Global Warming Report Not Based on Peer-Reviewed Science

From Donna Laframboise's blog "No Frakking Consensus" and the website "NOconsensus.org" comes the results of a citizen's audit of the Nobel Prize winning 2007 IPCC Report on Global Warming. After the highly publicized discovery of numerous errors and unsubstantiated alarmist claims in this report, Donna Laframboise decided to go through it line by line to see just how much of it actually is based on peer-reviewed scientific papers.

For years, the AGW alarmists have been taunting the skeptics by saying that anti-AGW viewpoints do not depend on peer-reviewed science. Turns out, neither do pro-AGW viewpoints. Oh dear.

"21 of 44 chapters in the United Nations' Nobel-winning climate bible earned an F on a report card we are releasing today. Forty citizen auditors from 12 countries examined 18,531 sources cited in the report – finding 5,587 to be not peer-reviewed.

Contrary to statements by the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the celebrated 2007 report does not rely solely on research published in reputable scientific journals. It also cites press releases, newspaper and magazine clippings, working papers, student theses, discussion papers, and literature published by green advocacy groups. Such material is often called "grey literature."

We've been told this report is the gold standard. We've been told it's 100 percent peer-reviewed science. But thousands of sources cited by this report have not come within a mile of a scientific journal.

Based on the grading system used in US schools, 21 chapters in the IPCC report receive an F (they cite peer-reviewed sources less than 60% of the time), 4 chapters get a D, and 6 get a C. There are also 5 Bs and 8 As.

In November, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri disparaged non-peer-reviewed research in an interview with the Times of India (see the end of the article):

IPCC studies only peer-review science. Let someone publish the data in a decent credible publication. I am sure IPCC would then accept it, otherwise we can just throw it into the dustbin."

Looks like most of the IPCC report goes into the dustbin along with the final scraps of Pachauri's and the IPCC's credibility.