IPCC Snowed by Snowmobile Lobby

Thank goodness the climate bible can make us laugh as well as cry. We've been told the organization that produces it - the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) - has the highest standards. Its chairman has said that for information to even be considered for inclusion in the climate bible, it must first have undergone the rigours of a peer-review process and have been published in a scientific journal (see the last lines of this article).

I guess that's why, when the section dealing with how global warming could affect North American tourism got written, the IPCC chose to quote a dollar amount plucked from…drumroll please…a press release issued by an industry lobby group - in this case the International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association.

I'm certain the snowmobile folks are decent, hardworking people. They're just trying to make a living. But when one starts speaking of sums that begin with the letter "B" - in this case, $27 billion – it's a bit of a joke to accept at face value figures supplied by such an interested party. Nevertheless, peering into its crystal ball, the oh-so-scholarly climate bible reports:

The North American snowmobiling industry (valued at US$27 billion) (ISMA, 2006) is more vulnerable to climate change because it relies on natural snowfall. By the 2050s, a reliable snowmobile season disappears from most regions of eastern North America that currently have developed trail networks… [bold added]

This is what the full reference looks like:

ISMA, 2006: Facts and Figures about Snowmobiling. International Snowmobile Manufacturers Association. [Accessed 12.02.07: http://www.ccso-ccom.ca/ contente.htm] [see it in the list here]

The link the IPCC cites above in the first set of square brackets is dead. If you instead go to that website's home page you discover it belongs to the Canadian Council of Snowmobile Organizations. From there you can click over to a page titled "Facts and Statistics about Snowmobiling" (rather than the IPCC's slightly different wording: "facts and figures"). The page is dated June 2006.

Statement #6 declares that the "economic impact of snowmobiling" is worth $21 billion annually in the US and $6 billion annually in Canada. Who says so, and how they arrived at these numbers is not supplied. But this webpage does, indeed, appear to be the IPCC's sole source for that statistic.

In small print at the bottom we learn the webpage has been "Reproduced from ISMA's web site." After we click over to the International Snowmobile Manufacturer's Association – the industry's lobby arm - we find amongst its list of press releases, a "Facts and Statistics about Snowmobiling" entry. Click again and we get taken to a page with the filename: pr_snowfacts.asp.

PR – as in press release. As in public relations. The one PR to which there is no connection is that mysterious beast known as peer-review.

The page has been updated since the 2007 climate bible was published. But there, in statement #5, is a similar claim regarding the economic impact of snowmobiling. It now says the US economic impact is $22 billion (up from 21), while the Canadian economic impact remains at $6 billion. It's worth noticing that statements one to four list the number of snowmobile manufacturers, the number of units sold in 2009, the suggested retail price of those units, and how many snowmobiles are currently registered with the authorities in the US and Canada.

In other words, this listing of "facts" is a marketing exercise. We aren't told the first thing about how the $28 billion number was determined - or by whom. Instead we're advised, according to the statements numbered as follows, that:

#10: The average snowmobiler spends $4,000 each year on snowmobile-related recreation.

#15: Snowmobilers are caring neighbors, they raised over $3 million for charity during the 2008-2009 season.

#20: Snowmobiling is great exercise that brings people outdoors to interact with nature and each other. It is an invigorating sport that is great for stress release and good mental health.

#21: Snowmobiling is a great family lifestyle. It is an activity that keeps parents and kids together. Historically individuals who snowmobile at a young age continue to snowmobile with their parents throughout their lives, sharing great experiences as a family…

What's missing from this list, of course, is a tally of how many gallons of fossil fuel are burned each year by recreational users. It seems to me, if I were the IPCC, that number would be important. Perhaps an overall decline in snowmobiling might be a good thing from a carbon footprint perspective.

Indeed, this green oriented website claims that snowmobiles emit up to 100 times more CO2 than automobiles. (At this junction I should reveal that I grew up in a part of Canada where snowmobiles are common. That I personally find them noisy and smelly doesn't make me popular with certain relatives - who may now like me even less.)

But wait. If we click on yet another press release posted on the lobby group's website – the one titled "Snowmobiling is a $27 Billion Business" - in the second paragraph we read:

Recent Economic Impact studies performed by Iowa State University, Plymouth State University in New Hampshire, and the University of Minnesota all show dramatic increases in snowmobile activity and the economic importance of snowmobile tourism.

