Treatment of climate in the IPCC reports, especially in the summary for policy makers, is biased but, so far as I can tell, honest. Unfortunately, few people actually read the IPCC report and those who do mostly read only the summary for policy makers, which in my experience is the most biased and least scientific part of the report. Most people get their views on climate issues at second hand from news stories, blogs, YouTube channels, friends and acquaintances. Most reporters do not understand the issues and even climate scientists are unlikely to understand other subjects that feed into views on climate, such as economics, geology, or statistics. The result is that most people’s beliefs about climate issues have only a loose relation with the truth.
I would add that the institution under discussion is the UN-IPCC. And if the UN ever solves any world problem at all, it will be a first.
The UN has so far failed to solve or reduce problems with stateless persons and refugees, armed border conflicts, unexpected banking failures, insect-borne diseases, waste-water treatment issues, piracy on the high seas, sky-jackings, corrupt judges at Olympic games, not sending up successful space communication satellites or dealing with falling junk from degraded devices from orbits, cheating at chess matches, revising Postal conventions ... The primary goal of UN commissions and panels is to synthesize a problem so minor that it will be "solved" no matter what. "Global Warming" is ideal for that purpose. Either the weather changes -- as it usually does. Or nations will each adapt in individual ways. Or a general improvement in technology undirected by state policy will have applications to the issues. The best example of UN intentions and results is the peace treaty among combatants on the Korean Penninsula. Oh, right, there isn't one. Eighty years of armed and hostile cease fire maintained NOT by the UN, but by the American Military, is all the world can point to.
Success stories of the Global stage, however imperfect, like the Olympics and current Postal Conventions, were mostly accomplished without and before the UN. A few, like Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution, were accomplished OVER THE OBJECTIONS of the UN. Many were accidental "collateral construction" (is that a thing? opposite of damage? ) world improvements from the American Military. Steel sea containers and the port handling cranes at Bremerhaven, Rotterdam, Antwerp, then REALLY ramping up with VietNam and Lady Bird Johnson's "SeaLand" operations, then rolling over (grin) to intermodal containers in rail and barge and trucks not to mention keeping the Panama Canal open. World trade is built on a foundation of steel boxes and has nothing to do with the UN. Same with the internet, which leaked out of DARPA -- it wasn't the UN that gave us the World Wide Web. Same with Global Positioning Systems. The world is vastly better mapped now, but not by the UN. Stack up the world wealth created or saved by the US next to whatever you attribute to the UN, and it's like the old World Trade Center side by side with Edward Mooney brownstone.
ANYHOW, rant over. Just, when asked to "trust the science", I first consider the source.
In my experience, the news media rarely gets anything right. Coverage of the covid epidemic was so bad that I began joking that you needed to fail high school math to get a job as a journalist. Minimal competence at statistics appears vanishingly rare.
Their incentives and working conditions make things worse: they want to produce clickbait, and they want to produce it fast. They also want to produce what their customers will like, particularly if the subject is at all politicized.
I think this, rather than bias, accounts for the quality of reporting on climate change. Reporters serving readers with a left wing bias can create big scary headlines that also please their base, so happily do so.
I presume that reporters serving right wing readers have somewhat of a juggling act - do they minimize climate change to please their readers, or catastrophize it to draw additional clicks - and like as not resolve this with big scary headlines about dishonesty among their ideological opponents. (But I don't follow Breitbart, or even Fox News, so that's just a guess.)
I'm not nearly as forgiving. I have not read any of the IPCC reports at all, only extracts like here, and there is far too much misdirection for me to think the authors innocent.
The motive, to me, is obvious: the same that led to so much wasted expenditure during the Great Depression and the Cold War. I do not think it coincidental that the rise in fearmongering about global warming happened as the Cold War was winding down, nor that wokeness is rising as Global Warming fails to gain traction. The media need alarums and excursions, subsidized science needs the media just as much as the subsidized military industrial complex, and politicians feed the one to harvest the other.
There have simply been too many outright lies, frauds, and failed predictions coming out of the global warming cabal for me to believe a single thing they say now.
Those are interested in this post might find that worth reading too. I'd love to see you and he have a conversation about the IPCC reports (there are also areas of disagreement) - would be great to see 2 smart, open minded people talking about the issues.
As a student of economic history, I observe that the rise of Modern Man coincided with a rapid rise in temperatures of as much as 8 C (Greenland, Vostok) about 12 thousand years ago, introducing the Holocene. Before that, human existence except as nomad scavengers was simply not possible. Indeed a period of localized cooling in the Middle East in the second millennium BCE brought the downfall of several civilizations including the Oxus, Indus and Mesopotamian.
I know we have our differences of opinions, but goodness, I think you would appreciate the climate / environmental / "unpopular opinions" in https://bit.ly/3OcU2Kv
(You would, of course, dislike a lot of it.)
