By Kevin Mooney
CNSNews.com Staff Writer
February 02, 2007
(CNSNews.com) - Scientific evidence for human-induced global warming will receive a significant boost Friday when the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) releases the summary of a key report, according to environmental activists and top Democrats in Congress.
But wait.
Some climate researchers and environmental scientists previously associated with the IPCC claim the public relations summary of the panel's fourth assessment report distorts the actual scientific findings and that the discrepancies are driven by a political agenda.
The IPCC Summary for Policymakers, roughly 20 pages long, is primarily the work of political appointees, not of scientists, according to Richard Lindzen, professor of atmospheric science at MIT.
The full text will not be available for another three months, as two further documents making up the fourth assessment report are scheduled to be released in April and May.
Lindzen specialized in the study of clouds and water vapor for IPCC's third assessment report, which was released in 2001.
He told Cybercast News Service the rules for the fourth assessment report specifically require changes to be made to the body that will bring it into line with the summary statement.
"If you were doing that with a business report, the federal trade commission would be down your throat," Lindzen said.
"These people are openly declaring that they are going to commit scientific misconduct that will be paid for by the United Nations," Harvard University physicist Lubos Motl wrote on his website last week.
"If they find an error in the summary, they won't fix it," Motl said. "Instead, they will 'adjust' the technical report so that it looks consistent."
The relevant provision, which appears in an appendix of the IPCC's principles, also attracted the attention of Sen. James Inhofe (R-Okla.), a global warming skeptic and long-time critic of the IPCC process.
In a statement Inhofe slammed what he termed the "systematic and documented abuse" of the scientific process by the IPCC and called for changes that would mitigate against relevant scientific evidence from being excluded from its reports.
While Inhofe has previously questioned the "alarmist" findings contained in some climate change studies, Democratic colleagues, such as Sen. Barbara Boxer of California, the new chairwoman of the Senate Environment and Public Works Committee, have generally taken a different line.
"If we fail to take action on global warming now, we can expect future catastrophic impacts like rising sea levels, more extreme weather events of all kinds, damage to coral reefs and fisheries, and negative impacts on food production and water supplies," Boxer said Tuesday.
"We need to act soon, before we reach a tipping point when irreversible changes to the world we know may occur."
In the U.S. House, meanwhile, Rep. Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.), who chairs the Oversight and Government Reform Hearing, said he believes the science on global warming has "grown more compelling" over the past 15 years.
A memorandum prepared by the committee's Democratic majority staff invokes the IPCC report as proof that a strong scientific consensus has emerged on global warming.
This sentiment is shared by public advocacy groups such as the Union of Concerned Scientists (USC), which described the last IPCC report as a "landmark review" presenting evidence for an "overwhelming scientific consensus" on global warming.
In recent congressional testimony, Francesca Grifo, a USC senior scientist, claimed the reality of human influence upon climate change has been "repeatedly affirmed by scientific experts."
'Misrepresented'
Nonetheless, at least one scientific expert saw fit to resign from participation in the latest IPCC report, because he says "media sessions" associated with his research on hurricanes and tropical cyclones were being misrepresented.
Christopher Landsea, who is now science and operations officer at the National Hurricane Center in Miami, resigned from the IPCC's fourth assessment team two years ago.
In his resignation letter, Landsea expressed concern over statements by the IPCC to the media, which he said were "far outside current scientific understandings."
Landsea told Cybercast News Service his primary concern was with how lead authors representing the IPCC were interacting with the public and the media.
The hurricane activity Landsea has observed over the past 12 years is not, in his estimation, out of proportion with what was experienced in the mid-20th century during the last active hurricane cycle.
While he believes a "good portion" of the warming that has been detected most recently is manmade, the "sensitivity" to those changes in the areas where hurricanes form has been "very tiny."
Landsea also said the most relevant, up-to-date work done in this area comes from the The International Workshop on Tropical Cyclone, rather than from the IPCC.
According to Sterling Burnett, senior fellow with the National Center for Policy Analysis, the IPCC draws from experts in fields that don't necessarily have the best perspective to properly assess the factors behind warming and cooling periods.
Bonner Cohen, author of "The Green Wave: Environmentalism and Its Consequences," said in an interview he had similar concerns with what he views as an overly narrow perspective on the science of global warming.
He described geology as the "dog that is barking but being crowded out."
Cohen also said the political summary available on Friday, which precedes the release of the actual scientific data by three months, will overshadow the most important findings in the full report.
"It is safe to assume the summary will have the usual buzzwords, it is going to talk about 'dire consequences' and this is going to be for the media," he said.
But the actual report -- when it comes out later this year -- will be read by less than one percent of the world's journalists and will be treated accordingly in the media, Cohen predicted.
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