No Frakking Consensus
Donna La Framboise
Media outlets remain oblivious to the IPCC’s tainted-by-activism personnel.
After reading this document, the New York Times declared that “scientists have found” that climate change “will pose sharp risks to the world’s food supply.”
In Germany, Der Spiegel also emphasized the food angle. The Associated Press, meanwhile, advised that a “scientific report forecasts” that “starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease” will be exacerbated by climate change.
When I looked at this summary, however, it wasn’t the IPCC’s prose that caught my attention. It was the less obvious, subterranean story beneath the surface.
Hundreds of people helped write the 30 chapters in the Working Group 2 section of the IPCC’s new report. From those hundreds of people, 71 individuals were selected to work on this summary. Their job was to distil 30 chapters into 29 pages.
One would expect a body that says it’s conducting a scientific assessment to choose people who are clean as a whistle for such a task. People who exemplify science at its best – neutral, dispassionate, disinterested scholars.
But that’s not what happened. Among those who helped write this summary we find astrophysicist Michael Oppenheimer. He spent more than two decades on the payroll of the wealthy American activist organization, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). According to his online biography at Princeton University, he continues to advise the EDF to this day.
In other words, Oppenheimer is tainted by his activist past and his activist present. If an anti-junk-food crusader was asked to summarize a report on childhood obesity would they be likely to produce a carefully balanced précis – or one slanted in a particular direction?
Read more
Donna La Framboise
Media outlets remain oblivious to the IPCC’s tainted-by-activism personnel.
Over the weekend, mainstream media outlets published news stories regarding the recent leak of an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) summary document.
In Germany, Der Spiegel also emphasized the food angle. The Associated Press, meanwhile, advised that a “scientific report forecasts” that “starvation, poverty, flooding, heat waves, droughts, war and disease” will be exacerbated by climate change.
When I looked at this summary, however, it wasn’t the IPCC’s prose that caught my attention. It was the less obvious, subterranean story beneath the surface.
Hundreds of people helped write the 30 chapters in the Working Group 2 section of the IPCC’s new report. From those hundreds of people, 71 individuals were selected to work on this summary. Their job was to distil 30 chapters into 29 pages.
One would expect a body that says it’s conducting a scientific assessment to choose people who are clean as a whistle for such a task. People who exemplify science at its best – neutral, dispassionate, disinterested scholars.
But that’s not what happened. Among those who helped write this summary we find astrophysicist Michael Oppenheimer. He spent more than two decades on the payroll of the wealthy American activist organization, the Environmental Defense Fund (EDF). According to his online biography at Princeton University, he continues to advise the EDF to this day.
In other words, Oppenheimer is tainted by his activist past and his activist present. If an anti-junk-food crusader was asked to summarize a report on childhood obesity would they be likely to produce a carefully balanced précis – or one slanted in a particular direction?
Read more
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