first published in summary form in weblog one hundred and thirty seven on Wednesday 17th May 2006
The British Government is a signatory to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol to restrict carbon emissions. The scientific work underpinning this came from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) who claimed there was a scientific consensus that (a) global warming is a major threat to the planet; (b) it is primarily man-made; (c) the cause is carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels and (d) these greenhouse gases trap the sun's heat and warm the planet.
But there has never been such a scientific consensus. Indeed a recent analysis of scientific papers on climate change by Dr Benny Peiser, of John Moores University and Dr Dennis Bray, of the German-based GKSS National Research Centre concluded that dissenters are in a healthy majority.
In July 2005 a report from the House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affair…The Economics of Climate Change Volume 1, HL Papers 1201…included a quote from Professor Reiter at the Institut Pasteur in Paris that 'Consensus is the stuff of politics, not science'.
Here is the full text of the Committee's remarks in Section 116 of the report where the professor's comments are cited:
"We cannot prove that Professor Reiter’s nomination was rejected because of the likelihood that he would argue warming and malaria are not correlated in the manner the IPCC Reports suggest. But the suspicion must be there, and it is a suspicion that lingers precisely because the IPCC’s procedures are not as open as they should be. It seems to us that there remains a risk that IPCC has become a “knowledge monopoly” in some respects, unwilling to listen to those who do not pursue the consensus line. We think Professor Reiter’s remarks on “consensus” deserve repeating.
“Consensus is the stuff of politics, not science. Science proceeds by observation, hypothesis and experiment. Professional scientists rarely draw firm conclusions from a single article, but consider its contribution in the context of other publications and their own experience, knowledge and speculations”.
"We are concerned that there may be political interference in the nomination of scientists whose credentials should rest solely with their scientific qualifications for the tasks involved."
And here is the full text of the House of Lord's Committee's Conclusion in Section 118:
'Overall, we are concerned that the IPCC process could be improved by rethinking the role that government-nominated representatives play in the procedures, and by ensuring that the appointment of authors is above reproach. If scientists are charged with writing the main chapters, it seems to us they must be trusted to write the summaries of their chapters without intervention from others. Similarly, scientists should be appointed because of their scientific credentials, and not because they take one or other view in the climate debate. The IPCC publications as a whole contain some of the most valuable summary information available to the world on what we know about climate change. The standards employed are clearly very high. But this is all the more reason to ensure that procedures are unimpeachable. At the moment, it seems to us that the emissions scenarios are influenced by political considerations and, more broadly, that the economics input into the IPCC is in some danger of being sidelined. We call on the Government to make every effort to ensure that these risks are minimised.'