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How the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has unravelled in just months
Sinclair Davidson on the continuing fallout from the Climategate emails and the scandals that keep piling up.
The anthropogenic global warming scare has run for some twenty years.
In that time a narrative has developed that suggests that only credentialed scientists can have an opinion on the science; everyone else must simply believe. The expression to describe such supercilious condescension is de haut en has - from above, to below.
All that changed last November when the Climategate emails were either hacked or leaked from the Climatic Research Unit (CRU) at the University of East Anglia. Far from being philosopher-gods, these individuals were, in fact, being very naughty boys. Not content with merely hiding their own declines, they had subverted the peerreview process that underpins many of the claims that science has to objectivity. The peer-review process is a form of quality control; it does not guarantee correctness but it should ensure that the process whereby scientific progress is undertaken is rigorous and more likely to be correct than wrong.
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a body established to monitor and advise governments around the world on the status of climate science and in particular the impact humans are having on the environment and especially the impact of human activity on global warming. The Australian government's Department of Climate Change provides some background information on the IPCC.
The role of the IPCC is to assess the scientific, technical and socio-economic information relevant for the understanding of the risks of human-induced climate change. The IPCC provides policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive advice on the state of technical knowledge on climate change. The IPCC does not carry out new research nor does it monitor climate-related data.
It bases its assessments mainly on published and peerreviewed scientific and technical literature. The main purpose of IPCC assessments is to inform international negotiations on climate change issues.
In 2007 the IPCC released its fourth assessment report known as AR4. The Department of Climate Change describes this report as follows:
The AR4 represents the international consensus on climate change science and is...