|
True Blue...
|
phil.. here's why...
Why would an organization that claims to be scientific, that says it is conducting a scientific assessment, produce a report that is skewed rather than objective? There are many pieces to this jigsaw puzzle, but a large one is this: Strictly speaking, the IPCC is not - and has never been - a scientific body. Individual scientists do not belong to the IPCC. Nations do. That's why the IPCC tells us what country its authors represent and almost nothing else. International political considerations always come first at the IPCC. Scientific credibility comes second. The IPCC has never asked the science academies of the world to identify the top experts in a number of fields - and then systematically recruited only those people. Instead, nominations are sought from governments.
This is a problem for a few reasons. In democratic countries, governments rise and fall. A US administration in which Al Gore was Vice President regarded climate issues differently than the next administration, in which Dick Cheney was VP. This means that the political philosophy of whoever happens to be in office influences the IPCC author nomination process. Add in the fact that a country's environment ministry is usually the contact point for the IPCC and the problem becomes clearer. In many European countries, minority Green Party politicians are awarded the environment portfolio. Since it's unlikely that an environment department run by a Green Party politician would nominate the same list of experts as an environment department run by a Tory party politician, it becomes obvious that the selection of experts is colored by political - rather than scientific - considerations. In countries that are not democracies, ruling cliques retain their position via secret police and military force. Staying on the good side of those in charge is vitally important. There are many places in this worldwhere, if you say the wrong thing to the wrong person, the authorities break down your door in the middle of the night and drag you and your family off to prison. Let us not be naive. How likely is it that world-class scientific experts will emerge from the chaos, corruption, and widespread poverty common in undemocratic countries? Even more to the point: Why would we suppose that those nominated for IPCC duty by unsavory governments are at liberty to form independent scientific conclusions? They would be courageous people, indeed, to adopt a position counter to the one decreed by their political bosses. This is why the claim that the IPCC consists of scientists from 113 countries who've all independently come to the same conclusions is so misleading. All told, there are 195 nations in the world. According to the UN itself only a small fraction are developed economies. On this list are Australia, Austria, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Greece, Italy, Luxembourg, Japan, New Zealand, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, the Netherlands, the UK and the US.
That makes a grand total of 19. Add in Russia, China, and Israel and the number of countries in a position to nurture first-class educational and research facilities is still less than two dozen. The moment it was decided that the job of identifying the world's top scientific experts should be handed over to politicians from more than 100 countries (rather than to a handful of prestigious science academies) was the moment the IPCC ceased to be a scientific body. Peel another layer from the onion, and things get even stickier. Earlier I mentioned that the NOAA - the US National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration - devoted a page in one of its publications to celebrating its employees' involvement with the IPCC. According to that page "more than 120 NOAA scientists contributed" to the 2007 Climate Bible. In itself, that is a startling number. A single US government organization had 120 employees taking part in IPCC activities. Is every last one of them really a world-class expert?
But there's an even more important question: Were these people truly free to come to their own, independent conclusions as IPCC authors? Were they provided with written assurance that, should their scientific conscience lead them in a direction at odds with the organization that pays their salary, they were at liberty to follow their conscience? The IPCC is supposed to objectively evaluate the scientific literature regarding climate change. But if 120 of the IPCC's personnel are from the NOAA, and if the NOAA has already decided that human activity is causing climate change, how neutral can these people be expected to be? The NOAA has spent a ton of money on climate models that have, in turn, been used by the IPCC to make its arguments. The NOAA is therefore unlikely to be a workplace where people will receive promotions for questioning the climate change party line. In this regard, an anecdote from The Climate Caper, a book by an Australian atmospheric scientist, is illuminating:
In the early nineties I was involved in setting up an Antarctic research centre...to examine the role of Antarctica and the Southern Ocean in global climate. I made the error at the time of mentioning in a media interview - reported extensively in 'The Australian' on a slow Easter Sunday - that there were still lots of doubts about the disaster potential of global warming. Suffice it to say that within a couple of days it was
|
Forum
Pages: 
