Frontier was delighted to co-sponsor the annual Calgary luncheon of the Friends of
The IPCC has been co-opted by Eco-activist groups
Science which was held yesterday. It featured a presentation by Canadian author Donna LaFramboise who wrote an important book last year that exposes how the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has been completely co-opted by eco-activist organizations with very defined agendas. We will post the audio and related powerpoints slides shortly. Here are my introductory remarks to give you a flavour:
To start off, I would like to thank the Friends of Science Society for hosting yet another crucially important climate change event. We at the Frontier Centre for Public Policy are proud of our long standing relationship with the Friends. For those of you who don’t already know, Friends of Science is a non-profit organization run by volunteers dedicated to educating the public about what science really tells us about climate change.
Even though world temperatures have not risen for the past 16 years the global warming lobby continues to bombard us with breathless reports of imminent doom due to mankind’s use of conventional hydrocarbon fuels. They tell us that that our emissions of carbon dioxide from the burning of coal, oil and natural gas are causing a dangerous increase in our planet’s greenhouse effect. This then is causing the dreaded global warming that, so we are told by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or the IPCC, is leading to a host of frightening phenomena; such things as:
– increasing extreme weather like droughts, heat waves and hurricanes.
– Unprecedented Arctic sea ice melt
– Antarctic icecap growth – that too is a result of human induced global warming, climate alarmists announced last week (go figure . . .).
– the threat of extinction of polar bears due to Arctic warming. Apparently no one has told the bears about this since they stubbornly continue to thrive, with rising numbers threatening native communities.
– The Maldives in the Indian Ocean will also soon vanish from the face of the Earth due to rising sea level, alarmists tell us. The fact that sea levels in the Maldives are lower now than they were in the 1970s doesn’t seem to matter at all.
The IPCC’s reports have proven extremely useful for governments seeking justification for greater central planning and more regulatory and taxation powers. Politicians and bureaucrats often cite the IPCC as a rationale for handing out subsidies and privileges to favoured groups and corporations at huge taxpayer expense.
But is the IPCC the unbiased, rigorously scientific body that they claim to be? Well, you are about to find out!
Our speaker today has applied her well-honed investigative journalism skills to closely examine the so-called consensus in the climate science community about the causes of climate change. We certainly couldn’t have a better person on the job than Donna Laframboise. As a journalist, Ms. Laframboise frequently championed unpopular causes. After Guy Paul Morin was wrongly convicted of murder and sentenced to life in prison in 1992, most reporters forgot about him. But Ms. Laframboise did not. She used her weekly column in the Toronto Star to expose the flawed forensic science that led to his conviction. And she was right. Morin was exonerated in 1995 and eventually financially compensated.
The same critical-thinking skills that led Ms. Laframboise to bear witness to the Guy Paul Morin story are at work here. Starting a few years back, Donna shone a bright light on the IPCC and found an organization riddled with corruption, run by eco-activists with a political agenda.
Most people would be afraid to tell anybody about such a politically incorrect finding. But not Donna. She is no stranger to controversy. As a Canadian feminist, journalist, writer, and photographer she seems to relish tough assignments. From 1993 to 2001, Donna served on the board of directors of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association. Her writing has often supported organizations such as fathers’ rights groups. Taking advantage of her degree in women’s studies, she is the author of the 1997 book The Princess at the Window: A New Gender Morality. In that work, Donna was critical of many aspects of contemporary feminism.
In 2011 her book The Delinquent Teenager Who Was Mistaken for the World’s Top Climate Expert was published and it has taken the world by storm. This exposé of the IPCC has received critical acclaim and, as Georgia Institute of Technology climatologist Judith Curry explained: Laframboise book “makes a clear and compelling case regarding problems with the IPCC.”
In 2010, Donna organized a citizen audit of the latest IPCC assessment report to determine if the IPCC’s claim that it only included peer-reviewed was true. The audit found that 21 of the report’s 44 chapters used less than 60% peer-reviewed sources.
Besides her many articles in such publications as Canada’s National Post, Globe & Mail, and Toronto Star, Donna maintains nofrakkingconsensus.com, a website that everyone here should visit.
Ladies and Gentlemen, please welcome the author who exposed the IPCC to the world – Donna Laframboise!
