The United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) on September 27, 2013 released the “Summary for Policymakers” of its fifth and latest assessment of Earth’s climate. The IPCC report comes more than a week after the Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change (NIPCC) released the more-than-1,000-page Climate Change Reconsidered II: Physical Science (PDF) and its accompanying Summary for Policymakers (PDF).
The following statement from environment experts at The Heartland Institute — which published and is distributing the new NIPCC report and Summary for Policymakers —may be used for attribution. To read full the NIPCC report and summary, as well as get background on the report’s lead authors, visit the Climate Change Reconsidered Web site.
To interview Joseph Bast, please contact Director of Communications Jim Lakely at [email protected] or call or text 312/731-9364.
“We urge the public to compare and contrast these two reports on what is probably the most important public policy issue of our age. The NIPCC report was produced by a team of independent scientists with no agenda other than to find the truth. The Summary for Policymakers (SPM) for the NIPCC report is faithful to the full study.
“The IPCC study, in contrast, is produced by a government agency, part of the United Nations. That agency’s mission is to find a human impact on climate. Its SPM does not accurately reflect the contents of the complete study, which hasn’t even been completed. Over the history of the IPCC, each report has expressed a higher level of alarmism and a higher level of confidence in its certainty that man-made global warming will be harmful.
“The NIPCC report finds the human impact on climate is very small, and as a result, any warming that may be due to human greenhouse gas emissions is likely to be so small as to be invisible against a background of natural variability. The authors of the NIPCC study do not believe man-made global warming is a crisis, or that scientists know enough about how the climate works to make policy-relevant recommendations to the world’s government leaders.
“We look forward to reading the new SPM from the IPCC. We hope it marks a departure from the alarmism that has characterized past reports, although early press reports lead us to suspect we’ll be disappointed. And we urge everyone with an interest in the global warming debate to compare it to the NIPCC SPM and complete report at the Climate Change Reconsidered Web site.”
“Well, well. The IPCC has dispatched its latest SPM (or SPAM: Summary for Policymakers and Media). And given the bind they were in (global warming unrealized for a decade and a half) one might have some sympathy for them. Everyone makes mistakes, even practitioners of overheated rhetoric and political manipulation.
“One option for them was to pull the chord and admit that there is something that they never fully understood about climate – even their own scientists always warned them about that. I can cite chapter and verse in the main body of the TAR. If they did that, after outbreaks of anger by true believers and other suckers, some of us would no doubt make fun of them for a while (short of TARing and feathering), but we would all eventually get on to a more realistic outlook on these things.
“The second option was that they could act like Saddam’s information minister who with a straight face asserted that the Americans were not at the Bagdad airport. Alas, they have elected the second option. The mea culpa lines in the draft SPM were disappeared, and the undead specter of human induced global warming and hilarious bamboozling para-scientific probability language was reanimated for one more nostalgia tour. But the time for thermal theater is nearly at an end at long last. All they have done is pushed off the date a little longer that I and many of my scientific colleagues have been waiting twenty five years for: the date when we get to say, ‘I told you so.’
“I had hoped that it would come before I retire, and before all of science was made into a laughing stock. Oh ,well. Maybe I can go out and get myself denounced as a ‘denier’ one more time, for old times sake, before IPCC audiences finally fail to show up and someone switches out the lights on their stage.”
“Why should we believe what the IPCC predicts, given: the model prediction/projection failures, plus manipulation of the data, plus hiding of data , plus false claims that those preparing IPCC reports are experts, plus Climategate in general, plus Glaciergate?
“Pick an area of physics and ask whether that area has been subjected to the same kind of behavior as engaged in by the IPCC. Would those working in that area be believed?”
The Heartland Institute is a 29-year-old national nonprofit organization headquartered in Chicago, Illinois. Its mission is to discover, develop, and promote free-market solutions to social and economic problems. For more information, visit our Web site< or call 312/377-4000.
Joseph Bast is a Senior Fellow at The Heartland Institute. He cofounded Heartland in 1984, serving as executive director then as president & CEO until January 2018. His research and writing focuses on climate change and energy policy.
