THE ROLE OF THE IPCC
“The IPCC shall concentrate its activities on the tasks allotted to it by the relevant WMO Executive Council and UEP Governing Council resolutions and decisions as well as on actions in support of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process.... The role of the IPCC is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the scientific, technical, and socio-economic information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation. IPCC report should be neutral with respect to policy....”
This statement makes it clear that the IPCC is not an academic scientific organisation and that it has clear governmental – hence political - input. Furthermore its aim is not to investigate the reasons for changes in the climate, but to seek out “human induced climate change” – which presupposes there is such climate change.
The administrative part consists of three layers. The top one is a plenary panel comprising delegates from nearly 200 member states. It oversees a 30 member bureau that executes most of the operations of the IPCC. The bureau oversees three working groups that produce assessment reports on climate change science and policy issues.
Members of the Bureau can pick Lead Authors and contributing Authors without restraint. This means the Bureau can make sure the report gives them what they want by its selection of lead Authors. The Lead Authors being sympathetic to the cause. Further, Lead Authors can overrule reviewers or they can rewrite the text after the close of the expert review. Changes to important sections of text have been made in this manner in the past.
Let’s look at one made back in 1996. Dr Seitz, now retired, but a past President of the American Physical Society, president of Rockfeller University, and president of the National Academy of sciences, made allegations that three of the important statements in the 1996 report by scientists of the IPCC had been deleted. The three statements were:
1. None of the studies cited above (by the scientists) have shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed climate changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.
2. No Study to date has positively attributed all or part (of the climate change observed to date), to anthropogenic (human made) causes.
3. Any claims of positive detection of significant climate change are likely to remain controversial until uncertainties in the total natural variability of the climate system are reduced.
Governments participating in the IPCC process had accepted a draft of Chapter 8 (The one where changes were made), at a meeting in Madrid in November 1995. But Seitz said the version at Madrid was changed afterwards without proper authority; fifteen sections had been changed or deleted, to deceive policy makers and the public, charged Seitz, with the effect of causing those to believe that the scientific evidence shows human activities are causing global warming.
Seitz later stated: Nothing in the IPCC Rules permits anyone to change a scientific report after it has been accepted by the panel of scientific contributors and the full IPCC.
IPCC’S MISTAKE ON HIMALAYAN GLACIERS
The IPCC’s fourth assessment report’s malformed paragraph on the Himalayan glacier melt prompted intense and warranted criticism of the IPCC review process.
Here is the relevant paragraph from the IPCC report.
Glaciers in the Himalayas are receding faster than in any other part of the world, and if the present rate continues, the likelihood of them disappearing by the year 2035 and perhaps sooner is very high if the Earth keeps warming at the present rate. Its total area will likely shrink from the present 500,000 to 100,000 sq km by the year 2035.
Data coverage has focussed largely on the lack of scientific support for these claims. But three major errors can be spotted immediately.
1. The first sentence predicts disappearance (a 100% loss by 2035.) The next sentence predicts an 80% loss. Nonetheless, the first prediction is made using more confident language.
2. The second sentence begins with “Its” which is ungrammatical if it is referring to glaciers, (there are several glaciers not just one), and unclear otherwise.
3. The approximate area of the Himalayan glaciers is 33,000 sq km, so the 500,000 starting figure in the second sentence is off by a factor of 15, and the decreased area predicted in 2035 - 100,000 sq km - is three times greater than the current Himalayan glacier area.
David Saltz, an IPCC reviewer, spotted the first two errors before publication but they were not corrected. An elaborate search revealed that the third sentence originated in V.M. Kotlyakov’s paper: Variations of Snow and Ice in the past and at present on a Global and Regional scale.( Published in 1996 but written in 1991).
“The extrapolar glaciation of the Earth will be decaying at rapid catastrophic rates- its total area will shrink from 500,000 sq km to 100,000 sq km by the year 2350.”
