Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change
Rajendra K. Pachauri, the chair of the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Congressman Luetkemeyer strongly objects to the UNFCC’s use of IPCC’s suggestions and faulty data to implement a job-killing agenda here in America. He argues: “The American people should not have to foot the bill for an international organization that is fraught with waste, engaged in dubious science, and is promoting an agenda that will destroy jobs and drive up the cost of energy in the United States. Unfortunately, the president appears to be ready to fund these groups, revive harmful policies like cap and trade, and further empower out of control federal regulators at a time when we should be doing everything possible to cut wasteful spending, reduce regulatory red tape, and promote economic growth.”
While the amount we give to the UNFCC and IPCC may seem like a tiny pittance in the realm of government spending largesse, it’s important to realize that true costs of that folly amount to countless billions in disastrous policy and regulatory impacts. Under the Obama administration, the two organizations together have received a total average of $10.25 million annually, which will be upped to $13 million under a FY 13 budget request. The George W. Bush administration previously provided about $5.7 million each year.
Representative Luetkemeyer’s defunding proposal cites unsupportable IPCC claims based upon irresponsible science practices which were revealed in e-mail exchanges between climate researchers in the U.K.’s East Anglia University network. These communications provide clear evidence that leading global scientists intentionally manipulated data and suppressed legitimate opposing arguments in peer-reviewed journals. In some instances, collaborators were asked to delete and destroy incriminating e-mails rather than comply with legally-binding Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests.
It may be instructive to remember that all of this global warming crisis frenzy really got heated up in the late 1980s, less than two decades after many scientists had warned during the mid-1970s that the next Ice Age was rapidly approaching. Even the National Academy of Sciences predicted in 1975 that there was a “finite possibility that a serious worldwide cooling could befall the Earth within the next 100 years.”
But guess what? Climate actually does change, and the planet then experienced a warming spell. Attributing this “crisis” to influences of man-made carbon emissions, a presumption based upon theoretical climate models, the U.N. established its FCCC in 1992, began to organize conferences, and created the IPCC to conduct scientific reviews.
The central FCCC strategy to fight what was promoted as “anthropogenic” (man-made) climate change was brilliant…to put a value credit on cutbacks in the amounts of carbon dioxide emitted by fossil-burning industries, and then let other industries that produced amounts of CO2 emissions in excess of their allocations, purchase credits from them. In other words, they would create a trading market to buy and sell air.
This carbon “cap-and-trade” program would be accomplished on a country-to-country international scale through the Kyoto Protocol treaty, penalizing developed countries that produce lots of CO2 emissions by forcing them to purchase credits from less developed countries (amounting to free money for them). Incidentally, China and India, which emit huge amounts of CO2, were given a pass because of their developing country status.
Although IPCC is broadly represented to the public as the top authority on climate matters, the organization doesn’t actually carry out any original climate research at all. Instead, it simply issues assessments based upon supposedly independent surveys of published research. However, some of the most influential conclusions summarized in its reports have neither been based upon truly independent research, nor properly vetted through accepted peer- review processes.
The IPCC asserted in its 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would likely melt by 2035 due to global warming, prompting great alarm across southern and eastern Asia, where glaciers feed major rivers. As it turned out, that prediction was traced to a speculative magazine article authored by an Indian glaciologist, Syed Hasnain, which had absolutely no supporting science behind it. Hasnain worked for a research company headed by the IPCC’s chairman, Rajendra Pachauri. IPCC’s report author, Marari Lai, later admitted to the London Mail, “We thought that if we can highlight it, it will impact policymakers and politicians and encourage them to take action.”
Can we count upon objective conclusions from scientists who feel “called to action”? Consider commentary by the late Stephen Schneider who served as a lead author for important parts of three sequential IPCC reports. In a 1989 interview he told Discover magazine: “On the one hand, as scientists we are ethically bound to the scientific method, on the other hand, we are not just scientists, but human beings as well. And like most people, we’d like to see the world a better place, which in this context translates into our working to reduce the risk of potentially disastrous climatic change. To do that, we need to get some broad-based support, to capture the public’s imagination. That, of course, entails getting loads of media coverage. So we have to offer up scary scenarios, make simplified, dramatic statements, and make little mention of the doubts we might have. Each of us has to decide what the right balance is between being effective and being honest.”
Oh, by the way… while “climate” is generally associated with periods spanning at least three decades, Schneider’s alarmist global warming position completely reversed a view he championed little more than a decade earlier. His 1976 book, The Genesis Strategy, warned that global cooling risks posed a threat to humanity.
