IPCC Slammed, But . . .

Business as Usual

Some integrity at last! The Daily Express has summarized a report by a disinterested international panel of scientists called the InterAcademy Council which has evaluated the methodology of the UN Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change (“IPCC”). The IPCC, you recall, is the UN body which has led the charge on attempts to jawbone, bully, bribe shame, and blackmail nations into accepting an international treaty on climate change.(The New York Times summary of the Report can be found here.)

The IPCC had cast a cloak of “science” over its conclusions to bolster its credibility. Yet it has now become clear to all but those who will not see that its “threat assessments” were more the conjurings of propagandists than objective scientists. The InterAcademy Council, led by Howard Shapiro of Princeton, independently evaluated the procedures and governance of the IPCC and concluded that it has been guilty of schoolboy procedural errors.

Amongst the findings and conclusions are:

-The need for the IPCC to differentiate between the relative uncertainty of scientific claims. Obviously some claims and evidence are more clear and certain (more probable) than others. The IPCC needs to make clear when its prognostications are tendentious and speculative.

-All conflicts of interest need to be managed properly and ethically. This is a slap at the Chairman on the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri (amongst others) because of his financial and business connections with entities standing to benefit commercially were the nations of the world collectively to agree to combat climate change by taxing nations and funding entities purporting to combat global warming.

-Misleading and deceptive statements in the IPCC report were identified and condemned. Some authors were found reporting high confidence in “some statements for which there is little evidence. Furthermore, by making vague statements that were difficult to refute, authors were able to attach 'high confidence' to the statements.”

-The IPCC did not listen to the criticisms of peer reviewers, often ignoring them, weakening them, or editing them out of the reports. “The response to the discovery of errors was slow and inadequate,” the Council concluded.

One recommendation of the Council was that a Chairman of the IPCC should not preside over more than one Climate Change status report. Surprise, surprise. Dr Pachauri has rejected this recommendation outright, insisting that he is going to stay working on the next IPCC assessment, due to be published in 2013—2014. It would appear that the self-serving corrupt UN, unlike the climate, never changes.