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

by dhw, Sunday, January 31, 2010, 11:41 (5206 days ago) @ David Turell

The scandals mount. From today's Sunday Times:-"A startling report by the United Nations climate watchdog that global warming might wipe out 40% of the Amazon rainforest was based on an unsubstantiated claim by green campaigners who had little scientific expertise."-Apparently the IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) attributed this potential disaster to a slight change in rainfall. They relied on a report by WWF (World Wildlife Fund, I presume), which in turn was based on a study in the science journal Nature, but this did not consider rainfall at all; it looked at the impact of human activities such as logging and burning! -After East Anglia, Himalayan glaciers, false links between global warming and natural disasters, it appears that "scientists fear the controversies will be used by climate change sceptics to sway public opinion to ignore global warming." If the newspaper articles are correct, these are not controversies but instances of false data, by way of either negligence or deliberate deception. As we have noted many times, you can't separate science from scientists, but if you can't trust the United Nations panel, who can you trust? Even if, as they claim, the fundamental science "remains strong" (which many question), at the very least all these folk should be removed from office after being made to recite Aesop a hundred times: "The Boy Who Cried Wolf".