While it should be recognized that most of the many scientific reviewers are indeed dedicated and competent people who take their work very seriously, few of them have much if any influence over final conclusions that the public hears about. Instead, the huge compilations they prepare go through international bureaucratic reviews, where political appointees dissect them, line by line, to glean the best stuff that typically supports what IPCC wanted to say in the first place. These cherry-picked items are then assembled, condensed and highlighted in the Summaries for Policymakers which are calibrated to get prime-time and front page attention.
Political summary editing processes usually progress through a series of drafts that become increasingly media-worthy. For example, the original text of an April 2000 Third Assessment Report (TAR) draft stated: “There has been a discernible human influence on global climate.” That was followed by an October version that concluded: “It is likely that increasing concentrations of anthropogenic greenhouse gases have contributed significantly to observed warming over the past 50 years.” Then in the final official summary, the language was toughened up even more: “Most of the observed warming over the past 50 years is likely to have been due to the increase in greenhouse gas concentrations.”
When the U.N. Environment Programme’s spokesman, Tim Higham, was asked by New Scientist about the scientific background for this change, his answer was honest: “There was no new science, but the scientists wanted to present a clear and strong message to policymakers.”
Sometimes IPCC report statements directly contradict conclusions published by the same authors during the same time period. Regarding any “discernible human influence on global climate”, a 1996 IPCC report summary written by B.D. Santer, T.M.L Wigley, T.P. Barnett, and E. Anyamba states: “…there is evidence of an emerging pattern of climate response to forcings by greenhouse gases and sulphate aerosols…from geographical, seasonal and vertical patterns of temperature change…These results point towards human influence on climate.”
However, another 1996 publication, “The Holocene”, by T.P. Barnett, B.D. Santer, P.D. Jones, R.S. Bradley and K.R. Briffa, says: “Estimates of…natural variability are critical to the problem of detecting an anthropogenic [human] signal…We have estimated the spectrum…from paleo-temperature proxies and compared it with…general [climate] circulation models…none of the three estimates of the natural variability spectrum agree with each other…Until…resolved, it will be hard to say, with confidence, that an anthropogenic climate signal has or has not been detected.”
Go figure!
That same 1996 IPCC report used selective data, a doctored graph, and featured changes in text that were made after the reviewing scientists approved it and before it was printed. The many irregularities provoked Dr. Frederick Seitz, a world-famous physicist and former president of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, the American Physical Society, and Rockefeller University, to write ( in August 1996) in the Wall Street Journal: “I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer review process than events that led to this IPCC report.”
Several tens of thousands of scientists have lodged formal protests regarding unscientific IPCC practices. Some critics include former supporters. One of them is Prof. Fritz Vahrenholt, a socialist founder of Germany’s environmental movement, who headed the renewable energy division of the country’s second largest utility company. His recent coauthored book titled “The Cold Sun: Why the Climate Disaster Won’t Happen”, charges the IPCC with gross incompetence and dishonesty, most particularly regarding fear-mongering exaggeration of known climate influence of human CO2 emissions.
And that ain’t all…not by a long stretch. IPCC’s political science-driven Summaries for Policymakers offer prescriptions for distribution of wealth and resource redistribution, including regionalized (smaller) economies to reduce transportation demand, reorienting lifestyles away from consumption, resource- sharing through co-ownership, and encouraging citizens to pursue free time over wealth.
Pursuit of America’s wealth by the U.N. however, is obviously sanctioned. As IPCC official Ottmar Edenhofer admitted in November 2010,“…one has to free oneself from the illusion that international climate policy is environmental policy. Instead, climate change policy is about how we redistribute de facto the world’s wealth…”
That plan appears to be going very well. During the U.N’s 2010 Cancun, Mexico, Climate conference, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton officially offered a $100 billion annual contribution from us and our more prosperous friends to the “poorest and most vulnerable [nations] among us” by 2020 to aid them in solving climate problems. Where it would actually come from no one knew, including Hillary and her boss. (Any guesses?)
And just how likely is it that Congress will put an end to this U.N.- sponsored IPCC insanity? Congressman Luetkemeyer told me about some large obstacles and challenges ahead: “We have had the opportunity in the past couple of years to end this wasteful spending of taxpayer dollars, but unfortunately, the Senate has refused to take up and pass the budgets where these spending cuts were included. It is obvious that this president, and his allies in the Senate, want to spend more of people’s hard-earned money, while also pushing their misguided climate change agenda, which makes this an uphill battle, but one I am prepared to fight.”
Good for him! Let’s urge his enlightened House and Senate colleagues to join him.
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