Put the IPCC out of its misery, writes Dr Patrick Michaels.
Another day, another IPCC-gate. Just last week, it came out that the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change based its alarming statement that massive Himalayan ice cap will largely disappear in 2035 upon nothing but hearsay and propaganda.
Every scientist who has studied the glaciers there knows that they are exceedingly thick and even if it warmed substantially, they will be around for centuries. Under pressure, the IPCC finally ‘fessed up that it was lying for political purposes. Murari Lal, a senior author (who holds a PhD in Geophysics) told the London Daily Mail ‘It related to several countries in this region and their water sources. We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policy-makers and politicians and encourage them to take some concrete action.”
IPCC’s critics are absolutely shocked!
If this is true, then it seriously affects the credibility of the lead author of this chapter, climatologist Martin Parry of the United Kingdom. That’s because any climate scientist seeing the 2035 figure would (first) laugh and then (second) search for and root out the perpetrator. It makes one think that the highly respected Parry didn’t read the chapter of which he was the senior author. I think his saying “I missed it” isn’t going to get much traction, either.
The source for IPCC’s claim was a propaganda piece put out by the World Wildlife Fund.
In response to the UN’s nonsense, India recently conducted its own survey of high-altitude glaciers in South Asia and concluded that, while there is some recession, the rates are in general quite modest. IPCC Chief Rajenda Pauchari, fully aware of the 2035 gaffe, called the Indian report “voodoo science”.
What Pauchari didn’t state is that he also runs the India’s Energy and Research Institute (TERI), which got a half million dollars from the Carnegie Foundation to study the effects of glaciers melting as rapidly as IPCC said they were.
Also last week, University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. found that the IPCC had claimed certain peer reviewed articles demonstrated increasing hurricane damages caused by global warming. Indeed, the work in question did not. Rather the opposite; in the original paper, Stewart Miller and Robert Muir-Wood said, “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.”
As they say, IPCC’s got a history. It was started by the UN in 1987, chartered “to initiate action leading as soon as possible to…a possible future international convention on climate”. The scientists who write the IPCC’s many volumes are nominated and chosen by their governments. The IPCC cannot avoid being political. Let’s translate its 1987 charter into common language: the UN wants you scientists, chosen by your governments, to give us an excuse to regulate the entire world.
And so the IPCC did its job. It published its first science compendium in 1990, and an updated one in 1992 as support for a proposed Framework Convention on Climate Change, also known as the Rio Treaty.
The Rio Treaty merely stated a “goal” (whatever that is). of limiting carbon dioxide cocentrations in the atmosphere below “dangerous” levels (whatever those are). These “goals” eventually became specific emissions reductions targets and timetables that were agreed to in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention. The Kyoto Protocol mandated reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide of around 5% from the industrialized world. They rose by a larger amount. The few nations that actually complied with its dictates only did so with statistical sleight of hand. Although the reductions were supposed to be from a 1990 base year, Germany included the wildly polluting German Democratic Republic in its base, despite the fact that it didn’t exist for most of 1990 and was rapidly de-industrializing.
Kyoto was a massive failure. The green plan was then to resurrect a stronger agreement last December at Copenhagen. That failed, too, in no small part because it had become clear, thanks to the climategate emails, that the IPCC’s authors were now nakedly coloring the IPCC reports to push emissions reductions. Jonathan Overpeck, of University of Arizona, exhorts his colleagues to use “only that science which is policy relevant” and that would support executive summary bullet points that had already been written (email 1121392136 14Jul05). Finally, under a threat of a Freedom of Information inquiry, they asked each other to destroy emails pertaining to long-term climate records the 2007 IPCC report (email 1212073451 29May09). The fact that they requested this two years after the publication of the IPCC’s latest report is very suspicious, and the subject line of this particular email is “IPCC & FOI”.
The attachment of “gate” to this scandal is more than appropriate. In its original 1973-4 incarnation, little bits of information, snippets of foul play, and deletions of records dripped out one-by-one over a year. Ultimately the person responsible, President Richard Nixon, had to resign.
