NIPCC on IPCC History
The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was created by a group of scientists concerned about flaws in the organization and procedures of another organization, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), so it is necessary and appropriate that those flaws be presented here.
Though often described by scientists and media as an independent scientific organization, the IPCC is in fact an arm of the United Nations. Dr. Steven J. Allen reminded us of the true nature of the United Nations in a recent article for the Capital Research Center:
“The United Nations [is] a famously corrupt body in which most votes are controlled by kleptocracies and outright dictatorships. Most of the member-states, as they’re called, are rated as either “not free” or “partly free” by Freedom House, and both Communist China and Putinist Russia have veto power. And any settlement of the Global Warming issue by the UN would entail massive transfers of wealth from the citizens of wealthy countries to the politicians and bureaucrats of the poorer countries. Other than that, one supposes, the IPCC is entirely trustworthy on the issue. (Well, aside from the fact that the IPCC’s climate models predicting Global Warming have already failed.)”*
The IPCC was created in 1988 largely due to the efforts of Maurice Strong, a billionaire and self-confessed socialist, as part of a larger campaign to justify giving the United Nations the authority to tax businesses in developed countries and redistribute trillions of dollars a year to developing nations. Strong had previously succeeded in bringing about the creation of the UN Environment Programme in 1972 and served as its first executive director. The IPCC is a joint project of that entity and the World Meteorological Organization.
(Strong was subsequently implicated in corruption surrounding the UN’s Oil-for-Food-Program and has resigned from his UN positions. According to John Izzard writing for the Australian publication Quadrant Online, <1> “Following his exposure for bribery and corruption in the UN’s Oil-for-Food scandal Maurice Strong was stripped of many of his 53 international awards and honours he had collected during his lifetime working in dual role of arch conservationist and ruthless businessman.”<1>)
Strong and his allies at the UN gave the IPCC a very narrow brief by defining climate change in the Framework Convention on Climate Change, Article 1.2, as “a change of climate which is attributed directly or indirectly to human activity that alters the composition of the global atmosphere and which is in addition to natural climate variability observed over comparable time periods.” IPCC’s mandate is not to study climate change “in the round,” or to look at natural as well as man-made influences on climate. It is to specifically find and report a human impact on climate, and thereby make a scientific case for the adoption of national and international policies that would supposedly reduce that impact.
The IPCC is also designed to put political leaders and bureaucrats rather than scientists in control of the research project. It is a membership organization composed of governments, not scientists. The governments that created the IPCC fund it, staff it, select the scientists who get to participate, and revise and rewrite the reports after the scientists have concluded their work. Obviously, this is not how a real scientific organization operates.
The IPCC’s first report, released in 1990, admitted that observed climate change was probably due to natural rather than human causes. However, every report since then has claimed with rising certainty that there is a “discernable human impact” on the climate and that steps must be taken to avoid a global climate crisis. There is ample evidence that this level of alarmism and asserted confidence is fueled by political considerations rather than actual science.
For example, in 1996, Dr. Frederick Seitz, one of the world’s most prominent and respected physicists, wrote in the Wall Street Journal: <2>“In my more than 60 years as a member of the American scientific community, including service as president of both the National Academy of Sciences and the American Physical Society, I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report.”
Numerous authors (see here, here, and here)<3> have observed a growing disconnect between the “Summaries for Policymakers,” which are designed to be read and used by political leaders and the media, and the reports themselves. The former systematically remove the expressions of scientific uncertainty and alternative explanations of climate phenomena that were abundantly present in the first three reports, with the obvious intention of misrepresenting the science and fueling unnecessary alarm. By the fourth and fifth assessment reports, even the underlying reports were being purged of ideas and evidence that contradicted the IPCC’s political agenda.
In 2009, a hacker or whistle blower made available on the Internet a collection of email exchanges among leading authors and contributors to the IPCC reports. The ensuing scandal, called Climategate, <4> exposed efforts by IPCC authors to withhold data from independent scholars and attempt to prevent peer-reviewed journals from publishing research that undermined or questioned their own work. In 2011 <5> the hacker or whistle blower released a second batch of emails that made even more clear that the IPCC process was broken.
This sordid history has led to calls for the IPCC to be dismantled <6> and for its Fifth Assessment to be its last. <7> This would be good news, though long over-due. The Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) was created to take the IPCC’s place by giving honest scientists an alternative outlet for their work and citizens of the world a genuinely independent source of research on this issue.
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