One of America’s top meteorologists, Jeff Masters, and Dr Joe Romm, author of one of the most important books re climate change and politics, held a press teleconference focused on extreme weather, the recent (DC area) snowstorms, and climate science. The audio makes for, sadly, too interesting listening as so many of the reporters seemed intent to get quotes that would falsely support arguments that snow in DC somehow disproves the reality of a warming globe.
Now, the Faux News reporter sought to get Romm and Masters to support truthiness-arguments against climate science. In response to questioning the implications of a few errors within the IPCC report, the following exchange provides an excellent path, imo, to provide reporters an understanding of how to conceive of errors within 1000s of pages of reporting.
Fox News:
“So in this case would you ask the public to overlook these errors given that they are minor?”
Romm:
Well yeah.
Look, each of you works for media outlets that publish corrections. Yet you expect day by day the public should come back and not think because you made a mistake and admitted 2 or 3 or 4 mistakes every single day that somehow your reporting is not trustworthy.
Now, in the case of the scientific body, these are reports every 5 or 6 years. And they publish like three 1,000-page reports. It’s going to be very difficult for errors not to creep into it.
But, again, I encourage you to draw distinctions between the wealth of observations in this scientific literature and these reports, which are an effort to collect everything and digest it. It would be very difficult for it to be error free.
Hmmm …
Let us add that the most serious “errors” within the IPCC work are almost certainly on the optimism side, understating the speed and severity of climate disruption for a variety of reasons such as the mandate to look backwards at already published peer-reviewed literature and inadequate modeling of positive feedbacks (positive feedback, unlike at the work place, is actual negative). Thus, rather than some form of pessimism, the IPCC reporting is almost certainly optimistic in nature.
PS: And, sadly, the modeling / examination of the benefits of action to mitigate climate disruption seem to systematically overstate costs and understate benefits.