Kotlyakov was referring to ALL extrapolar glaciers and suggesting they would decline by the year 2350 NOT 2035.
There were no comments at the first draft stage related to the errors. One reviewer said the retreat table above should be removed but gave no explanation. The writing team said it was an irrelevant editorial comment and did not remove it.
The second draft generated twelve comments from experts and four comments from governments. One comment was about: “that Himalayan glaciers were receding faster than in any other parts of the world”. There was no data on glaciers from other parts of the world. Another suggested that some glaciers in the Western Himalayas may even be expanding.
In the end very little change was made by the IPCC.
WAS THIS A GENUINE MISTAKE OR MORE SCAREMONGERING
Here’s what the IPCC had to say in its 5th report in 2014. I came across this while writing my book and did my own calculations.
Since the beginning of the Industrial era, oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide has resulted in acidification of the ocean; pH of surface water has decreased by 0.1 corresponding to a 26% increase in acidity, measured as Hydrogen ion concentration.
Firstly, let’s look at the first statement. “Oceanic uptake of carbon dioxide has resulted in acidification of the ocean.” The oceans have been alkaline for millions of years, and still are alkaline. Just to remind readers, acids have a pH less than 7 on the pH scale and alkalis a pH greater than 7. The closer to 0 an acid is the stronger it is. Strong alkalis have a pH close to 14.
Now what about the second statement? The 26% increase in acidity sounds very frightening. It is NOT a 26% decrease in pH, it is a 26% increase in Hydrogen ion concentration. It is Hydrogen ions that determine the degree of acidity. I’ll go through the arithmetic but if it is all too baffling just look at the results.
pH = - log10 [H+‑] in English, this says the pH is equal to the negative log to the base 10 of the Hydrogen ion concentration. The pH is now 8.2 so it must have been 8.3 at the start of the Industrial era. According to the IPCC. We can calculate the Hydrogen ion concentration by rearranging the above to get:
[H+] = 10-8.3 = 5x10-8 This is the initial Hydrogen ion concentration.
[H+] = 10-8.2 = 6.3x10-8 This is the final Hydrogen ion concentration.
The percentage change in the Hydrogen ion concentration is (6.3 - 5.0)/6.3 x 100 = 20.6
So note the percentage change in Hydrogen concentration is actually 20.6 NOT 26 as the IPCC states.
NOW WHAT PERCENTAGE HAS THE ACTUAL pH DROPPED BY?
The pH has dropped from 8.3 to 8.2 so the percentage drop is [(8.3-8.2) / 8.3] x 100
THIS GIVES AN ANSWER OF JUST 1% which is a very small amount. The oceans are still alkaline with a pH of 8.2. It will take a very long time for the oceans to pass the 7pH mark. So in 170 years since the Industrial Revolution the pH of the oceans has dropped just 1%.
It sounds more scary to give a 26% increase in acidity rather than a drop in pH of just 1%. Bear in mind the 26% is incorrect too and should be 20%.
THE MANN HOCKEY STICK
It is important to the climate alarmists that the temperature of the Earth keeps rising, as CO2 levels are also rising. It wouldn’t do their cause any good if temperatures in the immediate past were higher than they are now when CO2 levels were actually much lower. Many attempts were made to try and keep recent temperatures higher than the past. Here is what Christine Stewart , the former Canadian Minister of the Environment said: “We’ve got to ride this global warming issue. Even if the theory of global warming is wrong, we will be doing the right thing in terms of economic and environmental policy.”
Timothy Worth President of the UN Foundation, made this statement: “When prosecuting the case for unprecedented man-made global warming, the first thing you need to make sure of is that no recent climate era was as warm or warmer than the present, even if it means having to rewrite the past to fit your narrative.”
Timothy Worth’s statement says it all. The UN whose mouthpiece on climate is the IPCC says they have to change the past temperatures to fit their own narrative.
