Al Gore and IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri (now under fire) display Nobels/ The American Interest online

EDITOR’S CHOICE: Due to flawed science and even worse politics, the global warming movement as we have known it may be dying. The demise of the crusade has some important political and cultural consequences. In the U.S. it is scored Sarah Palin 1, Al Gore 0. The global warming meltdown confirms all of the populist suspicions about an arrogantly clueless establishment invoking faked science to impose off-the-wall social mandates on the long-suffering American people -- fully backed by a mainstream media that is totally in the tank.

Christopher Brooker writes in the Daly Telegraph January 30 2010:

It is now six weeks since I launched an investigation, with my colleague Richard North, into the affairs of Dr Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), the hugely influential body which for 20 years has been the central driver of worldwide alarm about global warming. Since then the story has grown almost daily, leading to worldwide calls for Dr Pachauri's resignation. But increasingly this has also widened out to question the authority of the IPCC itself. Contrary to the tendentious claim that its reports represent a "consensus of the world's top 2,500 climate scientists" (most of its contributors are not climate experts at all), it has now emerged, for instance, that one of the more widely quoted scare stories from its 2007 report was drawn from the work of a British "green activist" who occasionally writes as a freelance for The Guardian and The Independent.

Last week I reported on "Glaciergate", the scandal which has forced the IPCC's top officials, led by Dr Pachauri, to disown a claim originating from an Indian glaciologist, Dr Syed Husnain, that the Himalayan glaciers could vanish by 2035. What has made this reckless claim in the IPCC's 2007 report even more embarrassing was the fact that Dr Husnain, as we revealed, was then employed by Dr Pachauri's own Delhi-based Energy and Resources Institute (Teri). His baseless scaremongering about the Himalayas helped to win Teri a share in two lucrative research contracts, one funded by the EU.

The source the IPCC cited as its "scientific" authority for this claim, however (as Dr North first reported on his EU Referendum blog), was a propagandist pamphlet published in 2005 by the WWF, the environmentalist pressure group, citing a magazine interview with Dr Husnain six years earlier.

Dr North next uncovered "Amazongate". The IPCC made a prominent claim in its 2007 report, again citing the WWF as its authority, that climate change could endanger "up to 40 per cent" of the Amazon rainforest – as iconic to warmists as those Himalayan glaciers and polar bears. This WWF report, it turned out, was co-authored by Andy Rowell, an anti-smoking and food safety campaigner who has worked for WWF and Greenpeace, and contributed pieces to Britain's two most committed environmentalist newspapers. Rowell and his co-author claimed their findings were based on an article in Nature. But the focus of that piece, it emerges, was not global warming at all but the effects of logging.

A Canadian analyst has identified more than 20 passages in the IPCC's report which cite similarly non-peer-reviewed WWF or Greenpeace reports as their authority, and other researchers have been uncovering a host of similarly dubious claims and attributions all through the report. These range from groundless allegations about the increased frequency of "extreme weather events" such as hurricanes, droughts and heatwaves, to a headline claim that global warming would put billions of people at the mercy of water shortages – when the study cited as its authority indicated exactly the opposite, that rising temperatures could increase the supply of water.

Little of this has come as a surprise to those who have studied the workings of the IPCC over the years. As I show in my book The Real Global Warming Disaster, there is no greater misconception about the IPCC than that it was intended to be an impartial body, weighing scientific evidence for and against global warming. It was set up in 1988 by a small group of scientists all firmly committed to the theory of "human-induced climate change", and its chief purpose ever since has been to promote that belief.

The blatant bias of each of its four reports has been pointed out by scientists – notably the rewriting of key passages in its 1995 report after the contributing scientists had approved the final text. This provoked a magisterial blast from Professor Frederick Seitz, a former president of the US National Academy of Sciences, who wrote that in all his 60 years as a scientist he had never seen "a more disturbing corruption" of the scientific process, and that if the IPCC was "incapable of following its most basic procedures", it was best it should be "abandoned".

The centrepiece of the IPCC's 2001 report was Michael Mann's notorious "hockey stick", the graph purporting to show temperatures in the late 20th century soaring at an unprecedented rate – later exposed as a statistical artefact. Another new book, The Hockey Stick Illusion by A W Montford, brilliantly tells the bizarre tale of how Mann's colleagues, calling themselves "the Hockey Team" and now at the heart of the IPCC, managed to resurrect the discredited graph for inclusion in its 2007 report. Montford's book, if inevitably technical, expertly recounts a remarkable scientific detective story. And of course, it was incriminating leaked emails between members of the Hockey Team that were at the centre of the recent "Climategate" scandal at the University of East Anglia.

Most disturbing of all are the glimpses the story gives of the inner workings of the IPCC, an institution now so discredited and scientifically corrupted that only those determined to shut their eyes could possibly defend it. This is now compounded by the recent revelations by Dr North and myself in these pages of how its chairman, Dr Pachauri, has built a worldwide network of business links which provide his Delhi institute with a sizeable income.