No further information is provided. We don't know who the researchers are, what the papers are titled, or when they were published. Is it possible these studies appeared in peer-reviewed journals and would, on examination, turn out to be based on solid analysis? Sure. But without considerably more digging we have no idea if this is the case. And what really matters is that the IPCC doesn't, either.

Here, again, we find the IPCC relying on a questionable information source that turns out to be a press release in drag. But hey, when one considers the snowmobile-carbon-footprint issue, at least this instance offers some entertainment value.

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UPDATE: An hour after I posted the above, reader Neal Bridges tipped me off to the fact that if one types the dead link included in the IPCC reference above into the WayBack Machine at Archive.org, (removing the space) one can see what that web page looked like in early 2007 - which is when the IPCC claims it last accessed it.

Curiously, at that point in time the page appears not to have discussed economic impacts at all. Instead, it begins with the Canadian Council of Snowmobile Organizations' mission statement. Even more curious, at the very top of the page is a link to a brief the organization submitted to a parliamentary committee in 2001. The brief includes a section on the economic impacts of snowmobiling.

According to the first paragraph of that section, snowmobiling has a "positive impact on the [Canadian] economy - $3.1 billion in fact!" This is, of course, rather distant from the IPCC's $6 billion figure. Could the economic impact have doubled between 2001 and 2007? Strange.

It would seem that the most logical explanation is that the IPCC cited the wrong web address in the reference (a version of the page making the $21 and $6 billion claims did exist back in 2007).

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>> What the IPCC learned from press releases
>> IPCC falls for press release masquerade
>> Press release masquerade - Part 2
>> Climate bible gets 21 'F's on report card

Press Release Masquerade - Part 2

We've been told the 2007 climate bible, produced by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is written by the world's most qualified people working within a framework that has no "parallel on this planet". But the fact that some of the IPCC's analysis is based on suspect documents like press releases undermines this view.

I recently blogged about a press release that, in an abridged form, masqueraded as a news article which then got cited by the 2007 climate bible. On closer examination it turns out this news item doesn't say what the IPCC says it does. The full article appears at the top of the second page of this PDF. (The original press release is here.) The reference looks like this:

Anon, 2004: Government of Canada and Canadian pulp and paper industry agree on blueprint for climate change action. Forest. Chronic., 80, 9. [see it in the list here]

As the title indicates, it announces a plan to reduce the emissions of Canada's pulp and paper industry. But the IPCC uses this article to back up a claim regarding how climate change could, sometime in the future, affect certain industries.

It gets cited by the IPCC in the bottom right corner of this table – as Anon, 2004. But scan left, over to the beginning of that row, read all the way across, and what you discover is that the IPCC thinks the global pulp and paper industry, as well as the food processing sector, may face some risk from climate change because:

• raw resources may cost more
• production patterns may change
• supply chains may shift or be disrupted and
• changing lifestyles may influence consumer demand

All of the above are perfectly plausible with or without climate change. Nothing stays the same forever. So what?

What merits attention, though, is that the above-mentioned news article addresses none of these issues. And it says even less about how climate change will affect the international food processing sector.

In other words, the IPCC chose to rely on a news article that is actually an abridged press release to backup certain claims – but received no benefit from this decision. The news article doesn't talk about the issues the IPCC is discussing. Not even close.

So what about the second reference, the one listed after Anon, 2004? In its full version, it looks like this:

Broadmeadow, T., D. Ray and C. Samuel, 2005: Climate change and the future for broadleaved forests in the UK. Forestry, 78, 145-161. [see it in the list here]

An abstract of that paper appears here. (There's a discrepancy in the latter part of the title. The IPCC says "broadleaved forests in the UK", but the paper reads: "broadleaved tree species in Britain". The journal name, volume, date, and page numbers match, however.)

I've read this 17-page paper and, first of all, it's important to note its narrow focus. It discusses how climate change might affect a subset of trees in a particular country. It says increased C02 in the atmosphere is expected to enhance tree growth, improve the ability of forests to survive with less water, and extend the growing season. On the other side of this "largely positive" ledger, it says climate change will likely result in "an increase in the frequency and severity of summer droughts" in the UK (pp. 146-147).

Long story short, this peer-reviewed research paper concludes that the UK forestry industry might, sometime in the future, consider planting different sorts of trees. Only under the "most extreme" climate change scenarios, it says, are lower yields expected to be a concern (p. 159).

