Staggering Blunder By IPCC, June 16 2011

Watts Up With That?
Steve McIntyre has uncovered a blunder on the part of Pachauri and the IPCC that is causing waves of doubt and calls for retooling on both sides of the debate. In a nutshell, the IPCC made yet another inflated claim that:

…80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century…

Unfortunately, it has been revealed that this claim is similar to the Himalayan glacier melt by 2035 fiasco, with nothing independent to back it up. Worse, it isn’t the opinion of the IPCCper se, but rather that of Greenpeace. It gets worse.

Steve McIntyre discovered the issue and writes this conclusion:

It is totally unacceptable that IPCC should have had a Greenpeace employee as a Lead Author of the critical Chapter 10, that the Greenpeace employee, as an IPCC Lead Author, should (like Michael Mann and Keith Briffa in comparable situations) have been responsible for assessing his own work and that, with such inadequate and non-independent ‘due diligence’, IPCC should have featured the Greenpeace scenario in its press release on renewables.
Everyone in IPCC WG3 should be terminated and, if the institution is to continue, it should be re-structured from scratch.

Those are strong words from Steve. Read his entire report here.

Elsewhere, the other side of the debate is getting ticked off about this breach of ethics and protocol too. Mark Lynas , author of a popular pro-AGW book, Six Degrees, has written some strong words also: (h/t to Bishop Hill)

New IPCC error: renewables report conclusion was dictated by Greenpeace

Here’s what happened. The 80% by 2050 figure was based on a scenario, so Chapter 10 of the full report reveals, called ER-2010, which does indeed project renewables supplying 77% of the globe’s primary energy by 2050. The lead author of the ER-2010 scenario, however, is a Sven Teske, who should have been identified (but is not) as a climate and energy campaigner for Greenpeace International. Even worse, Teske is a lead author of the IPCC report also – in effect meaning that this campaigner for Greenpeace was not only embedded in the IPCC itself, but was in effect allowed to review and promote his own campaigning work under the cover of the authoritative and trustworthy IPCC. A more scandalous conflict of interest can scarcely be imagined.
…
The IPCC must urgently review its policies for hiring lead authors – and I would have thought that not only should biased ‘grey literature’ be rejected, but campaigners from NGOs should not be allowed to join the lead author group and thereby review their own work. There is even a commercial conflict of interest here given that the renewables industry stands to be the main beneficiary of any change in government policies based on the IPCC report’s conclusions. Had it been an oil industry intervention which led the IPCC to a particular conclusion, Greenpeace et al would have course have been screaming blue murder.

And, Bishop Hill reports other rumblings in AGW land with a consensus that the IPCC is “dumb”.
What a mess. The IPCC and Pachauri may as well give it up. After a series of blunders,insults of “voodoo science” to people asking honest, germane, questions, Africagate, and now this, they have no place to go, they’ve hit rock bottom.

The credibility of the IPCC organization is shredded. Show these bozos the door.