It is noticeable how many of those now calling for Dr Pachauri's resignation, led by Professor Andrew Weaver, a senior IPCC insider, are passionate global warming believers. Fearing that Pachauri damages their cause, they want him thrown overboard in the hope of saving the IPCC itself. But it is not just Pachauri who has been holed below the waterline. So has the entire IPCC process. And beyond that – and despite the pleading of Barack Obama, Gordon Brown and the BBC that none of this detracts from the evidence for man-made global warming – so has the warmist cause itself. Bereft of scientific or moral authority, the most expensive show the world has ever seen may soon be nearing its end.

The global warming movement had been in steady decline during the last year as the once robust hopes for a strong and legally binding treaty to be agreed upon at the Copenhagen Summit faded away. By the time that summit opened, campaigners were reduced to hoping for a politically binding agreement that would set the stage for the rapid adoption of the legally binding treaty. After the failure of the summit to agree to even that much, the movement went into a rapid decline.

BOGUS CLAIMS: In a lengthy analysis, Walter Russell Mead notes in The American Interest that the movement died from two causes: bad science and bad politics. After years in which global warming activists had lectured everyone about the overwhelming nature of the scientific evidence, it turned out that the most prestigious agencies in the global warming movement were breaking laws, hiding data, and making inflated, bogus claims resting on, in some cases, no scientific basis at all.

The latest story in the London Times (see below) is yet another shocker; the IPCC’s claims that the rainforests were going to disappear as a result of global warming are as bogus and fraudulent as its claims that the Himalayan glaciers would melt by 2035. It seems as, if a scare story could grab a headline, the IPCC simply didn’t care about whether it was reality-based.

CLIMATEGATE: With this in mind, “climategate” -- the scandal over hacked emails by prominent climate scientists -- looks sinister rather than just unsavory. The British government has concluded that University of East Anglia, home of the research institute that provides the global warming with much of its key data, had violated Britain’s Freedom of Information Act when scientists refused to hand over data so that critics could check their calculations and methods.

Breaking the law to hide key pieces of data isn’t just science as usual,’ as the global warming movement’s embattled defenders gamely tried to argue. A cover-up like that suggests that you indeed have something to conceal. The urge to make the data better than it was didn’t just come out of nowhere.

FUNDING: The global warmists were trapped into the necessity of hyping the threat by their realization that the actual evidence they had -- which still may be serious, troubling and in need of intensive additional research and investigation, as well as some prudential steps that would reduce CO2 emissions by enhancing fuel use efficiency and promoting alternative energy sources -- was not sufficient to get the world’s governments to do what they thought needed to be done. Nor would it assure the continued flow of funding for what was rapidly becoming a very profitable academic industry. Hyping the threat wasn’t an accident: it looks like it was a conscious political strategy.

Now it has failed. Mead goes on: Not everything that has come out of the IPCC and the East Anglia Climate Unit is false, but enough of their product is sufficiently tainted that these institutions can best serve the cause of fighting climate change by stepping out of the picture. New leadership might help, but everything these two agencies have done will now have to be re-checked by independent and objective sources.

BAD POLITICS: The global warming campaigners got into this mess because they had a deeply flawed political strategy. They were never able to develop a pragmatic approach that could reach its goals in the context of the existing international system. The global warming movement proposed a complex set of international agreements involving vast transfers of funds, intrusive regulations in national economies, and substantial changes to the domestic political economies of most countries on the planet.

As it happened, the movement never got to the first step -- it never got the world’s countries to agree to the necessary set of treaties, transfers and policies that would constitute, at least on paper, a program for achieving its key goals. Even if that first step had been reached, the second and third would almost surely not have been.

The U.S. Congress is unlikely to pass the kind of legislation these agreements would require before the midterm elections, much less ratify a treaty. It takes 67 senate votes to ratify a treaty and only 60 to overcome a filibuster. After the midterms, with the Democrats expected to lose seats in both houses, the chance of passage would be even more remote -- especially as polls show that global warming ranks at or near the bottom of most voters’ priorities.

LOW PRIORITY:  American public opinion supports ‘doing something’ about global warming, but not very much; support for specific measures and sacrifices will erode rapidly as commentators from Fox News and other conservative outlets endlessly hammer away. Without a commitment from the U.S. to pay its share of the $100 billion per year that poor countries want for compliance, and without U.S. participation in other aspects of the proposed global approach, the intricate global deals fall apart.

Since the U.S. was never very likely to accept these agreements and ratify these treaties, and is even less prepared to do so in a recession, and with the Democrats in retreat, even “success” in Copenhagen would not have brought the global warming movement the kind of victory it sought -- although it would have created a very sticky and painful political problem for the United States.

UNENFORCEABLE: But even if somehow, miraculously, the U.S. and all the other countries involved not only accepted the agreements but ratified them and wrote domestic legislation to incorporate them into law, it is extremely unlikely that all this activity would achieve the desired result. Countries would cheat, either because they chose to do so or because their domestic systems are so weak, so corrupt or so both -- that they simply wouldn’t be able to comply.

