IPCC Imploding

The highly influential and by charter non-advocacy research group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, is imploding. Here are two more articles out of Britain from today alone with new information. First, from the (London) Times Online:

Top British scientist says UN panel is losing credibility:

A LEADING British government scientist has warned the United Nations’ climate panel to tackle its blunders or lose all credibility.

Robert Watson, chief scientist at Defra, the environment ministry, who chaired the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from 1997 to 2002, was speaking after more potential inaccuracies emerged in the IPCC’s 2007 benchmark report on global warming.

The most important is a claim that global warming could cut rain-fed north African crop production by up to 50% by 2020, a remarkably short time for such a dramatic change. The claim has been quoted in speeches by Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC chairman, and by Ban Ki-moon, the UN secretary-general.

This weekend Professor Chris Field, the new lead author of the IPCC’s climate impacts team, told The Sunday Times that he could find nothing in the report to support the claim. The revelation follows the IPCC’s retraction of a claim that the Himalayan glaciers might all melt by 2035.

The African claims could be even more embarrassing for the IPCC because they appear not only in its report on climate change impacts but, unlike the glaciers claim, are also repeated in its Synthesis Report.

This report is the IPCC’s most politically sensitive publication, distilling its most important science into a form accessible to politicians and policy makers. Its lead authors include Pachauri himself .

Next, from the Telegraph (UK), New errors in IPCC climate change report:

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) report is supposed to be the world’s most authoritative scientific account of the scale of global warming.

But this paper has discovered a series of new flaws in it including:

The publication of inaccurate data on the potential of wave power to produce electricity around the world, which was wrongly attributed to the website of a commercial wave-energy company.
Claims based on information in press releases and newsletters.

New examples of statements based on student dissertations, two of which were unpublished.
More claims which were based on reports produced by environmental pressure groups.

They are the latest in a series of damaging revelations about the IPCC’s most recent report, published in 2007.

Last month, the panel was forced to issue a humiliating retraction after it emerged statements about the melting of Himalayan glaciers were inaccurate.

There are more and more articles in the mainstream press than the above today alone. Thus there are more and more plumes of smoke. Are there simply multiple smudge pots obscuring the clear truth that the billionaire-in-the-balance Al Gore wants us to believe? Are is there now so much smoke that there is an increased likelihood, and perhaps even the probability, of fire? In other words, is important global warming now really simply an interesting hypothesis, but one that cannot justify massive shifts in tax systems, ways of transportation and heating/cooling of homes, etc?

The simple solution is for the globe to use fewer fossil fuels because they are getting used up. It's that simple.

Forget the cap and trade scam. Just tax fossil fuel use more and we will get less usage of it.

An even simpler solution is to substitute animal protein with vegetable protein. The health and environmental benefits will be major.

The global warmists are falling on their faces. Their cause is important and reasonable, and may or may not be correct, but the sight of them flying in their private jets all over the place to tell the rest of us to conserve is of a piece with the latest revelations. They are not credible advocates for change we can believe in.

If they had kept the narrative simple (using fewer resources is better on multiple and provable counts) they could have had a win for common sense and Mother Earth. Now they are hoisted with their own petards; this is blowing up in their faces.

Let them advocate by phone, not by private jet. That would be a start. And if the IPCC deserves to survive at all, it needs entirely new leadership.

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