A leading Dutch environment agency reported Monday that the seminal 2007 U.N. scientific report on climate change is too generalized and has even more errors than discovered so far — including one contributed by the agency itself.

But the review by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency claimed the errors had no effect on the fundamental conclusion by U.N. panel of scientists: that global warming caused by humans already is happening.

Glaring mistakes discovered in the 3,000-page report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change last year fed into an atmosphere of skepticism over the reliability of climate scientists who have been warning for many years that human-induced emissions of greenhouse gases could have catastrophic consequences, including rising sea levels, drought and the extinction of nearly one-third of the Earth's species.

The errors put scientists on the defensive just as a major conference on climate change in Copenhagen, attended by some 120 world leaders, met with limited success to agree on how to limit carbon emissions and contain the worst effects of global warming.

How many times has some celebrity manipulated the public with global warming threats as a result of cow gaseous discharges?  Could it be that they were wrong and I can eat that burger without guilt?

In the past environmentalists, from Lord Stern to Sir Paul McCartney, have urged people to stop eating meat because the methane produced by cattle causes global warming. However a new study found that cattle grazed on the grasslands of China actually reduce another greenhouse gas, nitrous oxide.

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"The science still holds up" though, he adds. A follow-up study verified the original conclusions for the Chinese data for the period 1954–1983, showing that the precise location of weather stations was unimportant. "They are trying to pick out minor things in the data and blow them out of all proportion," says Jones of his critics.

Regarding his use of surface temperatures instead of tree-ring proxy data (i.e., tree-ring data is used for the past to represent temperatures but is inconsistent with the same over the past 20-years), Jones also defended his practice and suggested,

"We need more reconstructions from different parts of the world to reproduce a better history of the past thousand years". Jones challenges his critics to help with those efforts. "Why don't they do their own reconstructions?" he asks. "The work that's been published has been through the peer-review process; if they want to criticize that they should write their own papers."

Finally, Jones is quite concerned that critics have redefined the peer review process:

But he fears that the aftermath of the climategate affair is undermining the integrity of the scientific review process. "I don't think we should be taking much notice of what's on blogs because they seem to be hijacking the peer-review process," says Jones.

Readers may want to also refer to this post as they consider the veracity of Jones' claims.

Interestingly, a comment on the article, posted by Douglas J. Keenan, states,

This news report discusses my work on the Chinese weather-station data, but provides no references for that work. The main reference is this: Keenan, D. J. Energy & Environment, 18, 985-995 (2007). It is freely available on the web.

The news report also misrepresents my allegations.

My principal allegation is that some of the data on station histories never existed. Specifically, Jones et al. (1990) claim to have sourced their data from a report that was published by the U.S. Department of Energy and the Chinese Academy of Sciences. Yet for 49 of the 84 meteorological stations that Jones et al. relied upon, the DOE/CAS Report states "station histories are not currently available" and "details regarding instrumentation, collection methods, changes in station location or observing times … are not known". Those statements imply that the quoted claim from Jones et al. is impossible: "stations were selected on the basis of station history: we chose those with few, if any, changes in instrumentation, location or observation times". My paper presents more details; some updates are available via http://www.informath.org/apprise/a5620.htm .

The comment continues with additional useful information.  

THERE has been no global warming for 15 years, a key scientist admitted yesterday in a major U-turn. Professor Phil Jones, who is at the centre of the “Climategate” affair, conceded that there has been no “statistically significant” rise in temperatures since 1995.

Here's more:

The scientist behind the so-called "climate-gate" e-mail scandal now admits there has been no statistically significant global warming since 1995.

Professor Phil Jones also tells the BBC that scientists are unsure whether the Medieval Warm Period was actually warmer than current temperatures. Some skeptics say that is the first time a senior scientist working with the U.N. report on climate change has admitted the possibility that the time between 800 and 1300 A.D. could have actually been warmer than present temperatures. That would be a blow to global warming believers.

Jones also admitted some of his weather data was not organized well enough and that contributed to his refusal to share raw data with critics. But Jones maintains he's just a scientist doing a job: "I have no agenda."