So how does the subject matter of this paper relate back to the IPCC's claims listed above? Employing a highly charitable interpretation, there's a tenuous link to the idea that production patterns and supply chains might be altered. In extreme situations, because a portion of the part of the global pulp and paper industry that happens to be located in the UK might face reduced yields, costs could increase. But I think that's a stretch.

What's more clear-cut is that this second source – like the news item discussed above - says nothing about climate change and the food processing sector. Nada. Zilch. The IPCC wants us to believe food processing will suffer due to climate change but it can't come up with a single reference that even mentions the sector.

So would it surprise you to learn there's at least one peer-reviewed research paper that argues climate change will benefit the global pulp and paper industry and consumers alike? An 18-page PDF of that paper is available here. According to its abstract: "Consumers in all regions benefit from the lower prices, and the overall impacts of climate change in timber markets are expected to be beneficial, increasing welfare in those markets from 2% to 8%."

The IPCC knows about this paper, because it cites it five times on this page, three times on this page, and once here. But the folks who put together this table preferred instead to rely on an irrelevant news item that's really a press release in disguise.

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I am embarrassed to report that I made a mistake in my post two days ago. I said the IPPC did not italicize journal names in its reference lists, even though this is standard academic practice. (See the navy-coloured sidebar text here.) This is untrue. In the online version of the references, journal names are, in fact, italicized. Because formatting depends on a style sheet internal to the IPCC's website, however, when one cuts-and-pastes the references into a new document (as I did in order to send the list of chapter references to citizen auditors) the style is lost and the italics disappear. My apologies to the IPCC and to you, dear reader.

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>> IPCC falls for press release masquerade
>> What the IPCC learned from press releases
>> The Stern Review scandal - the IPCC breaks 3 of its own rules
>> IPCC reliance on grey literature 30 times greater than UK threshold
>> What's left if we disregard non-peer-reviewed claims?

IPCC Falls for Press Release Masquerade

Those with an informed view of journalism know that some news articles are simply press releases in disguise. A reporter in a hurry will snip a little here, reorganize a little there - and presto! they have a story to file.

Such activities bear little relation to the romantic notion of the hard-nosed journalist who, much like a detective, begins with an open mind, digs deep, and then tenaciously pursues the story wherever it leads. In the real world few journalists behave that way, only the rarest of publications reward such behaviour, and readers with busy lives and short attention spans often just want the basics.

Which brings me to The Forestry Chronicle, published by the Canadian Institute of Forestry. Part trade magazine and part scholarly journal, it keeps readers abreast of new developments. Pages 8 to 15 of the January-February 2004 edition were devoted to "National News" and one of the items appearing there was titled: "Government of Canada and Canadian Pulp and Paper Industry Agree on Blueprint for Climate Change Action."

Those involved in preparing this news item had no way of anticipating that, three years later, it would get cited by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). But that is what happened. In the references at the end of Chapter 7 of the report written by the IPCC's Working Group 2, the news item is listed like this:

Anon, 2004: Government of Canada and Canadian pulp and paper industry agree on blueprint for climate change action. Forest. Chronic., 80, 9. [bold added]

SIDEBAR: Allow me to digress for a moment. A number of the citizen auditors who helped examine all 18,531 references in the climate bible commented on the poor quality of many of these references. It's almost as if the IPCC went out of its way to obscure publication names, to throw up barriers against the uninitiated.

Take a look at the bolded part of the reference above. Both words have been abbreviated even though this accomplished little. The first word - Forestry - normally has eight characters. In its abbreviated form it contains seven (because a period must be inserted). The same goes for the second word. Chronicle - if fully spelled out so that there's no mystery - contains nine characters. But the IPCC chose to abbreviate it to eight.

Whatever rationale explains this, the end result is that readers trying to follow the conversation must first play hide and seek with many of the references on which the IPCC bases its arguments. Step one is figuring out what the full publication name actually is. (Had the IPCC provided a list of abbreviations and then used them consistently throughout the report, that would be another matter. But it did not.)

And since we're on the subject of reference formatting, it is standard practice in academic circles that journal names are italicized. Science and Nature on down demand this as a matter of course from their authors. Italics provide a visual cue so that readers may quickly determine the source of a citation. Although we hear a great deal about the high-quality of the IPCC's scholarship, it's worth noting that it can't be bothered to follow this simple convention.

