In their story August 3rd Cover story, Congressional Quarterly reporters Coral Davenport, Benton Ives and Phil Mattingly perpetuate a common mythology about the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which surely will proliferate as reportage increases, with numerous international confabs scheduled to discuss an international treaty in coming months. Their piece, Carbon, From the Ground Up at least admits that “carbon dioxide [is] a naturally occurring by-product of human and animal respiration, and the principal gas breathed in by green plants”, but then goes on to state:

The more than 2,000 scientists on the Nobel-Prize winning Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change have said that carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are warming the planet, causing drought, rising sea levels and widespread disease.

This is just not true. The IPCC arguably does include participation by 2,000 or more “scientists”, in some capacity or another. But the vast majority of IPCC participants are reviewers who, like lead authors and authors, are broken into three Working Groups, only one of which addresses the issue of whether  “carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels are warming the planet, causing drought, rising sea levels and widespread disease.” So, immediately this claim is reduced by about two-thirds.

Furthermore these 2,000-plus scientists include anthropology teaching assistants, transport policy instructors, and teachers of “the human dimension of environmental change”, as well as economists, statisticians, chemist, engineers, and computer modelers. When others, like EPA whistle blower Alan Carlin (holder of a PhD in economics from MIT and physics degree from CalTech), voice opinions contrary to the IPCC they are not called scientists and are instead deemed irrelevant to the debate.

As researcher John McLean has revealed, there is no evidence to suggest that most reviewers participated in any substantive way. He notes:

How many times have you heard or read words to the effect that 4000 scientists from the [IPCC] supported the claims about a significant human influence on climate? …There’s no question whatsoever. It’s utterly wrong.

The IPCC is a governmental organization that admits on its home page that it “does not conduct any research nor does it monitor climate related data or parameters “. It writes reports, attracting the nominal participation of individuals from around the world not unhappy with being described as a world’s leading scientist. Often these participants bear conflicts that would preclude them from any legitimate, peer-reviewed enterprise due to conflicts including a propensity to reference their own and each other’s work.