New United States Senate Report: The IPCC Science Under Heavy Scrutiny

Recently, a number of corporations, associations, states, and congressmen filed suit against the EPA, as they all shared grave doubts about the legitimacy of the science backing the EPA’s 2007 “endangerment finding.” This controversial finding has also led to a congressional investigation by the Minority Staff of the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works, which recently issued a report scrutinizing “key documents and emails from the University of East Anglia’s Climate Research Unit”  which was instrumental in developing the UN’s report on climate change. Ultimately, the Minority Staff report concludes that scientists from the CRU have committed a certain degree of scientific impropriety. According to the report,



The scientists involved in the CRU controversy violated fundamental ethical principles governing taxpayer-funded research and, in some cases, may have violated federal laws.


The emails and documents that have been discovered cover a span of 13 years; from 1996 to November 2009. According to the report, the emails that were discovered show the following:



• Obstructing release of damaging data and information;
• Manipulating data and knowingly using flawed climate models to reach preconceived conclusions;
• Colluding to pressure journal editors who published work questioning the climate science “consensus”; and
• Assuming activists roles to influence the political process


This scientific corruption on behalf on the CRU is an important and relevant issue because, according to the report, the CRU’s scientific findings are linked to the findings of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; the international body whose scientific work “serves as the key basis for climate policy decisions made by governments throughout the world, including here in the United States.” Regarding the scientific collaboration of the CRU and the IPCC, the report indicates;



…scientists at the center of the scandal were participants in drafting IPCC assessment reports. Nearly all of the scientists worked at the highest levels of the IPCC, shaping and influencing the content of the assessment reports that form the international global warming “consensus.


The fact that the CRU and the IPCC have worked in conjunction with one another implies that the IPCC’s findings are at least in part, a product of the CRU’s scientifically tainted research. Therefore, U.S. cap and trade legislation, which the report indicates is scientifically justified on the basis of IPCC findings, should therefore be re-examined. If lawmakers, bureaucrats and climate change activists are going to continue advocating the need for a cap and trade system, then it is only fair that their argument not include a scientific argument.  The new Minority Report and the evidence that it contains are clear indications of uncertainty and unanswered questions regarding climate change, and it would be imprudent to rush to pass a costly cap-and-trade bill.  It also demonstrates the importance of the Murkowski resolution, which would keep the Environmental Protection Agency from leapfrogging Congress to impose a massive new program to regulate carbon dioxide as a pollutant under the Clean Air Act.