Saturday, February 20, 2010

Chronic and pervasive bias by global warming advocates?

David Henderson, former head of the OECD economics and statistics department, criticizes a possible pre-commitment on the part of IPCC, which might be perceived from the fallout of ClimateGate:

The glaring defects in the expert advisory process have gone unacknowledged and unremedied by what I call the environmental policy milieu. This high-level failure and the defects themselves have resulted from chronic and pervasive bias. Right from the start, members of the milieu, and of the IPCC's directing circle, have been characterised by what has been well termed "pre-commitment to the urgency of the climate cause".

Henderson urges an evolutionary and adaptive approach to climate issues:

In an area of policy where so much is at stake, and so much remains uncertain and unsettled, policies should be evolutionary and adaptive, rather than presumptive as they are now; and their evolution should be linked to a process of inquiry and review that is more thorough, balanced, open and objective.

In passing, one might recall some involvement of OECD in the US patent reform debate.
In the IPBiz post The issue of "when" something is published one has the text:

For example, in the OECD paper cited by Quillen and Webster in Continuing Patent Applications and the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office--Updated, 15 Fed Cir B J 635-677 (2006) [see footnote 65 of QW3 at page 644], there is no indication of "when" the study appeared in the on-line version of the OECD paper. I emailed the OECD people to determine when the paper appeared, but got no response.

See also

http://ipbiz.blogspot.com/2007/03/coalition-for-21st-century-patent.html

One might say there was a "chronic and pervasive bias" in the way patent grant statistics were applied to suggest that there was a 97% grant rate at the USPTO.
An evolutionary approach to patent reform, untainted by false horror stories about patent grant rate, might be appropriate.

**Also

OECD Official Joins WIPO Economics Team: Sacha Wunsch-Vincent, formerly an economist at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Directorate for Science, Technology, and Industry, has joined the World Intellectual Property Organization as a senior economic officer under its chief economist Carston Fink.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

<< Home