A Brief History of the IPCC
The rise in environmental consciousness since the 1970s has focused on a succession of ‘calamities’:
cancer epidemics from chemicals, extinction of birds and other species by pesticides, the depletion of the ozone layer by supersonic transports and later by freons, the death of forests (‘Waldsterben’) because of acid rain, and finally, global warming, the “mother of all environmental scares” (according to the late Aaron Wildavsky).
The IPCC can trace its roots to World Earth Day in 1970, the Stockholm Conference in 1971-72, and the Villach Conferences in 1980 and 1985. In July 1986, the United Nations Environment
Program (UNEP) and the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) established the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) as an organ of the United Nations.
The IPCC’s key personnel and lead authors were appointed by governments, and its Summaries for Policymakers (SPM) have been subject to approval by member governments of the UN. The
scientists involved with the IPCC are almost all supported by government contracts, which pay not only for their research but for their IPCC activities. Most travel to and hotel accommodations at exotic locations for the drafting authors is paid with government funds.
The history of the IPCC has been described in several publications. What is not emphasized, however, is the fact that it was an activist enterprise from the very beginning. Its agenda was to justify control of the emission of greenhouse gases, especially carbon dioxide. Consequently, its
scientific reports have focused solely on evidence that might point toward human-induced climate change. The role of the IPCC “is to assess on a comprehensive, objective, open and transparent basis the latest scientific, technical and
socio-economic literature produced worldwide relevant to the understanding of the risk of human-induced climate change, its observed and projected impacts and options for adaptation and
mitigation” (emphasis added) [IPCC 2008].
The IPCC’s three chief ideologues have been (the late) Professor Bert Bolin, a meteorologist at Stockholm University; Dr. Robert Watson, anatmospheric chemist at NASA, later at the World Bank, and now chief scientist at the UK Department
of Environment, Food and Rural Affairs; and Dr. John Houghton, an atmospheric radiation physicist at Oxford University, later head of the UK Met Office as Sir John Houghton.
Watson had chaired a self-appointed group to find evidence for a human effect on stratospheric ozone and was instrumental in pushing for the 1987 Montreal Protocol to control the emission of chlorofluorocarbons (CFCs). Using the blueprint of the Montreal Protocol, environmental lawyer David Doniger of the Natural Resources Defense Council then laid out a plan to achieve the same kind of control mechanism for greenhouse gases, a plan that eventually was adopted as the Kyoto Protocol.
From the very beginning, the IPCC was a political rather than scientific entity, with its leading scientists reflecting the positions of their governments or seeking to induce their governments to adopt the IPCC position. In particular, a small
group of activists wrote the all-important Summary v
for Policymakers (SPM) for each of the four IPCC reports [McKitrick et al. 2007].
While we are often told about the thousands of scientists on whose work the Assessment reports are based, the vast majority of these scientists have no direct influence on the conclusions expressed by the IPCC. Those are produced by an inner core of scientists, and the SPMs are revised and agreed to, line-by-line, by representatives of member governments. This obviously is not how real scientific research is reviewed and published. These SPMs turn out, in all cases, to be highly selective summaries of the voluminous science reports – typically 800 or more pages, with no indexes (except, finally, the Fourth Assessment Report released in 2007), and essentially unreadable except by dedicated scientists.
The IPCC’s First Assessment Report [IPCCFAR 1990] concluded that the observed temperature changes were “broadly consistent” with greenhouse models. Without much analysis, it gave the “climate sensitivity” of a 1.5 to 4.5º C temperature rise for a doubling of greenhouse gases. The IPCC-FAR led
to the adoption of the Global Climate Treaty at the 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro.
The FAR drew a critical response [SEPP 1992]. FAR and the IPCC’s style of work also were criticized in two editorials in Nature [Anonymous 1994, Maddox 1991].
The IPCC’s Second Assessment Report [IPCCSAR 1995] was completed in 1995 and published in 1996. Its SPM contained the memorable conclusion, “the balance of evidence suggests a discernible human influence on global climate.” The SAR was
again heavily criticized, this time for having undergone significant changes in the body of the report to make it ‘conform’ to the SPM – after it was finally approved by the scientists involved in writing the report. Not only was the report altered, but a key graph was also doctored to suggest a
human influence. The evidence presented to support the SPM conclusion turned out to be completely spurious.
There is voluminous material available about these text changes, including a Wall Street Journal editorial article by Dr. Frederick Seitz [Seitz 1996]. This led to heated discussions between supporters of the IPCC and those who were aware of the altered text and graph, including an exchange of letters in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society
[Singer et al. 1997].
SAR also provoked the 1996 publication of the Leipzig Declaration by SEPP, which was signed by some 100 climate scientists. A booklet titled “The Scientific Case Against the Global Climate Treaty” followed in September 1997 and was translated into several languages. [SEPP 1997. All these are
available online at www.sepp.org.]
In spite of its obvious shortcomings, the IPCC report provided the underpinning for the Kyoto Protocol, which was adopted in December 1997. The background is described in detail in the booklet “Climate Policy – From Rio to Kyoto,” published by the Hoover Institution [Singer 2000]. The Kyoto
Protocol also provoked the adoption of a short statement expressing doubt about its scientific foundation by the Oregon Institute for Science and Medicine, which attracted more than 19,000 signatures from scientists, mainly in the U.S. [The
statement is still attracting signatures, and can be viewed at www.oism.org.]
The Third Assessment Report of the IPCC [IPCC-TAR 2001] was noteworthy for its use of spurious scientific papers to back up its SPM claim of “new and stronger evidence” of anthropogenic global warming. One of these was the so called
‘hockey-stick’ paper, an analysis of proxy data, which claimed the twentieth century was the warmest in the past 1,000 years. The paper was later found to contain basic errors in its statistical analysis. The IPCC also supported a paper that
claimed pre-1940 warming was of human origin and caused by greenhouse gases. This work, too, contained fundamental errors in its statistical analysis. The SEPP response to TAR was a 2002 booklet, “The Kyoto Protocol is Not Backed by
Science” [SEPP 2002].
The Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC [IPCC-AR4 2007] was published in 2007; the SPM of Working Group I was released in February; and the full report from this Working Group was
released in May – after it had been changed, once again, to ‘conform’ to the Summary. It is significant that AR4 no longer makes use of the hockey-stick paper or the paper claiming pre-1940 human-caused warming.
AR4 concluded that “most of the observed increase in global average temperatures since the mid-20th century is very likely due to the observed increase in anthropogenic greenhouse gas
concentrations” (emphasis in the original). However, as the present report will show, it ignored vi
available evidence against a human contribution to current warming and the substantial research of the past few years on the effects of solar activity on climate change.
Why have the IPCC reports been marred by controversy and so frequently contradicted by subsequent research? Certainly its agenda to find evidence of a human role in climate change is a major reason; its organization as a government entity beholden to political agendas is another major reason; and the large professional and financial rewards that go to scientists and bureaucrats who are willing to bend scientific facts to match those agendas is yet a third major reason.
Another reason for the IPCC’s unreliability is the naive acceptance by policymakers of ‘peerreviewed’ literature as necessarily authoritative. It has become the case that refereeing standards for many climate-change papers are inadequate, often because of the use of an ‘invisible college’ of reviewers of like inclination to a paper’s authors.
[Wegman et al. 2006]
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