We’re seeing the same with climategate and the IPCC. Wouldn’t if just save everyone a lot of time and trouble if Rajenda Pauchari resigned and the United Nations disbanded the IPCC. Neither its head nor its body have any remaining credibility, so why not put it out of its misery?
IPCC’s critics are absolutely shocked!
If this is true, then it seriously affects the credibility of the lead author of this chapter, climatologist Martin Parry of the United Kingdom. That’s because any climate scientist seeing the 2035 figure would (first) laugh and then (second) search for and root out the perpetrator. It makes one think that the highly respected Parry didn’t read the chapter of which he was the senior author. I think his saying “I missed it” isn’t going to get much traction, either.
The source for IPCC’s claim was a propaganda piece put out by the World Wildlife Fund.
In response to the UN’s nonsense, India recently conducted its own survey of high-altitude glaciers in South Asia and concluded that, while there is some recession, the rates are in general quite modest. IPCC Chief Rajenda Pauchari, fully aware of the 2035 gaffe, called the Indian report “voodoo science”.
What Pauchari didn’t state is that he also runs the India’s Energy and Research Institute (TERI), which got a half million dollars from the Carnegie Foundation to study the effects of glaciers melting as rapidly as IPCC said they were.
Also last week, University of Colorado’s Roger Pielke Jr. found that the IPCC had claimed certain peer reviewed articles demonstrated increasing hurricane damages caused by global warming. Indeed, the work in question did not. Rather the opposite; in the original paper, Stewart Miller and Robert Muir-Wood said, “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and normalized catastrophe losses.”
As they say, IPCC’s got a history. It was started by the UN in 1987, chartered “to initiate action leading as soon as possible to…a possible future international convention on climate”. The scientists who write the IPCC’s many volumes are nominated and chosen by their governments. The IPCC cannot avoid being political. Let’s translate its 1987 charter into common language: the UN wants you scientists, chosen by your governments, to give us an excuse to regulate the entire world.
And so the IPCC did its job. It published its first science compendium in 1990, and an updated one in 1992 as support for a proposed Framework Convention on Climate Change, also known as the Rio Treaty.
The Rio Treaty merely stated a “goal” (whatever that is). of limiting carbon dioxide cocentrations in the atmosphere below “dangerous” levels (whatever those are). These “goals” eventually became specific emissions reductions targets and timetables that were agreed to in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to the Framework Convention. The Kyoto Protocol mandated reductions in emissions of carbon dioxide of around 5% from the industrialized world. They rose by a larger amount. The few nations that actually complied with its dictates only did so with statistical sleight of hand. Although the reductions were supposed to be from a 1990 base year, Germany included the wildly polluting German Democratic Republic in its base, despite the fact that it didn’t exist for most of 1990 and was rapidly de-industrializing.
Kyoto was a massive failure. The green plan was then to resurrect a stronger agreement last December at Copenhagen. That failed, too, in no small part because it had become clear, thanks to the climategate emails, that the IPCC’s authors were now nakedly coloring the IPCC reports to push emissions reductions. Jonathan Overpeck, of University of Arizona, exhorts his colleagues to use “only that science which is policy relevant” and that would support executive summary bullet points that had already been written (email 1121392136 14Jul05). Finally, under a threat of a Freedom of Information inquiry, they asked each other to destroy emails pertaining to long-term climate records the 2007 IPCC report (email 1212073451 29May09). The fact that they requested this two years after the publication of the IPCC’s latest report is very suspicious, and the subject line of this particular email is “IPCC & FOI”.
The attachment of “gate” to this scandal is more than appropriate. In its original 1973-4 incarnation, little bits of information, snippets of foul play, and deletions of records dripped out one-by-one over a year. Ultimately the person responsible, President Richard Nixon, had to resign.
We’re seeing the same with climategate and the IPCC. Wouldn’t if just save everyone a lot of time and trouble if Rajenda Pauchari resigned and the United Nations disbanded the IPCC. Neither its head nor its body have any remaining credibility, so why not put it out of its misery?
Patrick J. Michaels is Senior Fellow in Environmental Studies at the Cato Institute and author of “Climate of Extremes: Global Warming Science They Don’t Want You to Know’.
