UN climate report lead author claims the summary was altered for political reasons

  A couple of weeks ago the United Nations released its latest IPCC climate change report and it found that greenhouse emissions were rising faster than ever and we had to act quickly if we wanted to save the planet.

Delivering the latest stark news about climate change on Sunday, a United Nations panel warned that governments are not doing enough to avert profound risks in coming decades. But the experts found a silver lining: Not only is there still time to head off the worst, but the political will to do so seems to be rising around the world.

In a report unveiled here, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change found that decades of foot-dragging by political leaders had propelled humanity into a critical situation, with greenhouse emissions rising faster than ever. Though it remains technically possible to keep planetary warming to a tolerable level, only an intensive push over the next 15 years to bring those emissions under control can achieve the goal, the committee found.

“We cannot afford to lose another decade,” said Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist and co-chairman of the committee that wrote the report. “If we lose another decade, it becomes extremely costly to achieve climate stabilization.”

   We all remember the Climategate scandal and the ‘hide the decline’ fiasco from several years ago when it was learned through hacked emails that the CRU was purposely fudging the numbers to reach a predetermined and desired outcome.

  We might be seeing something along those lines once again because according to this article Robert Stavins, the lead author of this latest IPCC climate change report, is now claiming that most of the summary report was either altered or deleted just prior to its release for political reasons.

Prof Stavins claimed the intervention amounted to a serious ‘conflict of interest’ between scientists and governments. His revelation is significant because it is rare for climate change experts to publicly question the process behind the compilation of reports on the subject.

[…] Prof Stavins said the government officials in Berlin fought to make big changes to the full report’s ‘summary for policymakers’. This is the condensed version usually cited by the world’s media and politicians. He said their goal was to protect their ‘negotiating stances’ at forthcoming talks over a new greenhouse gas reduction treaty.

Prof Stavins told The Mail on Sunday yesterday that he had been especially concerned by what happened at a special ‘contact group’. He was one of only two scientists present, surrounded by ‘45 or 50’ government officials.

He said almost all of them made clear that ‘any text that was considered inconsistent with their interests and positions in multilateral negotiations was treated as unacceptable.’

Many of the officials were themselves climate negotiators, facing the task of devising a new treaty to replace the Kyoto Protocol in negotiations set to conclude next year.

Prof Stavins said: ‘This created an irreconcilable conflict of interest. It has got to the point where it would be reasonable to call the document a summary by policymakers, not a summary for them, and it certainly affects the credibility of the IPCC. The process ought to be reformed.

  While calling into question the credibility of the IPCC he admits the final summary document was mostly written by government officials who were seeking to protect their “negotiating stances” in the upcoming climate talks.

  Basically we have 2 scientists and roughly 50 government officials sitting around the table to determine the best way to present this to the public and if this story is true we can clearly see that politics was at the heart of the summary and not the environment.

  The government officials were only concerned with protecting their interests and in this case it is a good bet those interests just happened to be money. Does anyone doubt that those countries who were protesting the loudest are also the ones that stand to get the most money if a treaty is ever signed?