THE FACTS
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is controlled by political hacks who override the scientists with a predetermined agenda. Calling it science is a fraud upon the public.
In spite of claims to the contrary, there is absolutely no consensus of scientists supporting the findings and recommendations of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. On the other side, there exists a very large and vocal group of highly qualified dissenters (often denigrated as skeptics, deniers or worse). If there is any “consensus” at all, it is against the man-made global warming theory, not supporting it.
Published letters and opinions in the press suggest the scientific community is still divided and the community has not succumbed to the propaganda of human-caused global warming. Many in the community, with every justification, are awaiting more information about the costs and the economic and social impacts before lining up to march behind the government’s carbon dioxide reduction banner. As well, many so-called scientists are on government and UN payrolls which have vested interests in pushing the climate change propaganda on the world. Recently it was revealed that funding for “climate change science” and technologies has surpassed $79 BILLION. Yes, that’s billion with a big fat “B”. There are an awful lot of jobs and an awful lot of money at stake. It’s quite staggering. Compared to the paltry $20 million paid to skeptics by oil companies, it’s enormous. Big Environment, major politicians, and mega corporations everywhere are major players in this mother of all scams.
A widely accepted conviction that dangerous climate change is actually pending will be required before the community will support the government’s strategy to shut down fossil-fuel-dependent industries and willingly abandon the energy-dependent and satisfying lifestyle activities they enjoy. After all, in the cause of saving the planet we will all be required to give up a wide range of personal freedoms that we currently take for granted. We will want to be in full agreement that the alleged dangers are real and present, and that the course of government-imposed actions really will avert them.It’s an assertion repeated by politicians and climate campaigners the world over – ‘2,500 scientists of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) agree that humans are causing a climate crisis’.
But it’s not true. And, for the first time ever, the public can now see the extent to which they have been misled. As far as lies go, it’s a whopper. Here’s the real situation:
Like the three IPCC ‘assessment reports’ before it, the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) released during 2007 (upon which the UN climate conference in Bali was based) includes the reports of the IPCC’s three working groups. Working Group I (WG I) is assigned to report on the extent and possible causes of past climate change as well as future ‘projections’. Its report is titled “The Physical Science Basis”. The reports from working groups II and II are titled “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and “Mitigation of Climate Change” respectively, and since these are based on the results of WG I, it is crucially important that the WG I report stands up to close scrutiny.
There is, of course serious debate among scientists about the actual technical content of the roughly 1,000-page WG I report, especially its politically motivated Summary for Policymakers which is often the only part read by politicians and non-scientists. The technical content can be difficult for non-scientists to follow and so most people simply assume that if that large numbers of scientists agree, they must be right.
Consensus never proves the truth of a scientific claim, but is somehow widely believed to do so for the IPCC reports, so we need to ask how many scientists really did agree with the most important IPCC conclusion, namely that humans are causing significant climate change–in other words the key parts of WG I?
The numbers of scientist reviewers involved in WG I is actually less than a quarter of the whole, a little over 600 in total. The other 1,900 reviewers assessed the other working group reports. They had nothing to say about the causes of climate change or its future trajectory. And many have spoken out against the notion of humans causing any climate changes. Some have even resigned over it, and insist the IPCC does not listen to their opinions. Still, 600 “scientific expert reviewers” sounds pretty impressive. After all, they submitted their comments to the IPCC editors who assure us that “all substantive government and expert review comments received appropriate consideration.” And since these experts reviewers are all listed in Annex III of the report, they must have endorsed it, right?
Wrong.
For the first time ever, the UN had released on the Web the comments of reviewers who assessed the drafts of the WG I report and the IPCC editors’ responses. This release was almost certainly a result of intense pressure applied by “hockey-stick” co-debunker Steve McIntyre of Toronto and his allies. Unlike the other IPCC working groups, WG I is based in the U.S. and McIntyre had used the robust Freedom of Information legislation to request certain details when the full comments were released.
An examination of reviewers’ comments on the last draft of the WG I report before final report assembly (i.e. the ‘Second Order Revision’ or SOR) completely debunks the illusion of hundreds of experts diligently poring over all the chapters of the report and providing extensive feedback to the editing teams. Here’s the reality.
A total of 308 reviewers commented on the SOR, but only 32 reviewers commented on more than three chapters and only five reviewers commented on all 11 chapters of the report. Only about half the reviewers commented more than one chapter. It is logical that reviewers would generally limit their comments to their areas of expertise but it’s a far cry from the idea of thousands of scientists agreeing to anything.
Compounding this is the fact that IPCC editors could, and often did, ignore reviewers’ comments. Some editor responses were banal and others showed inconsistencies with other comments. Reviewers had to justify their requested changes but the responding editors appear to have been under no such obligation. Reviewers were sometimes flatly told they were wrong but no reasons or reliable references were provided. In other cases reviewers tried to dilute the certainty being expressed and they often provided supporting evidence, but their comments were often flatly rejected. Some comments were rejected on the basis of a lack of space – an incredible assertion in such an important document. The attitude of the editors seemed to be that simple corrections were accepted, requests for improved clarity tolerated but the assertions and interpretations that appear in the text were to be defended against any challenge.
An example of rampant misrepresentation of IPCC reports is the frequent assertion that ‘hundreds of IPCC scientists’ are known to support the following statement, arguably the most important of the WG I report, namely “Greenhouse gas forcing has very likely caused most of the observed global warming over the last 50 years.”