Apr. 30 UPDATE: I am embarrassed to report that I'm mistaken regarding this last point. In the online version of the references, journal names are, in fact, italicized. Because formatting depends on a style sheet internal to the IPCC's website, however, when one cuts-and-pastes the references into a new document (as I did in order to send the list of chapter references to citizen auditors) the italics disappear. My apologies to the IPCC and to readers.

But let us return to the news item. The eagle eye of a citizen auditor noticed that it bears the same title as a 2003 government of Canada press release. Was this, in fact, merely a reprint? Had the IPCC inadvertently based its analysis on yet another media release?

Answering these questions required that we examine the article that appeared in The Forestry Chronicle. But that content is behind an online paywall and although several of our citizen auditors were academics with electronic access to an array of journals, no one seemed to have the keys to this specific publication.

I therefore sent an e-mail to the appropriate IPCC technical support unit (there's one for each working group) which began: "I'm hoping you can help me. I would like to read [the] full text of this article, cited in Chapter 7 of the Working Group 2 report..." [mea culpa, I left out the "the" in my e-mail]

The next day, the IPCC replied (kudos to them for their prompt response), regretting that they couldn't be of assistance:

Unfortunately, we are unable to provide subscription access to online journals cited in IPCC Assessment Reports. Perhaps you might check your local library as they frequently have thousands of subscriptions to online journals such as The Forestry Chronicles. [sic, bold added]

Sigh. I wrote back, asking them to please re-check their records. Since the article in question appeared to be a non-peer-reviewed news item I argued it was surely covered by the policies described on page 14 of this IPCC document. According to the IPCC's own policies and procedures, the news article should have been collected prior to the first round of IPCC expert reviews - so that it could be provided to any reviewers wishing to read it for themselves.

I quoted from the first paragraph at the top of page 14 which explains that those policies:

...have been designed to make all references used in IPCC Reports easily accessible and to ensure that the IPCC process remains open and transparent. [bold added]

Well, what do you know? After I cited chapter and verse the IPCC replied with an e-mail that read, in its entirety:

Here is the complete text of the article you requested. You will find it on page 9 of the attached document.

A PDF of the entire news section from the relevant edition of The Forestry Chronicle accompanied this e-mail. See pages 8-9 here.

Inch by inch, row by row, I now had my answer. The IPCC had, indeed, based its arguments on yet another press release. This time, though, the press release had masqueraded as a news item.
The original press release is 700 words long. The news item published in The Forestry Chronicle is 480 words. The Chronicle cut four paragraphs from the press release and re-wrote the release’s first five words. In every other respect, the text is identical. A press release was transformed into a news article that was later cited as evidence by the IPCC's climate bible - a document on which governments around the world base multi-billion-dollar decisions.

This story, however, does not end here. There's a whole second chapter. Stayed tuned.

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>> What the IPCC learned from press releases
>> The Stern Review scandal
>> IPCC reliance on grey literature 30 times greater than UK threshold
>> What's left if we disregard non-peer-reviewed claims?

What the IPCC Learned from Press Releases

We now know that the UN's Nobel-winning, allegedly gold-standard climate bible bases factual assertions on dodgy source material like press releases.

For example, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is confident that "many genuine efforts" are being made to help the poor cope with energy price increases. Why? Because a press release talks about one initiative in one country: [read it here]

World Bank, 2005: An open letter to the Catholic Relief Services and bank information centre in response to the report ‘Chad’s Oil: Miracle or Mirage for the poor?’. News release no: 2005/366/AFR, Washington D.C. [IPCC reference listed here]

The IPCC declares that the United States decreased its greenhouse gas intensity by specific percentages during 2003 and 2004. There seems to be no need to verify these facts since a White House news release (no longer available at the supplied online address and, we might note, issued by an administration not usually trusted by climate change activists) apparently said so.

