Journalist Donna Laframboise has published a new book, The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert: An Expose of the IPCC, that blows the lid off of misconduct within the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC). Laframboise’s book is available at Amazon.com and is already receiving rave reviews.

According to Georgia Tech climate professor and moderate “warmist” Judith Curry, “The book is well written with ample documentation (numerous hyperlinks in the kindle version). The target audience is the broader public, and the ‘spoiled child’ metaphor provides a readable narrative for her arguments about the IPCC. Most (not all) of this material I’ve seen before, but Laframboise’s narrative makes a clear and compelling case regarding problems with the IPCC. Notably, she covers distinctly different ground from Montford’s book ‘The Hockey Stick Illusion.’ Her final chapter is entitled ‘Disband the IPCC.’ She makes a good case for this.”

Noting the strong reviews of the book posted at Amazon.com, Curry takes prominent global warming alarmist Peter Gleick to task for panning the book without apparently ever reading it.

“Reviews are pouring in at amazon.com: 38 out of 46 reviewers give it 5 stars,” wrote Curry. “Peter Gleick gives it 1 star, stating “This book is a stunning compilation of lies, misrepresentations, and falsehoods about the fundamental science of climate change.’ It is difficult to believe that Gleick has read the book from the statements in his reviews; the book is not about the science of climate change. Rather, it is about the IPCC as an institution: the use of graduate students, WWF and Greenpeace sympathizers as IPCC authors; the use of gray environmentalist literature in IPCC (especially WG2); lack of conflict of interest oversight; the review process and the process producing the executive summaries; etc.”

Laframboise documents how the World Wildlife Fund (WWF) has infiltrated the IPCC, with nearly two-thirds of chapters in the IPCC’s most recent report being co-authored by an individual affiliated with WWF. In fully one-third of the chapters, an individual affiliated with WWF put together the final content of the chapter as Coordinating Lead Author.

Laframboise also sheds light on the extreme political agenda of IPCC Chair Raj Pachauri, IPCC’s scientifically unjustified reliance on Michael Mann’s hockey stick temperature graph, Climategate, and a host of other IPCC-related issues.

“Overall, this is a very good book on an exceedingly important topic,” writes Curry, giving the book a rating of 4.5 out of 5 stars.

By Norman Rogers

Imagine that you are a climate scientist and the Earth is threatened with a climate disaster.  You need to warn the people of Earth and lobby Earth’s governments.  If you are tired of poring over boring computer printouts, you may be only too ready to accept this mission of transcendent importance.

On the other hand, maybe you have lost touch with reality.  Maybe you have become a true believer fighting a dubious battle.  Maybe you are Dr. James Hansen, high civil servant, recipient of cash awards from left-wing foundations, and director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies.  Hansen was arrested in front of the White House, dressed up to look like J. Robert Oppenheimer, the 1950s scientific martyr.  Hansen wants CEOs of energy companies to be prosecuted for “crimes against humanity.”

When scientists are fanatical believers in a cause, the authority and credibility that attach to science are turned into political capital to be spent in pursuit of that cause.

The late Stephen Schneider, Stanford climate scientist, explained how this works:

To capture the public imagination, we have to offer up some scary scenarios, make simplified dramatic statements and little mention of any doubts one might have.  Each of us has to decide the right balance between being effective, and being honest.

Global warming catastrophism is convenient for climate science.  It is simplistic to claim that climate scientists are making up the global warming scare in order to promote research funding.  But global warming catastrophism clearly does promote research funding.  So there is a convenient congruence between catastrophism and the bureaucratic ambitions of research establishments.

Climate science deals with the energy balance of the Earth and the behavior of the atmosphere.  This is a very complicated system involving convection, evaporation, precipitation, clouds, ocean heat storage, reflection, and emission of radiation, and more.  Although scientific understanding of the system has advanced, especially with the advent of computers and satellites, the system is still quite mysterious in important respects.  It’s not at all clear that climate science will ever advance to a point where long-range predictions can be trusted, or, as they say, demonstrate skill.

