The Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency known as PBL carried out an evaluation of the chapters in the 2007 IPCC working group II report that were regionally relevant to the Netherlands. They found the following errors.

1. The area in the Netherlands that the IPCC said was at risk of flooding by the sea was exaggerated.

2. A systemic tendency by the IPCC to stress negative effects of climate change and to ignore positive effects to the point of a built in misleading bias in the IPCC reports.

3. A systemic tendency to generalize localized information as in the following two examples.

4. The statement that “by 2020 in some countries yields from rain fed agriculture could be reduced to 50%” was based on a paper that was specific to Morocco. Also the paper said that the reduction in yields would occur only in drought years and not in other years. Even worse, it is not possible for auditors to read this paper because the IPCC is unable to produce a copy of it.

5. A statement in a source document about lower yields of three crops, viz millet, groundnuts, and cowpeas in Niger was generalized by the IPCC without justification to the entire Sahel region and to all crops.

6. A statement in the source document specific to cattle in Argentina was incorrectly generalized by the IPCC to all livestock in all of South America.

7. Statements are made without any supporting data or references as shown by the following examples.

8. The claim by the IPCC that fresh water availability in southern and eastern Asia will decline is not supported by data or the literature.

9. The claim that in balance the net health effect of global warming on Europe will be negative is not supported by data or literature.

10. The IPCC report tends to be unremittingly bad news because they focus on vulnerabilities and damage quite possibly because bad news brings in more research funds than good news.

11. Vulnerable countries are asked to make a self assessment of their vulnerability with the knowledge that vulnerability encourages adaptation funding from rich countries; and so these assessments tend to be biased but they form the source material for IPCC reports.

12. The alarming and negative impression of IPCC reports on their readers would not exist if the IPCC presented the source material without bias and with a more narrow and objective interpretation without injecting the authors’ judgement.

13. A rise in heat related deaths in Australia due to a rise in population was presented by the IPCC instead as due to rising temperatures.

14. The way in which the IPCC synthesizes, generalizes, and checks its findings systematically favors adverse outcomes in a way that goes beyond serving the needs of policymakers.

Jamal’s summary: The IPCC is  primarily concerned with selling us the idea of climate change calamity and its mitigation by emission reduction and their use of  science is limited to its utility  in supporting that primary purpose.

Cha-am Jamal

Thailand