Climate Change: as much fraud as junk science…?

After the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) published a report last Friday, which zealous environmentalists are now touting as “the final word on global warming”, I felt obliged to respond…

The way the findings in this report are being proselytized begs allusions to the Holy Bible. It is ironic, though, that some renowned scientists (including Dr Tim Ball – Chairman of the Natural Resources Stewardship and Dr Richard Lindzen – Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology) are dismissing this IPCC report with the same intellectual derision with which secular humanists dismiss the Holy Bible…

[G]lobal warming and cooling are natural phenomena that have occurred in (30 to 40 thousand-year) cycles since the beginning of time… Believers in global warming are uninformed, fad-obsessed herds being led by a cadre of myopic media and political elite…

I could not be more indignant at rich environmentalists who seek absolution for their environmental sins by “purchasing carbon credits or offsets” in the same spirit with which Catholics once sought absolution for their moral sins by purchasing Papal indulgences.  

[Mother Nature makes UN report on global warming seem like flaming hoax, TIJ, April 12, 2007]

These excerpts are from a commentary I published almost three years ago.  Back then, I’m obliged to note, the orthodoxy of global warming was such that I got branded a veritable heretic for not only questioning, but actually ridiculing the purported scientific findings upon which this orthodoxy is based.

Trust me, I have the scars to show from the metaphorical flogging and stoning I took. But that was then. For recent revelations are causing a pandemic of doubt even among the most devoted believers in the IPCC’s report, which most famously provided the script for Al Gore’s cult classic, An Inconvenient Truth.

First Climate-gate exposed emails in which scientists from the Climate Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia – who conducted much of the research for this now infamous 2007 IPCC report – are clearly conspiring to manipulate data to hide the fact that there’s more evidence of global cooling than warming.

Research in some areas of climate science has been and is full of machination, conspiracies and collusion, as any reader can interpret from the CRU files… The scientific debate has been in many instances hijacked to advance other agendas.

(Eduardo Zorita, an expert in European climate trends)

Then a January 23, 2010 article in the Times of London cast doubts on almost all of the IPCC’s most important findings.  For example, the report, which won the IPCC and Al Gore the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize, found that “the probability of Himalayan glaciers disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high.” But according to the Times:

It emerged last week that the forecast was based not on a consensus among climate change experts, but on a media interview with a single Indian glaciologist in 1999.

Even worse, this article continued as follows:

[The IPCC report] says the total area of Himalyan glaciers ‘will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 square kilometers by the year 2035′. There are only 33,000 square kilometers of glaciers in the Himalayas.

Now comes an article in the most recent edition of The Sunday Telegraph of London which reveals that some of the IPCC’s findings weren’t based on any scientific research at all. 

Instead, the scientists who authored this critical section of the report evidently relied, alternatively, on “anecdotal evidence from mountaineers about the changes they were witnessing on the mountainsides around them,” which were published in a climbers magazine; and on a dissertation by a geography student at the University of Berne in Switzerland.

And in a late-breaking development, the Guardian is reporting today that the head of the beleaguered CRU, Professor Phil Jones, clearly tried to hide flaws in the data on which his climate change findings were based.

These revelations, as well as others, finally forced the head of the IPCC, Dr Rajendra Pachauri, to concede that:

There may have been other errors in the same section of the report, and I am considering whether to take action against those responsible.

All the same, there’s a crescendo among politicians and scientists alike calling for Dr Pachauri to resign. And those calls will only grow louder given reports in recent days that, despite his denials, he knew of the errors and did nothing to correct them; and, more damning, that he used the report to win hundreds of thousands in grants. But he remains defiant:

I know a lot of climate sceptics are after my blood, but I’m in no mood to oblige them.

Of course, any self-respecting scientist who contributed in any way to this report could be forgiven for wanting to disassociate from Dr Pachauri and the IPCC’s now tarnished Nobel.  In fact, here is how Professor Richard Tol of the Economic and Social Research Institute in Dublin, Ireland did just that:

Why did they do this? It is quite astounding … it is illustrative of how sloppy Working Group Two (the panel of experts within the IPCC responsible for drawing up this section of the report) has been.

Yet, according to The Sunday Telegraph, a survey of the 400 authors and contributors to the IPCC report found that a majority not only stand by it but still support Dr Pachauri and his panel of agenda-driven climate-change scribes.

But redemption for the IPCC might still come from the efforts of other scientists who are driven more by the science than politics of global warming.  Here, for example, is the constructive insight Roger Sedjo, a senior research fellow at the US research organisation Resources for the Future, shared on this embarrassing spectacle … fraud:

The IPCC is, unfortunately, a highly political organisation with most of the secretariat bordering on climate advocacy. It needs to develop a more balanced and indeed scientifically sceptical behaviour pattern. The organisation tend to select the most negative studies ignoring more positive alternatives.

I fear, however, that the IPCC will only be redeemed if melting glaciers defy God’s Rainbow Covenant and cause another flood of Biblical proportions. 

In the meantime, these revelations should compel the Nobel Committee to revoke the IPCC’s, as well as Al Gore’s, Nobel Prize. Although, with British MPs calling for criminal prosecutions, Dr Pachauri, Prof Jones and others clearly have far more to worry about than professional humiliation.

They are not merely bad scientists – they are crooks. And crooks who have perpetrated their crimes at the expense of British and U.S. taxpayers.

(Lord Christopher Monckton, Science and Public Policy Institute, Chief Policy Advisor)

Related commentaries:
… UN report on global warming
Gore and IPCC win Nobel Prize
Climate-gate…
Copenhagen: more hot air but no binding agreement