The US-based website, FamilySecurityMatters.org, has today published a lengthy interview with yours truly beneath a review of my book. It’s titled The Fraudsters Who Invent the “Science” of Climate Change.
The term “fraud” does not appear in my book. But ordinary people who smell a rat, who think they’re being manipulated and misled, often end up using words like fraud and scam. These words amount to a moral shorthand; they are a quick way of expressing the idea that a message is suspect.
The IPCC is not a trustworthy organization. I think my book demonstrates that point ten times over. But as I say in today’s interview:
many good, smart, sincere people have worked on IPCC reports over the years. Many of them were simply naïve – oblivious to the fact that they were being used by UN officials like pawns in an international chess game.
I don’t believe, therefore, that the average IPCC participant is defrauding anyone. But I think we should be clear-eyed about the fact that the IPCC was established by UN bureaucrats as a means of helping them achieve the UN’s climate agenda. That agenda has never been submitted to any country’s electorate for their direct approval.
Here’s another tidbit from the interview:
politicians like fighting climate change. It appeals to their egos. It casts them as heroes. It’s more gratifying and glamorous to rail against climate change than to spend one’s time balancing the budget or fixing the school system. Here, for example, is a quote from a recent newspaper article regarding Florida governor Charlie Crist:
Crist’s climate-change crusade got him national attention, with a write-up in Time magazine and an interview on the CBS Early Show. He shared a stage with singer Sheryl Crow and met with Robert Redford. California’s then-Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger called him “another great action hero.”
In a world in which politicians are popularly regarded as scumbags and pathological liars, fighting climate change casts them as admirable. They aren’t going to give that up easily.
A few weeks back I was interviewed for 40 minutes by the Japan-based Corbett Report. It’s audio only and you can hear it here. Two people have since left comments on that website. The first person is disappointed with me since, even though I’m critical of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), I don’t challenge the idea of human-caused global warming.
The idea that my book is not about climate science, but about the influential UN body that interprets that science on behalf of the world’s governments is sometimes a difficult concept to communicate.
The second commenter writes:
Why hasn’t someone tied Donna Laframboise to a chair, propped her eyelids open, and forced her to read Merchants of Doubt?
Since page four of that particular book claims that:
the IPCC has an exceptionally inclusive and extensive peer review process.
perhaps the authors may wish to consult Chapter 33 of my own work. That’s where I explain that what goes on at the IPCC is nothing like what is normally understood by the term peer-review.
I then list six examples of how the IPCC’s peer-review process, such as it is, has been undercut, circumvented, and short-circuited. IPCC rules sound great in practice. But there are no traffic cops enforcing them, and absolutely no consequences when people violate them.
It is foolish, in the extreme, to imagine that just because an IPCC rule exists on paper it is being followed 100% of the time. But that seems to be the position of those who wrote Merchants of Doubt.
And while I’m on that subject, when did doubt become a bad thing? When did asking questions become a sin? I recall wearing an activist button in my youth that read: Question Authority. Now, apparently, to express doubt about the establishment view of climate change is to be a baddie.
I think we should all remind ourselves that people who don’t tolerate doubt usually belong to cults.
