Stinging criticism of the IPCC

See the 2005 comment from Steve McIntyre here.

An excerpt:

But in the climate field, and for multiproxy work in particular, I am really struck by the extraordinary prevalence of defects in the work of the most influential authors. While I’ve opined about MBH, IMHO the work of Jones, Briffa, Crowley etc. has equally glaring defects, which I’m in the process of documenting. I really don’t see how the corpus of present multiproxy work can be used to develop a valid scientific “consensus”. It seems odd that competent people should have adopted and applied such weak papers or that the replication effort should be so nonexistent, suggesting that there is a very strong ideological component or bias to the widespread acceptance and use of this weak material.

One clue may be in the IPCC process itself. One of the curious features of this process is the vast number of meetings at various relatively nice places all over the world, at which the scientists attempt to reach “consensus”. Yet for all the money and time spent on this, they make no attempt to do any engineering-quality due diligence. Most civilians assume that IPCC carries out engineering-quality due diligence rather than this type of negotiation.

In general, I prefer dealing with the particular rather than the general. In this case, the IPCC process, with its emphasis on a political form of process rather than an engineering audit, seems to result in a type of mutual reinforcement and excitement more characteristic of market phenomena and fads, than what I take to be the more usual scientific process where there is no attempt to negotiate and institutionalize a “consensus”. Thus the IPCC itself may be distorting the lens.