The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) just released its latest big report, this one titled Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change (a mere 2,913 pages). Practically nobody will ever read it. (I confess haven’t.) Its Technical Summary is just 142 pages. (No, haven’t read that yet, either.) Its Summary for Policymakers is a mere 64 pages. (Still nope—though this one I might actually try to read in the next week or so.)

Why would I write about a report of which I haven’t read even the Summary for Policymakers? Well, I’m not doing that. Instead, I’m writing about reporting about it.

What I’ll say applies to the vast majority of news reports about this all over the world, but it focuses on just one because I expected better from its publisher, World News Group (WNG), an evangelical Christian news organization committed to what it calls “Biblical objectivity” in reporting—a commitment it’s had since its founding in the 1980s by my revered friend and long-time publisher Joel Belz and throughout the tenure of another revered friend, Marvin Olasky, as its editor and then editor in chief for some 26 years. Others at WNG are also my friends. Often WNG does outstanding work.

The story in WNG’s digital feature The Sift, by Rachel Lynn Aldrich, was short and sweet. Sgt. Joe “Just the Facts” Friday of the old Dragnet TV show would have been pleased.

But WNG’s podcast, The World and Everything In It, handled it differently. Here’s the full transcript of the segment:

UN climate report slams global governments, warns of ‘unlivable world’ » The UN’s climate change panel warned on Monday that the Earth is “firmly on track toward an unlivable world.” WORLD’s Josh Schumacher has more.

JOSH SCHUMACHER, REPORTER: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report sticks to the usual script. It warns that without drastic change, mankind will cause irreversible damage to the planet.

The report said governments around the world have failed to follow through on promises in the 2015 Paris Climate Accord. Commitments in the accord were aimed at keeping global temperatures from rising 2 degrees over the next century.

It said global warming has triggered more intense wildfires and hurricanes, longer droughts, and more floods.

The report urges a quick move away from the use of fossil fuels in favor of clean, renewable energy.

It also highlighted risky experimental methods of reducing temperatures along with simpler steps like fixing methane leaks in mines and landfills.

Reporting for WORLD, I’m Josh Schumacher.

This may sound nitpicking, but anyone familiar with the working of the IPCC will understand why, instead, it’s a very important distinction: It was not “The UN’s climate change panel” that “warned … that the Earth is ‘firmly on track toward an unlivable world.'” It was UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres. The report about which he spoke is—and this is important—the Summary for Policymakers, not the full report. And neither the Summary nor the full report is by the whole “panel” but only by a subset of it.

Why are these distinctions important? Several reasons.

First, the process by which the “summaries for policymakers” of the various major (quasi-)scientific reports released by the IPCC’s three working groups (WG1 focuses on the physical science of climate change; WG2 on the impacts of climate change; WG3 on mitigation of and adaptation to climate change) is itself highly political.

That shouldn’t surprise anyone. The organization is the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

Furthermore, the Summary is not exactly what most respect in a summary. In proper process, a summary of a scientific report would be prepared after the report was finalized. It would carefully limit its claims to only what the report itself said.

With the IPCC, the process is different. When the underlying report by the scientists (and some other experts) is nearing completion, a few from the working group are joined by government appointees to write the “summary.” The government appointees are charged with ensuring that the the summary represents their governments’ policies. Then, after the summary for policymakers has been finalized, the underlying report is changed to ensure that it agrees with the summary. I.e., facts are sacrificed to summary. That is bad science and highly misleading to the public.

Second, Working Group 3’s expertise (such as it is) is not on the physics (geo-, atmospheric, oceanic, cryo-, etc.) of climate but on policies proposed to mitigate manmade climate change. When one goes back not to the Summary for Policymakers of Working Group I’s contribution, The Physical Science Basis (which came out last summer) of the Sixth Assessment Report but to the technical volume itself, one finds that, as Judith Curry, former Professor and Chair of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at Georgia Tech and one of the world’s leading climate scientists, points out,

… the IPCC itself does not use the words ‘crisis’, ‘catastrophe’, or even ‘dangerous’ [or, I would note, “unlivable world”]; rather it uses the term ‘reasons for concern.’ Apart from the scientific uncertainties, the weakest part of the UN’s argument about manmade global warming is that it is dangerous. The highest profile link to danger relies on linking warming to worsening extreme weather events, which is a tenuous link at best.

So, Working Group 3, about the government-representative-shaped summary of whose report Guterres made his remark, doesn’t have the expertise to justify the claim that “global warming has triggered more intense wildfires and hurricanes, longer droughts, and more floods”—and Working Group 1’s own report stops way short of it. True, Working Group 2 does assert such things, but as Curry points out, the link is “tenuous at best.” Indeed, the IPCC itself, in a special report on extreme weather events in 2012, essentially denied that any such links could be established. One good resource making the point is weather statistician William Briggs’s The Climate Blame Game, available from the Cornwall Alliance. There has in fact been no increase in the frequency or intensity of extreme weather events over the period of allegedly manmade warming.

Third, the IPCC long ago forced out of its working groups experts who didn’t already embrace the alarmist perspective so much associated with it. Thousands and thousands of topic-credentialed scientists and other experts think the IPCC’s reports

1. exaggerate the warming effects of added greenhouse gases in the atmosphere,
2. exaggerate the negative impacts of such warming on extreme weather events (like tropical cyclones, floods, droughts, heat waves, cold snaps, wildfires) and sea-level rise,
3. ignore the positive impacts of such warming (fewer and milder cold snaps, which on average kill 20 times as many people per day as heat waves; lengthened growing seasons; expanded growing ranges; higher crop yields; reduced land necessary to feed humanity, meaning more left over to conserve biodiversity), and
4. ignore the benefits of the heightened carbon dioxide blamed for the warming (improved plant growth leading to higher crop yields and more abundant, and thus more affordable, food).

Don’t get me wrong. I’m not singling WNG out for criticism here because its report was somehow worse than most. In fact, it was better. Most of the mainstream media acted like a marching band ushering a dictator into a pep rally. But WNG’s coverage, through The World and Everything In It, could have been better had it clearly distinguished between political things, said by Guterres and other IPCC representatives (let alone politicians from countries all over the world), and what the report itself says.

But then, with a report that’s 2,913 pages long, that’s a little difficult, especially a day after its release.

I would love to see World do an in-depth investigative report on the debate over the magnitude, causes, consequences, and responses to climate change, one that would bring Biblical discernment to bear along with excellent scientific, engineering, and economic understanding, and on the processes by which the IPCC, which presents itself to the world as an objective scientific body, has poisoned that debate. Short of that, though, it should at least treat news like this with more discernment than the mainstream media.

[This article was revised slightly for clarity on April 7, 2022, and again on April 8 to correct it from saying Aldrich’s article appeared in WNG’s print magazine to saying it appeared in WNG’s digital feature The Sift.]