Geoscience Reference
In-Depth Information
First, as a branch of the United Nations, the IPCC is itself an intensely political and not
a scientific body. As its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri observed in an interview with the
Guardian
newspaper:
Weareanintergovernmentalbodyandwedowhatthegovernmentsoftheworldwantustodo.Ifthegovernmentsdecide
we should do things differently and come up with a vastly different set of products we would be at their beck and call.
10
To boot, the IPCC charter requires that the organisation investigates not climate change in
the round, but solely global warming caused by human greenhouse emissions, a blinkered
approach that consistently damages all IPCC pronouncements.
Second, from local green activist groups up to behemoth NGOs like Greenpeace and
WWF, over the last twenty years the environmental movement has espoused saving the
planet from global warming as its
leitmotif
. This has had two devastating results. One is
thatradicalenvironmentalistshaveworkedrelentlesslytosowmisinformationaboutglobal
warming in both the public domain and the education system. And the other is that, faced
with this widespread propagandisation of public opinion and young persons—and also by
strong lobbying from powerful self-interested groups like government research scientists,
alternative energy providers and financial marketeers—politicians have had no choice but
to fall into line. Whatever their primary political philosophy, all active politicians are daily
mindful of the need to assuage the green intimidation and bullying to which they and
their country's industries and citizens are incessantly subjected—and to which no Western
country has yet devised a feasible counter.
Third,andperhapsmostinfluentialofall,withveryfewexceptionsmajormediaoutlets
have provided unceasing support for measures to 'stop global warming'. This behaviour
appearstobedrivenbyacombinationoftheleft-wing('liberal'intheUSsense)andgreen
personal beliefs of most reporters, and the commercial nose of experienced editors who
understand that alarmist environmental reporting sells both product and advertising space.
As one experienced editor has written:
The publication of 'bad news' is not a journalistic vice. It's a clear instruction from the market. It's what consumers, on
average, demand.… As a newspaper editor I knew, as most editors know, that if you print a lot of good news, people stop
buyingyourpaper.Conversely,ifyoupublishthecorrectmixofdoom,gloomanddisaster,yourcirculationswells.Ihave
done the experiment.
11
Where to from here—the IPCC and NIPCC Reports
And thus we arrive at the present impasse, in which the IPCC and its attached covey
of special interest groups continue to argue vehemently in favour of taking costly action
to limit industrial CO
2
emissions at the same time that many thousands of qualified
independent scientists assert that government policy should be concerned with adaptation