Governments in countries like China and India aren’t going to stop pushing for all the economic growth they can get by any means that will work -- and even if central governments decided to move on global warming, state and local authorities have agendas of their own. The examples of blatant cheating would inevitably affect compliance in other countries; it would also very likely erode what would in any case be an extremely fragile consensus in rich countries to keep forking over hundreds of billions of dollars to poor countries -- many of whom would not be in anything like full compliance with their commitments.

For better or worse, the global political system isn’t capable of producing the kind of result the global warming activists want. It’s like asking a jellyfish to climb a flight of stairs; you can poke and prod all you want, you can cajole and you can threaten. But you are asking for something that you just can’t get -- and in the end you won’t get.

GRIEVING: Mead concludes: The grieving friends and relatives aren’t ready to pull the plug; in a typical, whistling-past-the-graveyard comment, the BBC first acknowledges that even if the current promises are kept, temperatures will rise above the target level of two degrees Celsius -- but let’s not despair! A BBC reporter says:  “The accord lacks teeth and does not include any clear targets on cutting emissions. But if most countries at least signal what they intend to do to cut their emissions, it will mark the first time that the UN has a comprehensive written collection of promised actions.”

Great; a real first -- and this after the UN has been caught flat out lying about the data. It is just another example of the futility of international institutions accomplishing most anything in a sensible manner – but Gore and Obama get Noble prizes for nothing. What is wrong with Norway?

***

THE LONDON TIMES 1/31/’10

Jonathan Leake

A STARTLING report by the UN climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) said in its 2007 benchmark report that even a slight change in rainfall could see swathes of the rainforest rapidly replaced by savanna grassland.

PRESSURE: The source for its claim was a report from WWF, an environmental pressure group, which was authored by two green activists. They had based their “research” on a study published in Nature, the science journal, which did not assess rainfall but in fact looked at the impact on the forest of human activity such as logging and burning. This weekend WWF said it was launching an internal inquiry into the study.

This is the third time in as many weeks that serious doubts have been raised over the IPCC’s conclusions on climate change. Two weeks ago, after reports in The Sunday Times, it was forced to retract a warning that climate change was likely to melt the Himalayan glaciers by 2035. That warning was also based on claims in a WWF report.

The IPCC has been put on the defensive as well over its claims that climate change may be increasing the severity and frequency of natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods. This weekend Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, was fighting to keep his job after a barrage of criticism. Scientists fear the controversies will be used by climate change skeptics to sway public opinion to ignore global warming -- even though the fundamental science, that greenhouse gases can heat the world, remains strong.

CONTROVERSY: The latest controversy originates in a report called A Global Review of Forest Fires, which WWF published in 2000. It was commissioned from Andrew Rowell, a freelance journalist and green campaigner who has worked for Greenpeace, Friends of the Earth and anti-smoking organizations. The second author was Peter Moore, a campaigner and policy analyst with WWF.

In their report they suggested that “up to 40% of Brazilian rainforest was extremely sensitive to small reductions in the amount of rainfall” but made clear that this was because drier forests were more likely to catch fire. The IPCC report picked up this reference but expanded it to cover the whole Amazon. It also suggested that a slight reduction in rainfall would kill many trees directly, not just by contributing to more fires.

It said: “Up to 40% of the Amazonian forests could react drastically to even a slight reduction in precipitation; this means that the tropical vegetation, hydrology and climate system in South America could change very rapidly to another steady state. It is more probable that forests will be replaced by ecosystems that have more resistance to multiple stresses caused by temperature increase, droughts and fires, such as tropical savannas.”

Simon Lewis, a Royal Society research fellow at Leeds University who specializes in tropical forest ecology, described the section of Rowell and Moore’s report predicting the potential destruction of large swathes of rainforest as “a mess.”

AMAZON: “The Nature paper is about the interactions of logging damage, fire and periodic droughts, all extremely important in understanding the vulnerability of Amazon forest to drought, but is not related to the vulnerability of these forests to reductions in rainfall,” he said. “In my opinion the Rowell and Moore report should not have been cited; it contains no primary research data.” WWF said it prided itself on the accuracy of its reports and was investigating the latest concerns. “We have a team of people looking at this internationally,” said Keith Allott, its climate change campaigner.

Scientists such as Lewis are demanding that the IPCC ban the use of reports from pressure groups. They fear that environmental campaign groups are bound to cherry-pick the scientific literature that confirms their beliefs and ignore the rest. It was exactly this process that lay behind the bogus claim that the Himalayan glaciers were likely to melt by 2035 -- a suggestion that got into another WWF report and was then used by the IPCC.

George Kaser, a glaciologist who was a lead author on the last IPCC report, said: “Groups like WWF are not scientists and they are not professionally trained to manage data. They may have good intentions but it opens the way to mistakes.”

Research by Richard North