Really insightful new essay by Simon Robertson on issues raised by the IPCC dual roles in both assessing and producing climate research onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.100…
Hughes and Patterson (2017) document how the IPCC WG3 has been dominated by a small group of inter-connected scholars who engage in a rather shocking degree of self-citation in the assessment reports
Under indicators of the @UN Sustainable Development Goals the world is making progress with respect to disasters - but there is no guarantee that it will continue, sustained effort is needed
Vulnerability has decreased globally:
"Results show a clear decreasing trend in both human & economic vulnerability, with global average mortality & economic loss rates that have dropped by 6.5 and nearly 5 times, respectively, from 1980–1989 to 2007–2016" sciencedirect.com/science/articl…
Back in 2007, in its annual report CRED/EM-DAT warned about using pre-2000 data to say anything about climate change, because of the massive increasing in reporting of disasters around the world.
None of us are prepared to examine evidence ourselves & judge which experts are more reliable than others
Fortunately, there are formal & informal mechanisms which play this role
That’s the short cut
Such “short cuts” — which we can call science advisory mechanisms — generally (but importantly, not always) work well in contexts like climate & GMOs, but have for the most part failed miserably in the pandemic
I appreciate Prof Thompson's interest in my work, but he gets some things badly wrong, some thoughts
Prof Thompson certainly isn't the 1st academic to write about a colleague w/o reading their work or asking their views, hence
"He presumably thought..."
"His post was seen as..."
"Some critics question..."
How does this sort of uninformed speculation get published in a journal?
I hear this a lot:
"Witnessing professionals would do better to emphasize instead the long-term harms rather than getting involved in controversies about the causes of particular weather disasters."
IOW: "Your good science makes my political advocacy more difficult. Shut up."
Projecting Confidence: How the Probabilistic Horse Race Confuses and Demobilizes the Public | The Journal of Politics: Vol 82, No 4 journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.108…
I discussed the pathological potential of horse race election predictions a little ways back