After last year’s scandal with the leaked e-mails which possibly show that The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) tried to suppress conflicting views, now we find that a key part of their reports was effectively copied off the back of a cerial packet.
The IPCC had claimed that the Himalayan glaciers would have melted by 2035 due to climate change, they even labeled the Indian Government’s study that disproved this as “voodoo science”. Now it turns out that the claim was lifted from an interview in New Scientist magazine, an interview that the scientist in question admits was his own personal opinion and not based on any scientific research.
Professor Julian Dowdeswell, a glacier specialist at Cambridge University, said: “The average glacier is 1,000ft thick so to melt one even at 15ft a year would take 60 years. That is a lot faster than anything we are seeing now.”
The IPCC seems to have been taken over by politicians whilst still masquerading as scientists, they seem to have forgotten that the role of scientists is to constantly challenge and reassess conventional wisdom, especially in a subject where we know so little. It is certainly questionable that the chairman of the IPCC, Rajendra Pachauri (Who has incidently a degree in Industrial Engineering and a PH.D. in Industrial Engineering and Economics – no environmental qualifications as far as I can see), is reported to have business interests that receive millions of pounds of funding derrived from IPCC policies.
The Climate Home Guard are quick to point out that there is a difference between climate and weather (or at least they are when an unexpected cold winter comes along and makes everyone question their dogma) but climate is made up of all the little pieces of weather. It’s hard to take these people’s rightiousness seriously when we can’t accurately predict conditions a week away (we certainly have no idea how much of it is caused by human activity) and these people are evangelical about what will “definately” happen in 40-50 years.
There is global warming, historically we’re near the bottom of a cycle that has been going on for millions of years, it’s also possible that global warming won’t be good for the human race (a change in the opposite direction certainly allowed the mammals to take over from the reptiles as the dominant class. The real question is how much of this climate can we change, (the world will continue to get warmer even if we stop all man-made carbon emissions).
We just don’t know and until science can understand the subject well enough to separate the natural changes from the man-made ones scientists need to continue questioning and challenging people’s views on the subject not silencing each other.
Well said Monks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!