So, the natural question to ask is if global warming is linked to carbon dioxide emissions, and if C02 emissions have continued to increase, why no warming? 

One of the consequences of our recent snowstorm in Washing DC was the delay of a press release announcing the impact of global warming:

NOAA, part of the Department of Commerce, is going to be providing information to individuals and decision-makers through a new NOAA Climate Service office. “More and more, Americans are witnessing the impacts of climate change in their own backyards, including sea-level rise, longer growing seasons, changes in river flows, increases in heavy downpours, earlier snowmelt and extended ice-free seasons in our waters. People are searching for relevant and timely information about these changes to inform decision-making about virtually all aspects of their lives,” the release says.

Interesting … I thought we were witnessing unseasonably harsh Winters witnessed in our own backyard?  

Audi's Super Bowl commercial is hilarious at the expense of the eco-nazis.

The chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds.

Rajendra Pachauri's Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), based in New Delhi, was awarded up to £310,000 by the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the lion's share of a £2.5m EU grant funded by European taxpayers.

It means that EU taxpayers are funding research into a scientific claim about glaciers that any ice researcher should immediately recognise as bogus. The revelation comes just a week after The Sunday Times highlighted serious scientific flaws in the IPCC's 2007 benchmark report on the likely impacts of global warming.

The scientist behind the bogus claim in a Nobel Prize-winning UN report that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 last night admitted it was included purely to put political pressure on world leaders.

Dr Murari Lal also said he was well aware the statement, in the 2007 report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), did not rest on peer-reviewed scientific research.

In an interview with The Mail on Sunday, Dr Lal, the co-ordinating lead author of the report’s chapter on Asia, said: ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.

‘It had importance for the region, so we thought we should put it in.’

And here we see a belief driven presentation of the evidence based upon desired outcome rather than substantiated fact, which is opposition to the IPCC's governing standards: 

According to the IPCC’s statement of principles, its role is ‘to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis, scientific, technical and socio-economic information – IPCC reports should be neutral with respect to policy’. 

To what extent this type of action is present in the remainder of the report is unknown.  However, the IPCC's credibility has certainly taken a serious hit.

The UN’s top climate change body has issued an unprecedented apology over its flawed prediction that Himalayan glaciers were likely to disappear by 2035.

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said yesterday that the prediction in its landmark 2007 report was “poorly substantiated” and resulted from a lapse in standards. “In drafting the paragraph in question the clear and well-established standards of evidence, required by the IPCC procedures, were not applied properly,” the panel said. “The chair, vice-chair and co-chairs of the IPCC regret the poor application of IPCC procedures in this instance.”

The stunning admission is certain to embolden critics of the panel, already under fire over a separate scandal involving hacked e-mails last year.

The 2007 report, which won the panel the Nobel Peace Prize, said that the probability of Himalayan glaciers “disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high”. It caused shock in Asia, where about two billion people depend on meltwater from Himalayan glaciers for their fresh water supplies during the dry seasons.

It emerged last week that the prediction was based not on a consensus among climate change experts but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999. That scientist, Syed Hasnain, has now told The Times that he never made such a specific forecast in his interview with the New Scientist magazine.

“I have not made any prediction on date as I am not an astrologer but I did say they were shrinking fast,” he said. “I have never written 2035 in any of my research papers or reports.” Professor Hasnain works for The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in Delhi, which is headed by Rajendra Pachauri, head of the climate change panel.

Models and predictions have a degree of uncertainty which will translate to errors and inconsistencies.  What is troubling about this admission is that the process of validating data and supporting conclusions was systemically flawed.  While it does not invalidate the entire report, this apology should be accompanied with a commitment to evaluate every claim made in the 2007 report.

Update:  The vice-chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jean-Pascal van Ypersele, states that the admission of error actually strengthens the credibility of the report:

"I don't see how one mistake in a 3,000-page report can damage the credibility of the overall report," he said. 

"Some people will attempt to use it to damage the credibility of the IPCC; but if we can uncover it, and explain it and change it, it should strengthen the IPCC's credibility, showing that we are ready to learn from our mistakes," he further said. 

Spin.