Bishop Hill Into the dustbin
Sep 10, 2013 Books Donna Laframboise's new book about the IPCC is now available. Here's the blurb:
Rajendra Pachauri, the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), is a non-stop train wreck. The IPCC is supposed to be an objective scientific body, but Pachauri writes forewords for Greenpeace publications and has accepted a 'green crusader’ award. He is an aggressive policy advocate even though his organization is supposed to be policy neutral. In 1996, an Indian High Court concluded that he’d "suppressed material facts" and "sworn to false affidavits." He has long claimed to hold two PhDs, but in fact only earned one.
This book is a collection of essays about Pachauri originally published as blog posts between February 2010 and August 2013. Essay number one, The IPCC and the Peace Prize, appears here for the first time. It documents how Pachauri improperly advised IPCC personnel that they were Nobel laureates after that organization was awarded half of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize (Al Gore received the other half).
Scientists aren’t supposed to embellish. They’re supposed to be clear-eyed about what is true and what is false. The idea that hundreds of scientists have been padding their resumés, that they’ve been walking around in broad daylight improperly claiming to be Nobel laureates, isn’t something any normal person would expect.
But that is exactly what happened. It took the IPCC five years to correct the record. During that time, media outlets, science academies, and senior government officials went along for the ride. The moral of this story is that, when faced with a choice between the unadorned truth and exaggeration, IPCC personnel made the wrong call. Their judgment can’t be trusted.
;)
Reader Comments (6)
I have a review copy which I confess I've not opened. But this sounds the ideal follow up to Delinquent Teenager from Donna. It's already been a remarkable year for publishing by policy sceptics.
Please do not forget that you, I, and all other Europeans are Nobel laureates - we were all awarded the Peace prize last year. (Unless, by accepting the award to "the EU", I am mistaken in thinking that you or I or any other citizen in the EU are actually part of "the EU". But... what else could they mean?)
[Snip - venting]
I have to say, as a long-time admirer of Donna and as someone who has written almost more blurbs than I can – or care – to remember, that hers is horribly crude and clumsy. I strongly suspect it was given to the newest member of the publishers' staff to write. It is a shame. Blurbs can be important, much more than mere puff pieces that no one reads.
For any polemic, the key is always to be factual, objective and calm, the facts speaking for themselves. So unless you have a genius for invective, to claim in your opening statement that your subject is a 'non-stop-train wreck' instantly suggests that you are lowering yourself to precisely the level of inanity that you are arguing against while simultaneously trying to be, hey!, controversial in a particularly groovy and thoroughly unconvincing way.
She deserves much, much better.
Why is the US government pushing the global warming fraud? Is this something to do with the country’s debt and seeing global warming as an opportunity to print money out of thin air? Very sad to see the western world, the birthplace of scientific rationalism, forcing dark ages-type pseudoscience on the rest of the world. Combine this with Snowden’s whistle-blowing and I’m seriously worried about the world’s future.
"Why is the US government pushing the global warming fraud? Is this something to do with the country’s debt and seeing global warming as an opportunity to print money out of thin air? Very sad to see the western world, the birthplace of scientific rationalism, forcing dark ages-type pseudoscience on the rest of the world. Combine this with Snowden’s whistle-blowing and I’m seriously worried about the world’s future."
It's really about global government, or as I see it international Marxism? And the tool to get there is a political/ideological (digital) illusion that we have a serious global environmental or climate crisis?