This is a guest article by Donna Laframboise.

Last summer the National Association of Evangelicals, an organization largely in America but with some representation in my country, Canada, published a report that urges Christians to care deeply about climate change. Titled Loving the Least of These, it relies on the work of a United Nations (UN) entity to make its case.

Having written two books about that entity—the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—I was sorry to discover that Loving the Least of These exhibits an alarming degree of naivety.

Let us start with the UN itself. Whatever else it may be, this is a massive bureaucracy. Bureaucracies are staffed by careerists who hop from assignment to assignment, leaving the real-world consequences of their decisions far behind. It’s important to understand that UN personnel carry a permanent get-out-of-jail-free card in their back pockets. It’s called diplomatic immunity, and it means they can never be held legally responsible for their actions.

In 2010, UN peacekeepers inadvertently introduced cholera to post-earthquake Haiti. Terrible sickness was added to the trauma of a terrible natural disaster. An estimated 10,000 Haitians lost their lives to that cholera. Families endured immense suffering.

The UN spent years denying, stonewalling, and covering up the harm it had inflicted. A whitewash report pointed fingers at Haitians but not the peacekeepers (who’d been deployed from Nepal following a cholera outbreak in that country). Prior to admitting the obvious, UN experts tried mightily to blame the cholera on climate change. Lawsuits went nowhere due to the above-mentioned legal immunity. 

If I were teaching a college course about the UN, I’d start by requiring my students to read two books. The Big Truck That Went By: How the World Came to Save Haiti and Left Behind a Disaster was written by Jonathan Katz, a journalist stationed there when the earthquake hit. Deadly River: Cholera and Cover-up in Post-Earthquake Haiti tells the story of a French physician called in to investigate. Written by Ralph Frerichs, it shows the UN failing one moral test after another. Most of us have never witnessed the UN in action. Between them, these books provide a front-row seat. It is not a pretty picture.

Organizations that lack accountability mechanisms are dangerous. The UN is one such organization. Nothing it says, therefore, should ever be taken at face value. 

So let us now turn to the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC.

Loving the Least of These tells us that, because the scientists who write IPCC reports are unpaid volunteers who “do not get royalties from the final products,” they are less likely to be biased. This is a lovely theory. Unfortunately, reality is more complicated.

Before I address the institution itself, let me address the inference that because the scientists who prepare its reports are unpaid, they are unbiased.

Money isn’t the only thing of value. Being a lead author, coordinating lead author, or contributor to an IPCC report bolsters an academician’s reputation, which will contribute to his or her ability to gain teaching and research positions, tenure, publication in professional journals, and many other benefits of enormous financial value. Those things are worth far more than any monetary fee a contributor might receive.

Now, on to the institution.

The IPCC, as its name reveals, is an intergovernmental entity—a collection of government representatives whose activities are managed and orchestrated by UN personnel. Scientists have never been in charge at the IPCC. After being assigned to work on a particular chapter, they’re told what to write about, and how many words they’re permitted to use. Report topics are pre-determined by IPCC upper management years in advance, in consultation with governments. If the government of country X wants topic Y to be discussed, the scientists are obliged to do so, even if reliable research is scant to non-existent. The scientists have so little leeway that one group was advised in 2013 that they couldn’t change the word “systems” to “ecosystems” in the title of their chapter without first gaining the approval of multiple levels of the IPCC bureaucracy. In other words, IPCC scientists are mere cogs in the bureaucratic machine. Even if every last one of them were 100% free of bias, the machine itself is the problem.

Major IPCC reports are typically thousands of pages long. Since few people will ever read them in their entirety, at the end of the report-writing process summary documents are produced—one for each of three sections. Each summary is a few dozen pages and is written by a subset of the scientists involved. These aren’t selected randomly but are handpicked by the powers that be. Even then, the summaries they produce are clearly labelled “drafts.”

How does a draft become a final document? By passing through fire. The final version is whatever emerges out the other end of a massive, week-long IPCC meeting attended by representatives of every government that cares to participate. At this meeting, scientists are outnumbered by politicians, diplomats, and bureaucrats. Paragraph by paragraph, the draft summary is examined. It is wrangled over. One government wants to remove three words. Another government wants to insert two sentences. Only when everyone in the room consents do they move on to the next paragraph. 

These meetings take place behind closed doors. Activists from organizations such as Greenpeace and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) are allowed to attend, but journalists and members of the public are not. The people who wrote Loving the Least of These sincerely believe the IPCC is morally upstanding and trustworthy. But if that is so, why the secrecy? Why the security guards at the door? What are journalists not supposed to see? What is the public not supposed to know?

Like clockwork, at the end of the week a UN spokesperson announces at a news conference that “Science has spoken!” If science were truly in the driver’s seat, the scientists would finish their report and it would get released promptly. They’d write up a summary and it, too, would be released promptly—no meeting, no wrangling by politicians, diplomats, and bureaucrats.

In the IPCC universe, the final version of the summary is made public before the lengthy report. Why? Because, as astonishing as it sounds, it’s normal practice at the IPCC to go back and tweak things to ensure the original report agrees with the politically negotiated summary. In 2013, nine out of 14 chapters of one section of the report had to be revisited, with more than 20 changes being made to a single chapter. You read that right. The report gets altered. Because, contrary to how things happen elsewhere, the summary is the one document that rules them all.

Journalists have done an abysmal job of explaining how the IPCC actually operates. It’s understandable that the average person has no idea what really goes on. As someone who has watched the climate world for more than a decade, I’m sorry to report that the IPCC does not deserve our trust. The National Association of Evangelicals’ naive embrace of this organization is therefore unwarranted.

This piece originally appeared at WND.com and has been republished here with permission.

This brief critique of the IPCC is but the tip of the iceberg. The fuller story appears in my books The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert (2011) and Into the Dustbin: Rajendra Pachauri, the Climate Report & the Nobel Peace Prize (2013), my address to the World Federation of Scientists, 3 Things Scientists Need to Know About the IPCC (2013), and a three-part series of articles on my website (2013).

Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise is the author of the IPCC exposé, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, and recently discussed the shortcomings of the IPCC on Tom Nelson’s popular podcast here. She wrote this article for the Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation.