Commentary - Mark Newgent: What consensus on climate change?

BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Is there really a scientific consensus of 2,500 climate experts in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, and are all the IPCC signatories experts on the global climate?

Global warming alarmists and media advocates for the Global Warming Solutions bill now before the Maryland General Assembly incessantly tout the IPCC’s scientific “consensus” of climate experts, which states that humans are causing global warming. According to Donald Boesch, head of the University of Maryland Center for Environmental Science, “There is a very solid consensus on what we know about climate change.”

According to the Science and Public Policy Institute’s analysis of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report’s peer-review process, only 62 (eight were government officials) panelists reviewed the chapter, which ascribes the causes of global warming to human activity. Furthermore, the analysis concludes, “Among the 23 independent reviewers just four explicitly endorsed the chapter with its hypothesis of a significant human influence on climate, and one other endorsed only a specific section.” Hardly a consensus!

Reporters cite historian Naomi Oreskes’ 2004 systematic review of peer-reviewed articles published between 1993 and 2003 as proof of a consensus. Oreskes claimed that of the 928 scientific articles concerning climate change that she surveyed, none contradicted the “consensus” view of global warming. However, Oreskes’ study has been thoroughly debunked. In reality, only 13 articles (2 percent) in her data sent back the consensus view. Where is the consensus here?

Daniel Kirk-Davidoff of the atmospheric and oceanic science faculty at the University of Maryland said, “For political reasons, people will complain about the IPCC, but it’s just crap. ... The people on the panel are the best and brightest.”

But are the IPCC panelists really the “best and brightest” climate experts?

Science writers Ben Pile and Stuart Blackman researched the background of British and American IPCC panelists and found that a substantial portion of them are in fact not climate experts at all. Many of the panelists are social scientists, not climate scientists. One panelist is a graduate student in international affairs, who has yet to receive her doctorate. Other “experts” include political activists, administrative assistants, a network programmer and Web site designer.

The claim that the IPCC represents a consensus of 2,500 climate experts is simply not true.

What goes unmentioned is the fact that the IPCC is a political body. Skeptics are critical of the IPCC because alarmists — even though they masquerade their political motivations in sanctimonious moral language — tout this nonexistent consensus in their patently political quest for massive government interventions into the economy and private life.

The truth is, the so-called consensus is not found in the IPCC scientific assessment reports, but rather in the body’s Summary for Policy Makers, which is written by United Nations bureaucrats. This is the source of uncritical reporters’ claims of a consensus of 2,500 experts. The SPM excludes contrary evidence and in many significant areas disagrees with the underlying scientific report. The real consensus is political. It consists of a coalition of environmentalists, academics and rent-seeking corporations, all of whom have a substantial stake in increased government control over the private sector.

The assertion of an undeniable scientific consensus on catastrophic man-made global warming is nothing more than an alarmist cudgel used to force policy prescriptions through the political process and paint skeptics as outside the realm of legitimate public discourse.

Mark Newgent, of Baltimore, blogs for Red Maryland. He can be reached at marknewgent@comcast.net.

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