Nye avsløringer om FNs Klimapanel og et oppblåst marked for klimakvoter med store muligheter for fortjeneste og svindel, kan undergrave folks tillit til klimasaken og miljøvennlig politikk.
Det kommer stadig flere tegn på at FNs klimapanel er en gigant på leirføtter. Det heter seg at konsensus fortsatt består, til tross for avsløringer om politisert forskning og dårlig funderte prognoser. Men det er feil, det er selve fundamentet som nå sprekker, skriver Christopher Booker.
Lederen for IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri, har tjent seg rik på sitt forskningsinstitutt Teri, og skaffet seg lukrative kontrakter med EU.
Markedet for klimakvoter var i fjor på 126 milliarder dollar, og skal stige til astronomiske beløp. Mulighetene for svindel er store. Hvis det viser seg at handelen bygger på sviktende premisser, er skandalen komplett.
Almost as revealing as the leaked documents themselves, however, was the recent interview given to the BBC by the CRU’s suspended director, Dr Phil Jones, who has played a central role in the global warming scare for 20 years, not least as custodian of the most prestigious of the four global temperature records relied on by the IPCC. In his interview Jones seemed to be chucking overboard one key prop of warmest faith after another, as he admitted that the world might have been hotter during the Medieval Warm Period 1,000 years ago than it is today, that before any rise in CO2 levels temperatures rose faster between 1860 and 1880 than they have done in the past 30 years, and that in the past decade their trend has been falling rather than rising.
The implications of all this for the warming scare, as it has been presented to us over the past two decades, can scarcely be overestimated. The reputation of the IPCC is in shreds. And this is to say nothing of the personal reputation of the man who was the mastermind of its 2007 report, its chairman, Dr Rajendra Pachauri.
It was in this newspaper that we first revealed how Pachauri has earned millions of pounds for his Delhi-based research institute Teri, and further details are still emerging of how he has parlayed his position into a worldwide business empire, including 17 lucrative contracts from the EU alone. But we should not expect the truth to break in too suddenly on this mass of vested interests. Too many people have too much at stake to allow the faith in man-made global warming, which has sustained them so long and which is today making so many of them rich, to be abandoned. The so-called investigations into Climategate and Dr Michael “Hockey Stick” Mann seem like no more than empty establishment whitewashes. There is little reason to expect that the inquiry into the record of the IPCC and Dr Pachauri that is now being set up by the UN Environment Programme and the world’s politicians will be very different.
Since 1988, when the greatest scare the world has seen got under way, hundreds of billions
of pounds have been poured into academic research projects designed not to test the CO2 warming thesis but to take it as a given fact, and to use computer models to make its impacts seem as scary as possible. The new global “carbon trading” market, already worth $126 billion a year, could soon be worth trillions. Governments, including our own, are calling for hundreds of billions more to be chucked into absurd “carbon-saving” energy schemes, with the cost to be met by all of us in soaring taxes and energy bills.With all this mighty army of gullible politicians, dutiful officials, busy carbon traders, eager “renewables” developers and compliant, funding-hungry academics standing to benefit from the greatest perversion of the principles of true science the world has ever seen, who are we to protest that their emperor has no clothes? (How apt that that fairy tale should have been written in Copenhagen.) Let all that fluffy white “global warming” continue to fall from the skies, while people shiver in homes that, increasingly, they will find they can no longer afford to heat. We have called into being a true Frankenstein’s monster. It will take a mighty long time to cut it down to size.
A perfect storm is brewing for the IPCC
The emerging errors of the IPCC’s 2007 report are not incidental but fundamental, says Christopher Booker