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 he United Nations
scientific review process on global warming has become a sham. Once
again, its
Intergovernmental
Panel on Climate Change has released a scientifically vacuous, though
politically explosive draft of a summary that claims to reflect
the scientific findings of a report that is yet to be completed.
The purpose of the release is to browbeat national governments,
particularly the Bush administration, into accepting international
energy controls. "Scientists and environmentalists … hope [the report]
will prod political leaders to action," according to the New
York Times. "Monday's report warned that the United States —
where skepticism about warming is strong in the new administration
— would not escape a rise in flooding and storms that have
caused billions of dollars in damage in recent years."
The draft summary is the second released in the last month. This
summary claims to reflect Working Group II's report, "Climate Change
2001: Impacts, Adaptation, and Vulnerability." Like the Working
Group I summary released a month ago it is a distortion of the true
state of climate science.
The summary assumes that the worst-case warming scenario presented
in the first summary is plausible and presents the impacts of said
scenario. The result is a nightmarish vision of the future. The
New York Times reports that scientists foresee "Massive flooding,
disease and drought…glaciers and polar icecaps melting, countless
species of animals, birds and plant life dying out, farmland turning
to desert, fish-supporting coral reefs destroyed, and small island
states sunk beneath the sea."
The rise in natural disasters claimed by the summary has not been
born out in the real world, however. Dr. John Christy,
| “Several
scientists have already reacted negatively to the summaries.” |
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director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of
Alabama at Huntsville and a lead author of the IPCC report, told
the London Times that, "Hurricanes are not increasing. Tornadoes
are not increasing. Storms and drought do not show any pattern of
increasing or decreasing. The evidence shows we are living in a
climate of natural variability. Variations of climate have always
occurred, even when humans could not have had any impact!"
The summary touts negative impacts and ignores the benefits that
would result from a warmer climate. It claims, for instance, that
there will be "Increased energy demand for space cooling due to
higher summer temperatures," but fails to mention lower winter heating
costs. Global warming theory posits, for example, that most warming
will occur in winter and at night with very little warming in the
summer. This has been the case so far. This translates into lower
winter heating bills with no change summer cooling bills, a net
benefit that the summary fails to mention.
A preview of this phenomenon occurred with the 1997-98 El Niño,
which led to milder winters and hotter summers. A study in the Bulletin
of the American Meteorological Society (September 1999) showed
that there was a net benefit of $15 billion dollars, due to lower
winter heating costs that were only partially offset by higher summer
cooling costs.
Releasing summaries, which are written and approved by government
bureaucrats rather than the scientists, before the reports themselves
guarantees that the conventional wisdom about global warming will
be shaped by the outlandish claims of the summaries and not the
more reasoned scientific reports. The purpose, of course, is not
to produce a true picture of climate science but to influence the
political process.
Several scientists have already reacted negatively to the summaries.
Dr. Christy criticized the attention paid to the extreme scenarios
in the summaries. Referring to the Working Group I summary he said
that, "The world is in much better shape than this doomsday scenario
paints. There are 245 different results in that report, and this
was the worst-case scenario. It's the one that's not going to happen.
It was the extreme case of all the different things that can make
the world warm."
Another lead author Dr. Andrew Weaver, holder of the Canada Research
Chair in atmospheric science at the University of Victoria argued
that, "Based on the science you simply can't make the statement
that it is going to warm faster," as is argued in Working Group
I summary. Those who claim otherwise don't understand the IPCC report,
he said.
And lead author Dr. Richard S. Lindzen, the Alfred P. Sloan professor
of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says
that the IPCC is using the summaries to misrepresent what scientists
say and exaggerate the accuracy and certainty of their findings.
The political nature of the IPCC's work shouldn't surprise anyone.
When science involves itself with politics it becomes subordinate
to political agendas. Most political agendas involve grabbing power
from the people. The biggest power grab ever attempted in the western
democracies, control of energy use, is currently underway. The IPCC
has become a key pawn in that effort.
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