The IPCC and the Peace Prize - Climate Change: The Facts - page 154

15 The IPCC and the Peace Prize
Donna Laframboise
In late 2012, the art director of a reputable magazine contacted photographer Alex
Waterhouse-Hayward. How would he like to meet a Nobel laureate? 1 Three months later,
the photographer posted online a black-and-white portrait, announcing to the world that this
was 'Nobel Laureate Mark Jaccard.'
But Jaccard has never won a Nobel Prize. Visit NobelPrize.org, type his name into the
search box, and you'll find no mention of him. Why did the smart people at Canada's The
Walrus magazine think otherwise? Why did the cover of this award-winning publication
wrongly describe him as a 'Nobel economist?'
The short answer is that Jaccard is one of an estimated 9,000 people who've helped the
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) write its many reports over a span of
25 years. In late 2007, following news that this UN body had been awarded the Peace Prize
jointly withAlGore,theIPCC'schairman profoundlyover-stepped hisauthority.Writingto
IPCC-affiliatedacademics en masse ,RajendraPachaurimistakenlyproclaimed'Thismakes
each of you Nobel Laureates.'
Everyone should have understood that this was mere rhetorical flourish. When an
individual wins a Nobel, they are contacted directly by Nobel officials and later receive
a significant sum of money. As Australian researcher John McLean would later tell New
Zealand meteorologist Kevin Trenberth, 'Pachauri can't hand-out laureates like cups of
coffee, and you, Kevin, surprise me by seeming to believe that he can.'
The IPCC isn't the first organisation to be honoured in this manner. In 1977, the Peace
Prize went to Amnesty International. In 1999, it was Doctors Without Borders. In between,
in 1988, the efforts of UN peacekeeping forces were recognised.
IfsomeonewhoonceservedinapeacekeepingcapacitydescribedthemselvesasaNobel
laureate,we'dhavenotroubleidentifyingthemasaninsecureegorunamok.Buttheclimate
world isn't a normal one. Instead, it resembles the Wild West. Poorly socialised adolescents
swagger and bluster, grownups are in short supply, and the sheriffs turn out to be as lawless
as everyone else.
The Walrus misled its readers because a significant part ofthe climate community chose
to embrace a Nobel fiction. The unadorned truth was door number one. Cringe-worthy
exaggeration was door number two. Many IPCC personnel—the very people entrusted to
give us the straight goods about climate change—made the wrong call.
Jaccard was among 23 individuals who worked on one chapter (out of 47) of the IPCC's
1995 report. Along with 24 others, he helped write a second chapter. The role he played
was so minor that, when he coauthored a 2007 topic on climate change with a Canadian