The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) divides its large assessment reports into three sections.
Working Group 1 is tasked with examining climate change research from a hard science perspective. In the 2007 report, Working Group 1′s contribution consisted of 11 chapters. So how many of these chapters were free of the influence of scientists who have publicly aligned themselves with the professional climate lobbyists otherwise known as the World Wildlife Fund (WWF)?
Less than half. Chapters 2, 3, 4, 6, and 7 contained no names that appear on the WWF’s Climate Witness Scientific Advisory Panel (see more about that matter beginning here).
Six other chapters, however, are tainted by WWF-affiliated personnel. First, there’s Michael MacCracken, who served as a Chapter 1 contributing author. That chapter was titled: Historical Overview of Climate Change Science.
Then there’s Vincenzo Artale, a lead author for chapter 5, which discussed Observations: Ocean Climate Change and Sea Level.
Next there’s (Daithi) D.A. Stone. He served as a contributing author for two chapters and as a lead author for a third (chapters 8, 9, and 11) respectively. These chapters dealt with: Climate Models and their Evaluation, Understanding and Attributing Climate Change, and Regional Climate Projections.
Chapter 10, which focused on Global Climate Projections, had two participants affiliated with the WWF. Zong-Ci Zhao was a lead author. Govind Ballabh Pant was a review editor.
Which brings us to Chapter 11. It discussed Regional Climate Projections. I’ve already mentioned that D.A. Stone was a lead author. So were three other WWF-affiliated personnel: Mark New, Claudio Guillermo Menéndez, and Victor Magaña Rueda.
A single chapter, in the hard science section of the Climate Bible, therefore had four lead authors linked to the WWF. This is not good news to those who believe that the only serious problems are to be found in Working Groups 2 and 3.
Working Group 1′s Chapter 11, incidentally, also comes up in my book. I point out that its authors relied on 10 papers that not only hadn’t been published yet, they hadn’t even been accepted for publication by an academic journal prior to the IPCC’s own cutoff dates. Later, rather implausibly, all 10 were published together, between the covers of a single issue of Climatic Change.
As I observe in my book:
The IPCC says its reports are based on already-published scientific literature. Yet in this case a group of IPCC authors appears to have favored a particular conclusion regardless of what the scientific literature actually said. The fact that necessary information hadn’t yet been published posed no impediment. They simply wrote the IPCC chapter they desired and arranged for the necessary papers to be published after the fact.
One of the leaders of Chapter 11 was a climate modeler named Jens Hesselbjerg Christensen. It turns out he was also a guest editor of the very issue of Climatic Change in which these papers were ushered into the hallowed ranks of the peer-reviewed literature well after the fact.
Serious irregularities, therefore, aren’t confined to only some parts of the Climate Bible. They are evident in every working group. The IPCC system is rotten from start to finish.
To see the May 2007 issue of Climatic Change click here, then click the Issue tab near the top-left of the screen. A scrolling Table of Contents appears. (The website used to include a static table of contents that could be linked to, but things have since changed.) The hard copy of this issue of the journal makes it clear that Christensen was a guest editor. My working notes here link directly to each article.
