On the Scientific Quackery of the Carbon Cult

It’s change you can believe in... in fact all it IS is a belief:

The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of global disasters, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month's Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by developing countries for compensation of $100 billion (£62 billion) from the rich nations blamed for creating the most emissions.

Ed Miliband, the energy and climate change minister, has suggested British and overseas floods — such as those in Bangladesh in 2007 — could be linked to global warming. Barack Obama, the US president, said last autumn: "More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent."

In the wake of the non-meltdown of the Himalayan icecaps that display a meltdown in the practice of ‘activist-science’, we find further truthy-truthiness:

It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report's own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.

That it would cost $100 billion or some part of $100 billion matters little to those who insist that ‘we have to do something!’ and shove it through in a manner reminiscent of Genghis Khan. In fact we don’t, especially when another $100 billion will not be able to be found to do something real, and founded on, at the very least, something founded partially in fact if that’s at all possible.

It’s urban myth as science, not to mention the fact that it feeds the racketeering.

The IPCC had warned that climate change was likely to melt most of the Himalayan glaciers by 2035 -- an idea considered ludicrous by most glaciologists. Last week, a humbled IPCC retracted that claim and corrected its report.

However, the same bogus claim has been cited in grant applications for TERI. One of them, announced earlier this month, resulted in the $US500,000 grant from Carnegie. An extract from the grant application published on Carnegie's website said: "The Himalaya glaciers, vital to more than a dozen major rivers that sustain hundreds of millions of people in South Asia, are melting and receding at a dangerous rate.

"One authoritative study reported that most of the glaciers in the region `will vanish within 40 years as a result of global warming, resulting in widespread water shortages'."

The Carnegie money was specifically given to aid research into "the potential security and humanitarian impact on the region" as the glaciers began to disappear. Dr Pachauri has since acknowledged that this threat, if it exists, will take centuries to have any serious effect.

It’s telling that to the political environmentalists who are actually seeking a revolutionary seizure of the control people can have over their fate, that this standard is adequate: i.e. the incorporation in whole of a WWF article into the IPCC report asserting that, unlike previous assumptions, the Amazon go from forest to savannah the next time you look at them, and that Jesus will strangle a puppy if mankind doesn’t ‘at least do something. Veracity of the source?

The two expert authors of the WWF report so casually cited by the IPCC as part of its, ahem, “robust” “peer-reviewed” process weren’t even Amazon specialists. One, Dr PF Moore, is a policy analyst.

Yeah, but he’s, like, a Doctor, ya know?

And the lead author Andy Rowell is a freelance journalist (for the Guardian, natch) and green activist.

Activist with a private line into print, scientist... repeat that often enough, and you’ll be expected to believe it.