The IPCC has abandoned science in favour of affirmative action.

For years, we’ve been told fairy tales about the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). There was nothing accidental about this. They were a deliberate part of the IPCC’s marketing message. And 99% of the world’s journalists fell for them.

The biggest fairy tale of all was that IPCC reports are produced by the world’s finest scientific minds – by the crème de la crème. Here’s Rajendra Pachauri, the IPCC’s chairman, explaining in 2007 why we should trust his organization’s findings:

look at the facts as they are. You have close to 600 people who are actually the authors of these working group reports. These are people who have been chosen on the basis of their track record, on their record of publications, on the research that they have done. There is a very careful process of selection. We had something like 2,000 such nominations and out of that less than 600 were selected. So it is not as though anybody can get in. They are people who are at the top of their profession. [backup link]

If you click over to this webpage you will find dozens of examples of journalists and others parroting that approximate message. But it turns out to be nonsense.

As I discuss at length in my book-length exposé of the IPCC, entire categories of people have been selected to be IPCC authors for reasons that have nothing to do with scientific prowess. This is because the IPCC is a UN organization. It is therefore concerned about all those things that other UN organizations worry about. Things like diversity. Gender balance. Regional representation. The degree to which developing countries are represented compared to developed countries.

Large numbers of “clearly not qualified” people with “insufficient scientific competence” have already served, therefore, as IPCC authors. Ample hard evidence of this scandalous state of affairs has been available for more than a year, but has yet to be reported by the mainstream media. (See my blog post dated January 2011 here.)

According to an article in yesterday’s New Scientist, the IPCC has now abandoned all pretense in this regard. It isn’t bothering to repeat the best-and-brightest fairy tale anymore. Apparently it has now formalized strict geographical quotas with respect to the IPCC’s bureau – the group of senior officials who are responsible for coordinating and directing that organization’s work. The article says that:

from now on the 30-person IPCC bureau – which oversees all publications – will have geographical quotas. For instance Africa will have five members and North America four. In addition, each of its three working groups must now include at least one person from every continent in their eight-person bureaux. [backup link]

How many top-notch universities exist in Africa versus North America? How likely is it, therefore, that that the former is going to produce, nurture, and support the highest calibre scientists the world has to offer?

The true state of affairs is now becoming clear to even the most casual observer. The IPCC never was a collection of the world’s top scientists. It’s just another UN boondoggle.

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