The UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has become the official face of climate science in the eyes of the world. But how far can it be trusted?

The Story So Far

In the first article in this series (‘A Climate of Fear’), I pointed out that our present concerns about global warming were shaped by a milieu of ‘cultural catastrophism’. The immediate source of that mood was the Cold War, with its oppressive forebodings of nuclear apocalypse. But when such anxiety takes hold, it tends to spread from one object to another. This, I suggested, is what happened at the dawn of the environmental movement. Public concern about human impact on the natural world drew much of its initial impetus from books like ‘Silent Spring’ (1962), which exposed the damage done by the overuse of pesticides. But just six years later, in 1968, the title of another popular book — ‘The Population Bomb’, by Paul Ehrlich — revealed the direction that the new environmental movement was taking. The second word of the title was an echo of the nuclear threat that haunted the era. 

At the same time, the first word of the title — ‘population’ — pointed to the deeper roots of climate catastrophism. In many ways, it was a new manifestation of an old fear that stemmed from the theory of an eighteenth-century clergyman. In his 1798 ‘Essay on the Principle of Population’, Thomas Malthus prophesied bleakly about the dangers of population growth. His theory was the ultimate progenitor of the now-fashionable form of environmentalism that views humanity as a morbid growth on nature rather than the apex of evolution. Over the two centuries since he wrote, Malthus’ predictions have helped to animate various inhumane theories and policies, such as social Darwinism and the eugenics movement.

Today, Malthus’s pessimistic generalisations stand revealed as deeply flawed. A key work in this debunking was Hans Rosling’s 2018 book ‘Factfulness’. Rosling presented copious evidence to show that, on most measures, human flourishing has increased, not diminished, notwithstanding population growth. Rosling also reflected perceptively on the deep strand of anxiety in the human mind that leads us to overestimate the likelihood of catastrophes.

Malthusian pessimism, despite being discredited, still wields formidable power. It keeps us spellbound by worst-case scenarios whenever we contemplate global environmental problems. It dominates the thinking of what I have called ‘the climate lobby’ — the caucus of scientists, politicians, bureaucrats and journalists who are convinced that human-made CO2 poses an existential threat to humanity and even to nature itself. This movement is having grave social and political consequences. In a relatively short time, it has generated a political culture obsessed with accumulating and centralising power to avert the imagined danger. And just as the threat is thought to be worldwide, the scale of the power-grab is commensurately global.

I am far from suggesting that the world is a perfectly safe place. There are real grounds for concern about the natural environment. Human folly does indeed have the power to jeopardise the future of the race. And yes, there are some problems that call for a significant measure of international cooperation. Yet despite all this there are good reasons to believe that our current fears over human impact upon the climate are greatly exaggerated. For the same reasons, the extent to which nations are handing over policy-making to unaccountable global bureaucracies is both unnecessary and dangerous.

In this series of articles, my aim is to chart the progress of climate catastrophism from its precursors in Malthus’ horror of population growth, through its first explicit stirrings in the 1980s, and onwards to the powerful position it holds in global politics today. At the present point of the story, we are concerned with the capture of climate science by the climate lobby. In the present article, I will examine the part played by the United Nations, and in particular by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). 

The Progress of Climate Politics

The 1980s were the period in which cultural catastrophism switched its focus from nuclear conflict to climate doom. As I explained in the previous article, the Villach conference of 1985 marked a key moment in that transition. In the same period, a UN commission on ‘sustainable development’ was at work under the chairmanship of the Norwegian politician, Gro Harlem Brundtland. Two years after Villach, in 1987, this eventuated in another influential report, officially titled ‘Our Common Future’ but more often called the ‘Brundtland Report’.¹ This did much to popularise the concept of ‘sustainability’ and to flag global warming as a potential threat to humanity.

After Villach and the Brundtland Report, it was a short step to the UN’s decision in 1988 to establish the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. The purpose of the IPCC was to collect and assess the science relevant to the hypothesis of anthropogenic warming and its potential dangers. The Panel was tasked with providing information as a basis for policy making — a role it has since discharged by publishing ‘assessment reports’ every few years.

From the foregoing, it should be clear that the IPCC has been from its birth a creation of the United Nations. It is not an independent scientific body, standing above the hurly-burly of international politics. Its very name identifies it as an ‘intergovernmental’ entity, rather than a purely scientific one. True, it plainly draws on the work of numerous scientists, but the member governments exercise ultimate control over its pronouncements, as we will see in more detail shortly.

But the climate lobby needed something more than an apparently scientific body to promote coordinated international action. A political agency was required. In 1992, the UN held a major conference in Rio de Janeiro. This ‘Earth Summit’ was organised and co-chaired by Maurice Strong, a Canadian businessman with longstanding ties to the UN. As I explained in my earlier article, Strong was an enthusiast for the utopian notion of world government. He was also a key figure in the ascendancy of the climate lobby.

