UN climate agencies primarily only lobbyists

Most people probably believe that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) are honest UN agencies with great integrity.

I see them as something very different.  The IPCC is primarily a lobbyist and the UNFCCC exaggerates the IPCC’s work and pressures governments into action.

Let me explain.

The IPCC describes its role as … “to assess … information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change, its potential impacts and options for adaptation and mitigation.”

It therefore has a single focus, man-made climate change, rather than a broader look at all plausible reasons why the climate might change. No discernible risk would mean no need for an IPOCC.

It was established following higher temperatures in the 1980s, probably due to the sudden appearance of some El Nino events after a long period with very few. 

It was also established on the back of output from climate models predicting dire things.  Those models were woefully primitive.  Carbon dioxide was one of few things the modellers thought they knew, so higher temperatures were blamed on that, never mind that carbon dioxide levels had been monitored since late 1958 and no warming occurred until the late 1970s.

Like all lobbyist organizations the IPCC falsely claims or implies that the issue is important and that its reports tell the truth.  In fact it exaggerates, only shows data that supports its claims, twists its facts, doesn’t check the data and science in its sources, some of which are very dubious, and ignores the potential benefits of what it rails against.

The latest IPCC report says that the 2011-2020 average global temperature was just 1.1 °C above the 1850-1900 average global temperature, which if we take the middle of each period is over 140 years.   The temperature data has been adjusted so much that even this warming might be an exaggeration, but no matter, the IPCC wants us to believe this shows a serious threat.

Its 2001 report showed the “hockey stick” temperature graph eight times but this was exposed as false just a few years later.  In similar fashion its 1994 report cited an unpublished paper that claimed evidence of manmade warming had been identified but the paper was roundly criticised when it was eventually published.

IPCC reports ignore papers that argue about natural forces causing climate change, which implies that the human influence is small.  This is surely “information relevant to understanding the scientific basis of risk of human-induced climate change” but it’s ignored.

The latest IPCC report ignored eight papers that said there was no increasing trend in the occurrence of US hurricanes but cited the only paper that said there was.