More Details Emerge on Shoddy Climate Change Research

With Washington and the rest of the normally temperate mid-Atlantic paralyzed by 3 feet of snow, perhaps it will give policy-makers some time to re-examine their plans to address climate change.

Maybe they'll get a chance to catch up on their reading about the latest flaws in the 2007 findings from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations' standard-bearer for all things global warming. If they can find anything to read, that is.

The American press has been typically negligent in covering the unfolding scandal about the IPCC and its apparent attempts to skew science to support a political agenda. Earlier in the year, purloined e-mails from the University of East Anglia's Climate Research Unit, which supplied data for the IPCC reports, indicated the institute's top officials manipulated research to make global warming look as dire as possible, and hid important data that might dispute its findings.

This week, the London Daily Telegraph newspaper uncovered further irregularities, including that statements in a supposedly authoritative report on climate change actually came from untested student dissertations that were never even published, and that other claims were based on reports from environmental pressure groups.

That comes on the heels of a forced retraction by the IPCC of its projections on the extent of glacial melting in the Himalayas.

As it turns out, they were based on nothing more scientific than a student's observations published in a mountaineering magazine.

And last week, the institute revealed it had wrongly stated that half of the Netherlands was now below sea level. It turns out the IPCC researchers never bothered to double-check the accuracy of information supplied by a Dutch government agency.

It increasingly appears that the U.N. agency has placed its political agenda ahead of science and is willing to pass off shoddy research as fact.

Unfortunately, the IPCC's research drives policy, including in the United States.

The Columbia Journalism Review recently chided the American press for ignoring the scandals at the institute.

It's vital that the public be fully informed. Policy decisions are moving rapidly ahead in Washington based on climate research that may be less than conclusive.

Before the snowstorm hit, a bipartisan group of senators was preparing to challenge the Environmental Protection Agency's plan to implement new regulations to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant.

If the rules go into effect, they will have a crushing impact on manufacturing and energy production.

The struggling automobile industry would be the first to suffer.

The reports on the IPCC's irregularities should give lawmakers the ammunition they need to force the EPA to stand down while the scientists get their facts sorted out.

Making policy based on bad science will only lead to bad policy.

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