The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has issued a press release that calls allegations in my book “ludicrous.”
In The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert, I state that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been infiltrated by the WWF. In any sane world, I write, this revelation alone would be sufficient to “vaporize the IPCC’s credibility – now and forever, once and for all.”
At the end of Chapter 31, titled Extinction Fiction, I point out that eight people who helped write the section of the 2007 IPCC report that concluded 20-30% of the planet’s species are at risk of extinction are affiliated with the WWF.
Each IPCC chapter usually has two coordinating lead authors. Chapter 4 of Working Group 2, which was devoted to the ecosystem, was led by two people who belong to a WWF panel titled the Climate Witness Scientific Advisory Panel. Their names are Andreas Fischlin and Guy Midgley.
According to an internal WWF document, the purpose of the Climate Witness program is not to advance science. It is to heighten the public’s “sense of urgency” over climate change so that the WWF can “build a movement” (see pages 1,2, and 8).
Among the IPCC’s species extinction chapter’s ten lead authors, five are affiliated with WWF. Among these people is Jeff Price – who’s now employed by that organization, Fischlin, Midgley, Rik Leemans and Brij Gopal. (Three of the chapter’s 19 contributing authors also sit on the WWF panel – Lesley Hughes, Antoine Guisan, and Christian Körner.)
My book further points out that two-thirds of the 44 chapters in 2007 IPCC report contained at least one WWF-affiliated individual. We’re told that IPCC scientists are the world’s top experts and that we can therefore count on their sound judgment. Yet dozens of them have publicly associated their scientific reputation with an advocacy organization that claims “It is almost impossible to overstate the threat of climate change.”
My book also calls attention to the fact that fully one-third of the IPCC’s 44 chapters were led by a WWF-affiliated scientist. The Asia chapter, for example, was led by two such individuals – Hideo Harasawa and Murari Lal. That was the section in which the IPCC mistakenly claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. The source cited by the IPCC for that claim – which, incidentally, has been called ludicrous in its own right? A WWF publication.
That word ludicrous really is apt. The WWF calls my book “a new climate change denial book.” But as the thousands of people who’ve already purchased it know, climate change is discussed only tangentially.
The IPCC as an organization is the real focus of my book. It has been around for 22 years, and has been awarded a Nobel Peace Prize. Yet this is the first time anyone has taken a sustained, critical look at it.
What I’ve found is not pretty.
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