Strong ensured that the Earth Summit was a grand affair, attended by leaders of many national governments, as well as 20,000 activists.² The climate was a major theme of the conference, but not the only one. It was set in the context of a broader action plan for global sustainable development. This encompassed a range of worthy goals such as combating poverty, promoting health, protecting fragile environments, and controlling pollution. The idea of averting dangerous global warming was thereby incorporated into a package of projects that were undoubtedly noble, at least in their intent. The resulting action plan was called ‘Agenda 21’ because it was a plan for the 21^st Century. It was, in effect, a set of guidelines for political action on international, national and local levels

On the specific issue of climate, the principal outcome of the Earth Summit was the establishment the ‘United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change’ (UNFCCC), with the aim of coordinating an international response to the supposed threat of warming. The UNFCCC was provided with a Secretariat whose function is to organise and support intergovernmental negotiations, most notably the annual ‘Conferences of the Parties’ (COP). The Secretariat is, in effect, the international executive agency that the climate lobby needed, alongside the IPCC, in order to advance its aims. The IPCC’s Assessment Reports provide the supposedly scientific context in which the secretariat works.

In due course, the twin motors of the IPCC and UNFCCC generated two major international agreements about climate. The first was the Kyoto Protocol. This was adopted at the third Conference of the Parties (COP3) at Kyoto in 1997, and came into force in 2005. It committed parties to an official view that global warming was being driven by man-made greenhouse gases, and to the need for policies and targets (albeit nominally ‘non-binding’ at this stage) to reduce those emissions in order to avoid harmful impacts. The second was the Paris Agreement of 2015 — the product of negotiations by UNFCCC members at COP21 in Paris. The Agreement set targets of keeping global warming below 2 degrees Celsius and reaching ‘net zero’ emissions of greenhouse gases by the middle of this century.

Also in 2015, the UN General Assembly approved the updating of its ‘sustainable development goals’. In effect, this replaced the earlier Agenda 21 (and the ‘Millenium Development Goals’) with what is informally known as ‘Agenda 30’ — named with the aim of achieving the targets by the year 2030. Like the earlier Agenda 21, this affirms the need to counter dangerous man-made climate change, and embeds that project firmly — inextricably, perhaps, in intention — within a wider set of apparently admirable long-term goals, such as ending poverty, improving health and education, transitioning to sustainable production of energy, and so on.

Green Totalitarianism at the UN

The triumphs achieved by the climate lobby via the United Nations — namely, the Kyoto Protocol, the Paris Agreement, the COPs and the Agendas — have been vital stepping stones in the lobby’s attempts to re-shape the world in response to the supposed threat of climate change. Among progressive-minded western elites, these events are celebrated as landmarks in a long journey towards a safer, greener future for humanity.

Yet for those willing to look, it is increasingly apparent that there is a dark side to the story. To risk stating the obvious, re-shaping the world is no small affair. Social engineering on a global scale has the potential for truly global disaster as well as global salvation. Any mistakes will be writ very large indeed. The successes of the climate lobby are having huge political and economic impacts, to which many of us have not yet woken up. Whether those impacts are truly necessary and beneficial can be doubted. This has both a political and a material dimension. In political terms, the citizens of developed, democratic nations are seeing a loss of freedom and governmental accountability. Materially, climate-related policies are beginning to impinge negatively upon the welfare of people, even in the developed nations.

First, consider the political dimension. While ostensibly about saving the world through peaceful international cooperation, the UN’s web of treaties and ‘agendas’ has a totalitarian aspect. Compelled by the seemingly unimpeachable deliverances of ‘the science’, governments have entered into treaty obligations. Under the weight of those obligations, they are implementing policies determined at the supra-national level by unelected bureaucracies whose actual relation to science is — as I aim to show here — much less transparent and much more manipulative than the public imagines.

Apart from binding national governments with international treaties, the IPCC and UNFCC can also reach over the heads of those governments to implement policies through local organisations that are infected with climate alarmism. This is happening here in the UK, for example, through the work of UK100 — a network of local councils that has pledged ‘to lead a rapid transition to Net Zero with Clean Air in their communities ahead of the government’s legal target [my emphasis].’ In this way, national democratic institutions have effectively been bypassed.

But this is not just an abstract matter of rights, liberties, democratic accountability and national sovereignty. It has begun to harm people’s well-being in palpable ways. A proper account of that harm really requires a separate article. Still, in the context of the present article, a few remarks may help to show why a critique of the IPCC is necessary not just for the sake of the integrity of science, but also for the welfare of ordinary people.

In the USA, for example, state governments such as that of Oregon are closing down small farms.³ This is in accord with a plan that ‘calls for governments to take control of all land use and not leave any decision making in the hands of private property owners’ — unless they happen to be billionaires. Into that category fall individuals like Bill Gates, an influential believer in disastrous anthropogenic warming, who is busily buying up farmland.^[ii]4

In Europe, farmers have been staging massive protests against Net Zero policies and associated restrictions, which are undermining their ability to farm their land.⁵ If their protests and other challenges fail, Europe may soon see a significant reduction of farming. This is not a trivial matter. If a significant number of farms are shut down, this can hardly fail to result in rising food prices, and potentially acute distress for at least the poorer parts of the population.

