Matt Ridley - soothscribe emeritus

The eminent Matt Ridley's op-ed on the crumbling of the reputation of the UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in today's Times (£) can be read on his blog The Rational Optimist. Solid stuff, as always.

Yesterday, after a four-month review, a committee of scientists concluded that the Nobel prize-winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has assigned high confidence to statements for which there is very little evidence, has failed to enforce its own guidelines, has been guilty of too little transparency, has ignored critical review comments and has had no policies on conflict of interest”.

Enormous and expensive policy changes have been based on the flawed work of these scientists. Yet there is apparently to be no investigation, blame, suspension or withdrawal of papers, just a gentle bureaucratic fattening of the organisation with new full-time posts.

IPCC reports are supposed to be the gold standard account of what is - and is not - known about global warming. The panel boasts that it uses only peer-reviewed scientific literature. But its claims about mountain ice turned out to be anecdotes from a climbing magazine, its claims on the Amazon’s vulnerability to drought from a Brazilian pressure group’s website and 42 per cent of the references in one chapter proved to be to reports by Greenpeace, WWF and other “grey” literature. 

For instance, the notorious claim that glaciers in the Himalayas would disappear by 2035 seems to have been based on a misprint (for 2350) in a document issued by a pressure group. When several reviewers challenged the assertion in draft, they were ignored. When Indian scientists challenged it after publication, they were not just dismissed but vilified and accused of “voodoo science” by the IPCC chairman, Rajendra Pachauri.

Actually, it was worse than that. The original glacier claim was made by the obscure Dr Syed Hasnain, who is an employee of The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), an NGO set up by the Tata Group in 1984. The Director General of TERI is . . . the railway engineer Rajandra Pachauri. The IPCC’s endorsement of Hasnain’s opinion, unsupported by research and uncorroborated by anyone else, enabled TERI to win a $500,000 grant from the Carnegie Foundation, along with a share in a €3,000,000 grant from the EU.

Ridley's last paragraphs speaks for me, only I must immodestly point out that I reached the same conclusion fifteen years ago purely by studying the internal illogic and evident profiteering-political agenda of the eek!-o-freak phenomenon.

Three years ago, not having paid much attention, I thought that IPCC reports were reliable, fair and transparent. No longer. Despite coming from a long line of coal-mining entrepreneurs, I’m not a “denier”: I think carbon dioxide is a greenhouse gas. I’m not even a sceptic (yet): I think the climate has warmed and will warm further. But I am now a “lukewarmer” who has yet to see any evidence saying that the current warming is, or is likely to be, unprecedented, fast or tending to accelerate.

So I have concluded that global warming will most probably be a fairly minor problem - at least compared with others such as poverty and habitat loss - for nature as well as people. After watching the ecologically and economically destructive policies enacted in its name (biofuels, wind power), I think we run the risk of putting a tourniquet round our collective necks to stop a nosebleed.