Burning fossil fuels adds CO2 to the atmosphere faster than natural processes can remove it.  As a result, CO2 has been slowly increasing.  Increasing the proportion of CO2 in the atmosphere will probably exert a warming influence because CO2 has an inhibiting effect on the outgoing infrared (heat) radiation that cools the Earth.  Nearly everyone, skeptic or believer, agrees with these basic facts.  Another basic fact that the purveyors of global warming like to keep quiet about is that more CO2 in the atmosphere makes plants grow much better with less water.  That’s because plants in general struggle to extract the scant CO2 in the air.

What is controversial is how much warming can be expected and whether the warming will create practical problems.  The evidence supporting substantial warming (i.e., 3 degrees C) is output from bad computer models.  It’s said that dogs come to resemble their masters.  Computer models tend to reflect the aspirations of their creators.

The global warming promoters try to hang all kinds of supplementary disasters on their proposed 3-degree warming over a century.  This is even more dubious than the warming itself.  Some of their claims are absurd, such as the suggestion that the oceans are going to rise substantially, a claim for which there is zero credible evidence.  The data has been running against the theories of global warming.  The atmosphere has failed to warm since 1998, and, more importantly, the upper ocean has failed to warm since 2003.

The idea that we are on the verge of a climate disaster caused by modern civilization is a romantic idea that appeals to people who have lost traditional religion.  It’s another iteration of the environmentalist dogma that civilization is ruining the earth.  It’s a Garden of Eden story.  Anyone can see that the landscape of areas where industry and technology dominate nature, like Germany or New Jersey, is in far better condition than the landscape is in most third-world countries—countries that lack evil industry and that practice the precious local small-scale agriculture so loved by the ideologues who want remake the economy to prevent global warming.  The idea that the Earth would be a paradise without civilization is contradicted by the wild climate swings that we know have taken place in recent geological time.  Ice sheets a mile thick retreated from much of North America 10,000 years ago.

The reports of the International Panel on Climate Change (the IPCC) are often taken as the authoritative last word on climate change.  These reports are are disorganized and unfocused.  As a result, most people go no further than the introductory Summary for Policy Makers.  If you dig deep into the reports, solid scientific support for the claims of impending catastrophe is not there.  Computer models are the shaky foundation of global warming.  Models from different modeling groups disagree with each other by wide margins.  As the IPCC admits, the models have serious deficiencies.  The IPCC uses misleading graphical illustrations to make it appear that the models can accurately mimic the Earth’s climate.

The CO2 reduction proposals of the global warming gang are relentlessly ideological and impractical.  CO2-free nuclear power supplies 80% of France’s electricity and 20% of the electricity in the U.S.  Nuclear fuel is very cheap, and vast supplies are available.  The real problem with nuclear is that environmentalist groups have run a hysterical anti-nuclear campaign for the last 50 years.  A reversal now would be a severe blow to their credibility.  So, instead of nuclear, the global warming gang proposes that we use solar power and wind power, technologies that can cost 10 times more per kilowatt-hour.  They don’t seem to understand that solar doesn’t work when a cloud blocks the sun or at night, and wind doesn’t work when the wind isn’t blowing.  As a consequence, solar and wind need to be backed up by fossil fuel or hydro plants with spinning generators ready to quickly assume the load of the grid.  People who are ignorant concerning engineering or science may accept the notion that wind and solar are realistic sources of electricity.  It is more difficult to explain why the government is dumping billions of dollars into these technologies, both in the form of cash and in the form of mandates that shift the cost to electricity users.

Many scientists may have a predilection for green fashion—for example, backyard compost heaps, organic food, bicycles, solar panels, or giant wind turbines.  Nobody cares.  But it is wrong to misuse the authority and credibility of science to scare the rest of us into embracing the green lifestyle.

Norman Rogers is a physicist and a Senior Policy Advisor at the Heartland Institute.  He maintains a website: www.climateviews.com.

EI has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental accounts, which correspondence a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA. This ‘cloud’ serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

By Christopher Horner, CEI.org for WUWT

Although this is seedy and unlawful at any time, it also goes in the ‘bad timing’ file. Or it’s good timing, depending on one’s perspective.

