A lie will travel around the world while the truth is pulling on its boots….Mark Twain
Putting CO2 and Climate Warming on the Global Stage
Michael Mann was already involved with a few colleagues in creating better public understanding of human-induced global warming. Coincidentally, the World Meteorological Organization had proposed to the United Nations, together with the UN’s Environmental Programme (UNEP) to establish the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in 1988. The IPCC would be located in the Headquarters of the WMO in Geneva, Switzerland. The operating procedures of the IPCC were established as follows.
- The IPCC did not do scientific work, but collected scientific research from scientists worldwide, both peer-reviewed and not.
- Members of the IPCC were from the membership of the two founding organizations.
- IPCC paid-staff in Geneva were only about ten in number.
- Science/Environmental Members were unpaid volunteers who gave volunteer time to produce scientific climate-change assessments based on worldwide research collected by the IPCC.As of 2018, volunteer members numbered about six hundred.
- The IPCC would from time-to-time publish science-based assessments on three subjects:
- i. Scientific Assessments of Climate Change
- ii. Impact Assessments of Climate Change, and
- iii.Response Strategies.
- The environmental and science members were divided into teams to read, edit, discuss, approve and disseminate the research collected by the IPCC.t
- An IPCC committee of delegates from all UN countries and their non-governmental organization would prepare a Policymakers Summary, and thereafter published.
The IPCC was founded and operating in November, 1988. Hansen testified on June 23, 1988.
The IPCC’s first Climate Assessment was published in 1990. It contained Michael Mann’s infamous “hockey stick” graph of global temperatures; “the most controversial chart in science.” The graphs (there were several) showed historical temperature records for the past 500 to 2000 years showing relatively stable downward values until 1850, and thereafter a sharp upward finish in 1995. What had happened to The Little Ice Age, The Medieval Warming, The Dark Ages, et al?
The planners of the Global Climate-Change strategy must have been humbled by the success of their plan. By 1993, the first year of the Clinton/Gore administration, the United States appropriated nearly five billion dollars to be spent by September 30 on Climate Science, Technology to reduce CO2 production and international aid. By 2014, the annual appropriation had reached $11.4 billion. Research money to study climate change must have piled up for atmospheric scientists; Earth scientists still had to scratch for funds. One complaining oceanographer was said to have had trouble “scaring up grants.” He must have resented the scary exaggerations, even in the 1990s, of the catastrophes waiting for Earth’s inhabitants when accumulated CO2 went over the tipping point. From the time of the Clinton/Gore administration onward, the scientists and environmentalists lost control of the ship. Politicians got control, which we will see, is a bad mixture.
Publiustoo.com January 19, 2020
