Is The Climate Consensus Beginning to Change? - FrontPage Magazine

The current scientific consensus on Global Warming and Climate Change (or Global Weirding or Global Climactic Disruption, etc.) may be slowly shifting away from the catastrophism of the United Nations IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. True, the shift has been tentative. Carbon-driven global warming was an easy sell, but it will be a hard buybackâ€"too many professional reputations are on the line. Nonetheless, the evidence is piling up to suggest that the human contribution to (earlier) global warming is far less than originally assumed and that a meteorological calamity is highly unlikely. Two-thirds of the scientists attending the 33^rd International Geological Congress in Norway in August 2008 were “hostile to, even dismissive of, the UN’s IPCC report” (U.S. Senate Committee & Public Works online, December 10, 2008).

More recently, a coalition of 49 former NASA scientists and seven Apollo astronauts has accused the bureaucracy of both NASA and the Goddard Institute of Space Studies, with which it is affiliated, of diddling with the facts. They write: “We believe that [their] claims that man-made carbon dioxide is having a catastrophic impact on global climate change are not substantiated, especially when considering thousands of years of empirical data. With hundreds of well-known climate scientists and tens of thousands of other scientists publicly declaring their disbelief in the catastrophic forecasts, coming particularly from the GISS leadership, it is clear that the science is NOT settled.” (Watts Up With That, April 10, 2012).

Further, the Interim Report of the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) of August 29, 2011 showed unambiguously that the UN suppressed or ignored much of the countervailing data that challenged its official position. This is hardly surprising since the IPCC, which certified and entrenched the so-called “scientific consensus,” is essentially a political body with an agenda of its own. Mark Hendrickson of the Center for Vision and Values at Grove City College points out that the IPCC “does not speak as one voice,” since some of the “leading scientists on the panel contradict its official position.” Others have resigned in protest against its policymakers’ summaries, which are “produced by a committee of 51 government appointees, many of whom are not scientists.” It turns out that those “who compose the summaries are given considerable latitude to modify the scientific reports,” and Hendrickson quotes a U.S. State Department official who informed an IPCC co-chair that “it is essential… chapter authors be prevailed upon to modify their text in an appropriate manner” (Doc’s Talk, May 25, 2009).

Hendrickson cites warmist crusader and suspect guru Al Gore’s ally, former Under-Secretary of State Tim Wirth, who has gone on record justifying the kind of scientific fraud perpetrated by the IPCC. “Even if the theory of global warming is wrong,” he said, “we will be doing the right thing.” Further data casting serious doubt on this railroaded consensus may be found at Inhofe EPW Press Blog, Daily Tech online, and the journal Energy and Environment, whose findings are based on a survey of the Institute for Scientific Information Web of Science database covering almost 9000 scientific publications.

But the fix is still in and soldered tight by all sorts of disreputable means. In her new book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Scientist, Donna Laframboise shows that “IPCC has been recruiting 20-something graduate students” as lead authors, many of whom had not even earned their degrees and some of whom were majoring in non-climate disciplines. More than a third of the 2007 IPCC report (or Climate Bible) consisted of so-called “grey references,” that is, unaccredited studies. The IPCC has also chosen “to muddy the water by aligning [itself] with lobbyists” and relies heavily on non-peer reviewed material, including newspaper items, press releases, magazine articles, unpublished graduate theses and Green activist sources.

And then there is the taradiddle, emanating from a University of Illinois 2009 survey, that 97.4% of scientists agree that mankind is responsible for global warming. This is easily debunked when one considers its selection methodology. As Rich Trzupek explains (FrontPage Magazine, August 30, 2011), citing Lawrence Solomon’s crushing putdown (FullComment, December 30,  2010), the Illinois researchers decided that of the 10,257 respondents, the 10,180 who demurred from the so-called consensus “weren’t qualified to comment on the issue because they were merely solar scientists, space scientists, cosmologists, physicists, meteorologists, astronomers and the like. Of the remaining 77 scientists whose votes were counted, 75 agreed with the proposition that mankind was causing catastrophic changes in the climate. And, since 75 is 97.4% of 77, ‘overwhelming consensus’ was demonstrated once again.” The real percentage of concurring scientists in the survey is less than .008%. That these 75 were, as Solomon writes, “scientists of unknown qualifications” adds yet another layer to the boondoggle.