Article Tags: Fred Singer, Headline Story
Almost daily, we learn about new problems with the formerly respected UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC): In their 2001 report, they claimed that the 20th century was “unusual” and blamed it on human-released greenhouse gases. Their infamous temperature graph shown there, shaped like a hockey stick, did away with the well-established Medieval Warm Period (around 1000AD, when Vikings were able to settle in Southern Greenland and grow crops there) and the following Little Ice Age (around 1400 to 1800AD). Two Canadians exposed the bad data used by the IPCC and the statistical errors in their analysis.
The most recent IPCC report of 2007 predicted the disappearance of the Himalayan glaciers within 25 years; the imminent death of nearly half the Amazon rain forest; and major damage from stronger hurricanes — all in contradiction to expert opinions offered by its appointed reviewers, but ignored by IPCC editors for mostly ideological reasons. More scandalous even, the IPCC based their lurid predictions on anecdotal, non-peer-reviewed sources — not at all in accord with its solemnly announced principles and scientific standards.
These events showed not only a general sloppiness of IPCC procedures but also an extreme bias — quite inappropriate to a supposedly impartial scientific survey. By themselves, they do not invalidate the basic IPCC conclusion — that a warming in the latter half of the 20th century was human-caused, presumably by the rise of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide. Yet all of these missteps pale in comparison to ClimateGate, which calls into question the very temperature data used by the IPCC’s main policy result.
Source: americanthinker.com