Another unsubstantiated claim turns up in U.N. climate report

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
is under fire for another erroneous claim. (Examiner.com)

Advocates of the manmade climate change theory have long tried to link global warming to natural disasters but empirical data has never supported the claim. Nevertheless, the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) included such a charge in its seminal AR4 report. The new episode is the second error from the climate body discovered in less than a week.

The world has “suffered rapidly rising costs due to extreme weather-related events since the 1970s” was the claim made in the report. It further goes on to link the rise to global warming.

"One study has found that while the dominant signal remains that of the significant increases in the values of exposure at risk, once losses are normalized for exposure, there still remains an underlying rising trend," it said.

That finding cited a scientific paper authored by Robert Muir-Wood, head of a London consulting firm, that at the time had not been peer reviewed or even published. When the paper did find its way to publication, it said quite clearly, "We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and catastrophe losses."

The discovery of the error is significant as it calls into question the U.N.’s claim that the research it publishes is peer reviewed and above reproach.

Roger Pielke Jr, professor of environmental studies at the University of Colorado outlined the issue at hand saying the statement IPCC used “a non-peer reviewed source to make a claim that was not true, and contrary to what the peer reviewed literature actually said.” Pielke has previously written about what he called the “systemic misrepresentation of the science of disasters and climate change” by the IPCC.

U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) head
Rajendra Pachauri looks on at a press conference in New Delhi,
India, Thursday, Jan. 21, 2010. Five glaring errors were discovered
in one paragraph of the world's most authoritative report on globa
l warming, forcing the Nobel Prize-winning panel of climate
scientists at the IPCC who wrote it to apologize and promise to
be more careful. (AP Photo/Gurinder Osan)

This latest error follows the revelation earlier this week that the IPCC had erroneously claimed that Himalayan glaciers would disappear by 2035. That error, also contained in the same report, prompted the climate change body to apologize and issue a statement saying it “refers to poorly substantiated estimates of rate of recession and date for the disappearance of Himalayan glaciers.”

Attempts to attribute an increase of natural disasters to global warming are not new. In his movie “An Inconvenient Truth”, Al Gore famously proclaimed that, “Temperature changes are taking place all over the world and that is causing stronger storms.” He repeated a similar claim in February while giving a presentation but was forced to pull the slide the next week when the claim was disproven.

President Barack Obama, in a town hall meeting in April echoed the Nobel laureate’s comments saying, “You're now looking at huge, cataclysmic hurricanes, complete changes in weather patterns.” He followed that in September when in a speech before the United Nations he claimed, “More powerful storms and floods threaten every continent.”

These claims however have not been substantiated with empirical data.

Calls have been mounting for Dr. Rajendra Pachauri, head of the IPCC, to step down and this latest episode will likely increase the demand. Pachauri has been the source of a great deal of controversy, most recently when it was discovered how he benefits financially from the advancement of the IPCCs work.

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