Ice Age on Campus

With official admissions of tampering evidence of temperature declines accumulating weekly, global warming alarmists on campus, still a majority, at least among officials, must be getting their science from the animated film Ice Age. “Some are already using the word ‘Glaciergate’ in reference to the scandal over a scientifically untenable claim in the fourth IPCC assessment report, which the UN climate body publishes every five years,” ABC News reported on January 28, 2010. “The fourth assessment report was originally published in 2007.”

“Last week, the IPCC withdrew the erroneous claim and apologized for the error.” IPCC Chairman and Nobel laureate Rajendra Pachauri has become the center of the controversy. “Pachauri should resign, so as to avert further damage to the IPCC,” German climatologist Hans von Storch told ABC. “He used the argument of the supposed threat to the Himalayan glacier in his personal efforts to raise funds for research.”

“Every time I have questioned our politicians about global warming they have fallen back on the mantra that ‘2,500 scientists can’t be wrong,’ referring to the vast numbers supposedly behind the IPCC consensus,” Andrew Neal wrote on the BBC Daily Politics site. “But it is now clear that the majority of those involved in the IPCC process are not scientists at all but politicians, bureaucrats, NGOs and green activists.”

“They may—or may not—still be right or wrong but what has become clear in the past couple of months is that, contrary to what many leaders have claimed, the science as promulgated by the IPCC is very far from ‘settled’ and that there are important questions still to ask.” Don’t expect too many inquiring minds in academia to ask them: They may be part of the problem.

“Phil Jones, the director of the University of East Anglia’s Climatic Research Unit and a contributor to the IPCC’s reports, has been forced to stand down while an investigation takes place into leaked e-mails allegedly showing that he attempted to conceal data,” Ben Webster reminds us in The Times of London.

“We have 25 or so years invested in the work,” Professor Jones wrote in response to one request for data. “Why should I make the data available to you when your aim is to try and find something wrong with it?”

Of course, noted American academics showed up in that electronic trail, most notably Michael Mann of Penn State, also under investigation by his employer. And there’s more.

“The hits to IPCC and R K Pachauri just don’t seem to stop,” Swati Mathur wrote in The Times of India in an article posted January 27, 2010. “In the latest embarrassment to the Nobel-winning body, the British Daily Telegraph has published details on IPCC’s dire prediction regarding the huge depletion of Amazon forests, which was based on unverified reports.”

“The Daily said the IPCC forecast about the loss of Amazon forests because of ‘even a slight reduction in precipitation’ came from a journal that was not peer-reviewed.” By the way, India is also Pachauri’s country of origin.

“Some might argue we need a change in some of the upper leadership of the IPCC, who are perceived as becoming advocates,” Andrew Weaver, a climatologist at the University of Victoria told Canwest News Service. “I think that is a very legitimate question.”

Malcolm A. Kline is the Executive Director of Accuracy in Academia.