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.