[extropy-chat] The great global warming swindle

[Michael Lawrence]

RE the IPCC:

The claim that the IPCC presents objective scientific opinion is quite disingenuous.

The IPCC is the government representatives who meet in plenary, as they did a few weeks ago in Paris. The Secretariat is the relatively small team of UN staff who support the panel and its work programme. It is hosted in Geneva by WMO and staff are funded by WMO and UNEP - WMO and UNEP jointly appoint the IPCC Secretary.
 
The IPCC Panel selects the Bureau to manage the work of the Panel from its 'members' but the Bureau are not UN staff. They retain their own government job, are paid by their respective governments, work by correspondence and come together in meetings.
 
The Bureau nominates the lead authors and work program of the working groups and these are put to the Panel for confirmation. For the first three assessments the UK had volunteered to host and largely fund the Secretariat for Working Group 1 and John Houghton was Co-Chair of the Working Group. Susan Solomon was co-chair of the WG1 of the fourth Assessment and the WG1 Secretariat was in NCAR. To be co-chair of a working group it is necessary to have your government funding to maintain the secretariat.
 
The two most powerful positions in the IPCC are the Chairman of the IPCC itself but more powerful is the co-chair of WG1 (Houghton and now Solomon). The latter can have great influence on setting the agenda, nominating contributors and finally editing the assessment. The IPCC Chairman (Bolin, Watson and now ?) get a lot of publicity because they are the front of the organisation, travel and speak publicly, and present the results of the working groups Summary for Policymakers agreed at plenary.
 
The IPCC Secretary located in Geneva really only has small influence with the agenda at the meetings of the Panel. It manages the IPCC fund which is donations by members to pay for travel and per diem of people going to the various non-panel meetings and publications. The IPCC is open to all UN Members but participation in the panel is at the expense of each country. There is however a fund administered by the Secretariat to pay the travel and per diem of developing country members.   

To put it another way:

The IPCC is not a body of scientists but of government officials who select scientific advisor's.

The IPCC is not selected by the scientific community but is a body selected and maintained primarily by environmental bureaucracies, including helpers from UN. These UN helpers (UNEP and WMO) are in the end also funded by governments, and in the case of UNEP have to fight for funding annually.

It is also politically important that the Bureau (selected not elected by the Panel, I.e. by governments), nominates lead authors who are indeed scientists, often in charge of large research programmes or 'on the make' to becoming science managers / government advisors at home. Working for the IPCC is a good career move.

Michael ... who adds ...

Global temperatures have not again reached the high they did in the El Nino year of 1998. Indeed, the global temperature trend has seen global cooling for the last nine years.

Also, several recent studies (e.g. Krotov, 2001; Klyashtorin & Lyubushin, 2003; Loehle, 2004; and Abdusamatov, 2006) suggest that we are entering a cooling phase.

Question - how many more years of the world not warming do we need in order for the AGW theory to get a critical review? 



On 4/18/07, Rafal Smigrodzki wrote:
>
> Nah, I know science when I read it, and this isn't science.
>


Well, it is putting up a brave front of being science.

The IPCC bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published
scientific/technical literature. And has been working on this since
1988.


<http://www.ipcc.ch/index.html>

Mandate and Membership of the IPCC

Recognizing the problem of potential global climate change, the World
Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment
Programme (UNEP) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC) in 1988. It is open to all members of the UN and WMO.

The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open
and transparent basis the scientific, technical and socio-economic
information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of
human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for
adaptation and mitigation. The IPCC does not carry out research nor
does it monitor climate related data or other relevant parameters. It
bases its assessment mainly on peer reviewed and published
scientific/technical literature. Its role, organisation, participation
and general procedures are laid down in the "Principles Governing IPCC
Work".


BillK
_______________________________________________
extropy-chat mailing list
extropy-chat at lists.extropy.org
http://lists.extropy.org/mailman/listinfo.cgi/extropy-chat



-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: winmail.dat
Type: application/ms-tnef
Size: 5716 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://lists.extropy.org/pipermail/extropy-chat/attachments/20070419/d7f8b19c/attachment.bin>