Climate Cover-Up: The Crusade to Deny Global Warming by Richard Littlemore James Hoggan

process is largely to be blamed for opening the IPCC up to legitimate accusations of political interference. The consensus format tends to give the greatest influence to the most resistant parties. If there is the tiniest grain of doubt in any specific piece of science, it is likely to be dismissed, either in the last scientific review or in the first political one. When you consider that among the reviewers you have the governments of oil-producing giants such as Russia, Saudi Arabia, and Argentina, you can imagine a degree of foot-dragging. Add to that the fears of India and China that they will be prohibited from lifting their nations out of poverty, and, perhaps worse, the intractability over the past eight years of the Bush administration, and you have a review process that was indeed highly politicized and that strained the scientists’ ability to put a sensible and accurate document before the people of the world.
    In that light, it is—what’s that phrase again?—Orwellian in the extreme to suggest that the IPCC was biased toward overstating the risks of selling and burning oil, coal, and natural gas. But that was the unavoidable inference that an impartial reader might draw from Ken Green and his Exxon-sponsored think tank compatriots. After receiving a copy of Green’s letter of solicitation, the researchers at the DeSmogBlog started watching for evidence that any scientists had taken up the challenge.
    Round two began at the end of January 2007, barely a week before the scheduled release of the first, and potentially most controversial, section of the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. A Canadian think tank, the Fraser Institute, announced that it was about to release an Independent Summary for Policy Makers ( ISPM ). This seemed like more than a passing coincidence. Ken Green’s last job before moving to the American Enterprise Institute was Director for the Centre of Studies of Risk and Regulation at the Fraser Institute. And the Fraser Institute is also listed on Greenpeace’s ExxonSecrets Web site as a recipient of direct funding from ExxonMobil and other energy interests.
    Although the Fraser Institute had promised to release its summary on February 5, 2007, Kevin Grandia at DeSmogBlog obtained a copy on January 31, 2007. It had been circulated for its own informal “peer review,” and one of the potential reviewers was sufficiently concerned about the content to pass it along for early release. We obliged, posting it on DeSmogBlog for a somewhat wider public review.
    The report itself was unsurprising. Although it stated that “the ISPM was prepared by experts who are fully qualified and experienced in their fields, but who are not themselves IPCC chapter authors,” the actual credits showed that the project coordinator was an economist, Ross McKitrick (a senior fellow at the Fraser Institute), and the lead author was the Weather Channel’s retired chief meteorologist, Joseph D’Aleo, a man who had had been working on a Ph.D. at New York University when he chose to leave academia.
    The Independent Summary for Policy Makers was long (more than fifty pages), convoluted, and obsessed with uncertainty. Its most enthusiastic argument addressed the so-called Mann hockey stick graph, which had appeared in an earlier IPCC document but was not part of the Fourth Assessment Report purportedly under review. The summary’s overall conclusion, which had been telegraphed by Green’s original letter of solicitation, was this: “There is no evidence provided by the IPCC in its Fourth Assessment Report that the uncertainty can be formally resolved from first principles, statistical hypothesis testing or modeling exercises. Consequently, there will remain an unavoidable element of uncertainty as to the extent that humans are contributing to future climate change, and indeed whether or not such change is a good or bad thing.”
    Notwithstanding that actual climate scientists—the best in the world—had judged