In The Delinquent Teenager Who was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise makes a formidable case that the IPCC is biased and corrupt and should be disbanded.

The first seven chapters of The Delinquent Teenager report the findings of Laframboise’s investigations of the leading scientists of the IPCC, their expertise, and their affiliations.

Hundreds of IPCC authors, officials, and reviewers are also involved in political activist organizations including Greenpeace, The World Wildlife Fund, and others, and hence have serious conflicts of interest. Many have not even finished their master’s degrees, let alone a doctorate, before becoming lead authors simply because they agree with the consensus.

It’s not only the inclusion of activists that compromises IPCC’s objectivity but also how the IPCC chooses its authors, with quotas for genders and nationalities regardless of proper expertise. The IPCC also excludes many of the world’s leading experts in sea-level rise, hurricanes, and geodynamics. Internal emails reveal the reason: they disagree with the IPCC’s positions.

The IPCC depends heavily on computer climate models. But the models include hundreds, even thousands, of variables whose real values are simply unknown and so must be parameterized—assigned values according to the programmers’ prejudices. Even then, they fail to describe Earth’s climate system realistically. They’re also not subject to falsification because their many ad hoc assumptions can be adjusted to account for any observations. Consequently, their projections for future climate lack credibility—as was revealed recently when the British Meteorological Office published data showing there’s been no global warming for over 16 years, contrary to model predictions.

In the next nine chapters Laframboise reviews the answers of an IPCC personnel questionnaire that reveals that even the authors felt the review process was poor. Expert reviewers, faithful volunteers trying to ensure the scientific veracity of the reports, were given insufficient time, resources, and consideration to make errors in the reports known. Their requests for relevant resources often were denied. Authors were under no obligation to deal with reviewers’ comments, and often they added to reports after reviewers’ one and only review, making the reviewers’ work seem pointless. Laframboise makes a persuasive case that much of the silencing of reviewers is meant to silence dissent.

In addition to the faulty review process, the faulty choice of authors, and reliance on faulty computer models, its frequent violations of its own rule requiring that all sources be peer reviewed also undermines the credibility of the IPCC’s predictions of catastrophic, anthropogenic global warming. Many of the Fourth Assessment Report’s (AR4) citations come not from peer-reviewed literature but from “grey literature,” including advocacy pieces by environmental activist organizations. Many chapters draw barely more than half their citations, and the whole AR4 draws only about 70 percent, from peer-reviewed sources—contrary not only to its rules but also to repeated claims by its leaders, including Chairman Rajendra Pachauri.

In the second half of the book, Laframboise demonstrates how IPCC officials, while professing political neutrality, vigorously pursue political agendas. Pachauri tells environmentalist supporters that the global economy must decarbonize—despite the impossibility of doing so without slowing, stopping, or reversing economic development and hence harming the world’s poor. The IPCC’s frequently choosing luxurious venues for its meetings, requiring participants to emit vast amounts of carbon dioxide to attend, offers more than a whiff of hypocrisy.

Laframboise also documents how the IPCC seeks to silence dissenting voices, even of those who believe man is significantly, dangerously, and unnaturally warming the Earth by burning fossil fuels. Chris Landsea and Roger Pielke Jr. are prime examples of experts whose opinions have been squelched because IPCC insiders and favorites are in jeopardy of scrutiny.

Landsea, once a research meteorologist with the Hurricane Research Division of Atlantic Oceanographic & Meteorological Laboratory of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and now Science and Operations Officer at the National Hurricane Center, is one of the world’s leading experts on hurricanes. Yet Landsea resigned as an author of AR4’s chapter on hurricanes because his objections to an official statement made by chapter lead author Kevin Trenberth were ignored. Trenberth, with no expertise on the topic and relying on models rather than empirical observation, stated that hurricanes had increased due to global warming. Landsea provided the contrary observational data, but his opinion was rejected.

Pielke, an environmental studies professor at the University of Colorado in Boulder, and a believer in anthropogenic global warming, is an expert on the statistical costs of catastrophic events. Yet his opinion was excluded, while others based on non-peer reviewed science were included. Pielke found that, after indexing for inflation, population growth, and economic development, the costs of disasters were falling—the opposite of what the IPCC wanted to convey.

Finally, the IPCC’s assertions that tropical diseases, especially malaria, will spread and bio-diversity will fall with global warming are based on models but contradicted by real-world observations.

Laframboise concludes that the IPCC is not an objective, policy-neutral, institutionally accountable, high-quality scientific review organization with accountability, but deeply biased, highly political, largely unaccountable advocacy organization run, maintained, and protected by activists who choose less qualified candidates, expel dissent, expunge reviews, practice systemic confirmation bias, and push hard for a political agenda set twenty years before the evidence was in.

She recommends disbandment. It’s hard to disagree.

 

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