Nobel Prize Winning U.N. Panel Deserves Criticism WSJ Columnist Says

If you’re on the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), you might be thinking Al Gore is hogging all the glory after they split the Nobel Peace Prize. But that could be a good thing because all the skepticism will be drawn to him also.

According to David Henderson, a former chief economist of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD), the panel’s worthiness of the Nobel Prize is in question.

“From the outset, leading figures within the IPCC process have shared the conviction that anthropogenic [human-caused] global warming presents a threat which demands prompt and far-reaching action,” Henderson wrote in the October 11 Wall Street Journal. “Indeed, had they not held this belief, they would not have been appointed to their positions of influence.”

Despite its claim of scientific peer review, the IPCC relies on peers “largely drawn from the same restricted professional” circles and accepts “failures of disclosure, such as many journals would not tolerate,” Henderson charged.

Henderson warned governments to thin twice about the IPCC’s policy recommendations.

“Even if the IPCC process were beyond challenge, it is imprudent for governments to place such heavy reliance, in matters of extraordinary complexity where huge uncertainties remain, on this particular source of information, analysis and advice,” Henderson wrote. “In fact, the process is flawed, and this puts in doubt the accepted basis of official climate policies.”