United Nations Perverts Science for Political Advantage

Washington, D.C., March 7, 2001 – The release this week of the United Nations’ latest summary reports on global warming have many of the scientists who contributed to them up in arms over the way their work has been twisted to serve a political agenda. The Third Assessment Report’s three Summaries for Policy Makers have taken the work of the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change’s (IPCC) contributing scientists and distorted it until if reflects the political agenda of its bureaucratic authors – that catastrophic global warming is undeniable, that the problem demands massive intervention in the global economy, and that the nations of the world have no rational choice but to support the Kyoto Protocol in order to stave off disaster. 

The actual science of the Third Assessment Report (TAR), however, in no way supports such conclusions. The Summaries for Policy Makers are less a condensed version of the IPCC’s full report than they are effective propaganda tools for misleading the media and alarming the public into supporting the policies of international environmental activists. Several co-authors of the full TAR have voiced their concerns:

It [the IPCC report] is presented as a consensus that involves hundreds, perhaps thousands, of scientists and none of them were asked if they agreed with anything in the report except for the one or two pages they worked on. It uses summaries to misrepresent what scientists say; uses language that means different things to scientists and laymen; exploits public ignorance over quantitative matters; exploits what scientists can agree on while ignoring disagreements to support the global warming agenda; exaggerates scientific accuracy and certainty; exaggerates the authority of undistinguished scientists; and poses leading questions.

~Dr. Richard Lindzen, Alfred P. Sloan professor of meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Source: Address to the Cooler Heads Coalition, Washington, DC, March 1, 2001.

The world is in much better shape than this doomsday scenario paints. There are 245 different results in that report, and this was the worst-case scenario. It’s the one that’s not going to happen. It was the extreme case of all the different things that can make the world warm.

~Dr. John Christy, director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama at Huntsville. Source: The Times (London), February 20, 2001.

Based on the science you simply can’t make the statement that it is going to warm faster.

~Dr. Andrew Weaver, Canada Research Chair in atmospheric science at the University of Victoria. Source: Toronto Star, January 23, 2001.

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