Climategate, Glaciergate, Amazongate, Pauchauri…and now comes Greenpeacegate. We can barely keep up. Every time we think we can rest, another global warming scandal comes up. Hey, not that we’re complaining–it’s all falling apart faster than any of us had dreamed. Let’s just go to Donna Laframboise out of Toronto Canada, the creator of NOconsensus.org, who yesterday broke the story that the IPCC is using the politcal activist group Greenpeace as source for quite a few “facts” in its report; in fact, in at least one case, they were the sole source. She begins:
Considered the climate Bible by governments around the world, the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report is meant to be a scientific analysis of the most authoritative research. Instead, it references literature generated by Greenpeace – an organization known more for headline-grabbing publicity stunts than sober-minded analysis. (Eight IPCC-cited Greenpeace publications are listed at the bottom of this post.) In one section of this Nobel-winning report, climate change is linked to coral reef degradation. The sole source for this claim? A Greenpeace report titled “Pacific in Peril” (see Hoegh-Guldberg below). Here the report relies on a Greenpeace document to establish the lower-end of an estimate involving solar power plants (Aringhoff). When discussing solar energy elsewhere, the report references two Greenpeace documents in one sentence. Here it uses a Greenpeace paper as its sole means of documenting where the “main wind-energy investments” are located globally (Wind).