MORE HOT AIR FROM THE UN?

I really wish that all these scientists would get their act together and agree on whether we’re all doomed to die in a combination of floodwaters rising, extreme storms and C02 levels gassing us or whatever else is supposed to be happening through global warming. Should I be buying a new boat or not? Should I be repairing my water wings? Should I begin stockpiling oxygen tanks? I’m in such as tizz as to what I should expect and what I should be doing that I wouldn’t be surprised if all this stress generated over climate change catastrophes is financed by the big drug companies in an effort to sell more of their ‘happy pills’!

Well…. Don’t despair folks. A consistent story is being drummed up even as we speak! The good old United Nations' climate panel, IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change), is fiddling (sorry, I should have said ‘adjusting’) the results of it’s fourth report on climate change which has been widely reported over the last few days as predicting that the imminent global apocalypse is going to be even worse than previously anticipated! Hand me another happy pill mother! Come to think about it, the way the media love to dramatise all this worrying news one would think that they were in cahoots with the drug companies as well! I feel a conspiracy theory coming on….. but then I digress. Back to the IPCC.

What seems to have been largely overlooked by all the media hype is that what has been released by the IPCC is merely the summary for policymakers, while the actual science on which that summary is allegedly based will not be formally published for a further three months! As with previous IPCC reports, the summary is a political document written not by scientists but by officials. Needless to say, various folk who have read the draft scientific material for the fourth report are saying that the IPCC summary bears little relation to the IPCC science which tells a very different story indeed — namely, that previous IPCC forecasts of the climate change apocalypse were exaggerated and wrong and that accordingly current forecasts have been drastically scaled back.

So, will we hear about that? Not if the IPCC has it’s way! Why? Because, as has already been reported in the ‘Wall Street Journal’ - one of the few papers to keep sane and sensible observations on this emotive subject - and supported by a number of scientists, we will not be able to judge for ourselves when the IPCC scientific reports are finally published because it appears that the IPCC intends to make the scientists falsify the science!

An appendix on procedures for the IPCC publication states: “The content of the authored chapters is the responsibility of the Lead Authors, subject to Working Group or Panel acceptance. Changes (other than grammatical or minor editorial changes) made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers or the Overview Chapter. These changes shall be identified by the Lead Authors in writing and made available to the Panel at the time it is asked to accept the Summary for Policymakers, in case of reports prepared by the Task Force on National Greenhouse Gas Inventories by the end of the session of the Panel which adopts/accepts the report.”

What’s that again? The IPCC has said that the authors of the scientific papers will have to change their findings if they depart from the summary in order to bring them into line with it? In other words, research which apparently shows that the panic over man-made global warming is exaggerated, misleading and wrong is to be altered to support the summary’s view that man-made global warming is even worse than previously thought!

As I said earlier, there have been protests from leading scientists who are aware of this. Amongst them, Harvard University physicist Lubos Motl, who puts it into clear English for us saying, “These people are openly declaring that they are going to commit scientific misconduct that will be paid for by the United Nations. If they find an error in the summary, they won’t fix it. Instead, they will ‘adjust’ the technical report so that it looks consistent.”

Furthermore, the atmospheric physicist Richard Lindzen, who produced evidence on the study of clouds and water vapour for the IPCC’s third assessment report in 2001, said of the requirement to bring the research into line with the summary statement: “If you were doing that with a business report, the federal trade commission would be down your throat”.

All this messing about with scientific research by politicians, despite the fact that on their own website the IPCC clearly states that “The IPCC does not carry out research nor does it monitor climate related data or other relevant parameters. It bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published scientific/technical literature”. Hmmm…. Doesn’t sound like that to me. But then what can I know when the truth is that well messed about with?

So there we are folks. Are we any the wiser? Do we really know what to believe now? Unfortunately, it seems that nothing is too important to be messed around with in order that somebody can promote their own political agenda.