Thursday, June 16, 2011

The Latest IPCC Kerfuffle

So what is the big deal if someone from Greenpeace was a Lead Author on the IPCC report on renewable energy?

Experts can be found in many organizations. As a Greenpeace spokesperson points out, the report also includes an author who is from Chevron as well as researcher from Exxon.

I highly suspect that Mark Lynas is wrong to write that Greenpeace "dictated" the report. I've heard many people talk about their experience working on an IPCC report and no one seems to dictate anything -- every sentence is gone over with a fine-tooth comb and endlessly hashed out. Unless someone has some good evidence that Sven Teske had some special influence in constructing the report (and nothing Lynas offers indicates that), this is once again a vastly overblown issue.

This is hardly the equivalent of a Dick Cheney-like situation huddling with oil industry representatives to divide up the Iraqi oil fields.

As Andrew Revkin writes, the IPCC should have been more transparent in their press release. But they should take expertise where they find it, and nothing says Greenpeace or any NGO can't have that. In fact, I've met more than one person from NGOs who knew as much about an issue and had done as much detailed research into it than so-called experts.

4 comments:

charlesH said...

David,

Still fighting the last war I see. AGW is dead for the foreseeable future along with energy subsidies (e.g. ethanol). A fine example of the corp/gov corruption that we both detest.

Steve Bloom said...

Opinion lacking analysis, blindly doing the bidding of the rentier class.

crf said...

Lynas said that the section of the report claiming 80% of energy can be met by renewables, is referenced on a paper (ER-2010), authored by Teske, in the minor journal Energy Efficiency. However, this paper has an anticedent, written by Greenpeace (of which Teske is a member) and European Renewable Energy Council, which Lynas says is propagandistic.

I don't share your dismismal of this as overblown. It's seriously wrong to base the public trumpeting of this report, whatever its merits, upon some conclusions it makes that rely heavily upon research done by its lead author, research based on a paper that began its life as a German Greenpeace/Renewable Energy Council propaganda paper, where the author occupies a high position in Greenpeace.

Dano said...

I haven't been following and don't really want to read. But one would think that with hackers at every turn and shills like Morano and Watts willing to trumpet lies to high heaven, they'd be careful.

Maybe they are and the professional liars and their gullible rubes are banging pots over nothing again.

Best,

D