Wednesday, January 14, 2009

Protecting The IPCC Turf

There are some who are dismissive of non-alarmists on climate. Their allegiance to AGW theory often causes them to be imperious and derogatory in their remarks, with any questioning of the alarmist dogma derided as lacking in credibility or the product of ideological paranoia (a theme developed more fully here).

The latest post from Roger Pielke Sr. is difficult to dismiss because of the accepted expertise of its author and the facts he documents.

A recent participant at a planning meeting convened by the National Academy of Sciences and the National Research Council to discuss The detection and attribution of the solar influence on climate change, Pielke Sr. details the meeting agenda, its participants and those presentation that were made public.

He comments:
  • The proposal for a formal NRC Panel was rejected..., unless it was very narrowly focused, such as on "decadal forecasts". The agency representatives (from NASA and the NSF) were similarly not willing to support such a study.
  • The reason, undoubtedly preordained before we even met on that Monday, is that a significant number of the members of the Committee were (and presumably still are) active participants of the IPCC assessment, as documented above.
  • Thus, the intensity of the dismissive and negative comments by a number of the committee members, and from even several of the agency representatives, with respect to any view that differed from the IPCC orthodoxy, made abundantly clear, that there was no interest in vesting an assessment of climate to anyone but the IPCC.
  • The IPCC is actually a relatively small group of individuals who are using the IPCC process to control what policymakers and the public learn about climate on multi-decadal time scales. This NRC planning process further demonstrates the intent of the IPCC members to manipulate the science, so that their viewpoints are the only ones that reach the policymakers.
His post is a serious indictment of the supposed neutrality of scientific enquiry into climate and a confirmation of many of the allegations of bureaucratic politicization within the IPCC world of modeled climate behaviors.