Science fictions

What is it about international organisations that makes them so impervious to criticism? If the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) were a British ministry or quango, it is inconceivable that its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, would still be in his post.

The IPCC’s reports, which have been accepted by governments around the world as a definitive judgment on the science of global warming and used to influence policies with huge economic and social consequences, have over the past few months been exposed as shoddy pieces of work which would have disgraced an undergraduate thesis. A fantastic claim that Himalayan glaciers will have melted by 2035 turns out to have been derived from a piece of speculation in a climbing magazine, the author of which may himself have mistyped 2035 for 2350. Now an inquiry by the United Nations — itself often guilty of behaving with lofty arrogance — has revealed that many of the IPCC’s other claims derive not from peer-reviewed scientific papers but from so-called ‘grey’ literature: a polite term for bunkum pumped out by pressure groups.

And yet Dr Pachauri not only remains in his job; he is adamant that he will stay until his term expires in 2014. The failure of our own leaders to subject the IPCC’s output to critical scrutiny has been astounding. Neither the former Labour government nor the Conservatives can take much credit from the affair: both have blindly accepted the IPCC’s reports and used them as the basis for a series of policies which could prove hugely damaging to the British economy. No matter what the cost, Britain is now committed to cutting carbon emissions by 80 per cent over the next few years.

Why have our politicians, normally so keen to argue and debate with each other, been so reluctant to question the IPCC’s findings? Their attitude can be summed up by the words of David Miliband, who as environment secretary in 2006 declared that ‘the scientific debate on climate change is now closed’.