Just as a brand new book further exposes the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)(which scam I dissected here, and in more disturbing detail here), and on the heels of the weekend surprise of a 2005 memo showing President Obama’s cooling/warming/population zealot of a ‘science czar’ John Holdren is the kind of guy Mitt Romney turns to to develop his ‘environmental’ policies, we’ve exposed the Obama administration and IPCC have cooperated to subvert U.S. transparency laws, run domestically out of Holdren’s White House office.

With this morning’s Freedom of Information Act request, the explaining they have to do must begin by providing the taxpayer certain records regarding - including but not limited to user name and password - for a backchannel ‘cloud’ established to hide IPCC deliberations from FOIA.

The IPCC, you will recall, is Al Gore’s co-recipient of the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize. And the host over the years of numerous scandals involving fudged and twisted data, cut-and-pastes from student theses, popular magazine articles and green-group press releases and of course the infamous “hide the decline” in temperatures. This is not just one more scandal, however.

Until the FOI request is posted at CEI.org (later today), here is a snapshot:

CEI has learned of a UN plan recently put in place to hide official correspondence on non-governmental accounts, which correspondence a federal inspector general has already confirmed are subject to FOIA. This ‘cloud’ serves as a dead-drop of sorts for discussions by U.S. government employees over the next report being produced by the scandal-plagued IPCC, which is funded with millions of U.S. taxpayer dollars.

As our FOIA request details, the UN informed participants that it was motivated by embarrassing releases of earlier discussions ("ClimateGate" key among them), and to circumvent the problem that national government transparency laws were posing the group.

CEI reminds OSTP that this practice was described as “creat[ing] non-governmental accounts for official business”, “using the nongovernmental accounts specifically to avoid creating a record of the communications”, in a recent analogous situation involving lobbyist Jack Abramoff. CEI expects similar congressional and media outrage at this similar practice to evade the applicable record-keeping laws.

This effort has apparently been conducted with participation - thereby direct assistance and enabling - by the Obama White House which, shortly after taking office, seized for Holdren’s office the lead role on IPCC work from the Department of Commerce. The plan to secretly create a FOIA-free zone was then implemented.

This represents politically assisting the IPCC to enable UN, EU and U.S. bureaucrats and political appointees avoid official email channels for specific official work of high public interest, performed on official time and using government computers, away from the prying eyes of increasingly skeptical taxpayers.

CEI also reminds OSTP of a similar, ongoing effort by the administration to claim that records on U.S. government computers belong to the UN IPCC, refusing to produce them under FOIA. This practice was affirmed in a report by the Department of Commerce’s Office of Inspector General earlier this year.

As talks resume next month to forge a successor to the failed Kyoto Protocol, CEI looks forward to OSTP ceasing this unlawful activity, and providing prompt access to the requested records so the taxpayer can know what they, and the IPCC, are up to.

So this morning we requested all relevant records under FOIA, including all records sitting on that server, as they all were provided to U.S. government employees for official purposes. This was filed with OSTP run by controversial ‘science czar” and, we now know, former Mitt Romney ‘climate’ advisor John Holdren. The taxpayer deserves to know about this coordinated effort between OSTP and the IPCC to subvert U.S. law.

Possibly one Republican candidate will call in the next debate for ending US funding of the IPCC, now shown to be actively working (with the Obama White House) to subvert US law. Enough is enough is enough. Possibly Gov. Romney could defend Holdren and the IPCC.

In the meantime, we look for Rep. Henry Waxman’s outrage over Abramoff to prove it was also not political, and come down hard on the practice he so aggressively condemned and pursued, demanding preservation of records, threatening subpoenas, the whole works. With our request, that’s essentially what we’ve done, and we’d appreciate the company. You too, NPR.

Of course, it may not be of interest to the media because it only uncovers unlawful dealings to hide an effort impacting our entire economy, the premise for that “fundamental transformation” of America, with the sleazy lobbying operation being the UN. We’ll wait on OSTP’s response and hope for the best from the Hill and Republican candidates.

The FOIA request has been filed here.