Snow, T., White House Press Briefing, 2006: http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061031-8.html# accessed 31 October 2006. [IPCC reference listed here]

Although we all know that weather is not climate, the IPCC seems confused on this point when it discusses the 2003 European heat wave. In a report that's supposed to focus on the impacts of long term climate change, the IPCC thinks it's worth mentioning that "Wine production in Europe was the lowest in 10 years" in 2003. The evidence for such a claim? A press release issued by a lobby group for European farmers:

COPA COGECA, 2003a: Committee of Agricultural Organisations in the European Union General Committee for Agricultural Cooperation in the European Union, CDP 03 61 1, Press release, Brussels. [IPCC reference listed here]

It's a similar story for the IPCC's claim that, also in 2003, "Forage production was reduced on average by 30% in France and hay and silage stocks for winter were partly used during the summer." According to an IPCC supplementary document (PDF - see p. 4), the above press release is actually the source of the hay claim, while the wine production data comes from a second press release that is cited thus: (see p. 6 of the above PDF)

COPA COGECA, 2003b: Committee of Agricultural Organisations in the European Union General Committee for Agricultural Cooperation in the European Union, CDP 03 61 1, Press release, Brussels.

Since the European farmers' organization website only has press releases from the last three years online, if we want to sort out which of these 2003 documents actually says what, we'll need to submit a special request.

And then there's the case of the vanishing World Bank press release. Issued in 2002, apparently in Spanish, the IPCC cites it to backup two separate claims. It is used in this context:

Conservation of biodiversity and maintenance of ecosystem structure and function are important for climate-change adaptation strategies, due to the protection of genetically diverse populations and species-rich ecosystems (World Bank, 2002a; CBD, 2003);

and in this one:

According to the World Bank (2002a, c), some developing countries are losing 4-8% of their GDP due to productive and capital losses related to environmental degradation.

Unfortunately, while the World Bank website lists hundreds of news releases from 2002, this particular document remains elusive. The website's internal search engine doesn't seem to think a press release with the ID number 2002/112/S exists - even though that is how the IPCC identifies this source:

World Bank, 2002a: Desarrollo en riesgo debido a la degradación ambiental: Comunicado de prensa (Development at risk from environmental degradation: News release), No. 2002/112/S. [IPCC reference listed here]

Google seems unable to provide assistance, either. Has the IPCC made an error? It's unclear.

But never mind, the celebrated IPCC report demonstrates its commitment to top-notch scholarship when it relies on an amateurish press release during a discussion of the relative energy densities of new technologies such as ultracapacitors and Ni-MH batteries (see the bottom of this page). That a smallish company might have its own reasons - competitive kung fu, an upcoming round of capital-raising, entrepreneurial enthusiasm run amok - for embellishing or exaggerating in a release aimed at the media doesn't appear to have occurred to anyone at the IPCC.

Instead, the IPCC is prepared to base its analysis - and its reputation - on a reference that looks like this:

Power System, 2005: Press release 2005.6.27. Development of High Power and High Energy Density Capacitor (in Japanese). <http://www.powersystems.co.jp/newsrelease/20050627nscreleaser1-1.pdf> accessed 30/05/07. [IPCC reference listed here]

generated by a company whose motto appears to be: "For sustainable growth of the human beings" [sic].

Oh dear, oh dear. The closer one peers at the IPCC report, the more tawdry it all seems.

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COMING SOON: The press release that masqueraded as a news item before hitting the big time

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>> Climate bible gets 21 'F's on report card
>> The great peer-review fairy tale
>> What's left if we disregard non-peer-reviewed claims?
>> The water cannon of the climate debate

Climate Bible Gets 21 'F's on Report Card

21 of 44 chapters in the United Nations' Nobel-winning climate bible earned an F on a report card we are releasing today. Forty citizen auditors from 12 countries examined 18,531 sources cited in the report – finding 5,587 to be not peer-reviewed.

Contrary to statements by the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the celebrated 2007 report does not rely solely on research published in reputable scientific journals. It also cites press releases, newspaper and magazine clippings, working papers, student theses, discussion papers, and literature published by green advocacy groups. Such material is often called "grey literature."

We've been told this report is the gold standard. We've been told it's 100 percent peer-reviewed science. But thousands of sources cited by this report have not come within a mile of a scientific journal.

Based on the grading system used in US schools, 21 chapters in the IPCC report receive an F (they cite peer-reviewed sources less than 60% of the time), 4 chapters get a D, and 6 get a C. There are also 5 Bs and 8 As.

In November, IPCC chairman Rajendra Pachauri disparaged non-peer-reviewed research in an interview with the Times of India (see the end of the article):

IPCC studies only peer-review science. Let someone publish the data in a decent credible publication. I am sure IPCC would then accept it, otherwise we can just throw it into the dustbin.

READ THE CITIZEN AUDIT REPORT HERE

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