FORMED in 1988, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change is the international body for the assessment of climate change.
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Yet, its charter is restricted to the risk of human-induced climate change, so that the overwhelming dominance of natural variability and the Sun are deemed inconsequential.
IPCC’s options: determine a risk of human-induced climate change, or be redundant.
Essentially, the IPCC is an administrative organisation and an assessment report writing process.
It has a central bureau of 30 people that executes most of its operations, overseeing three working groups that produce assessment reports on climate change science and policy issues.
These reports have to be accepted by a plenary panel of member nations’ delegates for acceptance as IPCC Reports, which is a highly politicised process, controlled by the bureau.
The content and conclusions of the assessment reports can and are, pre-determined, as the bureau chooses who to do what.
For example, activist scientist Ben Santer changed the key chapter 8 (Detection of Climate Change and Attribution of Causes) of its second assessment report in alarmist terms to indicate the complete opposite of what had been determined by the participating scientific authors – “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate”.
The IPCC relies on computer models, which have obvious limitations in dealing with the highly complex, real-world processes that drive Earth’s climate.
Yet, IPCC clearly realises that the essential core of science is the pre-eminence of empirical evidence over any and all authority and consensus, because it deceptively qualifies its text by well-hidden footnotes in the reports.
Since 1988, the IPCC has produced five assessment reports for policymakers for 195 UN member nations, the implications of which spell disaster.
Neville Hughes
Surf Beach