The Trump administration’s stop-work order to all US government scientists participating in the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is a breath of fresh air. After decades of unscientific doom and gloom forecasts that never come true, climate scientists will have to now find a different vehicle to peddle their silly claims.

Since the creation of the IPCC in 1990, policymakers across the developed world have relied on IPCC assessment reports to create national and international strategies to “stop climate change.” The fact that climate change is almost an entirely natural process over which humans have little control makes no difference. In the past year, well over a trillion dollars has been wasted on this futile crusade.

Last week I explained how the IPCC’s role changed when the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) was agreed to in Rio de Janeiro in 1992. During Convention negotiations, politicians decided that man-made global warming was a serious threat to the planet even though the IPCC’s First Assessment Report, released only two years earlier, said that we lacked the data to make that determination. Since the IPCC’s mandate was altered to require it to provide support to the UNFCCC, it has also become an instrument of climate alarmism. Ever since, policy-makers, not scientists, have led the process.

Nowhere is this more evident than in the official IPCC assessment report release process.

To properly appreciate how distorted the process is, imagine you are working on the annual progress report for a major project in the Department of Energy, and before you have completed the document, your supervisor decides to write the summary to impress your government masters.

“But I haven’t completed the survey of our work on the project yet,” you object. “How can you write the summary first?”

“Don’t worry,” replies your boss. “If your progress report doesn’t match what I already told the funding agency, I’ll have you modify your report to match the summary I already gave them. Next year’s funding is dependent on my summary, not your actual report.”

Elon Musk would have a field day with such corruption. The decision to continue project funding would have already been made by the time the report presenting the evidence to support it was completed and released. In contrast with the time-honored approach of evidence-based decision-making, this would be a clear example of decision-based evidence-making.

And this is precisely what happens with the IPCC.

Every five years since its launch, the IPCC has produced assessment reports, each thousands of pages long. So far, six such reports have been created. Thousands of scientists contribute to the massive documents and weighty tomes that are never read by the public, politicians, and the press. Instead, when they read anything at all about the IPCC reports’ findings besides media reports about it, they just skim through the IPCC Summary for Policymakers (SPM) of the assessment reports. The SPM reports are released with big fanfare several months before the huge documents they are supposedly summarizing are completed. And, get this: if the main science reports differ from the summaries that have already been released, scientists are told to go back and change the science reports.

The IPCC doesn’t even bother to hide this dishonest practice. Section 4 in “PROCEDURES FOR THE PREPARATION, REVIEW, ACCEPTANCE, ADOPTION, APPROVAL AND PUBLICATION OF IPCC REPORTS” specifies:

“Changes [to the main science reports] … made after acceptance by the Working Group or the Panel shall be those necessary to ensure consistency with the Summary for Policymakers …”

And who approves the SPM? Why, government representatives, generally not scientists, of course. In fact, the final version of the SPM is approved line-by-line by representatives from IPCC member governments, ensuring that it meets the needs of policymakers.

This skewed process led to what has become known as IPCC’s Second Assessment Report “Chapter 8 controversy.” The original draft of Chapter 8 included the following sensible assertion:

“Finally, we have come to the most difficult question of all: ‘When will the detection and unambiguous attribution of human-induced climate change occur?’ In the light of the very large signal and noise uncertainties discussed in the Chapter, it is not surprising that the best answer to this question is, ‘We do not know.’”

But this was, of course, inconvenient to the government representative writers of the SPM, so, before being released, the main report was edited to the following to accommodate the SPM:

“The body of statistical evidence in Chapter 8, when examined in the context of our physical understanding of the climate system, now points toward a discernible human influence on global climate.”

Not surprisingly, many climate scientists, even some directly involved in the IPCC assessment reports, have explained that the reports cannot be trusted:

• Dr. Paul Reiter is a professor of medical entomology at the Pasteur Institute in Paris, France. He is known for expertise in natural history, epidemiology and control of mosquito-borne diseases such as dengue fever, malaria and West Nile fever. Reiter was a contributor to the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report but resigned because he believed that some individuals involved were making authoritative pronouncements without adequate knowledge of his specialty. He argues that the consensus presented by the IPCC is more political than scientific and that his contributions were not adequately considered in the SPM.
• Dr. Richard Lindzen, a prominent MIT atmospheric scientist, has been critical of the IPCC and its reports. He argued that the potential impacts of climate change are overstated in the IPCC’s reports and has expressed concerns that the SPM does not always accurately reflect the content of the main scientific reports. The SPM can be influenced by political considerations, Lindzen believes, and that this can lead to a misrepresentation of the scientific findings.
• Dr. Patrick J. Michaels was an American climatologist, a senior fellow at the Cato Institute and served as an Expert Reviewer for the IPCC’s Fourth Assessment Report. Michaels believed that the SPM did not always accurately reflect the content of the main scientific reports and could be influenced by political considerations, leading to a misrepresentation of the scientific findings.
• Dr. William Happer of Princeton University has also been critical of the IPCC reports, believing that the scientific consensus on climate change is exaggerated and influenced by political considerations.

And the list goes on: economist Dr. Ross McKitrick of Guelph University has argued that the consensus presented by the IPCC is more political than scientific and that the SPM can misrepresent the scientific findings to support specific policy agendas. Dr. Steven E. Koonin, former Under Secretary for Science in the Department of Energy during the Obama administration, argues that the SPM can sometimes misrepresent the underlying scientific findings, emphasizing certain aspects of the science while downplaying others, leading to a skewed perception of the impacts of climate change.

So, the idea that the IPCC reports, the SPMs in particular, present the latest and greatest on climate change science is a big lie, the objective of which is to override the truth for as long as possible. It closely follows the original definition and objective of the big lie, as explained by Adolf Hitler’s Minister of Propaganda, Joseph Goebbels: 

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the state can shield the people from the political, economic, and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the state to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the state.”

Goebbels applied the big lie of Nazism towards the ultimate goal of a Third Reich to rule the world for a thousand years. The UN created the big lie of global warming because it identified the enemy — capitalism and industry — while threatening the world with a global emergency. This supposed threat exceeded the ability of any individual country to ‘solve,’ and that meant the need for a world government. This is why the human-caused global warming lie was created by and perpetuated through the UN.

President Trump is right to lead the United States away from this travesty.