Restrictions on travel are also being implemented. Here in the UK, this includes restrictions on the roads people can drive along, especially with initiatives such as ‘fifteen-minute neighbourhoods’ and ‘clean air zones’. The sale of new petrol and diesel cars will be banned in 2035. In the meanwhile, companies will be fined if they do not sell enough electric vehicles. Such vehicles are expensive, are problematic for long journeys — given their re-charging requirements — and constitute a low but significant risk of uncontrollable, life-threatening fires. There are also increasing demands on homeowners to comply with Net Zero rules and regulations, possibly using criminal law.⁶

At the same time, manufacturing industry in western countries is being undermined by strict environmental policies which push up energy prices and make western manufacturing internationally uncompetitive. In parallel with all this, strict environmental policies are being forced upon businesses by multinational investment firms such as BlackRock, with the imposition of ESG (i.e. ‘Environmental, Social and Governance’) principles.⁷

These are dangerous policies, which I hope to explore more fully in another article. Before that, however, we need to consider the reliability of the climate science that underpins the policies. The work of the IPCC is at the heart of that science. The IPCC has, on the whole, a high reputation. Look it up in Wikipedia and you will be told that:

The IPCC is a well-respected authority on climate change. Leading climate scientists and all member governments endorse its findings.  Governments, civil society organisations and the media regularly quote from its reports…. The IPCC shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for contributions to the understanding of climate change.

Unfortunately, this encomium is considerably less than the whole truth, as we are about to see.

The IPCC, Computer Modelling and CO2

So far, the IPCC has brought out six ‘Assessment Reports’, with the first in 1990 and the most recent — the sixth — completed just last year (2023). They follow the format of the 1985 Villach report, with chapters on specific issues, as well as summaries and overviews for politicians and policy makers. One difference is that the IPCC’s reports have become very much longer, with the latest running to over 3000 pages. This length, together with their technical nature, tends to make the detail of the reports opaque to non-specialists who are busy with other affairs — such as the very ‘policy makers’ who are the main intended recipients of the reports.

But the key respect in which the Assessment Reports still resemble the Villach document is in their reliance upon the computer modelling of future climate scenarios. This in itself is problematic. As I said in a previous article: ‘Weather and climate are so complex that running reliable long-range simulations of them on computers is impossible. The computational power required to simulate the detailed development of climate is immense.’ Even today’s computers are not really up to the job.

Moreover, the problems of the IPCC’s computer models are aggravated by their dependence on unreliable assumptions. Two of these are especially important. One is that man-made increases in atmospheric CO2 are driving current warming. The other is that the warming effect of CO2 will be amplified by positive feedback from water vapour. The fragility of these assumptions is evident in the simple fact that the computer models have demonstrably and consistently overestimated warming rates.⁸

Although I have discussed these matters before, they are important enough to require some further explanation here. Ever since the beginning of concern about global warming, the climate lobby has emphasised the role of CO2 (although other gases, such as methane, are acknowledged to play a part). Yet the warming power of CO2 is limited by a natural law of diminishing returns. This is because the relationship between temperature and CO2 is logarithmic. In other words, as the level of CO2 increases, its power to cause additional warming decreases. This is not a controversial view, but an accepted fact of physics.

Accordingly, in order to substantiate fears of dangerous warming, the climate lobby — and as part of it, the IPCC — had to find another factor that might supplement the direct effect of CO2. To that end, IPCC computer models incorporate the assumption that warming produced by CO2 will increase atmospheric humidity. As water vapour is itself a greenhouse gas, the increased humidity will produce positive feedback, amplifying the warming — or so the argument goes.

The foregoing information — the diminishing returns of CO2 and the assumption about water vapour — may be news to you. These things are typically not mentioned in the mainstream media’s reporting on climate. Nor are they often mentioned in political debate. Instead, CO2 is portrayed as almost the sole driver of a catastrophic rise in temperature (perhaps with a little help from methane). For example, here are two excerpts from the 2019 report of the UK’s Committee on Climate Change:

Every tonne of CO2 causes approximately the same increase in the long-term global average temperature no matter where and when it is emitted.  (Page 58)

Each additional tonne of CO2 emitted adds more long-lasting CO2 to the atmosphere and creates more warming, meaning that global temperature increases in proportion to the cumulative total emissions of CO2.  (Page 72)⁹

These assertions do not merely hide the ‘diminishing returns’ of CO2’s warming power. They even imply, falsely, that its power is linear, with the increase in warming proportional to the increase in CO2.

What about the hypothetical rise in temperature due to increased water vapour? It is true that water vapour is a greenhouse gas. However, its overall role in the atmosphere — its relationship to temperature, cloud formation and precipitation — is extremely complex. Within that complexity, there are variables that affect temperature far more than the small effect of increased CO2.  For example, the amount of energy reaching the Earths’ surface from the sun varies enormously with cloud cover. In fact, the difference in energy per square metre between the typical maximum and minimum levels of global cloud coverage is nearly two orders of magnitude greater than the added energy due to increased CO2.¹⁰

Furthermore, models typically only include the water vapour effect for CO2 levels above the pre-industrial level — as if CO2 before the industrial revolution did not have the same effect.¹¹ Throwing yet more doubt on the models, there is even a possibility that CO2 has already reached its ‘saturation’ point. In other words, further increases in CO2 above the present level may not produce any further rise in temperature. Recent scientific studies seem to indicate that this is the case. If so, it destroys the foundations of climate alarmism.¹²

Whether or not that proves correct, it remains a fact that IPCC reports rely far too heavily upon computer-modelled scenarios. Furthermore, whilst the IPCC reports draw on a range of computer models, they have tended to emphasise those models that incorporate the most catastrophic assumptions.¹³ This one-sided emphasis then gets amplified by the mainstream media. Journalists and news corporations understand all too well that warnings of impending doom can capture the attention of an anxious public, and boost their market share. In the preceding article in this series, I ventured to call the resulting public mood a case of ‘computer-generated panic disorder’.

