20111114_DL
Source: YouTube
URL: http://www.repealtheact.org.uk/videos
Date: 14/11/2011
Event: Donna Laframboise's seminar on the IPCC at the House of Commons Committee Room
Attribution: www.repealtheact.org.uk, Donna Laframboise
People:
- Donna Laframboise: Investigative journalist and author
- Philip Stott: Professor emeritus of biogeography at SOAS, University of London
Philip Stott: Many of you will have read Donna's blogs and know of her marvellous work. Donna Laframboise, it’s marvellous to have her here because she is from Canada, but luckily she was in Germany so was able to make the journey over to us here. She is going to tell us about perhaps the organization above all that has actually pushed through that change in science.
Donna Laframboise: Good afternoon, I am very excited to be here, this is my first time in the parliament buildings, this is very nice indeed. I have, um, just written a book, it is a very new book, it's called “The Delinquent Teenager Who was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert”. Which is a very long title, and the main argument of the book is that almost nothing that we have been told about the IPCC is true. And the title has come from the fact that when I first started doing research about climate change, I read about this marvellous organization called the IPCC - and I formed this picture in my mind - it was rigorous and it was respectable and it was dressed in business attire, and it was a very trustworthy organization. It was a grown up, and the more I learned about the IPCC, the more that idea, that mental picture changed.
And what I started to see instead was a spoiled child, a child that has been praised and admired, and flattered for its entire life. A child that was given rules to follow, didn’t follow those rules and faced no consequences as a result. So it seems to me that this spoiled child has now turned into an obnoxious teenager. And that this teenager has become all of our problems, because - it’s a problem for all of us because this organization is writing some very important reports and countries around the world are pointing to the IPCC and saying this is why we have to undertake these very expensive, very intrusive changes to our lives, because the IPCC says so.
Something strange is happening to my fonts, I’m sorry about that. So one of the things that is useful to ask is who writes IPCC reports... and there is actually a list of 5 quotes on this page but only one of them is showing here. So what the list, the list of this slide, should say, should have two quotes from science journalists.
It should have a quote from the science press, the energy sector press and there’s a quote from the head of UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program). And all of these people are essentially using slightly different words but they are telling us that it’s the best scientists, it's the top scientists, it is experts in their field, it’s the world’s finest scientific mind’s that is who is writing IPCC reports, and indeed the green NGOs are also singing from the same hymn book. So it’s the leading scientists, leading climate scientist, the world’s brightest scientists, that is who is working on the IPCC reports, that is who we are told it is.
Where did these ideas come from? Well we can trace them right back to the IPCC’s Chairman, so the former Chairman Robert Watson has told us that this is the world’s best experts, the current chairman Dr Rajendra Pachauri has also said that this is the world’s best specialists. So it would appear that we have a consensus, so just to give you an idea of the flavour, here is a quote from Chairman Pachauri, “These are people who have been chosen on the basis of their track record of publications, on the research they have done, they are people who are at the top of their profession.” So everyone agrees that’s who writes IPCC reports.
Well I do a lot of investigative work as a journalist, and rather than just accepting what people say, I actually go to the trouble of looking beneath the surface to see if these claims - if there is actually any evidence for these claims. And what I found was quite startling, and I’m not suggesting that there have not been some brilliant scientists who have been associated with the IPCC, but I am suggesting that there are a lot other people who have been helping to write these reports, who are not remotely close to being the world’s top experts.
So who really writes IPCC reports? One group is twenty-something graduate students. Now these people are not helping out, these are people who have been given lead author roles on IPCC reports. So we have Richard Klein who is currently a Geography professor. He became an IPCC lead author at age 25. Three years later the IPCC put him in a leadership role, he was leading a chapter. The problem is he didn’t get his PhD until 2003. Now in academic circles, before you get your PhD you are pretty invisible in the academic world; you are not, by any means, one of the world’s top experts.
So we have Laurens Bouwer, he was a lead author for the IPCC, before he earned his Masters degree, never mind his PhD. That is actually a representative of the UK on the IPCC. Back in 1994, the IPCC decided to write about a very important issue, of how climate change affects human health. It shows 21 people from the entire world, to look at this rather important issue.
Sari Kovats was one of those 21 people, but she didn’t get there because of her publication record, in fact it would be 3 years after - before her first academic paper was published. It would be in fact 16 years later before she earned her doctorate. But, she has been long time member of the IPCC, and in fact is currently working on the upcoming IPCC report.
So who else is writing IPCC reports. People who have been appointed, because they represent the right country or they belong to the right gender. Now this is pretty amazing because... you know, when you are told it is the world’s top experts, that’s what you expect.
Last year the InterAcademy Council, which is an organisation of science academies around the world, decided to launch an investigation into the IPCC. It was the first time anything like that happened, and it was a pretty remarkable. And as part of their information gathering they posted a questionnaire online and they invited people who had participated in the IPCC to answer questions such as: what is your opinion about how the IPCC chooses its lead authors? Those questions were bundled together into a 678 page pdf, which is available online and you can download it.
The names of the people were removed, however, so we don’t know who is speaking. And if you download that document, you find that as early as page 16 the IPCC insiders are saying that some of lead authors are clearly not qualified. Fast forward a hundred pages or so, you have someone saying that half of the lead authors in their chapter were not competent. That instead they were politically correct appointments from developing countries.
And then fast forward a few more hundred pages, and you have someone else saying all IPCC personnel decisions are political before being scientific. Now I think that’s rather alarming and these are IPCC insiders themselves.
Who else? Professional activists have also been helping to write IPCC reports, now these are people who are taking pay checks from activist organisations. We have Richard Moss who is being involved with the IPCC for 20 years, during part of that time he was a vice president of the World Wildlife Fund.