It is interesting that the IPCC in their 1990 report had the Medieval warm period at a relatively high temperature, somewhat higher than the average Earth temperature at present. They presented the following graph in 1990.
Enter Dr David Deming from the University of Oklahoma. He published a paper on some borehole work he did. He later made a statement to the US Senate Committee on Environment and Public works. This is what he said:
“ I had an interesting experience around the time of my publishing the paper. I received an E-mail from a major researcher in the area of climate change.” He said : “ We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
The Medieval Warm Period was a real problem for the climate alarmists. It had to be removed. It is generally accepted that the MWP was up to 1 Deg C warmer than at present. It was also a global phenomenon not localised as the alarmists would have you believe. So when the 1991 IPCC report came out the Medieval Warm Period has disappeared, thanks to what turned out to be a godsend for climate alarmists - the Mann Hickey Stick. Neither the MWP or the Little Ice Age appear on the graph. From 1000AD to about 1900 the graph shows a negative departure from the average temperature, then there is a sudden rise in warming supposedly caused by humans putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
“ I had an interesting experience around the time of my publishing the paper. I received an E-mail from a major researcher in the area of climate change.” He said : “ We have to get rid of the Medieval Warm Period.”
The Medieval Warm Period was a real problem for the climate alarmists. It had to be removed. It is generally accepted that the MWP was up to 1 Deg C warmer than at present. It was also a global phenomenon not localised as the alarmists would have you believe. So when the 1991 IPCC report came out the Medieval Warm Period has disappeared, thanks to what turned out to be a godsend for climate alarmists - the Mann Hickey Stick. Neither the MWP or the Little Ice Age appear on the graph. From 1000AD to about 1900 the graph shows a negative departure from the average temperature, then there is a sudden rise in warming supposedly caused by humans putting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
The Mann Hockey stick. The Medieval Warm Period is entirely missing.
Here’s a graph showing Earth’s temperatures back some 1,000 years (The same length of time shown in the Mann Hockey stick.) Humans played no part in the warming periods shown in red up to 1400. The Earth did all this warming by itself. So it’s probably doing the same at present.
Here’s a graph showing Earth’s temperatures back some 1,000 years (The same length of time shown in the Mann Hockey stick.) Humans played no part in the warming periods shown in red up to 1400. The Earth did all this warming by itself. So it’s probably doing the same at present.
The IPCC welcomed the Mann hockey stick in its 2001 report. Al Gore in his book, The Inconvenient Truth, also made use of it.
A PhD student Steve McIntyre and scientist Ross McKitrick became suspicious and decided to investigate the hockey stick. Mann used a proxy data set from Bristlecone pines from the mountains of S.W. United States. He measured the tree ring widths in spite of being warned that bristlecone pines were very unreliable, and that the width of tree rings depended on other factors apart from temperature.
Mann consistently refused to provide his data to McIntyre and McKitrick. It took legal action to get the information. McIntyre and McKitrick produced a detailed review into the mathematical and statistical methods used by Mann. Basically, any data plugged into Mann’s formula produced a hockey stick. In 2005 The US Congress sent Mann a set of questions which they required an answer for. In the end it was clear Mann’s results were not at all robust. When the bristlecone pine results were removed the graph collapsed.
Later, Dr Hamish Campbell PhD a Geologist at the NZ Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences said: “ Mann’s hockey stick has indeed been substantially discredited.”
Dr Michael Fox, Professor of Chemistry at Idaho State University stated: “We now know that the hockey stick is fraudulent.”
The damage was done however, and global warming caused by humans was the cry from the climate alarmists.
Studies of pollen, lake sediments, stalagmites and boreholes over several regions give records that indicate the presence of the MWP with a maximum temperature of about 1 deg C higher than at present.
CLIMATEGATE
In 2009 a large number of E-mails were leaked from the University of East Anglia. Most of the Emails were written by those involved in the IPCC report writing process. Many involved ways of getting round contradictory evidence regarding global warming. As a result, there was much discussion about the integrity of the IPCC process.
