IPCC’s Synthesis Report Focuses More on Ideology than Science

The UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) latest Synthesis Report, released on March 20, reads like a far-left manifesto, promoting “redistributive policies,” social justice, and equity, pushing policies to change behavior and lifestyles, and advancing an anti-conventional fuel agenda.

Science is supposed to answer objective questions and not make value judgments. Policymakers can then use the science to inform their policy decisions, which are inherently subjective.

The Synthesis Report though doesn’t inform through science as much as advocate and disguise favored policy outcomes as science.  The conflating of science and policy is a major problem in general, and there’s no better example of this problem than the IPCC’s work.

Regarding the science, the IPCC appears to have done a poor job.  For example, as climate expert Roger Pielke Jr. points out, the IPCC uses “loss and damage” as a major reason to take action and then doesn’t even demonstrate the data to make its case.  This may be understandable because the data show that “the overall number of weather and climate disasters have decreased so far this century, economic losses [are] down as a proportion of economic activity and deaths and people affected by extremes are sharply down in recent decades.”

Dr. Pielke also explains that he published a literature review on loss and damage that included 54 studies, which the IPCC ignored.  Further, the IPCC’s literature review “ignored 53 of the 54 papers, choosing to cite only one paper which asserted the attribution of losses to greenhouse gas emissions – the other 53 did not.”

The Synthesis Report just came out, and a more detailed review will reveal far more about its contents.  However, it’s already clear that the report is more of an advocacy document than an objective review of the science.