The ever-expanding gravy train will crash

Today on the Twittersphere I was pointed to an article in the UK’s Times Online (originally in the Sunday Times on the weekend) about the latest IPCC clanger.  The piece reported on the recently uncovered scandal by Graham Cogley, a geographer from Trent University in Ontario, Canada, who after a bit of detective work has found the IPCC guilty of using almost pure conjecture to form one of its more famous assertions that Himalayan glaciers would completely disappear by 2035.

It turns out that the 2007 IPCC report in which the claim was made drew on a 2005 report by the WWF called An Overview of Glaciers, Glacier Retreat, and Subsequent Impacts in Nepal, India and China, which itself was based on a 1999 New Scientist interview of Syed Hasnain “a little-known Indian scientist then based at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi.”

Not too surprisingly it turns out Fred Pearce, the journo from the New Scientist, first read Hasnain’s views in an Indian newspaper and wanted to get the scoop.  Pearce reported it on the basis that it was not a peer reviewed or formally published study.  The little-known scientist himself has admitted his claims of total glacial meltdown by 2035 were ‘speculative’.

So, let’s just recap that:  The IPCC included in its spiffy official end-of-the-world-as-we-know-it report as hard science that we would see a total glacial melt by 2035 based on a second hand report by an environmentalist group citing an interview in a popular magazine with a little known scientist engaging in speculative conjecture.

Now that’s the kind of peer review any warm-monger can get behind!

The IPCC has regressed from peer review, to peer selection, to peer bullying, to copy-and-paste-required-view-with-long-enough-snail-trail-to-make-it-a-real-pain-in-the-butt-to-verify-it.

Believe it or not though, I’m not really writing this to have a whine about the UN sponsored eco-cult.  What really struck a cord with me in this story was the total brazenness of the IPCC ‘scientists’ to actually claim something so utterly unfounded in order to support and justify their position on the UN’s payroll.  Even more creepy was the calm, collected, nothing-to-see-here-folks dodge of Murari Lal, who oversaw the IPCC chapter on glaciers, that the IPCC would simply remove the glacier claim from the report and move on, job done.

And that’s when it really strikes you: these guys will do and say anything to keep their state-sponsored jobs and avoid actually having to go out there and add value in the real world.  And then my mind flashed to Copenhagen, and Davos, and all the other ‘summits’ held on regular occasions attended by thousands of NGO staff, aid workers, ‘activists’, government aids, UK local ward global warming officers, carbon offset opportunists, environmentalists, and all manner of other designations on the gravy train, and I thought to myself – where are the people doing the real stuff?

And when you step back and take it all in you’re actually staring at a pretty ugly sight.  There is an entire subset of people in most modern economies, and increasingly in the not so modern ones as well, that make their living leaching off state and UN sponsored summits, initiatives, aid, programmes, reports, conferences, working plans, stimulus programmes and all sorts of other big government minutia.  Like a pulsating tumour feeding off whatever remains truly healthy, this fraternity of mostly well educated but hopelessly lazy and incompetent do-gooders frolics around the globe, attending to each issue with an earnestness and passion that grossly overstates their ambitions or their efficacy.

For, in the final analysis, all these post-graduate degreed summit prancers really have no bold and innovative solutions and can only imagine a world in which government comes to the rescue while they’re waiting in the wings to pick up the contract as lead ‘development consultant’ or ‘poverty reduction agent’ or ‘climate stabiliser’ or who knows what?  Whether its global warming, or globalisation, or fair trade, or HIV, or deforestation, or poverty, or inequality, or whatever you can think of that the UN unilaterally decrees falls under its benevolent gambit of global nanny paternalism, these folks have the solution – more government means more contracts dolled out to the hangers on.

Of course, the money for all this lunacy comes from you and me, getting up early and going to bed late, running around our drab cities actually producing stuff.  If these UN groupies were a fringe minority we could fob them off, but my fear is that as the assault on productivity continues, so the tumour grows and what’s left of the healthy sector slowly dwindles.  The IPCC seems to embody the worst of the hanger-on crowd.

Alas, it is not, as the eco-types like to say, sustainable.