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Who Makes up the IPCC?

Watt’s Up With That
Friday, March 13, 2009

Suzanne Goldenberg recently complained in the UK Guardian about the ICCC (International Conference on Climate Change) global warming “deniers” :

The 600 attendees (by the organisers’ count) are almost entirely white males, and many, if not most, are past retirement age. Only two women and one African-American man figure on the programme of more than 70 speakers.

In the UK, profiling like that might be considered a hate crime if it were about any other group other than the one she described. But that isn’t the point. Below is a photo of the vaunted IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel On Climate Change) taken at their last meeting. The spitting image of her description of the ICCC. No doubt Ms. Goldenberg considers the adult white men in the IPCC to be great visionaries, leading the noble fight against climate Armageddon.

http://changingclimates.colostate.edu/pastEvents/colloquium08/ChangingClimatesSept08_web.pdf

Here are some other scientists active in climate change:

Jim Hansen:

Hansen at a climate conference in Denmark 2009.

Left to Right: Dr. Gavin Schmidt (NASA Goddard Space Flight Center), Dr. Paul Knappenberger (President of the Adler Planetarium and Astronomy Museum), Dr. Wally Broecker (Columbia University), and Dr. Ray Pierrehumbert (University of Chicago) pose for a photo after the first of the Global Climate Change forum. Forum I was held at the Adler Planetarium.

Is it a big surprise that most senior scientists are adult white males? And what criteria did she use to choose the expertise of one group of prestigious scientists to the exclusion of another? Does she consider her personal climate expertise to be superior to Dr. Richard Lindzen, to the point where she can choose to simply ignore his opinion?

Richard Siegmund Lindzen, Ph.D., (born February 8, 1940) is a Harvard trained atmospheric physicist and the Alfred P. Sloan Professor of Meteorology at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Lindzen is known for his research in dynamic meteorology, especially planetary waves. He has published over 200 books and scientific papers. He was the lead author of Chapter 7 (physical processes) of the Third Assessment Report of the IPCC on global warming (2001). He has been a critic of some anthropogenic global warming theories and the political pressures surrounding climate scientists.

It is one thing to question the scientific conclusions of an organisation, and a completely different matter to make an ad hominem attack against an entire group – based on such witless criteria.

H/T to Aron for finding the article