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Ball: UN’s IPCC preying on people’s ignorance

by Dr. Tim Ball 

In previous parts of this series (Parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8), I identified the deliberate process by which climate science was hijacked to establish a political agenda of undermining developed industrialized nations. Maurice Strong and then others used UN agencies to control the science and the politics by proving the byproduct of those nation’s industries, specifically CO2, was causing catastrophic global warming and climate change. The urgent need throughout was not to understand climate but to find a clear human signal in the scientific data.

While the political and propaganda campaigns were successful,  the science continued to prove defiant. But that wasn’t a concern for the cabal functioning through the IPCC because they knew the public didn’t understand the science. Now the exploitation of lack of knowledge could proceed. A few brave scientific souls resisted the political pressure. Some were involved with the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) but resigned or withdrew.

The pattern of manipulation to find a human signal or “smoking gun” was gradually raising scientific eyebrows. A few politicians began asking questions, but the majority put on the cloak of green. It was considered political suicide to even ask questions.

Large segments of our supposedly open society were bullied into silence by a very small segment.  The tail has always wagged the dog, but now a flea on a hair on the tail was wagging the dog.

Most politicians didn’t understand the science of climate but were clearly hesitant to act as the battle over the Kyoto Accord showed. It gave them a vehicle when the policies threatened jobs and economies while doing nothing to reduce atmospheric levels of the demon CO2. Unilateral demands on developed nations to reduce CO2 while large developing nations were not constrained and their economies burgeoned was a bigger problem.

However, they were still hedging their bets. A sign of their confusion was the promotion of carbon credits – a costly and useless scheme. Apparently it suited the double think associated with “sin taxes” like tobacco, alcohol and gambling. Carbons were the new sin of the Puritanism that is environmentalism.

Meanwhile within IPCC criticism of the closed process following release of the Third Assessment Report (TAR) created a challenge. Control of the process and results has been the hallmark of all Reports and had to be maintained. In response, IPCC set up a review process for the Fourth Assessment Report (FAR) released in 2007, but as usual they chose and limited who could comment.  Here is what John McLean said,

“The IPCC would have us believe that its reports are diligently reviewed by many hundreds of scientists and that these reviewers endorse the contents of the report. An analysis of the reviewers’ comments for the scientific assessment report by Working Group I show a very different and very worrying story.”—http://scienceandpublicpolicy.org

I have been unable to determine who chose the reviewers or why they were chosen. We know they were sworn to secrecy during the process and it continued after. McLean again:

The comments for Working Group I are the only set of reviewers’ comments to be made available to the public, and only then thanks to use of US Freedom of Information laws rather than a willingness on the part of the IPCC to allow people to examine the material. Perhaps the IPCC is simply worried that exposing the reviewers’ comments and the responses to those comments to close scrutiny will reveal the delusions of thoroughness and widespread consensus.

They were well skilled in delay, providing answers that were meaningless, and using a willing media to claim those who challenged were the real problem. The most important issue in IPCC FAR (Fourth Assessment Report) was the continued attempt to identify a ‘human signal’ or smoking gun to prove humans are causing global warming or climate change.

When the FAR Summary for Policymakers (SPM) was released in April 2007, Canadian computer scientist Andrew Weaver raised the propaganda level when he said,

“This isn’t a smoking gun; climate is a battalion of intergalactic smoking missiles.”

It was typical hyperbole, but fell flat when the media noticed temperature and sea level rise predictions were significantly reduced. It was significant coming from Weaver because he was a lead author for the 2nd (SAR), 3rd (TAR) and 4th (FAR) scientific assessments and a computer modeler.

The models are the vehicles used to bamboozle the public and create the illusion they know what is going on. In a bizarre twist political climate science was upstaged by political realities in FAR. The carefully planned process of controlling the science through the SPM was in this case used to mute IPCC scientists more committed to the political objective than good science. Comments on one blog explained what happened.

During a lengthy and contentious session, with interventions by government representatives from the United States, China, Saudi Arabia, and other countries, numerous edits were made to the scientists’ draft prior to final joint approval by scientists and diplomats. Numerous changes appear clearly to have the effect of “toning down” the scientists’ own draft language on likely damaging impacts of climate change.

They could add India to the list according to a BBC report. What percentage of the world’s population do just these four countries represent?—http://www.climatesciencewatch.org

Why were those opposed to the draft able to have it toned down? Mostly because they knew the science, they could not be fooled like the media and the public.

Also, in the case of China they were not going to be bullied. Besides, too much public exposure of the process and weakness of the science would further erode the aims. A public fight was too dangerous, although some of the scientists showed petulance by staging a brief walkout and then threatening not to participate in the IPCC any further. (I am not aware of any who kept that commitment.)

Most also knew that the most recent ‘human signal’ is not actual evidence. It comes from carefully manipulated computer models designed to isolate a portion of temperature increase as clearly human.

Perhaps the greatest scientific deception of the IPCC is the abuse and misuse of computer climate models. They allow them to make their reports and deliberations appear credible. They allow them to bamboozle the public because computer models are a complete mystery to most people. Pierre Gallois explains,

If you put tomfoolery into a computer, nothing comes out of it but tomfoolery. But this tomfoolery, having passed through a very expensive machine, is somehow ennobled and no one dares criticize it.

This is an extension of the well-known Garbage In Garbage Out (GIGO), which some now translate as Garbage In Gospel Out.

Belief in the output of the models has reached religious proportions, but that is what the IPCC wanted. Now people are realizing the models don’t work, that their predictions are consistently wrong we hear a different story from IPCC.

Kevin Trenberth, head of the US National Centre for Atmospheric Research (NCAR) and participant in the IPCC process wrote in the Climate Feedback blog of Nature magazine that GCMs (General Circulation Models) cannot predict future climate and the IPCC is not about climate prediction.

This is not what most people understand, especially the policy makers. Armstrong and Green audited the IPCC Report and showed the claim was false. In one chapter they found that,

“in apparent contradiction to claims by some climate experts that the IPCC provides ‘projections’ and not ‘forecasts’, the word ‘forecast’ and its derivatives occurred 37 times, and ‘predict’ and its derivatives occur 90 times”

Read Principles of Forecasting here.

Armstrong and Green are talking about the scientific principles of forecasting and they find those wanting in the IPCC report;

“because the forecasting processes … overlook scientific evidence on forecasting, the IPCC forecasts of climate change are not scientific”.

To summarize, the IPCC claim they are not making predictions when the public think they are and their own words betray them. These predictions fail to meet scientific standards for forecasting, but the models fail to meet standards for modeling. Consider this statement on the Yahoo group site Climatesceptics by a financial modeler.

Any model with dozens of assumptions, the interactions between which are not even understood is useless, or worse dangerous, if future actions are taken based upon it. The GCM’s can’t even get the sign right in many cases, they are worthless. The fact that the IPCC allows them to look at the data each year, and then go back and make unscientific adjustments to force the output to conform to observational data tells any objective observer everything they need to know about the provenance of GCM’s.

Models are useful research tools in the laboratory where a scientific responsibility is required. However, when their output is the justification for massive socio-economic change a social and moral responsibility is required. The IPCC models don’t meet required scientific or socio-economic responsibilities. They do serve to drive the political agenda.

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