At Medsin's 2013 National Health Conference in Leeds, Ruth Laurence-King and I ran Healthy Planet's stream session on climate change, health and the fossil fuel industry's role in fuelling the climate change denial machine. This is the text of part of the stream, on the meaning of good and bad science in the context of the IPCC and NIPCC reports.
A few weeks ago, as most of you are probably aware, the UN’s
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change released part I of its 5th
Assessment Report on climate change. The IPCC is a democratic body with
participants from over 150 nations, which invites hundreds of scientists from
across the globe to participate in constructing systematic reviews of the best
evidence on issues of climate change in their area of expertise. The process by
which these reports are constructed is laid bare for all to see on the IPCC’s
websites, and the peer review process is entirely open – anyone can register to
participate in the peer review process. The AR5 WGI report concluded that
warming of the atmosphere and oceans was unequivocal, with it being more than
95% likely that human influence had been the dominant cause of observed warming
since 1950.
With any luck, fewer of you will be aware of another report
of climate change that was released in the past few months. Calling itself the
second report of the Non-governmental International Panel on Climate Change
(NIPCC), it details a list of grievances with the scientific consensus embodied
in the IPCC reports, attempting to review evidence that weighs against the
extent of anthropogenic climate change. This report was compiled by 47 authors
(35 of them scientists from a variety of fields) working for the Heartland
Institute, a libertarian think-tank bankrolled by tobacco, fossil fuel and
pharmaceutical companies with a fine tradition of mounting ‘scientific’
resistance to evidence of the dangers of second-hand smoke, the existence of
acid rain, and the growing depletion of the ozone layer - ably assisted in many of these enterprises
by Lead Author of the NIPCC report, former rocket physicist S Fred Singer. The
NIPCC report finds, in contrast, that CO2 is a mild greenhouse gas that may at most produce a fraction of a degree of global temperature increase, which in any case would probably be beneficial for the world overall.
