Resignations and Withdrawals
from the IPCC
Recent news on energy

Climate Science has had a bad press recently. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) no longer has the reputation it had a decade ago, in the wake of Climategate. Its reputation for objectivity has virtually disappeared, and even the mainstream media have started to publish articles critical of the IPCC. Consider what Sir John Houghton ((First chairman of IPCC, 1995) said:

"Unless we announce disasters, no-one will listen".

Unsurprisingly, this has led to disagreements between the IPCC and some of the scientists providing the material for its statements on climate.

A number of them have found it impossible to reconcile their scientific work with the lead-authors who compile IPCC reports. Others have found that when they criticize the IPCC, they are not selected to write for the next report.

Scientists who have aired their dissatisfaction with the IPCC are listed below, including a number who have resigned.

One assumes that there are other scientists unhappy at the way the IPCC presents their work but who do not wish to be whistleblowers. They remain unknown except to family and friends.

Some readers of these web pages will have read numerous letters in newspapers and elsewhere along the following lines.....

"When it comes to issues of science, I tend to believe scientists. I am not interested in the views of climate-change deniers who refuse to accept that humans are changing the climate."

I have a question for those people:

What if scientific conclusions are re-written by politicians and presented to the public as valid science?

The following scientists have worked for the IPCC but no longer do so because of the way their work has been misrepresented:

Christopher Landsea
Landsea is a scientist who has studied hurricanes for 20 years. He took part in the second and third IPCC reports. He resigned from the IPCC in January 2005 over the issue of exaggerated claims of the influence of global warming on hurricanes. In his resignation letter, he said "I am withdrawing because I have come to view the part of the IPCC to which my expertise is relevant as having become politicized. In addition, when I have raised my concerns to the IPCC leadership, their response was simply to dismiss my concerns."

Paul Reiter
Reiter is a specialist in tropical diseases. He was a contributing author to the WGII report of the TAR (2001) (chapter 9, dealing with impacts on human health). He found it difficult to work with lead authors who were not experts in the field, who were insisting on a link between climate change and diseases such as malaria. As a result he resigned from the IPCC. In a report to the House of Lords he wrote: "In my opinion, the IPCC has done a disservice to society by relying on "experts" who have little or no knowledge of the subject, and allowing them to make authoritative pronouncements that are not based on sound science."

Richard Lindzen
Lindzen is Professor of Meteorology at MIT. He was a lead author on Chapter 7 of the IPCC TAR, published in 2001. In May of that year he was critical of the Summary for Policymakers, which he said misrepresents what scientists say. He also said that the IPCC encourages misuse of the Summary; that the Summary does not reflect the full document, and that the final version was modified from the draft in a way to exaggerate man-made warming. He did not participate in later IPCC reports.

John T Everett
Everett is knowledgeable about fisheries and the oceans. He worked for the IPCC until 2000. In a statement to the US House of Representatives in 2007 he called for "a reality check" and said that warming is not a bad thing. He has a website highly critical of the IPCC.

Tom Segalstad
Segalstad is a geologist and former IPCC expert reviewer. He has a web site critical of the IPCC and climate alarmism.

Hans von Storch
Hans von Storch was a lead author in the Third Assessment Report (2001). In 2004 he published a paper that was critical of the "hockey stick" picture which was prominent in the TAR. He volunteered to act as a lead author in AR4, but was not chosen. He has said "IPCC authors have decided to violate the mission of the IPCC, by presenting disinformation".

Roger Pielke sr.
Roger Pielke is an atmospheric scientist. He was invited to write as a coauthor for the second IPCC report (1995), but his comments were ignored, so he resigned from what he saw as a biased assessment process. His resignation letter is in the public domain.

More details and links about these events, which I have summarized from the web page https://sites.google.com/site/globalwarmingquestions/ar4resign are shown here. .




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