Climate Change Reconsidered is an authoritative reply to the Fourth Assessment Report of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), released in 2007. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC), whose members produced Climate Change Reconsidered, was created as a “Team B” to study the same scientific data examined by the IPCC and to arrive at an independent opinion. What is the IPCC? And why does it arrive at conclusions that are so different from those of the NIPCC?

History of the IPCC

The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) can trace its roots to World Earth Day in 1970, the Stockholm Conference in 1971-72, and the Villach Conferences in 1980 and 1985. In July 1986, the United Nations Environment Program and the World Meteorological Organization established the IPCC as an organ of the United Nations.

While we are often told about the “2,500 scientists” who contributed to the latest IPCC report, the vast majority of these contributors had no influence on the conclusions expressed by the IPCC and were not asked if they endorsed those conclusions (McLean 2007, 2008, 2009). The IPCC’s key personnel and lead authors are appointed by governments, not by scientific organizations. Its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) are produced by a small group of scientists and are revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments before they are made public (McKitrick 2007). The full reports of the IPCC are then revised after their executive summaries were written in order to agree with the political documents.

The scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all in careers that rely on government contracts and rely on government grants to support their IPCC activities. Most travel to and hotel accommodations at exotic locations for the drafting authors is paid with government funds.

The IPCC’s agenda is often misunderstood. It is not to discover the truth about how the world’s incredibly complex and ever-changing climate operates. It is, instead, to justify control of the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. According to its Web site, the role of the IPCC “is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the latest scientific, technical and socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its observed and projected impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation” [emphasis added].

Fourth Assessment Report

The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4) of the IPCC was published in 2007; the Summary for Policymakers of Working Group I, on science, was released in February; and the full report from this Working Group was released in May--after it had been changed, once again, to “conform” to the summary. Nevertheless, the full report is a major research effort by a group of dedicated specialists in many topics related to climate change, and it forms a valuable compendium, albeit an incomplete and selective one, of the current science on climate change.

AR4 concluded that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas concentrations” (emphasis in the original). This conclusion, as Climate Change Reconsidered demonstrates, is not supported by the actual data. The IPCC arrives at this conclusion only by ignoring scientific data that were available but were inconsistent with the authors’ pre-conceived conclusions, and has already been contradicted in important parts by research published since May 2006, the IPCC’s cut-off date.

In general, the IPCC fails to consider important scientific issues, several of which would upset its major conclusion. The IPCC does not apply generally accepted methodologies to determine what fraction of current warming is natural, or how much is caused by the rise in greenhouse gases. It violates the established rules and procedures that should be used when making scientific forecasts. It relies heavily on general circulation models of the climate that are known to be unreliable. It uses surface-based temperature records known to be inaccurate, and ignores satellite data showing patterns of warming in the atmosphere that are different from what models predict would occur if greenhouse gases were the cause of warming.

The IPCC continues to undervalue the overwhelming evidence that, on decadal and century-long time scales, the Sun and associated atmospheric cloud effects are responsible for much of past climate change. It ignores the extensive biological benefits of higher carbon dioxide concentrations in the air. It accepts uncritically theories of extinction and human health effects that are widely understood by specialists in these fields to be wrong and contracted by real-world data.

Conclusion

The IPCC, like all institutions, is fallible. But unlike many other institutions, the IPCC’s shortcomings have been hidden from the public and policymakers, leading to an uncritical acceptance of its reports and conclusions. The IPCC is, first and foremost, a political organization and not a scientific one. It’s findings therefore should be understood to be political and not scientific findings.

The IPCC is also agenda-driven to exaggerate the threat of anthropogenic global warming and overlook the role of natural variations in climate and the benefits of a warmer world. It is not surprising that every report from the IPCC finds global warming to be an even greater threat than it was in the previous report. This escalation is the entirely expected result of the incentives facing the government officials and scientists who make up the IPCC.

The IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report is a flawed document. While many of the “contributors” to the report are highly respected scientists in their respective fields, the key arguments advanced in the document’s Summary for Policymakers and in the summaries of each chapter are not, in fact, consistent with the latest scientific research. The overall tone of AR4 is highly alarmist, with evidence that might point in other directions deliberately edited out or buried out of sight. It is not a reliable basis for making public policy.

References

McLean, J, 2007. An Analysis of the Review of the IPCC 4AR WG I Report. Science & Public Policy Institute http://mclean.ch/climate/docs/IPCC_review_updated_analysis.pdf [Accessed: February, 2009]

McLean, J, 2009. The IPCC Can't Count its “Expert Scientists” - Author and Reviewer Numbers are Wrong. International Climate and Environmental Change Assessment Project http://mclean.ch/climate/docs/IPCC_numbers.pdf [Accessed: February, 2009]

McLean, J, 2008. Prejudiced Authors, Prejudiced Findings. Analysis of IPCC Data on Chapter Authors and Reviewers. Science and Public Policy Institute. http://www.heartland.org/policybot/results/23573/ [Accessed May, 2009]

McKitrick, R. 2007. Independent Summary for Policymakers IPCC Fourth Assessment Report. Ed. Fraser Institute. Vancouver, BC.