Donna Laframboise: " IPCC is filled with environmental activists"

Alarmist mainstream media continue to portrait the IPCC as a body made up of the world's top scientists and experts. Donna Lafromboise, the Toronto based investigative journalist, has found out that the reality looks somewhat different:


So what did Laframbois find? Yes, “a number of talented and experienced scientists have indeed helped to write IPCC reports over the years. The problem is that many other IPCC authors don’t come close to being leading scientists at the top of their profession,” said Laframbois to the crowd made up of many geologists, geophysicists and astrophysicists.
On the screen, Laframbois flashed the photos of three “20-somethings,” who were lead authors and even co-ordinating lead authors of entire chapters of the IPCC Climate Bible that directs the governments of 185 countries into actions like raising gasoline prices, imposing carbon taxes and the like.
Richard Klein, for instance, was 23 in 1992 when he completed his master’s degree in geography and worked as a Greenpeace campaigner. Two years later, he was a lead author for the IPCC. Since 1994, he has been a lead author for six IPCC reports, and beginning in 1997, he was promoted to co-ordinating lead author — the IPCC’s most senior author role — at the age of 28. “That’s six years prior to him completing his PhD. Neither his youth nor his thin academic credentials prevented the IPCC from regarding him as one of the world’s top experts,” she said.
Laurens Bouwer was a lead author for the IPCC in 1999-2000, BEFORE earning his master’s degree in 2001.
The most egregious example is Sari Kovats. In 1994, Kovats was one of 21 people “in the entire world selected to work on the first IPCC chapter” looking into the affects of climate change on human health.
But she wasn’t anywhere near being one of the world’s top scientists or experts in her field. Indeed, she didn’t publish her first academic paper until three years after she acted as an “expert” and she didn’t earn her PhD until 2010 — a whopping 16 years after being tagged as one of the top 21 experts in the world.
And it gets worse. The IPCC is filled with environmental activists, not objective scientists measuring data and coming to conclusions.
Among a list of people she cites, Laframbois notes that Jennifer Morgan spent several years as the World Wildlife Fund’s chief spokesperson on climate change and then in 2010 the IPCC appointed her “to work on a report it describes as objective, rigorous and balanced.”
Indeed, two-thirds of the chapters of the IPCC’s Assessment Report 4 included at least one WWF affiliated scientist. Two-thirds! Laframbois calls that a “full-scale invasion.”


Read the entire article here

Peer review is a new version of the old Vatican truth councils

The way climate alarmists use peer review as a stamp of approval is according the Brendan O´Neill reminiscent of the old Vatican Councils, which determined the official Truth:

Not long ago, the only people who knew or cared what peer review involved were academic researchers, men of medicine and white-coat wearers in the sphere of science, who were understandably keen to have their papers OK'd by a handful of their peers so that they might be published and discussed by others. Outside of the ivory towers, peer review meant little, if anything, to Joe Public.

Now, thanks largely to climate-change activists who treat peer-reviewed documents about the environment in the same way early Christians treated the gospels, peer review is all the rage.

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More and more campaigners and commentators now insist that only ideas that have been peer-reviewed should be taken seriously. Everything else is bunkum, or possibly charlatanism.

Last week in The Guardian newspaper, a green campaigner described peer review as a "kitemark of quality assurance", implying that any claims about the climate or mankind's future that haven't been peer-reviewed have no quality.

She suggested that even newspapers articles written by everyday journalists should be subjected to something akin to peer review.

There should be a "system of certification", she said, where "teams of academics" would award an approving kitemark to articles that are "accurate (and that) use reliable sources and peer-reviewed studies".

Funnily enough, a few hundred years ago we had just that kind of system in the British media. It was called the licensing of the press, where only those writers whose ideas met with the approval of the king or queen and their tyrannical court would be permitted to publish, while all the rest would be branded heretics.

Fittingly, The Guardian article calling for peer review to be used in a similar way today, as a way of branding certain published ideas Good and others Bad, was headlined "Don't give climate change heretics an easy ride".

In Australia, public intellectual Robert Manne says that when it comes to climate change, only "leading peer-reviewed scientific journals" should be treated seriously. A "rational citizen has little alternative but to accept the consensual core position of climate scientists", he says.

"Discussion of this point should long ago have ended."

