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Monday, December 20, 2010

Miloslav Nic, Skeptical Science: Search the IPCC 4th Assessment Report

An online resource for the IPCC 4th Assessment Report

Guest post by Miloslav Nic, Skeptical Science, December 20, 2010

This is a post about my website Zvon.org where I've created a resource for the IPCC 4th Assessment Report (AR4). I've created a searchable database of almost every peer-reviewed paper referenced in the AR4, with links to each paper's abstract and lists of all the authors. This provides a powerful tool that lets you search the AR4 by author, subject, title and journal.
I used to be an organic chemist in the last millennium who reached a tipping point in 2000 and was irreversibly transformed to a computer specialist. The primary forcing behind my change was the foundation of site Zvon.org which became quite well known among XML programmers.
I always wished to turn Zvon.org from a programming site to a real information plunger (zvon means a bell but also a plunger in Czech, my native language). Zvon's international law documentsrepresent one incarnation of this dream. I have a first hand experience with an authoritative regime and so I do care about freedom and civil liberties.
Fourth Assessment Report of Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC AR4) provided a real challenge to prove that Zvon.org can fulfil such vision. I hope the following paragraphs aboutZvon.org Guide to IPCC AR4 will whet your appetite to try it and judge for yourselves.
The first feature of the guide is rather trivial, but I found it surprisingly useful. The contents page lists all chapters of the report using a keyword characterizing the chapter. A click on working group name then leads to the chapter contents and click on a chapter keyword leads to the enhanced references' list.

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