I read this post By Dr. Roy Spencer last night with my jaw in my lap. He may have written this kind of thing elsewhere, but I’ve certainly never read it from a climate scientist. There are so many points made which are absolutely true that I had to ask to repost it here.
There is a beast in the corner of climate science. A big ugly beast, called the IPCC. It was designed in my opinion to create and express extreme science for the purpose of a specific type of policy. It was cleverly built on a foundation incenting and even requiring the exaggeration of science.
There are 3 primary questions the IPCC answers every five years in their reports according to their working groups.
WGI – Assess the amount and severity of CO2 climate change and whether man is causing it.
WGII – Assess the impact good and bad of CO2 climate change including costs and options for adaptation
WGIII – Assess options for mitigation of climate change, look at the benefits and drawbacks of different policy scenarios.
These groups were established well before the consensus that CO2 causes warming even existed, but think about it, you don’t need question 2 if you haven’t already assumed 1 and you certainly don’t need 3 if you haven’t assumed 2. What’s more is, if the IPCC doesn’t answer all three of these assessments in an extreme fashion, the group itself would be dissolved. The more extreme the assessment, the more money they control, and more importantly to their intent the more policy they control.
If any of the following were true, the IPCC wouldn’t exist
WG1 – CO2 only causes only very moderate warming — IPCC closed
WG2 – Impacts of warming are mostly good or moderately bad — IPCC closed
WG3 – The solution to CO2 emissions is simple. Adaptation and adding more nuclear power generation over the next 50 years, fossil fuels will rise in cost on their own due to scarcity. — IPCC closed.
It’s obvious to me that the plan was in place before the group took the first look at the science, but Dr. Spencer says it better than I.
Reposted with permission below.
Dump the IPCC Process, It Cannot Be Fixed
August 30th, 2010
In a recent opinion piece, Ross McKitrick has argued that the IPCC process needs to be fixed. He correctly points out that, “There is too much conflict of interest built into the report-writing process”.