number totally ass-backwards because the planet has actually been officially greening according to the peer-reviewed NASA satellite data http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/GlobalGarden/. It might very well be 20% REforestation. If that was included int he carbon sink summation then there is less missing sink to search for. The missing sink argument is that we stick roughly 7 Gt (Gigatonnes)) in the air, 1.5 Gt is added by deforestation, 3 Gt stays in the atmosphere and 2 Gt is removed by land and sea.The remainder is unaccounted for. Of course the error bars on these numbers are quite high. The numbers also vary according to who does the calculation.

Ref: IPCC + http://www.greencollar.org/employer/the-missing-carbon-sink-ads-7868.html
Values in gigatonnes:

Existing idea: 7 (fossil fuels) + 1.5 (deforestation) - 3 (remains in atmosphere) - 2 (oceans) = 3.5 Gt missing sink.

More plausible idea?: 7 (fossil fuels) - 3 (remains in atmosphere) - 2 (oceans) =  2 (reforestation).

Of course the whole sink/source argument is inexact science to say the least, as this report shows:
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2007/06/070621140805.htm

They really don't in fact have a clue as to what is a sink and what is a source in nature. In fact the sea should be a net source too by Henry's law, since it is warming up. The reason it is treated as a sink is because then either the sea contributes to the total that we observe in the atmosphere which is politically incorrect (in my opinion) or there is an even greater missing sink, meaning our scientists are even more clueless about the carbon cycle. There isn't really a scientific justification for a warming sea being a net sink - there are some hand-waving arguments and iffy models but no real evidential numbers so it's mostly a politically convenient decision.

And I'd of course  noticed that the 90% certainty figures in the summary was presented as scientific, ie based on evidence when in fact it was no more than a show of hands, ie 100% unscientific and misleading.

But it's even worse than I thought. Things are added after the reviews are complete. This is brought to light becuase the review comments were eventually - after much pressure - released in this "open process". And they reveal that Kevin Trenberth and Phil Jones clearly thought the case wasn't strong enough so they just made things up and added them later - unreviewed.

The IPCC is always used as the yardstick to judge alarmism, eg by the UK judge who lorded it over the courtcase that identified 9 serious innaccuracies in "An inconvenient truth" and ordered schools to mention these when the film is shown. However, we no longer have that yardstick because the IPCC report was shaped by these two lead authors after everyone else had gone home. I'm reminded that several of the authors; Paul Reiter (malaria), Richard Lindzen (feedbacks), Chris Landsea (hurricanes), Roger Pielke Snr (land-changes) had of course resigned because of this post-review chicanery and had been summarily ignored by the press. In addition just about everyone has criticised the millenial reconstructions of temperature including Briffa the actual lead author of the report, who according to the "climategate" emails firmly believes that there was a medieval warm period as warm or warmer than today. Crazy! Science will recover because people have short memories but we really have to redefine peer-review procedures now that we have the chance.

Now some might think that it's all for the greater good. Wrong! Being honest is for the greater good! If you are dishonest in your summary of the science then you are more than likely dishonest in all of your science and you dishonour your profession. In engineering this type of chicanery would quite literally cost lives.

Update : some more links from a skeptic sight which you are free to peruse. The carbon cycle never really gets the discussion it deserves anywhere in the mainstream press or journals.

My argument beaten by 10 years and much more technically obtained - we get the same 30% fraction. Impressively this was 4 years before the satellite data confirmed the greening of the planet:

http://www.john-daly.com/bulletin/bull-111/bul111.htm

An alternative statistical conclusion to the IPCC:

http://www.john-daly.com/ahlbeck/ahlbeck.htm

http://www.john-daly.com/co2-conc/reviews.htm


An alternative bathtub model:
http://www.john-daly.com/carbon.htm

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