American Elephants

The InterAcademy Council, is  a multinational organization of science academies created to produce reports on scientific, technological, and health issues related to the great global challenges of our time, providing knowledge and advice to national governments and international organizations. Sound scientific, technological, and medical knowledge is fundamental to addressing critical issues facing the world today.

The current eighteen member IAC board embodies the collective expertise and experience of national academies from all regions of the world.

So this is about as official as it gets. The IAC slammed the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) for its process, suggested removal of top officials, followed by IPCC’s Pachauri should resign for “failures of leadership.”

On June 27, the IPCC issued a statement saying it had “complete[d] the process of implementation of a set of recommendations issued in August 2010 by the InterAcademy Council (IAC), the group created by the world’s science academies to provide advice to international bodies.”

Hidden behind this seemingly routine update on bureaucratic processes is an astonishing and entirely unreported story.  The IPCC is the world’s most prominent source of alarmist predictions and claims about man-made global warming.  Its four reports (a fifth report is scheduled for release in various parts in 2013 and 2014) are cited by the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in the U.S. and by national academies of science around the world as “proof” that the global warming of the past five or so decades was both man-made and evidence of a mounting crisis.

If the IPCC’s reports were flawed, as many global warming “skeptics” have long claimed, then the scientific footing of the man-made global warming movement — the environmental movement’s “mother of all environmental scares” — is undermined.  The Obama administration’s war on coal may be unnecessary.  Billions of dollars in subsidies to solar and wind may have been wasted.  Trillions of dollars of personal income may have been squandered worldwide in campaigns to “fix” a problem that didn’t really exist. (emphasis added)

IPCC lead authors failed to give due consideration to properly documented alternative views, failed to provide detailed written response to the mist significant review issues, reports are not peer-reviewed. The IPCC had no formal criteria for choosing authors, selection criteria is arbitrary, not always the best scientists, in other words authors are selected from a club of scientists and nonscientists who agree with the alarmist perspective favored by politicians.

Too bad, because these are both big issues in light of recent revelations that a majority of the authors and contributors to some chapters of the IPCC reports are environmental activists, not scientists at all. …

 The news release means that the IAC report was right.  That, in turn, means that the first four IPCC reports were, in fact, unreliable.  Not just “possibly flawed” or “could have been improved,” but likely to be wrong and even fraudulent.

It means that all of the “endorsements” of the climate consensus made by the world’s national academies of science — which invariably refer to the reports of the IPCC as their scientific basis — were based on false or unreliable data and therefore should be disregarded or revised.  It means that the EPA’s “endangerment finding” — its claim that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat to human health — was wrong and should be overturned.

Can we get our money back? Can we shut down the fraudulent and corrupt EPA? Will President Obama apologize for wasting so much money on windmills and solar shingles?

On June 27, the culprits at the IPCC confessed and promised to do better. It remains to be seen just what “better” is. Will the EPA apologize and give the coal miners and oil-field workers and offshore oilmen back their jobs?