In its continuing emphasis on extreme scenarios, the IPCC is also guilty of substantial inconsistency. The most recent (Sixth) Assessment Report acknowledged that the most extreme scenario for the accumulation of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere was never intended as a prediction, and is unlikely to be fulfilled. This scenario, the so-called ‘RCP 8.5’ (more fully, SSP5 – 8.5), has often been misleadingly labelled as ‘business as usual’. An independent critique of the Sixth Report comments:

The biggest news in the AR6 report is arguably that high-end scenarios like SSP5-8.5 and SSP3-7.0 are now believed to have low likelihood. That is extremely good news as it means that higher rates of warming in 2100 are thus viewed to be less likely than they were only a few years ago. Unfortunately, this news is deeply hidden in the report and few policy makers will see it. Worse, large parts of the report still emphasize these high-end scenarios. How did this happen?¹⁴

Overall, the tenor of the IPCC Assessment Reports continues that of the 1985 Villach report. They overstate the likelihood of dangerous anthropogenic global warming in the future, and grant only limited acknowledgement to the scientific uncertainty that surrounds this. Unfortunately, the IPCC’s bias has become worse since it was founded. Whilst the first Assessment Report was somewhat tentative about the risk of serious warming, subsequent reports have presented an increasingly one-sided overview of climate science and of the potential effects of warming.¹⁵

Politics and Scientific Integrity

In addition to the doubts surrounding computer modelling and the role of CO2, there are other reasons to challenge the authority of the IPCC’s Assessment Reports.

The IPCC claims that the reports are based upon expert examination of peer-reviewed scientific papers. The truth of the matter is considerably more complicated. Chapters of an assessment report can be edited in a political-bureaucratic process, which tends to remove evidence that is uncongenial to the member governments of the IPCC. Indeed, there are explicit IPCC rules that specify that governments have the final say in the contents of the crucial ‘summaries for policy makers’. Governments can even edit the chapters that underpin those summaries to make them consistent with the policy recommendations of the summaries.¹⁶ This means that a political process in writing the final versions of the reports leads to the suppression of scientific opinions and evidence that go against the hypothesis of anthropogenic warming.

For example, when it was published in 1996, the Second Assessment Report was subject to severe criticism relating to the final text of Chapter 8 of its working group report. Frederick Seitz, a leading physicist and former chairman of the U.S. National Academy of Sciences, wrote in the Wall Street Journal that in more than sixty years as a member of the American scientific community he had never witnessed a ‘more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process’. Seitz claimed that more than fifteen sections of the chapter had been changed or deleted, including the sentence ‘None of the studies above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases.’¹⁷

The investigative journalist Donna Laframboise has extensively documented the weaknesses of the Assessment Reports. One case she relates is that of Chris Landsea, an expert on hurricanes, who resigned from the IPCC in 2004. Landsea had been a contributing author and expert reviewer in previous IPCC reports. He considered that there was no evidence that global warming had increased the intensity of hurricanes. His resignation came after a ‘coordinating lead author’ of the chapter on hurricanes had publicly stated that global warming had increased hurricane activity. Landsea had written to senior officials at the IPCC about this, including its head, but his concerns were dismissed.¹⁸ His resignation letter bluntly declared: ‘I personally cannot in good faith continue to contribute to a process that I view as not being scientifically sound.’¹⁹

Another example comes from the work of Willie Soon, a scientist specialising in solar physics. Soon argues that IPCC reports have seriously underestimated the importance of the sun in climate change. Variations in the sun’s radiation and its magnetic field can affect the Earth’s atmosphere in complex ways. Changes in the shape of the Earth’s orbit, and the tilt of its axis, also have very significant effects. Soon noted that:

Of the 38 co-authors and three review editors of the IPCC’s solar sub-chapter (chapter 8 by Myhre et al. 2013), only one is an expert on solar physics. Perhaps not surprisingly, then, the subchapter is shot through with critical errors and serious misrepresentations.²⁰

He then detailed those errors and misrepresentations, and continued:

In conclusion, the IPCC has been practicing ‘para-science’ in that, while it affects the appearance of practicing science, it has violated long held scientific norms and practices of fully and accurately representing the current state of scientific knowledge, and of proposing and testing alternative hypotheses in order to extend knowledge…

