This undoubtedly will shock readers, but the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change has a tendency to shade the truth. And only in one
direction. It seems ... drumroll, please! ... that the member governments
have their own agendas and aren't above lying to the people to achieve
their ends.
With activists and politicians continuing to push draconian energy
control schemes even with no net increase in temperature over the
past decade, it is ever more important for the public to understand
the myths being presented as facts.
The article is a bit old, but is worth rereading. Writing from Bali,
Christopher Monckton, who contribiuted to the 2007 IPCC report, explained:
As a contributor to the IPCC’s 2007 report, I share the Nobel
Peace Prize with Al Gore. Yet I and many of my peers in the British
House of Lords - through our hereditary element the most independent-minded
of lawmakers - profoundly disagree on fundamental scientific grounds
with both the IPCC and my co-laureate’s alarmist movie An
Inconvenient Truth, which won this year’s Oscar for Best Sci-Fi
Comedy Horror.
Two detailed investigations by Committees of the House confirm
that the IPCC has deliberately, persistently and prodigiously exaggerated
not only the effect of greenhouse gases on temperature but also
the environmental consequences of warmer weather.
My contribution to the 2007 report illustrates the scientific problem.
The report’s first table of figures - inserted by the IPCC’s
bureaucrats after the scientists had finalized the draft, and without
their consent - listed four contributions to sea-level rise. The
bureaucrats had multiplied the effect of melting ice from the Greenland
and West Antarctic Ice Sheets by 10.
The result of this dishonest political tampering with the science
was that the sum of the four items in the offending table was more
than twice the IPCC’s published total. Until I wrote to point
out the error, no one had noticed. The IPCC, on receiving my letter,
quietly corrected, moved and relabeled the erroneous table, posting
the new version on the internet and earning me my Nobel prize.
The shore-dwellers of Bali need not fear for their homes. The IPCC
now says the combined contribution of the two great ice-sheets to
sea-level rise will be less than seven centimeters after 100 years,
not seven meters imminently, and that the Greenland ice sheet (which
thickened by 50 cm between 1995 and 2005) might only melt after
several millennia, probably by natural causes, just as it last did
850,000 years ago. Gore, mendaciously assisted by the IPCC bureaucracy,
had exaggerated a hundredfold.
Recently a High Court judge in the UK listed nine of the 35 major
scientific errors in Gore’s movie, saying they must be corrected
before innocent schoolchildren can be exposed to the movie. Gore’s
exaggeration of sea-level rise was one.
Others being peddled at the Bali conference are that man-made “global
warming” threatens polar bears and coral reefs, caused Hurricane
Katrina, shrank Lake Chad, expanded the actually-shrinking Sahara,
etc.
