The IPCC’s first report, released in 1990, admitted that observed climate change was probably due to natural rather than human causes. However, every report since then has claimed with rising certainty that there is a “discernable human impact” on the climate and that steps must be taken to avoid a global climate crisis. There is ample evidence that this level of alarmism and asserted confidence is fueled by political considerations rather than actual science.
For example, in 1996, Dr. Frederick Seitz, one of the world’s most prominent and respected physicists, wrote in the
Wall Street Journal: <2>“In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”
In 2010 the Amsterdam-based InterAcademy Council (IAC), a scientific body composed of the heads of national science academies around the world, revealed crippling flaws in the IPCC’s peer-review process and other procedural problems – long pointed out by global warming skeptics but ignored by the mainstream media – that seriously undermined the IPCC’s credibility.<1> Two years later, the IPCC itself officially recognized the truth of the critique and promised to reform itself.<2>
The IAC reported that IPCC lead authors fail to give “due consideration … to properly documented alternative views” (p. 20), fail to “provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors” (p. 21), and fail to “consider review comments carefully and document their responses” (p. 22). In plain English: the IPCC reports are not peer reviewed.
The IAC found “the IPCC has no formal process or criteria for selecting authors” and “the selection criteria seemed arbitrary to many respondents” (p. 18). Government officials appoint scientists from their countries and “do not always nominate the best scientists from among those who volunteer, either because they do not know who these scientists are or because political considerations are given more weight than scientific qualifications” (p. 18). In other words: authors are selected by politicians from a “club” of scientists and non-scientists who agree with the alarmist perspective.
The rewriting of the Summary for Policy Makers by politicians and environmental activists – a problem called out by global warming realists for many years, but with little apparent notice by the media or policymakers – is plainly admitted, perhaps for the first time by an organization in the “mainstream” of alarmist climate change thinking. “[M]any were concerned that reinterpretations of the assessment’s findings, suggested in the final Plenary, might be politically motivated,” the auditors wrote. The scientists they interviewed commonly found the Synthesis Report “too political” (p. 25). In other words, the Summary for Policymakers and the Synthesis Report are political documents, not scientific reports.
Finally, the IAC noted, “the lack of a conflict of interest and disclosure policy for IPCC leaders and Lead Authors was a concern raised by a number of individuals who were interviewed by the Committee or provided written input” as well as “the practice of scientists responsible for writing IPCC assessments reviewing their own work. The Committee did not investigate the basis of these claims, which is beyond the mandate of this review” (p. 46).
Too bad, because these are both big issues in light of recent revelations that a majority of the authors and contributors to some chapters of the IPCC reports are environmental activists, not scientists at all. That’s a structural problem with the IPCC that could dwarf the big problems already reported.
Despite its pledge to reform itself, the Fifth Assessment Report reveals that the IPCC is still operating in defiance of the IAC’s recommendations. A widely circulated draft of the Summary for Policymakers prior to the all-night sessions in Stockholm held in late September show that politicians and bureaucrats made extensive changes that removed admissions of uncertainty and attempted to hide key walk-backs of past findings. And once again, the full report is
being edited (as this was written in early October 2013) “for consistency with the approved SPM.” This is not how truly scientific reports are produced.
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