Typically, a chapter of an IPCC report is co-written by a combination of up to twenty ‘lead authors’ who are led by one or two ‘co-ordinating lead authors’.  A chapter may also include short sections written by ‘contributing authors’. Lead authors have not always been prominent experts in the relevant fields. For example, Richard Klein began as a lead author in 1994, and by 1997 he had become a coordinating lead author. Donna Laframboise comments, ‘This means that Klein was promoted to the IPCC’s most senior author role at age 28 — six years prior to the 2003 completion of his PhD… Nor is he an isolated case.’²¹ Many lead authors have been included in order to fulfil UN diversity requirements, and not because of expertise.²² Political activists have been lead authors. For example, Bill Hare, Greenpeace’s ‘chief climate negotiator’ in 2007, was a lead author of a chapter of that year’s report.²³

Also, despite the trumpeting of the reports as based upon ‘peer-reviewed’ science, they frequently cite articles that are not peer-reviewed. Choosing at random a chapter of the 2007 report, Donna Laframboise discovered that only 64 references out of 260 were from scientific journal articles.²⁴ Once a draft chapter has been written, ‘expert reviewers’ are invited to comment. But reviewers who happen to disagree with the man-made global warming hypothesis, or doubt its supposedly disastrous effects, can be ignored. The lead authors do not have to respond to their objections. And as we have seen, chapters, especially the summaries for policy makers, typically go through a complex politically-based assessment and rewrite after the ‘scientists’ have written them.

Donna Laframboise makes the following observations, which are worth citing at length:

It is both peculiar and ironic that an organization that so vigorously claims to represent a worldwide scientific consensus has systematically ‘disappeared’ so many consensus views held by so many different kinds of researchers. The IPCC ignores the consensus among hurricane experts that there is no discernible link to global warming. It ignores the consensus among those who study natural disasters that there is no relationship between human greenhouse gas emissions and the rising cost of these disasters. It ignores the consensus among bona fide malaria experts that global warming has not caused malaria to spread.

In each case the IPCC substitutes its own version of reality. In each case that version of reality makes global warming appear more frightening than genuine experts believe the available evidence indicates.²⁵

The Strange Case of the Hockey Stick

A prominent example of supposed evidence of dangerous warming is the famous — some would say infamous — ‘hockey stick’ graph. This purported to show that average world temperatures had been broadly stable for a thousand years until the twentieth century, and then had risen dramatically. Plotted on the graph, this produced a long, wavy, but roughly straight line with a sharp uptick at the end (hence the nickname ‘hockey stick’). This graph was a central feature of the IPCC 2001 report. It was also popularised in Al Gore’s film, ‘An Inconvenient Truth’.²⁶

The hockey stick graph was the work of Michael Mann, who went on to become one of the most influential prophets of climate doom. He is, for example, the author of the Encyclopedia Britannica article on ‘Global Warming’. Mann received his PhD in 1998, and in that year the journal Nature published his first paper on the ‘hockey stick’. At around that time, Mann also started working for the IPCC, and he became a lead author for the very chapter of the IPCC 2001 report that dealt with his own research.

The evidence on which the hockey stick graph was based is highly controversial.²⁷ To create the graph, Mann spliced together two quite different kinds of data: on the one hand, proxy estimates of historical temperatures and on the other, direct measurements of more recent ones. Both the data and Mann’s treatment of it have been subjected to forensic examination by Steve McIntyre, an expert in statistical analysis. In McIntyre’s eyes, the hockey stick resembled fraudulent graphs he had encountered in the mining industry. A crucial flaw was its dependence upon tree-ring data from just one location, which seemed to show a significant increase in warming in the late twentieth century. In fact, the authors of that study had warned that their tree-ring measurements should not be used as evidence of rising temperatures.²⁸

Mann’s hockey stick also clashed with evidence of significant natural climate variability in the millennium preceding the industrial age (and before). In particular there was a ‘Medieval Warm Period’ of about three hundred years from circa 950CE, and a so-called ‘Little Ice Age’ extending perhaps (estimates vary) from around 1300 to 1850. These periods had been scientifically acknowledged for decades before Mann’s work. Indeed, they had been acknowledged by the IPCC itself in its previous report (AR2). Commenting on the hockey stick, the geologist Don Easterbrook — the author of three textbooks and 150 research papers — once said:

If you look in GeoRef, which is the bibliography for publications in geology, you will find 485 papers on the Medieval Warm Period and you’ll find 1,413 on the Little Ice Age… And we’re expected to believe that one curve [based on] tree rings is going to overturn all those 1,900 papers? I don’t think so.²⁹

Despite the work of McIntyre and others, there have been strenuous efforts on the part of the climate lobby to salvage the ‘hockey stick’. Its defenders argue that while Mann’s original work might have been flawed, subsequent work has more or less confirmed his overall conclusion. Much of their argument hinges on the idea that the periods of natural temperature variability (such as the medieval warm period and the little Ice Age) were regional rather than worldwide events, and therefore were not significant for the global climate. Yet Willie Soon, the solar physicist, has argued — alongside others — that there is plenty of historical and physical evidence from all around the world to show that these were global patterns, not local blips, and that they can be correlated with long-term fluctuations in solar activity.³⁰

IPCC Bias

As I have mentioned, the IPCC Assessment Reports typically emphasise the more extreme scenarios. They also downplay or ignore scientific evidence and opinion that discredits climate alarmism. Why is there such bias?

