“A monopoly on official wisdom” — the IPCC

FT resident global warming alarmist Fiona Harvey must be flaming. Her colleague Clive Crook just came out with an article (subscription required) in today’s FT attacking the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change — the infamous IPCC. Crook states rather bluntly:

It is a seriously flawed enterprise and unworthy of the slavish respect accorded to it by most governments and the media. In the decisions which have already been made on climate-change mitigation, to say nothing of future decisions, the stakes are enormous. In guiding these momentous judgments, the flawed IPCC process has been granted, in effect, a monopoly of official wisdom. That needs to change and the IPCC itself must be reformed.

For a fully documented indictment, read the article by David Henderson in the current issue of World Economics. Mr Henderson, a distinguished academic economist and former head of economics at the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, has been tangling with the IPCC for some time.

Crook concludes with an even blunter IPCC assessment:

But if governments are to get the best advice, they need information and analysis from an open and disinterested source – or else from multiple dissenting sources. With the environmental risks calmly laid out, framing the right policies demands proper political accountability and a much wider range of opinion and expertise than the IPCC currently provides. One incompetent institution, committed to its own agenda, should never have been granted this degree of actual and moral authority over the science, over public presentation of the science and over calls for ”more serious action” that go well beyond the science.