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Still, the system isn’t flawless.
In any case, it didn’t prevent the error about Himalayan glacier melt.
Rather embarrassing. This IPCC member, one of its pioneers agrees.
It’s very disturbing when the IPCC makes an error.
One of their most terrible errors was to predict the exact date
on which the Himalayan glaciers would melt.
That’s impossible! Nobody can know that.
I missed it, my colleagues missed it.
But how many flawed conclusions have the deniers found?
Three!
How many pages are in the Working Group II report?
A thousand.
There are hundreds of conclusions.
So, the percentage of error is astronomically small.
Nonetheless, a report commissioned by the UN recommends
that the IPCC be thoroughly reformed.
But the report doesn’t challenge the IPCC’s findings
and just like this Belgian researcher,
most scientists still trust the IPCC.
You’d have to be a real dreamer to think this machine is perfect.
If you have a computer, it often crashes,
you curse all the bosses of Macintosh and the like and say:
“My machine doesn’t work anymore!”
but you’ll continue to use it.
Because you realise that the services it offers you
are greater than the inconveniences it brings.
Well, the IPCC is like that.
It’s a tool which is imperfect
but which is also the best we have for the moment
to try to take decisions about our impact on climate.
That’s all I can say.
So, if the IPCC is overall reliable, why was there such an outburst
around the organisation and its experts?
Why did two scandals, one after the other, hit the IPCC?
It’s not a light matter, all the more so as its timing is troubling.
On december 7th of 2009, the Copenhagen summit opens in Denmark.
All the world leaders are there to try to find an agreement
on reducing CO2-emissions, to fix standards
in order to limit global warming.
Interestingly, climategate bursts mid-November,
just 3 weeks before the Copenhagen summit.
The error on Himalayan glacier melt is made public by mid-January,
no more than 5 weeks after the summit.
So, is that just a coincidence?
So, is that just a coincidence?
The IPCC report came out in 2007, now we’re in 2010.
That there are a few errors, here and there in a report,
is logical, is normal!
But why didn’t they immediately say:
“Listen, the report you just brought out still has a few errors in it”?
Many people thought the release of e-mails had something to do
with the Copenhagen conference and it may well be true.
But there’s no evidence.
But you could imagine how governments and corporations,
especially the oil and coal companies
had a real interest in undermining climate science
in the days before the Copenhagen conference took place.
Many people believe that they must be linked.
One must also bear in mind that the IPCC’s work goes against
a certain number of interests that deserve to be preserved.
Huge interests are involved.
To fully grasp their size we head for the US.
Here, oil flows like rivers:
the world’s most powerful nation is also the third largest oil producer.
With G.W.Bush things were clear:
he was put into play by Big Oil from Texas.
So, next to the black gold,
CO2-emissions don’t weigh in very much.
Bush never ratified the Kyoto Protocol.
We will work with our allies to reduce greenhouse gases but
I will not accept a plan that harms the economy and American workers.
Bush went by, the oil mulitnationals didn’t.
They’ve become Greenpeace’s pet peeve.
In one of its last campaigns,
Greenpeace accuses Koch Industries of climate crimes.
Though you’ve probably never heard of them,
Koch Industries is active in the petrochemical industry
and manufactures Lotus toilet paper, for instance.
Greenpeace has conducted its inquiry and thinks the facts are appalling.
David and Charles koch, the owners of the company,
are very conservative richmen.
They fund a lot of the organisations in this country
who are opposing president Obama on everthing he does,
including climate change, energy policy, health care policy, everything.
So, we've revealed that Koch Industries in the past few years has spent
$25,000,000 to organizations who are opposing climate policy,
who are working towards denial of global warming.
Koch Industries’ name rarely appears.
The group acts discretely
by means of seemingly respectable think tanks
which bear the task of spreading the message.
As to their funding,
they operate through shell companies.
Naomi Oreskes is a historian at the University of Pasadena in California.
She’s just published a book on climate skepticism
and its way of operating.
These think tanks are very significant partners for the industry,
either directly – we know they’ve received a lot of funding
from the fossil fuel industry, the coal industry has been very active –
but also indirectly through other foundations.
So, there’s kind of a money laundering going on,
where corporations fund the foundations
and then the foundations give money to these institutes
and then the institutes support these denial campaigns.
This way of operating isn’t new.
Before Koch Industries, Exxon Mobil, the oil giant,
had already proceeded in the same way.
Greenpeace has also denounced what it regards as
a true denialism enterprise.
Koch Industries is sort of the silent partner to Exxon Mobil,
which is what we’ve described for many years as
the leading corporate actor on denial.
Exxon has given well over $20,000,000 since Kyoto in 1998
and funnelled it to multiple organizations who have run
campagins to delay action on climate change,
to deny the science, to obstruct states from
looking for their own solutions to climate change.
Basically, it’s a war on every level to stop action to solve the climate crisis.