Here we can clearly see the cultural snobbery and intellectual protectionism of the cheerleaders of peer review. Manne is effectively telling the little people to shut up and accept the Truth as revealed by their betters in academe.

What these modern-day licensers of acceptable thought refuse to recognise is that climate change, in terms of how it is framed by the green lobby, is not simply a scientific issue. It is a profoundly political one, touching on everything from economic growth to development in the Third World, from how we travel to what kind of expectations we have for our children.

Under the guise of promoting "correct science" and slamming "bad science", the priestly peer-review lobby is actually enforcing an ideological world view, using the tags "peer reviewed" and "non peer-reviewed" to distinguish between those who are politically on side and those who remain stubbornly heretical.

The extraordinary thing about the liberal intelligentsia's wide-eyed faith in peer review is that this academic process is actually massively open to corruption.

Much peer review involves little more than well-connected academics getting people they know or mates who owe them a favour to sign off on their latest bit of work. That is why the peer-reviewed reports of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have included so many factual inaccuracies and so much eco-claptrap.

In essence, huge swaths of the cultural elite are using peer review as a kind of intellectual licence, with those lucky enough to receive this stamp being treated seriously and everyone else being branded a dangerous outsider. For all the scientific pretensions of this process, it is most reminiscent of those old Vatican Councils that would get together every few years to determine what the Truth is and how it might be communicated to the pig-ignorant public.

 Read the entire article here

Italy´s top scientist on the politicization of climate science

This is what Professor Antonino Zichichi, one of the world´s leading particle physicists, thinks about the politicization of climate science:

He is an angry man. Angry because he, like me, was brought up in the Classical tradition, which insists that the duty of every “seeker after truth” (Al-Haytham’s beautiful phrase for the scientist) is to be logical and rational. He founded the Federation at the height of the Cold War to remind scientists of their moral responsibility to use their craft for good, not for ill, and of their intellectual obligation to adhere rigorously to the scientific method.

Nino is furious at the politicization of climate science. Science these days is a monopsony. There is only one paying customer: the State. Scientists increasingly produce the results their political paymasters want rather than seeking after truth.

Nowhere is the buying of desired results by governments clearer than in Nick Stern’s now-discredited report of 2006 on climate economics. The U.N.’s absurd climate panel had already at least tripled the true (and harmless) rate of warming to be expected from our adding CO2 to the air. Stern, to please his socialist paymasters, tripled it again without the slightest justification. Then he divided by 10 the true cost of making global warming go away and multiplied by 10 the true cost of not acting to Save The Planet (memo to Old Nick: The planet was triumphantly saved 2,000 years ago and doesn’t need saving again).

Tony Blair, the shifty socialist prime minister of the day, was so delighted with this nonsense that he gave Stern a peerage and installed him as head of the Grantham Institute, a lavishly funded propaganda institution promoting fear of climatic Armageddon and hatred of the West.

Using Old Nick’s report as a pretext, Blair (with the near-unanimous support of all parties, including Call-Me-Dave Cameron’s Not-The-Conservative-Party) introduced the biggest tax increase in human history. With only three votes against, the Climate Change and National Economic Hara-Kiri Act was passed on the very night when the first October snow for 74 years was falling outside in Parliament Square.

Read Christopher Monckton´s entire article here.

Climate science and politics make bad bedfellows

University of Kent sociology professor Frank Furedi, writing in the Australian, points out that science and politics make bad bedfellows. Furedi´s findings are directly applicable to the unhealthy relationship between climate science and government policy in most western countries:  