PS: Thanks for this post (from someone who was a DOE Global Change Fellow from 1991-1996)
I would add that the institution under discussion is the UN-IPCC. And if the UN ever solves any world problem at all, it will be a first.
The UN has so far failed to solve or reduce problems with stateless persons and refugees, armed border conflicts, unexpected banking failures, insect-borne diseases, waste-water treatment issues, piracy on the high seas, sky-jackings, corrupt judges at Olympic games, not sending up successful space communication satellites or dealing with falling junk from degraded devices from orbits, cheating at chess matches, revising Postal conventions ... The primary goal of UN commissions and panels is to synthesize a problem so minor that it will be "solved" no matter what. "Global Warming" is ideal for that purpose. Either the weather changes -- as it usually does. Or nations will each adapt in individual ways. Or a general improvement in technology undirected by state policy will have applications to the issues. The best example of UN intentions and results is the peace treaty among combatants on the Korean Penninsula. Oh, right, there isn't one. Eighty years of armed and hostile cease fire maintained NOT by the UN, but by the American Military, is all the world can point to.
Success stories of the Global stage, however imperfect, like the Olympics and current Postal Conventions, were mostly accomplished without and before the UN. A few, like Norman Borlaug's Green Revolution, were accomplished OVER THE OBJECTIONS of the UN. Many were accidental "collateral construction" (is that a thing? opposite of damage? ) world improvements from the American Military. Steel sea containers and the port handling cranes at Bremerhaven, Rotterdam, Antwerp, then REALLY ramping up with VietNam and Lady Bird Johnson's "SeaLand" operations, then rolling over (grin) to intermodal containers in rail and barge and trucks not to mention keeping the Panama Canal open. World trade is built on a foundation of steel boxes and has nothing to do with the UN. Same with the internet, which leaked out of DARPA -- it wasn't the UN that gave us the World Wide Web. Same with Global Positioning Systems. The world is vastly better mapped now, but not by the UN. Stack up the world wealth created or saved by the US next to whatever you attribute to the UN, and it's like the old World Trade Center side by side with Edward Mooney brownstone.
ANYHOW, rant over. Just, when asked to "trust the science", I first consider the source.
In my experience, the news media rarely gets anything right. Coverage of the covid epidemic was so bad that I began joking that you needed to fail high school math to get a job as a journalist. Minimal competence at statistics appears vanishingly rare.
Their incentives and working conditions make things worse: they want to produce clickbait, and they want to produce it fast. They also want to produce what their customers will like, particularly if the subject is at all politicized.
I think this, rather than bias, accounts for the quality of reporting on climate change. Reporters serving readers with a left wing bias can create big scary headlines that also please their base, so happily do so.
I presume that reporters serving right wing readers have somewhat of a juggling act - do they minimize climate change to please their readers, or catastrophize it to draw additional clicks - and like as not resolve this with big scary headlines about dishonesty among their ideological opponents. (But I don't follow Breitbart, or even Fox News, so that's just a guess.)
I use How To Lie with statistics to teach ESL. I'm doing a great service for the country.
I'm not nearly as forgiving. I have not read any of the IPCC reports at all, only extracts like here, and there is far too much misdirection for me to think the authors innocent.
The motive, to me, is obvious: the same that led to so much wasted expenditure during the Great Depression and the Cold War. I do not think it coincidental that the rise in fearmongering about global warming happened as the Cold War was winding down, nor that wokeness is rising as Global Warming fails to gain traction. The media need alarums and excursions, subsidized science needs the media just as much as the subsidized military industrial complex, and politicians feed the one to harvest the other.
There have simply been too many outright lies, frauds, and failed predictions coming out of the global warming cabal for me to believe a single thing they say now.
Some of your points are similar to those made by Roger Pielke, Jr. in his substack, The Honest Broker.
https://rogerpielkejr.substack.com
Those are interested in this post might find that worth reading too. I'd love to see you and he have a conversation about the IPCC reports (there are also areas of disagreement) - would be great to see 2 smart, open minded people talking about the issues.
I read both David and Roger regularly. I agree a discussion between the two would be excellent. I would pay for a ticket to that!
I would too!
As a student of economic history, I observe that the rise of Modern Man coincided with a rapid rise in temperatures of as much as 8 C (Greenland, Vostok) about 12 thousand years ago, introducing the Holocene. Before that, human existence except as nomad scavengers was simply not possible. Indeed a period of localized cooling in the Middle East in the second millennium BCE brought the downfall of several civilizations including the Oxus, Indus and Mesopotamian.
I know we have our differences of opinions, but goodness, I think you would appreciate the climate / environmental / "unpopular opinions" in https://bit.ly/3OcU2Kv
(You would, of course, dislike a lot of it.)
PS: Thanks for this post (from someone who was a DOE Global Change Fellow from 1991-1996)