Politics and science; is science being corrupted? (Introduction)

by dhw, Sunday, January 24, 2010, 11:45 (5214 days ago) @ David Turell

Some quotes from an article in today's Sunday Times under the heading "UN climate panel blunders again".-"The United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to a rise in natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods."-It appears that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) panel already knew that the evidence for the link was "too weak" before the Copenhagen summit, but no mention was made of this. The latest blunder comes a week after the panel was forced to withdraw the claim that the Himalayan glaciers would largely have melted by 2035. "The chairman of the IPCC has used bogus claims that Himalayan glaciers were melting to win grants worth hundreds of thousands of pounds."-Professor Roger Pielke (Colorado Univ.) is quoted as saying: "All the literature published before and since the IPCC report shows that rising disaster losses can be explained entirely by social change. People have looked hard for evidence that global warming plays a part but can't find it."-Robert Muir-Wood, head of research at Risk Management Solutions, London, says: "The idea that catastrophes are rising in cost because of climate change is completely misleading."