In total, only 62 scientists reviewed the chapter in which this statement appears, the critical chapter 9, “Understanding and Attributing Climate Change”. Of the comments received from the 62 reviewers of this critical chapter, almost 60% of them were rejected by IPCC editors. And of the 62 expert reviewers of this chapter, 55 had serious vested interest, leaving only seven expert reviewers who appear impartial.
Two of these seven were contacted by NRSP for the purposes of this article – Dr. Vincent Gray of New Zealand and Dr. Ross McKitrick of the University of Guelph, Canada. Concerning the “Greenhouse gas forcing …” statement above, Professor McKitrick explained “A categorical summary statement like this is not supported by the evidence in the IPCC WG I report. Evidence shown in the report suggests that other factors play a major role in climate change, and the specific effects expected from greenhouse gases have not been observed.”
Dr. Gray labeled the WG I statement as “Typical IPCC doubletalk” asserting “The text of the IPCC report shows that this is decided by a guess from persons with a conflict of interest, not from a tested model.”
Determining the level of support expressed by reviewers’ comments is subjective but a slightly generous evaluation indicates that just five reviewers endorsed the crucial ninth chapter. Four had vested interests and the other made only a single comment for the entire 11-chapter report. The claim that 2,500 independent scientist reviewers agreed with this, the most important statement of the UN climate reports released this year, or any other statement in the UN climate reports, is nonsense.
“The IPCC owe it to the world to explain who among their expert reviewers actually agree with their conclusions and who don’t,” says Natural Resources Stewardship Project Chair climatologist Dr. Timothy Ball. “Otherwise, their credibility, and the public’s trust of science in general, will be even further eroded.”
That the IPCC have let this deception continue for so long is a disgrace. Secretary General Ban Kai-Moon must instruct the UN climate body to either completely revise their operating procedures, welcoming dissenting input from scientist reviewers and indicating if reviewers have vested interests, or close the agency down completely. Until then, their conclusions, and any reached at the Bali conference based on IPCC conclusions, should be ignored entirely as politically skewed and dishonest.
LETTER BY SCIENTISTS TO IPCC
Dr. Rajendra Pachauri
Chairman Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
c/o World Meteorological Organization
7bis Avenue de la Paix
C.P. 2300 CH-1211 Geneva 2,
Switzerland 14 April 2008 Dear Dr. Pachauri and others associated with IPCC We are writing to you and others associated with the IPCC position – that man’s CO2 is a driver of global warming and climate change – to ask that you now in view of the evidence retract support from the current IPCC position [as in footnote 1] and admit that there is no observational evidence in measured data going back 22,000 years or even millions of years that CO2 levels (whether from man or nature) have driven or are driving world temperatures or climate change. If you believe there is evidence of the CO2 driver theory in the available data please present a graph of it. We draw your attention to three observational refutations of the IPCC position (and note there are more). Ice- core data from the ACIA (Arctic Climate Impact Assessment) shows that temperatures have fallen since around 4,000 years ago (the Bronze Age Climate Optimum) while CO2 levels have risen, yet this graphical data was not included in the IPCC Summary for Policymakers (Fig. SPM1 Feb07) which graphed the CO2 rise. More recent data shows that in the opposite sense to IPCC predictions world temperatures have not risen and indeed have fallen over the past 10 years while CO2 levels have risen dramatically. The up-dated temperature measurements have been released by the NASA’s Microwave Sounding Unit (MSU) [1] as well as by the UK’s Hadley Climate Research Unit (Temperature v. 3, variance adjusted -Hadley CRUT3v) [2]. In parallel, readings of atmospheric concentrations of CO2 have been released by the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii [3]. They have been combined in graphical form by Joe D’Aleo [4], and are shown below. 
These latest temperature readings represent averages of records obtained from standardized meteorological stations from around the planet, located in both urban as well as rural settings. They are augmented by satellite data, now generally accepted as ultimately authoritative, since they have a global footprint and are not easily vulnerable to manipulation nor observer error. What is also clear from the graphs is that average global temperatures have been in stasis for almost a decade and may now even be falling.
A third important observation is that contrary to the CO2 driver theory, temperatures in the upper troposphere (where most jets fly) have fallen over the past two decades. [Footnote 2] IPCC policy is already leading to economic and unintended environmental damage. Specifically the policy of burning food – maize as biofuel – has contributed to sharp rises in food prices which are causing great hardship in many countries and is also now leading to increased deforestation in Brazil, Malaysia, Indonesia, Togo, Cambodia, Nigeria, Burundi, Sri Lanka, Benin and Uganda for cultivation of crops [5]. Given the economic devastation that is already happening and which is now widely recognised will continue to flow from this policy, what possible justification can there be for its retention? We ask you and all those whose names are associated with IPCC policy to accept the scientific observations and renounce current IPCC policy. Yours sincerely,
| Hans Schreuder Analytical Chemist UK mMensa hans@— |
Piers Corbyn Astrophysicist UK Dir. WeatherAction.com piers@— |
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| Dr Don Parkes Prof. Em. Human Ecology Australia dnp@— |
Svend Hendriksen Nobel Peace Prize 1988 (shared) Greenland hendriksen@— |
Cc: IPCC’s yu.izrael@— / christy@— / spencer@— / dy.pitman@— / Tim Yeo MP (Chairman Environmental Audit Committee) / Lord Martin Rees (President Royal Society) / Gordon Brown MP / David Cameron MP / Nick Glegg MP
SEE ALSO: More Than 700 International Scientists Dissent Over Man-Made Global Warming Claims
SEE ALSO: Over 31,000 Scientists declare man-made global warming is a myth.
SEE ALSO: Our RESOURCE page for links to many more scientists speaking out.