UN IPCC author Mike Hulme says 'consensus' was only a 'few dozen' experts, not 'thousands'

4/12/2010, "Without a careful explanation about what it means, this drive for consensus can leave the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism. Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’

• are disingenuous.

That particular consensus judgment, as are many others in the IPCC reports,

• is reached by only a few dozen experts in the specific field of detection and attribution studies;

other IPCC authors are experts in other fields."...(see end of page 10, top of page 11)

• 6/13/10, from Lawrence Solomon, National Post:

"The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change misled the press and public into believing that thousands of scientists backed its claims on manmade global warming, according to Mike Hulme, a prominent climate scientist and IPCC insider. The actual number of scientists who backed that claim was “only a few dozen experts,” he states in a paper for Progress in Physical Geography, co-authored with student Martin Mahony.

“Claims such as ‘2,500 of the world’s leading scientists have reached a consensus that human activities are having a significant influence on the climate’ are disingenuous,” the paper states unambiguously, adding that they rendered “the IPCC vulnerable to outside criticism.”

Hulme, Professor of Climate Change in the School of Environmental Sciences at the University of East Anglia – the university of Climategate fame — is the founding Director of the Tyndall Centre for Climate Change Research and one of the UK’s most prominent climate scientists. Among his many roles in the climate change establishment, Hulme was the IPCC’s co-ordinating Lead Author for its chapter on ‘Climate scenario development’ for its Third Assessment Report and a contributing author of several other chapters.

Hulme’s depiction of IPCC’s exaggeration of the number of scientists who backed its claim about man-made climate change can be found on pages 10 and 11 of his paper, found here."

• pdf document
  

• 
  
• School of Environmental Sciences University of East Anglia
  

Norwich NR4 7TJ
Review Article for Progress in Physical Geography
5180 (plus) words
12 April 2010"

• see end of page 10, top of page 11