UCalgary prof Barry Cooper writes:
The IPCC, like so many organs of the UN, self-advertises as a force for good and an issuer of truths. They claim to be models of transparency, accuracy, and accountability. Two years ago Ross McKitrick, of Guelph University, showed that the IPCC was characterized by bureaucratic opacity, cronyism, conflicts of interest, and unchecked authorial bias. It is a model of how not to do science.
A few years ago I fell afoul of several senior administrators (since gone) at my university for supporting the heresy of skepticism regarding AGW while they had moved on to mitigating its effects – or at least to collecting money from various governments to plan CO2 sequestration schemes. Burying a gas in the dirt, I thought; what could possibly go wrong?
Since then, the dogma that “the science is settled” both with respect to CO2 and AGW has been laughed into oblivion.
Years ago, several Nobel Prize-winning natural scientists protested that science is never settled. These scientists are to be sharply distinguished from the authors of the IPCC reports who, after that body shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore, pretended that they too were Nobel Laureates. Donna Laframboise, who has exposed much of the IPCC mischief, characterized this self-promotion as fiction committed by poorly socialized adolescents. It certainly was comical.
Then McKitrick helped expose the famous hockey-stick graph, which purported to show an enormous increase in mean global temperature along with CO2 increases. The hockey stick turned out to be an artifact of the computer program that generated it.
It has always been just a power and money scam. I am very glad it is coming apart at the seams. The sooner the better.
It’s a fear-based sales gimmick, and it always was….