Posted on 10/08/2013 7:24:18 AM PDT by LucianOfSamasota
Thought experiment: Imagine you are a national security reporter, covering the release of a massive, 2,000-page report on domestic intelligence gathering activities and future threat assessment from the National Security Agency. But instead of issuing the full report, the NSA issues a 30-page “Summary for Policymakers” (SPM) written by political appointees at the Justice Department, promising that the full 2,000-page report will be released a few days later. Would you print a front-page story based only on the 30-page summary, or would you demand to see the full report?
If you’d go with the politically massaged summary, then congratulations—you too can be an environmental reporter. Because that’s exactly what the U.N.’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) did on Friday, September 27, in Stockholm, releasing only the SPM while withholding the full report. And the media played along, generating predictable headlines over the weekend about the increasing certainty of climate scientists that humans are warming the world.
To be fair, if they had waited until Monday’s release of the full Working Group I report on the current state of climate science, they’d have had to make sense of a jargon-filled report that Dutch scientist Arthur Petersen told the BBC “is virtually unreadable!” Churchill once quipped about a massive bureaucratic report that “by its very length, it defends itself against the risk of being read.” The IPCC appears to be following this example.
(Excerpt) Read more at weeklystandard.com ...
confidence should not be interpreted probabilistically, and it is distinct from ‘statistical confidence.’
It has certainly been portrayed as a scientific error bar in the press...
Hmm, sounds like they are saying that they think there is no chance their models could be wrong?
Is this author implying that really large reports and bills are made that large to prevent people from reading them? That politicians are hiding what they’re doing in the depths of these gigantic reports and bills?
::sarcasm:: why on earth would politicians want to hide what they’re doing from the people?
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