The Shenanigans Continue
Retired physicist Dr. Ralph Alexander writes a very interesting and informative research paper on the varying stages during the preparation of a United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report (IPCC). He compares it to a children’s game of “Chinese Whispers” or “Telephone” where messages are secretively sent along a line or circle of children to ascertain how distorted the message is when it arrives at the final child. I link that paper here.
As I have written previously, to produce the Assessment Reports, of which there are 6 now, the IPCC works in 3 groups. Group I, with a majority in a scientific discipline, assesses the current climate science. Group II, is largely filled with non-climate scientists, engineers, and government bureaucrats who review the impacts of climate and any mitigation measures. Group III, who write the Summary for Policymakers (SPM), are all government representatives and bureaucrats. As Alexander contends, the SPM is often written and completed before the work of Groups I and II is fully finished. Further, when forming the IPCC, the original mission statement advocated that the reports would not be, in any manner political. The SPM certainly and effectively evades that objective. In essence, the entourage contributing to the SPM becomes kind of a group soliloquy of partisan agents without necessarily using any of the science of climate.
We further discover that the official press releases, prepared by public relations officials, will differ substantially from even the SPM.
In the research at hand, Alexander looks at two topics in the IPCC’s Sixth Assessment Report released in 2021: He first reviews the reconstructions of global temperatures over the last two millennia using proxies known as the Hockey Stick Temperature Graph (HSTG) and then their coverage of marine heat waves. Interestingly in the first case, neither Groups I nor II even mentioned the discredited HSTG but it was prominently presented in the SPM.
As Dr. Alexander explains, “Take the global temperature reconstructions. The political hacks introduced Michael Mann’s famous Hockey Stick graph into the Summary for Policymakers, even though this was not even mentioned by the scientists in the report itself. This graph is then used by the press officers to claim that current temperatures are ‘unprecedented’, but the scientists who wrote the original report said nothing of the sort, and indeed reported data that would contradict such a claim.”
I’m certain anyone and everyone can glean the partisan promotion of climate change in that action.
A director of the Global Warming Policy Foundation (GWPF) the organization that published the paper said, “Ralph Alexander’s paper is a revelation, demonstrating beyond all reasonable doubt that the public are being failed by IPCC officials and the news media. The message is clear. You can’t trust the habitual hype and exaggeration the green establishment would like you to believe on climate.”
From the time of an IPCC audit by Canadian writer, photographer, and feminist activist, Donna Laframboise, this organization has shown its colors as advocate partisan hacks, especially at the backend where policies are produced and press releases issued. The IPCC, from its founding and furtherance, stated that it would only use peer-reviewed sources and references, yet the Laframboise audit team found 5,587 pieces of non-peer-reviewed literature and the unmitigated and prejudicial involvement of several major environmental groups.
In August of 2022, the GWPF also published “Extreme Weather the IPCC’s Changing Tune” again authored by Dr. Alexander. I link that paper here. In summation, the IPCC, like many proponent climate change organizations and advocates, don't alter their views to fit the facts but rather they alter their facts to fit their views.
The shenanigans continue.