The IPCC’s report was not only politicized, it was factually erroneous. The newest complaint comes from the Netherlands. From the story:
The Dutch environment minister, Jaqueline Cramer, on Wednesday demanded a thorough investigation into the 2007 report by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change after a Dutch magazine uncovered it incorrectly states 55 percent of the country lies below sea level. The the Dutch national bureau for environmental analysis has taken responsibility for the incorrect figure cited by the IPCC. Only 26 percent of the Netherlands is really below sea level.
Doh! That’s not a tiny error, but gets to the heart of the trustworthiness of the entire report:
When Cramer heard of that blunder she wrote a letter to the IPCC, saying she was “not amused” there were mistakes in the scientific report she bases the Dutch environmental policies on. Now she is confronted with errors in the data about her own country. “This can’t happen again,” the minister told reporters in The Hague on Wednesday. “The public trust in science and politics has been badly damaged.”
The excuse was not catching a bad report from Dutch scientists. Taken alone, it might not matter so much. But this is just one in a continuing cascade of errors. Still, the wagons continue to be circled:
The Dutch mistake, however, is of a different order. Scientists missed the incorrect wording of the claim that they received from the PBL. Maarten Hajer, the director of that agency argued the conclusions of the IPPC are still solid: climate is changing, the earth is warming up and human behaviour is to blame for a large part of that. He did acknowledge damage had been done to the reputation of climate scientists. “But I prefer to call it a scratch in the finish rather than a dent,” he said.
Dream on, Directer Hajer. Dream on.
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