Some of it can be ascribed to the mood of cultural catastrophism that I described in my previous article. This mood mainly affects the western member states of the UN, which are heirs to Malthus’ vision of humanity as a morbid growth on nature. However, there are other reasons. Firstly, a bureaucratic organisation is very unlikely to present evidence that reveals its own existence as unnecessary. That would hardly be a recipe for the job security or status of its staff (a fact that applies equally to all the environmentalist NGOs that have been promoting climate change fears from the late 1980s onwards). To point this out is not cynicism; it is simply to note a commonplace fact of human motivation — a truth that would not provoke indignation in most contexts.

The other factor behind bias in the IPCC reports is international politics. For example, in some ways, the narrative of dangerous man-made climate change suits the economic interests of many non-Western member states of the UN — those that belong to the developing world. It fits into an economic narrative that favours the transfer of resources from the richer to the poorer countries (for example, by carbon-emissions trading). However, that is a long story, which I will have to leave to a further article. 

Concerns about the integrity of the IPCC reports even led to a UN investigation. This was undertaken in 2010 by the UN InterAcademy Council (the IAC, since redesignated as the InterAcademy Partnership, or IAP). The IAC’S report reassured readers that the IPCC had ‘served society well.’ Nevertheless, it drily noted that ‘despite these successes, some fundamental changes to the process and the management structure are essential’. For example, with regard to the (then) most recent Assessment Report (the fourth, of 2007), the IAC had some severe strictures. Commenting on Working Group II (the group dealing with ‘Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability’), it remarked on ‘…many vague statements of “high confidence” that are not supported sufficiently in the literature, not put into perspective, or are difficult to refute…’. [p34]. The IAC also criticised the Report for ‘assigning subjective probabilities to ill-defined outcomes [p.37].’ Furthermore, it called for ‘the institution of conflict-of-interest policies for major players in the IPCC assessment process ‘[p51] — a clear recognition of bias.³¹

Thus, the UN’s own scientific watchdog found significant flaws in the IPCC’s work, and made recommendations for improvements. When an institution finds serious fault with one of its own divisions, that would seem a good reason to distrust the output of that division, and to anticipate its reform. Yet the IAC’s critique of the IPCC seems to have had little impact, and the world has taken little notice. An independent foundation, ‘Climate Intelligence’ (or Clintel), has commented that:

After every major IPCC report, the same complaints surface over and over again. The choice of lead authors and authors is ‘arbitrary,’ the IPCC’s own procedures are often not followed. Yet, time and again, nothing changes. … The fourth report resulted in the critical InterAcademy Council report, and so on. AR6 repeats past flaws and is, in many ways, worse than the previous reports.³²

Conclusion – Beware Politicised Science

In this article, I have focussed on the shortcomings of the IPCC. However, a truly adequate critique of climate alarmism would have to include much more than just the IPCC. It would require an explanation of the international political forces that produce the bias of the IPCC. It would also give an account of the climate lobby’s suppression of dissenting scientific voices. What is more, it would explode the idea that there is an overwhelming scientific ‘consensus’ — the much-trumpeted ‘97% of climate scientists’ — behind the claims that human activities are the sole or main cause of warming, and that such warming is a major threat to humanity. But all these matters will have to await another occasion.

In the meanwhile, what can be said, by way of summary, concerning the IPCC? Before I started to research the matter, I expected to find imperfections in its work. Even so, it has astonished me to find out just how extensive and incorrigible those flaws are. To put the matter in a nutshell, the IPCC is a political body which is not to be trusted about climate science. On that note, let us recapitulate the main charges that can be levelled against it:

• The IPCC’s forecasts of dangerous man-made global warming rely on computer modelling which, even with today’s computers, cannot be adequate to the immensely complex task of predicting long-term changes in climate.
• The IPCC incorporates into those models unjustified assumptions about the warming power of CO2 and the supposed positive feedback from water vapour.
• The IPCC has been subject to scathing critiques from distinguished scientists, including some who once worked for it but left in frustration at its methods.
• The IPCC’s Assessment Reports, which form the basis of international treaties, are vitiated by political interference. This is not a failure of governance, but a result of it, in the sense that the IPCC, as its name reveals, is constituted as an inter-governmental rather than a scientific body. Member governments can determine the final content of the reports, especially the ‘summaries for policy makers’.
• The reports are not always informed by the best available science.
• According to the IAC (a separate division of the United Nations, the IPCC’s own parent body) the IPCC is guilty of a variety of sins. These include making ‘…many vague statements of “high confidence” that are not supported sufficiently in the literature…’and failing to institute necessary ‘conflict of interest’ policies.
• To cap it all, the IPCC has helped imprint on the public’s mind the misleading image of the ‘hockey stick’ — perhaps the most potent icon of climate catastrophe that the climate lobby has ever produced — despite the flaws in the science that informed it.

To all this one might add that if the IPCC, which is supposed to represent authoritative climate science, is not to be trusted, what is one to say of extremist groups such as Extinction Rebellion or Just Stop Oil, which go far beyond the IPCC in their claims of immanent doom? But that too is another story.

1. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf
2. Christopher Booker, Global Warming; A Case Study in Groupthink, Global Warming Policy Foundation, 2018; available online at: https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2018/02/Groupthink.pdf

   The author notes [p9] that:

   “The so-called ‘Earth Summit’, which Strong organised and chaired in Rio in 1992, was easily the largest conference the world had ever seen. It was attended by 108 world leaders, ranging from Cuba’s Fidel Castro to a rather more reluctant US President George Bush Sr, along with 20,000 other official delegates. Also present in Rio were 20,000 climate activists and members of green lobby groups, all paid for out of UN and government funds, as arranged by Strong himself. He masterminded every detail of this extraordinary gathering, and ensured that it would set up a Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) to guide the advance to a global ‘climate policy’.

   It was planned that in 1997 the UNFCCC would stage another mega-conference in Kyoto, where the nations of the world would sign a treaty agreeing to make drastic cuts in carbon dioxide emissions. Or, to be more precise, in accordance with Strong’s real long-term agenda, this treaty would commit the ‘developed’ countries of the West to reduce their carbon dioxide emissions (since they were considered chiefly responsible for the problem), while paying out huge sums to the still-developing nations in the rest of the world, including China and India, to assist their economies to catch up with the West.”

3. https://www.post-journal.com/news/top-stories/2024/04/one-ranchers-story-oregons-small-farmers-receiving-cease-and-desist-letters/
4. A pioneering expose of this was the 2011 book Behind the Green Mask by Rosa Koire, which is available online at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/378654219_Rosa_Koire_-_Behind_the_Green_Mask_-_UN_Agenda_21_pdf_-_roflcopter2110

   The author shines a revealing light on the implications of UN Agenda 21. For example:

   “While many support the United Nations for its peacekeeping efforts, few know that it has very specific land use policies that it wants implemented in every city, county, state and nation. The specific plan is called United Nations Agenda 21 Sustainable Development… In a nutshell the plan calls for governments to take control of all land use and not leave any decision making in the hands of private property owners.”

5. https://www.dutchnews.nl/2024/02/farmers-protests-spread-to-the-netherlands-border-roads-closed/ and https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2024/feb/26/farmers-protests-brussels-eu-agriculture-leaders-riot-police/
6. https://www.esgtoday.com/eu-adopts-law-requiring-all-new-buildings-to-be-zero-emissions-by-2030 and https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2023/09/01/property-owners-failing-comply-new-energy-rules-face-prison/
7. https://www.blackrock.com/lu/intermediaries/themes/sustainable-investing/esg-integration
8. See p12 of https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Lindzen-Happer-Koonin-climate-science-4-24.pdf
9. UK Committee on Climate Change report, available online at: https://www.theccc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/2019/05/Net-Zero-The-UKs-contribution-to-stopping-global-warming.pdf
10. Cloud energy variation references: https://dailysceptic.org/2024/06/08/the-ipcc-catastrophe-narrative-is-a-myth/ and https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nd2GIx1tX8A
11. https://wattsupwiththat.com/2010/03/08/the-logarithmic-effect-of-carbon-dioxide/
12. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2666496823000456
13. https://www.thegwpf.org/content/uploads/2017/02/Curry-2017.pdf
14. The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, Clintel, p. 118. The report is available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373658782_The_Frozen_Climate_Views_of_the_IPCC
15. Compare these three extracts from IPCC reports:

    ‘The size of this [global] warming is broadly consistent with predictions of climate models, but it is also of the same magnitude as natural climate variability.’ (AR1, 1990)

    ‘The balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.’ (AR2, 1995)

    ‘Human activities, principally through emissions of greenhouse gases, have unequivocally caused global warming, with global surface temperature reaching 1.1°C above 1850-1900 in 2011-2020.’ (IPCC Synthesis report, 2023)

16. See pages 7 and 8 of https://co2coalition.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/Lindzen-Happer-Koonin-climate-science-4-24.pdf

    The two IPCC rules are:

    IPCC SPM Rule No.1: All Summaries for Policymakers (SPMs) Are Approved Line by Line by Member Governments

    ‘IPCC Fact Sheet: How does the IPCC approve reports? ‘Approval’ is the process used for IPCC Summaries for Policymakers (SPMs). Approval signifies that the material has been subject to detailed, line-by-line discussion, leading to agreement among the participating IPCC member countries, in consultation with the scientists responsible for drafting the report.’17 (Emphasis added)

    Since governments control the SPMs, the SPMs are merely government opinions. Therefore, they have no value as science. What about the thousands of pages in the IPCC reports? A second IPCC rule requires that everything in an IPCC published report must be consistent with what the governments agree to in the SPMs about CO2 and fossil fuels. Any drafts the independent scientists write are rewritten as necessary to be consistent with the SPM.

    IPCC Reports Rule No. 2: Government SPMs Override Any Inconsistent Conclusions Scientists Write for IPCC Reports

    IPCC Fact Sheet: ‘’Acceptance’ is the process used for the full underlying report in a Working Group Assessment Report or a Special Report after its SPM has been approved…. Changes …are limited to those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers.’ IPCC Fact Sheet, supra. (Emphasis added).

