Decision-Based Evidence-Making: More Disgrace From UN Panel on Climate Change

Most science teachers undergo the unpleasant experience of catching students fudging experimental data so as to yield desired results. If the data is not easily faked, students may simply run the experiment repeatedly until the “right” data are collected. They then discard the contradictory data.

Some such cheaters make it right through the education system; perhaps some become politicians, willing to direct staff to find evidence supporting decisions they have already made for political reasons. So it goes with the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which deserves to be disbanded following the release of their latest report.

With the Summary for Policymakers of the Working Group I part of the Fifth Assessment Report (AR5) along with the draft full report now released, we have an extreme example of such “decision-based evidence-making.” Since its last Assessment Reports in 2007, the IPCC has been revealed as committing most, if not all, of the below evidence-making ploys to prop up the global warming scare:

• Ignoring contradictory data, and acting as it does not exist.
• Releasing preliminary results before they are confirmed when those results support already decided-upon conclusions. Corrections made later rarely get as much attention as the initial announcement and so politicians ignore them.
• Highlighting apparently supportive information that is true, but irrelevant. In the hands of a skilled communicator, such information can be made to sound significant to the uninformed.
• Choosing supportive information from biased and/or unqualified sources.
• Making the underlying foundational science so complex that even qualified experts need weeks to assess it. This gives politically motivated bureaucrats a window of opportunity to make grandiose announcements that almost no one recognizes are inconsistent with the underlying data.
• Without consulting the experts who assembled a report, strategically editing the document just before release to the public so as to support political objectives while asserting that the report is supported by experts.
• Outright fabrication of data to support expedient conclusions.

The facts — which the newly released draft admits to — overwhelmingly support the conclusion that man’s impact on climate change is insignificant. But the IPCC asserts the exact opposite, namely that they are more convinced than ever that global warming is primarily caused by man, and that a crisis looms unless we radically change our ways. Even though their past forecasts failed to materialize, the IPCC claims an even higher level of confidence — 95%, we are told — that their conclusions are right this time around. The IPCC is hoping their theatrics distract the public, media, and government from some inconvenient truths; below is a partial list of them:

• While man continues to emit more carbon dioxide (CO2) into the atmosphere from power plants, automobiles, and industrial activity, the Earth has not warmed for at least 15 years. None of the computer models relied on by the IPCC to forecast climate calamity predicted this temperature standstill.
• It was warmer in many periods in the past than today, even though CO2 levels during these intervals were far lower than they are now.
• Antarctic ice, eight times greater than Arctic ice, is not receding. Overall global ice cover has not changed significantly since satellite measurements began in 1979.
• Global cyclone activity is now near a thirty-year low.
• There has been no statically significant increase in the frequency or severity of extreme weather events.
• Sea level rise is not accelerating beyond that normally expected due to the gradual warming since the end of the last glacial period 10,000 years ago.

That the IPCC is now heavily engaged in evidence-making to support the climate scare was entirely predictable. Their First Assessment Report, released in 1990, actually warned:

It is not possible at this time to attribute all, or even a large part, of the observed global-mean warming to (an) enhanced greenhouse effect on the basis of the observational data currently available.

This honesty did not stop world leaders and UN bureaucrats from creating the Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) at the 1992 Rio Earth Summit. The FCCC listed as its most important objective:

Stabilization of greenhouse gas concentrations in the atmosphere at a level that would prevent dangerous anthropogenic interference with the climate system.

Governments and the UN found it immaterial 21 years ago, and still do today, that no one knows what, if any, greenhouse gas level would cause climate problems. Governments comprising the UN decided we had to save the climate from man-made warming, so the UN IPCC complied. The IPCC became a political organization in which decision-based evidence-making became the norm.

Clearly, a UN-funded science organization was an ill-conceived idea. The Panel should be disbanded. But too much is at stake for politicians, government-funded scientists, and other financial interests to allow that to happen any time soon. Indeed, the global warming scare fosters one of the largest industries on the planet — though a disastrously unprofitable one — as hundreds of billions of dollars have been funneled from government coffers to fund such enterprises. And endless research dollars are still available for scientists intent on making man the culprit of events that are clearly beyond our control. Rather than admit to one of the biggest mistakes in history, governments will continue to prop up the IPCC and trumpet its results as if they were meaningful.

Eventually, due to publicized failure, public apathy, or another financial crisis, funding for the IPCC will dry up and the organization will disband. But this will not happen before alarmists do yet more damage to our society and to real, evidence-based environmental protection.

In the meantime, the public, governments, and the press need an alternative source of climate science information, one not controlled by the UN. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (see nipccreport.com) fills this urgent need.

Ten days before the latest IPCC report was released, the NIPCC issued a report titled “Climate Change Reconsidered II.” Thousands of peer-reviewed scientific references are cited to demonstrate that nature, not man, controls the climate.