Cool-Down Phase

America's media are largely uninterested in what a scientific association is saying about the United Nations' climate change panel. Which tells you that the findings are, indeed, worth knowing. The InterAcademy Council, an Amsterdam-based association of the world's top national science academies, reported Monday the results of its review of the U.N.'s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Its criticism of the IPCC, held up as the divine and inerrant voice on climate change, irrevocably tarnishes the panel's credibility and weakens the case for man-made global warming. While the Inter-Academy Council did not "redo the science," as its chairman said, it did scrutinize IPCC practices and methodologies and recommended a "fundamental reform" of its management structure. IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri, whose resignation we've called for, dismissed the council's findings, saying "the scientific community agrees that climate change is real." We dismiss his comments as those from someone struggling to hang on to a cushy position from which he can continue to enrich himself through, as reported by Britain's Telegraph, his interests in "banks, universities and other institutions that benefit from the vast worldwide industry now based on measures to halt climate change." Rather than react arrogantly, Pachauri should be fully focused on the "two kinds of errors" the council found in the IPCC's work...more