Here are the texts from just two of those E-Mails.
By the time that the preparation of the AR 4 (Assessment Report 4) had begun, evidence had been published by two independent teams in good quality peer reviewed journals showing statistically significant evidence that contamination in the surface temperature record due to industrialisation and related land use effects had not been adequately removed from climatic data sets and that it added a clear warming bias.
One of the Climategate E-mails is from IPCC Author Phil Jones to his colleague Michael Mann in July 8th2004, in which Jones confides that he and IPCC Co-Author Kevin Trembath were determined to keep this evidence out of the IPCC report.
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer–review literature is.”
Consistent with that intention, no mention of the studies was made in either of the drafts shown to reviewers. After the review process closed a paragraph was inserted that would appear in the published version dismissing the evidence.
One of the most infamous E-mails in the Climategate archive is the one from 1999 in which Phil Jones tells his colleagues: “I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the past 20 years i.e. from 1981 onwards, and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
That E-mail refers to the construction of a climate graph for a World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report. So it seems Keith also has a trick to hide the fall in temperature over a period from 1961, and in the end give the impression of a consistent warming.
Climatologist Hans von Storch wrote in the Wall St Journal: “what we can now see is a concerted effort to emphasize scientific results that are useful to a political agenda by blocking papers in the purportedly independent review process and skewing the assessments on the UN’s IPCC. The effort has not been so successful, but trying was bad enough.”
Christopher Booker wrote in the UK Daily Telegraph: “What we are looking at here is a small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not the least in the role they play at the heart of the UN’s IPCC.... It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not the least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.”
In response to the controversies and criticisms, in 2010 the IPCC requested an agency called the Inter Academy Council (IAC) to conduct a review of its procedures. But the core problems were not addressed. So many governments are involved no one person is in a position to provide effective leadership. There are approximately 200 member states and no one state would benefit enough to justify taking on the job.
Two members of the NZ Climate Change Commission are members of the IPCC. Their influence cannot be underestimated. The NZ government needs to abolish the CCC since the tiny amount of carbon dioxide that humans put into the atmosphere is NOT causing climate change. Finally, can anyone report sea level rise or notice a climate change? Remember rain and floods etc is NOT climate. It is weather.
Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.
A PhD student Steve McIntyre and scientist Ross McKitrick became suspicious and decided to investigate the hockey stick. Mann used a proxy data set from Bristlecone pines from the mountains of S.W. United States. He measured the tree ring widths in spite of being warned that bristlecone pines were very unreliable, and that the width of tree rings depended on other factors apart from temperature.
Mann consistently refused to provide his data to McIntyre and McKitrick. It took legal action to get the information. McIntyre and McKitrick produced a detailed review into the mathematical and statistical methods used by Mann. Basically, any data plugged into Mann’s formula produced a hockey stick. In 2005 The US Congress sent Mann a set of questions which they required an answer for. In the end it was clear Mann’s results were not at all robust. When the bristlecone pine results were removed the graph collapsed.
Later, Dr Hamish Campbell PhD a Geologist at the NZ Institute of Geological and Nuclear Sciences said: “ Mann’s hockey stick has indeed been substantially discredited.”
Dr Michael Fox, Professor of Chemistry at Idaho State University stated: “We now know that the hockey stick is fraudulent.”
The damage was done however, and global warming caused by humans was the cry from the climate alarmists.
Studies of pollen, lake sediments, stalagmites and boreholes over several regions give records that indicate the presence of the MWP with a maximum temperature of about 1 deg C higher than at present.
CLIMATEGATE
In 2009 a large number of E-mails were leaked from the University of East Anglia. Most of the Emails were written by those involved in the IPCC report writing process. Many involved ways of getting round contradictory evidence regarding global warming. As a result, there was much discussion about the integrity of the IPCC process.
Here are the texts from just two of those E-Mails.
