Articles: There is a Cancer Growing on the IPCC and Al Gore

There is a Cancer Growing on the IPCC and Al Gore
By Russell Cook

The opening sentence of a May 9, 2011 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change press release (pdf file) says, "Close to 80 percent of the world's energy supply could be met by renewables by mid-century if backed by the right enabling public policies, a new report shows."

Thank heavens, considering all the dire consequences that will arise if we continue our current greenhouse gas-emitting fossil fuel consumption. But there are two problems here: you must not question the notion that humans cause global warming, and you must not scrutinize the report's authors.

Most of us expect an intergovernmental agency not to have enviro-advocacy people influencing its reports. Unfortunately for the IPCC, Anthony Watts details at his blog how another blogger, Steve McIntyre, blows the whistle on the report's ties to Greenpeace. This only further piles on the problems of IPCC/Greenpeace ties exposed by Donna LaFramboise at her blog.

But, surely the IPCC wouldn't stoop to having people in its midst who push accusations surrounding the idea that skeptic scientists are fossil fuel industry stooges, right? Afraid not.

My American Thinker articles and others elsewhere primarily focus on the media smear of skeptic scientists and how a particular phrase from a leaked coal industry supposedly proves their guilt. So, when Donna LaFramboise noted how Greenpeace personnel were seen at the "Annex IV Reviewers of the IPCC WGIII Fourth Assessment Report" (8-page pdf file), I checked its United States section for names I'd recognize relating to the smear. I found three, but for brevity's sake, I'll describe only two of them.

"Gallagher, Kelly Sims, Harvard University"

She was formerly just Kelly Sims, Science Policy Director/International Policy Specialist at Ozone Action (which merged with Greenpeace USA in 2000), a speaker on behalf of that group at the August '97 UNFCCC Bonn meeting, later described at a nautilus.org bio (pdf file) as participating in "more than a dozen rounds of international negotiations on global climate change and was an advisor to CNN in Kyoto and Buenos Aires. She was previously a Truman Scholar in the office of Vice President Gore[.]"

Ms. Sims' appearance in a 1996 press release abundantly points out her association with Ozone Action, where we see her name appearing immediately after the accusation that skeptic scientists were out to "reposition global warming as theory, not fact." Note the other name in that press release: Al Gore's current spokesperson Kalee Kreider.

"Miller, Alan, International Finance Corporation"

His bio at an EPA award ceremony says:

Alan S. Miller is a principal project officer at the International Finance Corporation...from 1989 until..1997, Mr. Miller founded and directed the Center for Global Change at the University of Maryland and developed an international ozone protection program... Earlier, at the Natural Resources Defense Council (1979-1984), he initiated the suit against EPA that brought recognition of the ozone layer depletion threat[.]

At this IPCC page for the 1995 Second Assessment Report, the pdf file for "Appendix A. Expert Reviewers of the IPCC Working Group II Volume" has on page 8: "Alan S. Miller, University of Maryland."

Miller was the co-author with Curtis Moore of the 1994 book Green Gold: Japan, Germany, the United States, and the Race for Environmental Technology, which mentioned the "reposition global warming as theory [not fact]" accusation phrase on page 94. To assure everyone this isn't an instance of another person with the same name, the book's back cover says, "Alan Miller is director of the Center for Global Change at the University of Maryland."

The book's publishing date bears repeating: 1994.

My July 2010 American Thinker article showed how Al Gore repeatedly gave credit to retired Boston Globe reporter Ross Gelbspan for discovering the coal industry PR campaign memos containing the "reposition global warming" phrase, and Gelbspan's promotion of that specific phrase after 1996. But Miller and Moore must have seen those in person because they somehow knew to interview an individual named in another of the memos, which is not noted in their source, Matt Wald's 1991 NY Times article. Why doesn't Gore credit Miller and Moore as heroes of the global warming movement, or Matt Wald? For such damaging "smoking gun" evidence, it is quite strange how none of these people ever show the memos in their complete context.

In two of my recent articles, the first one at ClimateDepot, and another at RedState, I reveal a much more troubling problem. Al Gore appears to be among those who were the first to receive the leaked memos in 1991. The evidence is Gore's own words on page 360 of his 1992 Earth in the Balance book, namely the identical memo words in Gelbspan's 1997 book The Heat is On.

The global warming crisis is not a tidy settled issue demanding an immediate response from everyone to save the planet. We instead need to demand a thorough investigation to find out why it has so many hidden problems. This latest "IPCC/Greenpeace-Gate" controversy invites a slight revision to the words John Dean said to President Nixon:

We have a cancer on the IPCC and Al Gore, that's growing. It's growing daily. It's compounding. It grows geometrically now, because it compounds itself.

Russell Cook's collection of writings on this issue can be seen at "The '96-to-present smear of skeptic scientists."