Most research carried out in universities is funded by government and often needs to take account of its policy priorities. Consequently science too often becomes subject to political influences and commercial pressures. In turn, scientists often use their research to promote their pet causes. They step outside of their laboratory and use their status to influence public life and demand that “something must be done” about problems they have uncovered.
All too often the distinction between science informing policy and science directing it becomes blurred. For their part, policymakers are often willing accomplices to allowing science to acquire such a prominent role. Politicians find it easier to hide behind science and justify their claim by stating “evidence shows” than to engage in the difficult business of convincing the electorate that their policy is right!
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Whenever science acquires the role of directly authorising policy it tends to encourage paternalistic political management. It fosters a climate that is inhospitable to democratic accountability through assigning the power of agenda setting and decision-making to the experts at the expense of the citizen. Claiming a privileged access to the scientific truth, paternalistic policymakers often criticise people for not acting rationally and for failing to make healthy choices. That is why increasingly the refrain “research shows” or “science says” sounds suspiciously like a statement driven by a moralising imperative.
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The current tendency to treat the findings of research as the truth violates the very meaning of scientific thinking. Research provides information that needs to be scrutinised and evaluated. However, it is not evident what a scientific discovery means for society. A scientific fact does not indicate its significance for the community. Scientists have every right to interpret the facts and to offer advice about what they think should be done. Although such advice is useful and important, it is up to policymakers to decide how to use it. Science should have no privileged role in evaluating its significance for society. Moreover, when it comes to interpreting such information the public also has a decisive role to play. The final decisions should be decided by the public and their political leaders through weighing up the significance of scientific advice in light of wider social, economic and cultural concerns.
Whatever was the case in the past, it is no longer possible to separate science from politics. As a result both science and public life are the worse for it. Good science depends on the disinterested pursuit of the truth. It needs to be open-ended and experimentative. Imposing a political agenda on it can only have a corrupting influence on the science.

Read the entire article here

How true!

"Can We Really Call Climate Science a Science?"

Dr. Paul Roderick Gregory, professor of Economics and a research fellow at the Hoover Institution at Stanford, has written a must read article in Forbes, titled "Can We Really Call Climate Science A Science?"

Here is an excerpt:

The “warmist” consensus view of “climate science” is represented at a popular level by advocates like Al Gore and at the scientific and technical level by the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), as supported by researchers at East Anglia (Phil Jones) and Penn State (Michael Mann). This panoply of people and organizations is the equivalent of the Central Committee in my Stalin dialog above. “Skeptics” (the equivalent of Trotsky above) are individual scientists and advocates who stake out positions at odds with the IPCC-Central Committee orthodoxy. They are the ones who “dare to speak when fierce growling dogs roam everywhere.”

Three recent events have brought the controversy over climate science back into the news and onto my radar screen:

First: The Giaever story starkly disputes warmist claims of “inconvertible evidence.” Despite the press’s notable silence on such matters, there are a large number of prominent scientists with solid scholarly credentials who disagree with the IPCC-Central Committee. Those who claim “proven science” and “consensus” conveniently ignore such scientists.
With his public resignation, Nobel Laureate Giaever joins a long list of distinguished “skeptics,” which includes Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Atmospheric Science at MIT and member of the National Academy of Sciences, Hendrik Tennekes, retired Director of Research, Royal Netherlands Meteorological Institute, Sallie Baliunas, astronomer, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics, Ian Clark, hydrogeologist, professor, Department of Earth Sciences, University of Ottawa: William M. Gray, Professor Emeritus and head of The Tropical Meteorology Project, Department of Atmospheric Science, Colorado State University, William Happer, physicist, Princeton University, Tim Patterson, paleoclimatologist and Professor of Geology at Carleton University in Canada, and Fred Singer, Professor emeritus of Environmental Sciences at the University of Virginia (just to name a few from a long list).

This is professor Gregory´s conclusion:

I do not know whether the warmists or skeptics are right. I do know that the modeling of the climate is among the most complex of scientific tasks. In this regard, climate science and economics have much in common. We both must try to understand complicated systems with intricate feedbacks and uncertain causality. As recent experience shows, we economists have yet to find “incontrovertible truth.” We will never reach a consensus. Nor should we. Why should we expect climate science, unlike other disciplines, to reach a consensus when we do not expect this of other fields of scientific inquiry.
About a year ago, I attended a debate between a noted warmist and skeptic. They agreed only on one thing: Climate science is in its infancy. We are just beginning to understand the climate. When we look back, we will understand how little we really understood and how wrong our first findings were. This is the way science is created.
False claims of consensus and inconvertible truth reveal a political or ideological agenda wrapped in the guise of science. The incontrovertible bad behavior of the warmists has led skeptics to suspect base motives, and who could blame them?

Read the entire article here

PS
Professor Gregory is another, much needed voice of reason. Luckily, more and more prominent academics have began to speak out about the warmists´ non-scientific, purely political and ideological agenda (which clearly has Marxist roots).