Bill Hare is considered a legend in Greenpeace; he has been a spokesperson since the early 1990s for Greenpeace. And when the last report came out in 2007 he was one of only 40 people who helped to write the synthesis report, which is the summary of summaries because IPCC reports are 1,000s of pages you need some executive summaries. He is in the inner circle, writing that report.
Now there are more students and there are more activists, but we don’t have a lot of time today, so I’m... in my book, these are not the only ones, by any means. So here are two more, Michael Oppenheimer - he worked for 20 years for the Environmental Defense Fund. It is a very wealthy and very influential activist group in the US. He is currently leading an IPCC chapter for the upcoming report.
And Jennifer Morgan, she looks like a very pleasant person. I’m sure that she’d be really fun to have coffee or a drink with, but she is not one of the world’s finest scientific minds. If you look at Jennifer’s CV she has spent her entire career working for one activist group after another activist group, and for a while in fact she was the World Wildlife fund’s chief spokesperson on climate change. Nevertheless, the IPCC has appointed her to work on its current report.
Now there’s another problem with activism and the IPCC, and that’s that in 2004 something very curious started to happen, and that’s that the World Wildlife Fund began very deliberately to recruit IPCC personnel. By 2008, according to documents available on their website, it had persuaded 130 people that it describes as leading climate scientists, mostly, but not exclusively from the IPCC, to join its own panel. So this was - work on the last IPCC report AR4 was just beginning in 2004. So at the very moment that these scientists, these leading climate scientists, were supposed to be making a very neutral, and objective, and impartial examination of the evidence around climate change, they decided to get into bed with the WWF.
And what effect did that have? Well, in two thirds of the chapters for the last major IPCC report there was at least one, in as many as nine WWF affiliated scientists working on that. In one third of the chapters one of the leaders was a WWF affiliated scientist. There was a chapter that concluded that 20 to 30% of the world’s species are threatened with extinction. Both leaders of that chapter were affiliated with the WWF plus 6 other people. So the IPCC stacked this species extinction chapter, with 8 WWF people. I would be really surprised that they then concluded that species extinction is a big concern with respect to climate change.
So a few weeks after my book was released the WWF issued a press release in which they said, “Oh no, no the IPCC hasn’t been infiltrated by us. There is a little bit of overlap, there is some overlap, well in my view when two thirds of your chapter include WWF people that’s... that’s an invasion. That’s not a bit of overlap. That’s a really big concern.
So who really writes IPCC reports? Students, unqualified scientists, professional activists, and scientists who are so unsophisticated and so naive that they don’t appreciate that you should not be getting into bed with activist groups at the very moment that you are, and have been entrusted by the entire world to take very close and careful look at the evidence around these issues.
So what does this mean? A very simply question, who writes IPCC reports? What we think the answer is, what everyone thinks the answer is, is actually - it’s wrong. That it’s not, and I am told as a journalist that there is a consensus about what the science is around climate change. And I am not in a position to know whether that consensus is valid or not, but I do know that the consensus around the very simply question of who writes IPCC reports is wrong.
Now I am rushing here because my presentation is a bit longer than the time allotted. There are other claims about the IPCC that turn out not to be true. We are told that they are utterly transparent, no I’m sorry it’s not. And that there are a number of people who have looked at that question independently and we have all come to the same conclusion. We are told there are policies and procedures and these are followed rigorously. In fact I’m having a difficult time finding a single rule that the IPCC did follow. Like really truly, it’s amazing, I’ve never seen a story like this one.
We’ve been told that the IPCC relies solely on peer-reviewed literature. And the chairman of the IPCC likes to go around the world saying we don’t settle for anything less than peer reviewed literature. If it hasn’t appeared in a peer reviewed journal then you can just throw it into the dustbin, that’s what he says, but in fact when I invited some people about a year and a half ago to help me on my blog, look at the references cited by the 2007 IPCC report, we found approximately one third of those references were not peer reviewed literature. There is a huge gap between the rhetoric of the IPCC and reality.
So there are wider implications, and what we have then is we have is an organisation, in which lots and lots of people hundreds of thousands of people are involved which the IPCC many many people knew that a number of the authors who were involved are not remotely the world’s finest scientific minds.
Many people knew that it was not based solely on peer reviewed literature, but there have been no open letters, no one apparently took Chairman Pachauri aside and said "Sir you can’t go around saying that publicly it’s not true."
We have an organisation that have been saying very misleading things to the public and to policy makers and to law makers for a long time and it’s been this conspiracy of silence and I think that tells us about the integrity of this organisation about how trustworthy it is. So my book’s conclusion - I have just given you a very quick overview - is that the IPCC is an organisation that doesn’t describe its own personnel, its own reports or its own procedures accurately. That’s pretty basic stuff and if it can’t do that, why would we imagine that it has understood far more complicated questions and that it has come to the right conclusions.
So my message as a journalist to lawmakers is be very careful when you hear that the IPCC says that it has reached this conclusion, or that we should proceed down this path, because this is not a trustworthy organisation. Thank you.
Philip Stott: Thank you so much Donna, we still have a good role for investigative journalists, despite all that is going on at the moment, and I have a personal response, if I may,Donna, because during the 2000s, I was one of the few voices that was saying that the IPCC was politically decision making and of course I was taken every now and again to complaints all the rest of it and of course what we have seen unravelling, and through not just your own work, but of all that have been a vindication of that position. I said it openly in the ‘Great Global Warming Swindle’, some of you will remember and in fact it’s been criticised since, but of course we have learnt a lot more. Thank you so much, that was fascinating and I’m sure people will want to read your book. I’m absolutely certain about it.