By the time that the preparation of the AR 4 (Assessment Report 4) had begun, evidence had been published by two independent teams in good quality peer reviewed journals showing statistically significant evidence that contamination in the surface temperature record due to industrialisation and related land use effects had not been adequately removed from climatic data sets and that it added a clear warming bias.
One of the Climategate E-mails is from IPCC Author Phil Jones to his colleague Michael Mann in July 8th2004, in which Jones confides that he and IPCC Co-Author Kevin Trembath were determined to keep this evidence out of the IPCC report.
“I can’t see either of these papers being in the next IPCC report. Kevin and I will keep them out somehow-even if we have to redefine what the peer–review literature is.”
Consistent with that intention, no mention of the studies was made in either of the drafts shown to reviewers. After the review process closed a paragraph was inserted that would appear in the published version dismissing the evidence.
One of the most infamous E-mails in the Climategate archive is the one from 1999 in which Phil Jones tells his colleagues: “I’ve just completed Mike’s nature trick of adding in the real temperatures to each series for the past 20 years i.e. from 1981 onwards, and from 1961 for Keith’s to hide the decline.”
That E-mail refers to the construction of a climate graph for a World Meteorological Organisation (WMO) report. So it seems Keith also has a trick to hide the fall in temperature over a period from 1961, and in the end give the impression of a consistent warming.
Climatologist Hans von Storch wrote in the Wall St Journal: “what we can now see is a concerted effort to emphasize scientific results that are useful to a political agenda by blocking papers in the purportedly independent review process and skewing the assessments on the UN’s IPCC. The effort has not been so successful, but trying was bad enough.”
Christopher Booker wrote in the UK Daily Telegraph: “What we are looking at here is a small group of scientists who have for years been more influential in driving the worldwide alarm over global warming than any others, not the least in the role they play at the heart of the UN’s IPCC.... It seems they are prepared to stop at nothing to stifle scientific debate in this way, not the least by ensuring that no dissenting research should find its way into the pages of IPCC reports.”
In response to the controversies and criticisms, in 2010 the IPCC requested an agency called the Inter Academy Council (IAC) to conduct a review of its procedures. But the core problems were not addressed. So many governments are involved no one person is in a position to provide effective leadership. There are approximately 200 member states and no one state would benefit enough to justify taking on the job.
Two members of the NZ Climate Change Commission are members of the IPCC. Their influence cannot be underestimated. The NZ government needs to abolish the CCC since the tiny amount of carbon dioxide that humans put into the atmosphere is NOT causing climate change. Finally, can anyone report sea level rise or notice a climate change? Remember rain and floods etc is NOT climate. It is weather.
Ian Bradford, a science graduate, is a former teacher, lawyer, farmer and keen sportsman, who is writing a book about the fraud of anthropogenic climate change.
3 comments:
The UN is clearly a failed organisation. It sat on its hands impotently during the Rwanda crisis as genocide swept the country. Similarly with Cambodia and the Ukraine and currently doing nothing to save the hostages in Palestine.
Consistent with its failures, the UN formed a propaganda entity, as Ian mentioned, in 1988 called the IPCC. The information it churns out is anything but scientific but pure political ideology. Michel Mann’s famous and disproven hickey stick theory, where he blatantly re-wrote history to make it work, is still to this day, acknowledge as fact by the IPCC!
Hi Ian. The anthropogenic climate disaster fraud has been well and truly debunked and the Luxon government is wisely keeping up appearances whilst defunding the scam.
So can you please move onto more pressing matters such as..
Why did Luxon and his ministers set the covid inquiry up to likely exonerate the main protagonists and thieves.
Why hasn't the Luxon government alleviated the auditor general's concerns about the unfettered covid spend up by conducting a public forensic audit of the covid money trails?
Who benefitted from our $200b tax bill?
Taxpayers certainly didn't!
Ian's book has been published and is a good read and is available on Amazon.
Are Humans Causing Climate Change? : The Case Against Anthropogenic Global Warming
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