U.N. Agenda Subverts Science
Again.

By Paul Georgia, environmental-policy analyst with the Competitive Enterprise Institute & managing editor of Cooler Heads.
February 23, 2001 10:55 a.m.

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, 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.