The end of the IPCC: One mistake too many!

S. Fred Singer

A slightly modified version of this article was published in the Hindustan Times, 5 February 2010, with the title “The end is not near”
http://www.hindustantimes.com/The-end-is-not-near/H1-Article1-505317.aspx

IPCC has acknowledged they made a mistake in their projection of 2035 as the date when all Himalayan glaciers were said to melt. But the Himalayan blinder is not a one-off mistake; it is only the latest of the litany of errors that have dogged IPCC over the past ten years. …

In their 2001 report, IPCC had claimed that the 20^th century was “unusual” and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. … Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis.

And since then, the litany of errors continues to grow.

• In mid-August 2009, after repeated requests for such data under the Freedom of Information Act, the Climate Research Unit at the University of East Anglia (CRU), one of the three international centers that publish global temperatures, announced that it discarded the raw data used to calculate global surface temperatures. …

….

• In November, emails from the CRU were leaked to the public, creating what became known as “Climategate.” These emails reveal efforts to suppress independent studies that are contrary to IPCC conclusions of human-caused global warming. …
• In mid-December, the Russian Institute of Economic Analysis (IEA) reported that the Hadley Center for Climate Change of the British Meteorological Office (Met Office) had probably tampered with Russian climate data and that the Russian meteorological station data do not support human-caused global warming. …
• In January, Joe D’Aleo and E. Michael Smith reported that the US-National Climatic Data Center (NOAA-NCDC) and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Goddard Institute of Space Studies (NASA-GISS) dropped many meteorological stations from their data bases in recent years. …
• On January 23, 2010, the Sunday Times (London) reported that the AR4 wrongly linked natural disasters to global warming. …
• In January, 2010, Dr. Murari Lal, the coordinating lead author of the AR4’s chapter on Asia, stated that the IPCC deliberately exaggerated the possible melt of the Himalayan glaciers. …
• This past week, additional reports reveal that IPCC’s claims that warming will cause extensive adverse effects in the Amazon rainforests and on coral reefs came not from science studies but from publications by environmental groups, such as the World Wildlife Fund and Greenpeace. More scandalous even, the IPCC based their lurid predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources – not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards.

These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme ideological bias….

…

… Hundreds of billions have already been wasted -- most of this in transfers of tax revenues to a favored few.

These sums pale, however, in comparison to the trillions that would have been spent in future if some of the mitigation schemes had come to fruition. Fortunately for the world economy, these schemes all collapsed at the Copenhagen conference. …Copenhagen was mostly about transfer of money from rich to poor countries – or more precisely, from the poor in rich countries to the rich in poor ones.

“Climategate” now makes it unlikely that such mitigation and transfer schemes will ever be carried out.

Dr S. Fred Singer, an atmospheric physicist, professor emeritus at the University of Virginia, and former director of the US Weather Satellite Service, is the organizer of NIPCC (Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change) and coauthor of its reports “Nature, not human activity, rules the climate” [2008] and “Climate Change Reconsidered” [2009].