It's not just the peer pressure of political-correctness that's affecting the global warming mania at the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change; there's also the matter of peer pullout. Dr. E. Calvin Beisner explains:One reason why each report from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change must be taken with a heavy grain of salt is that over time dissenting scientists once involved in the IPCC have dropped out in protest over the bias. Ironically, their departure increases the bias.
Two recent examples:
Dr. Christopher Landsea, a climatologist and the Science and Operations Officer at the U.S. National Hurricane Center, withdrew in protest over the politicization of the IPCC and its dismissal of his concerns over unsubstantiated claims by some other IPCC members that manmade global warming was the cause of the active 2004 Atlantic hurricane season. See his open letter right here.
Dr. Paul Reiter, one of the world's leading scientists studying mosquitos, the diseases they carry, and how to combat them and those diseases, has criticized the IPCC for exaggerated claims of increasing rates of malaria and other mosquito-borne diseases in response to global warming. Although involved as a lead author on the relevant part of the IPCC's Third Assessment Report (2001), he did not participate in the Fourth Assessment Report (2007), though he had been nominated as lead author by the U.S. government. Here is his testimony on this before the U.K. House of Lords Select Committee on Economic Affairs.
A consequence is that "the IPCC peer review process provides no safeguard against dubious assumptions, arguments and conclusions. This is particularly so as, over time, dissenting panelists have withdrawn from the IPCC process, thereby reducing it to a restricted professional milieu within which close colleagues frequently review their own work or that of close colleagues," as the authors of The Stern Review: A Dual Critique put it. (Note especially page 193.)
Dr. Beisner, an Associate Professor of Historical Theology and Social Ethics at Knox Theological Seminary in Ft. Lauderdale, also serves as the national spokesman for the Interfaith Stewardship Alliance.
