I first read about Donna Laframboise’s timely, terrific and totally transforming expose of the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) about a month ago on one of the daily blogs I follow, Matt Ridley’s The Rational Optimist. Intrigued by Ridley’s then brief description – he has since published a review – I accessed Donna’s website (www.NoConsensus.org) and fired off an email. She replied with a .pdf attachment containing the book. As testimony to our connected-by-electricity-world, in the short amount of time the ebook has been out it has made a significant impact on the blogosphere and the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has denounced it.
Now Matt Ridley is no lightweight. He was the Science Editor for The Economist for several decades. But, more importantly, he used to believe that catastrophic anthropogenic global warming (CAGW) was real. Since retiring from his day job, Matt has been reading and writing about various topics on his blog, including global warming. In his words, after careful study – including reading several books such as The Hockey Stick Illusion and now, The Delinquent Teenager – he is convinced that CAGW is a modern day myth created by environmental activists.
Similarly, Canadian freelance investigative journalist Donna Laframboise originally believed that the science surrounding CAGW was solid until she started researching the matter in earnest beginning in 2009. What she found shocked her. Not only was the science as fragile as an egg, but, many of the people, who wrote much of the 44 IPCC Chapters in the latest report, were environmental activists – not objective distinguished world class scientists. Examples of environmental activists functioning as IPCC contributing authors, lead authors and others abound throughout the book’s 36 chapters. But before she exposes them, she makes sure that the curious reader understands a few things about the IPCC.
In Donna’s words (p. 13)
The activist scientists who emerged in the 1970s have been working their way into high-status, leadership positions. Rather than keeping its distance from those whose careers have been associated with activism, the scientific establishment now honors, celebrates, and promotes such people.
But this has consequences. The public is supposed to accept the Climate Bible's findings because it is a scientific document written by the world's top scientific experts. What happens when the public discovers that those involved are actually brazen activists? What happens when it discovers that the world's most illustrious science bodies have themselves stopped drawing a line in the sand between activists and those who strive to pursue science in a genuinely neutral and unbiased fashion?
If scientists want us to trust their expert opinions they need to behave in a trustworthy manner. If they want us to be impressed by their high standards, they need to enforce these standards.
From this perspective, the shenanigans at the IPCC shed light on a broader malaise within the scientific community as a whole.
The Delinquent Teenager identifies several of the prominent activists – their lack of expertise, their activist beliefs and their unsubstantiated claims in exquisitely exposed detail – involved in writing the latest Climate Bible, thus connecting the dots between the WWF, Greenpeace and the IPCC. For example, after detailing the various machinations of several activists, Donna concludes:
We've been told there is a direct connection between the IPCC's process and how much faith we should have in the big-picture conclusion that human-generated greenhouse gases are interfering with the climate. We've been urged to believe in the end result because the IPCC's process is itself trustworthy.
If it turns out this process is as full of holes as my colander, scientists and politicians cannot now argue that those holes don't matter.
In a criminal trial we all understand that if the jury has been rigged, the judge has been bought, or the prosecutor has cheated the verdict must be thrown out. It is worthless (original italics, p. 90).
Containing 20 pages of footnotes and associated explanatory text, The Delinquent Teenager provides the evidence that incriminates the IPCC including footnote 31-5 (p. 116) which names and hyperlink cross-references the connections between the 78 IPCC personnel who are also members of the WWF’s Climate Witness Science Advisory Panel.
Thus, The Delinquent Teenager reveals the ways and means that the above de facto definitions of a miscarriage of justice apply to the IPCC and concludes that the process is so tainted that the only way to proceed is to disband the IPCC and start over with real world class scientists – not a bunch of environmental activists masquerading as climate scientists.
THE DELINQUENT TEENAGER WHO WAS MISTAKEN FOR THE WORLD’S TOP CLIMATE EXPERT – IPCC EXPOSE
Donna Laframboise
Ivy Avenue Press, Toronto, Canada
ISBN: 978-1-894984-05-8, 2011, 123 pp.
ebook