17. Frederick Seitz, A Major Deception on Global Warming, Wall Street Journal, 1996; available online at: https://stephenschneider.stanford.edu/Publications/PDF_Papers/WSJ_June12.pdf
18. Donna Laframboise, The Delinquent Teenager Who was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, 2011, chapter 26
19. Ibid., p111
20. Willie Soon, Climate Change, The Facts, 2015, chapter 4, ‘Sun Shunned’. Soon comments:

    “In manipulating its selection and representation of the scientific literature on the solar influence on global mean surface temperature, the IPCC has attempted to bolster the stance of a tiny minority of scientists and then to pretend, with 95 per cent confidence, that this represents a ‘scientific consensus’. Such a consensus, even if it did exist, would be of no interest to science. The central lesson to be learned from this episode in scientific history is that to create an organisation financially and ideologically dependent upon coming to a single, aprioristic viewpoint, regardless of the objective truth, is to create a monster that ignores the truth.”

21. Laframboise, The Delinquent Teenager…, chapter 4
22. Ibid., chapter 5
23. Ibid., chapter 6
24. Ibid., chapter 7
25. Ibid., p150
26. McKitrick: What is the hockey stick debate about? Available online at: What is the ‘Hockey Stick’ Debate About? (utexas.edu) The author notes:

    “The hockey stick graph appears to show that the Earth’s climate was very stable from AD1000 to 1900, then suddenly began to change, with temperatures in the Northern Hemisphere rising dramatically. It was central to the 2001 Third Assessment Report (TAR) from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). It appears as Figure 1b in the Working Group 1 Summary for Policymakers, Figure 5 in the Technical Summary, twice in Chapter 2 (Figures 2-20 and 2-21) of the main report, and Figures 2-3 and 9-1B in the Synthesis Report. Referring to this figure, the IPCC Summary for Policymakers (p. 3) claimed it is likely ‘that the 1990s has been the warmest decade and 1998 the warmest year of the millennium’ for the Northern Hemisphere.”

27. For a detailed critique, see The Hockey Stick Illusion, by A W Montford, 2015
28. From Climate Change: The Facts, 2015, chapter 14 by Ross McKitrick’. The author notes:

    “A very brief summary of the problems of the hockey stick would go like this. Mann’s algorithm, applied to a large proxy data set, extracted the shape associated with one small and controversial subset of the tree rings records, namely the bristlecone pine cores from high and arid mountains in the US southwest. The trees are extremely long-lived, but grow in highly contorted shapes as bark dies back to a single twisted strip. The scientists who published the data had specifically warned that the ring widths should not be used for temperature reconstruction, and in particular their twentieth century portion is unlike the climatic history of the region, and is probably biased by other factors. Mann’s method exaggerated the significance of the bristlecones so as to make their chronology out to be the dominant global climatic pattern rather than a minor (and likely inaccurate) regional one; Mann then understated the uncertainties of the final climate reconstruction, leading to the claim that 1998 was the warmest year of the last millennium, a claim that was not, in reality, supportable in the data. Furthermore, Mann put obstacles in place for subsequent researchers wanting to obtain his data and replicate his methodologies, most of which were only resolved by the interventions of US Congressional investigators and the editors of Nature magazine, both of whom demanded full release of his data and methodologies some six years after publication of his original Nature paper.”

29. Quoted by Donna Laframboise in The Delinquent Teenager…, pp.150-151
30. Soon discusses these points in this video.
31. Climate Change Assessments; Review of the Processes and Procedures of the IPCC; InterAcademy Council, available online at: https://www.ipcc.ch/site/assets/uploads/2018/03/doc07_p32_report_IAC.pdf

    The authors note that:

    “The IPCC should develop and adopt a rigorous conflict of interest policy that applies to all individuals directly involved in the preparation of IPCC reports, including senior IPCC leadership (IPCC Chair and Vice Chairs), authors with responsibilities for report content (i.e., Working Group Co-chairs, Coordinating Lead Authors, and Lead Authors), Review Editors, and technical staff directly involved in report preparation (e.g., staff of Technical Support Units and the IPCC Secretariat). [p52]

    The Committee found that some existing IPCC review procedures are not always followed and that others are weak. In particular, Review Editors do not fully use their authority to ensure that review comments receive appropriate consideration by Lead Authors and that controversial issues are reflected adequately in the report. [p52]

    IPCC’s guidance for addressing uncertainties in the Fourth Assessment Report urge authors to consider the amount of evidence and level of agreement about all conclusions and to apply subjective probabilities of confidence to conclusions when there was “high agreement, much evidence.” However, such guidance was not always followed, as exemplified by the many statements in the Working Group II Summary for Policy Makers that are assigned high confidence, but are based on little evidence. [p52]

    Equally important is combating confirmation bias—the tendency of authors to place too much weight on their own views relative to other views (Jonas et al., 2001). As pointed out to the Committee by a presenter and some questionnaire respondents, alternative views are not always cited in a chapter if the Lead Authors do not agree with them. [p20]”

32. The Frozen Climate Views of the IPCC, Clintel, Epilogue [p171], available online at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/373658782_The_Frozen_Climate_Views_of_the_IPCC