The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency reported on July 5 that evidence it put into the 3,000-page Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has several factual errors. The Dutch agency still remained firmly behind the conclusions in the United Nations-sponsored IPCC report.
Martin Hajer, director of the Netherlands Environment Assessment Agency said of conclusions in the IPCC report: “We can’t say it’s plainly wrong. We don’t know.” He added that the IPCC should “be careful making generalizations.”
The errors submitted by the Dutch are not, in themselves, enough to unravel the global-warming theories that have entranced so many governments and organizations. But the steady stream of corrections and amendments by groups with a profound vested interest in global warming generates problems: (1) the mistakes in evidence made are often such bad mistakes as to cast doubt on the professionalism of the contributors, and (2) the mistakes invariably overstate the case for global warming.
The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, for example, reported that 55 percent of the Netherlands was below sea level. In fact, only 26 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level. The Dutch agency exaggerated the scientific data by more than 100 percent. How could such a simple and basic fact of the topography of the Netherlands be so inaccurately reported? A Dutch schoolboy would have been given very poor grades for such an error in a term paper. It reflects, at a minimum, very lame researching.
The Dutch agency responded to this false data: “The lesson to be learned for an assessment agency such as ours is that quality control is needed at the primary level.” Of course it is. The question for many people must be: Why is a Dutch government agency issuing scientific reports only now finding out “that quality control is needed at the primary level”?
The mistakes of science made by the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, like other governmental agencies issuing reports around the world on global warming, invariably tilt the argument in favor of global warming. Put another way, sloppiness always seems to improve the argument for global warming. Individually, a single mistake means nothing. Cumulatively, the uniform direction of errors toward one conclusion is very significant. It is rather like flipping a coin 50 times and always coming up with heads.
The Dutch report shows this same pattern. The error of more than doubling the percentage of the Netherlands below sea level mistakenly doubles the danger of global warming to that nation. The report said that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. In fact, the report should have said that there was a likelihood that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2350. The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency moved the theoretical danger of global warming so that it was 315 years earlier than data indicated. The report also said that global warming would put 250 million Africans at risk, when the number they meant to write was 220 million Africans.
None of the reported errors could be construed as minimizing the dangers of global warming; all of the erros would lead one to believe that global warming is dire. What is true in the Netherlands has been shown true in Britain, which also has a clear predilection toward nudging all the evidence in favor of global warming and suppressing conflicting opinions. What else in the Dutch report is inaccurate or skewed? Who can say? The protocols of science are intended to question and to review data and assumptions drawn from data. Obviously, what global-warming agencies around the world are pushing is not good science but ideologically driven opinion.
