Waxman’s Inquisition Should Look at the UN IPCC

Representative Henry Waxman (D-Calif.), Chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, this week launched an investigation of the several charges that the Bush Administration has politically manipulated and interfered with scientific research so as to make the science fit its policies. The charges are specious, as I and my CEI colleagues and many others have shown, but for a real example of the political manipulation of science, Chairman Waxman should take a look at the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Science Change. The IPCC today released its 21-page Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the first volume of its Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). The SPM is not written or approved by the hundreds of scientists that work on the countless sections of the many chapters of the roughly-thousand-page AR4 volume 1. Rather, the SPM is written by the IPCC’s member governments with technical and drafting assistance from the IPCC’s scientific bureaucrats and lead authors of chapters. The SPM was released today, but the mammoth volume itself won’t be published until late spring. That’s so they can adjust the report itself to agree with the SPM. The purpose of the IPCC is to support the agenda of the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change (the original 1992 Rio climate treaty, of which the 1997 Kyoto Protocol is a part). Thus the IPCC is quite open about the fact that it is twisting scientific research to support its alarmist political agenda. Chairman Waxman needs to launch an investigation immediately. The scientific integrity of the IPCC is at stake.