Thursday, June 28, 2012

Massive risk of financial corruption in climate science?

The push is on for hundreds of billions of dollars to be spent on climate change "mitigations", and naturally where money flows, corruption follows.


Long, but worth while:
We have previously discussed sources of bias in the IPCC, including groupthink, noble/Nobel cause ‘corruption’, green politics, etc.  But these kinds of biases pale in the face of the potential for scientific corruption associated with billions of dollars at stake for the developing world in the various UN climate funds.  They dynamic of the whole thing has changed with the prospect of these funds
I am particularly concerned about WG II, which has a large membership from the developing world.  Apart from torquing of the entire enterprise by the Bureau, what kind of pressure might the participating scientists be under from their governments (esp those ranking very high on the corruption index) to make their country look the neediest for these funds, by cherry picking or even ‘cooking’ data, or otherwise torquing the the Reports?  This is made easy by much of the information cited by WG II is not peer reviewed.
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And lets not forget WG III, where specific projects and technologies may benefit participants in terms of people providing or developing the technologies, and those benefitting from projects in their countries.
But fear not, gentle reader.  The UN in on the job, and will ensure the same level of accounting rigor in the IPCC process as in the rest of the UN.

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