Nature News online has published an interview with climate researcher Martin Parry at Imperial College London. I left a long comment, which is reprinted here.
Setting the climate record straight Nature News
Climate researcher Martin Parry at Imperial College London co-chaired the second working group of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) — the group charged with assessing the effects climate change is likely to have and how these might be mitigated — for the IPCC’s fourth assessment. During the past month, the IPCC has corrected an error about the amount of melting anticipated for the Himalayan glaciers and defended its estimates of the financial costs of damage caused by natural disasters. Nature talks to Parry, who has been busy juggling writing up his own research with investigating queries about the 2007 report.
Do you feel responsible for the Himalayan glacier error?
I have responsibility, with my co-chair, for the whole volume. Likewise, authors have responsibility within the structure of the IPCC for their conclusions. My job is to see that procedures are set up in such a way that we’ve got good quality control. That the procedures apparently weren’t followed in the case of the Himalayan glaciers is a pity. But if you set up procedures and they are not followed, that doesn’t absolve you from responsibility. Ultimately, it comes through to me.
Interview with Martin Perry continues at Nature.com
Schagen World Map SkateboardsAs a thinking person who respects scientific inquiry, I found the interview very unsatisfying, and wrote a response, which is my intellectual property. The first comment, framing resistance to climate change science as coming from Sarah Palin and American Conservatives ticked me off.
I try to post reliable climate research whenever possible. We all know that each week, new discoveries redimensionalize prior ‘facts’ about the environment.
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Friday, March 5, 2010 at 2:07PM 
A panel of 41 scientists reviewing 20 years worth of research has concluded that a giant asteroid smacking into Earth is the only plausible explanation for the extinction of the dinosaurs around 65 million years ago.
