The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) set climate research back thirty years, mostly by focusing world attention on CO2 and higher temperature. It was a classic misdirection that required planning. The IPCC was created for this purpose and pursued it relentlessly. Through the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) they controlled national weather offices so global climate policies and research funding were similarly directed.
IPCC’s definition of climate change narrowed the focus to human causes, but they exacerbated it by ignoring, downgrading or misusing variables. Most important and critical was water in all its forms and functions. The obsession restricted focus to higher temperatures and increased CO2, which directed funding of impact analyses, whether economic or environmental to cost only, instead of cost/benefit. Climate studies only considered temperature, usually and incorrectly attributing changes caused by precipitation to temperature. This practice was most evident in paleoclimate reconstructions, either done by IPCC participants or chosen for inclusion in the IPCC Reports.
It is almost a maxim that if the people at the Climatic Research Unit (CRU), who effectively controlled IPCC science, were looking at a topic it was because it posed a threat to their predetermined hypothesis.
Tom Wigley took over from Hubert Lamb as Director of the CRU and guided much of the early research and then remained the major influence as the leaked emails revealed. He completely redirected CRU from Lamb’s objective, which was the need for data before any understanding could occur;
“the first and greatest need was to establish the facts of the past record of the natural climate in times before any side effects of human activities could well be important.”
Lamb was at odds with and appears to regret hiring Wigley and wrote about the different direction Wigley took the Unit. He wrote,
“Professor Tom Wigley, was chiefly interested in the prospect of world climates being changed as a result of human activities, primarily through the burning of wood, coal, oil and gas reserves…”
That became the focus of the CRU and subsequently of the IPCC. It was a predetermined hypothesis that led to manipulated climate science. The leaked CRU emails disclose Wigley as the eminence gris to whom all his old pupils and colleagues at CRU turn to for advice and direction.
A classic danger in climate research and an early threat to claims of a human signal was that they could be dismissed as a result of auto-correlation. The issue was identified in 1944 in Conrad’s classic Methods in Climatology. A 1999 article The Autocorrelation Function and Human Influences on Climate by Tsonis and Elsner commented on Wigley’s attempt to prove a human influence was not due to autocorrelation.

This results in part from the ambiguity inherent with asking scientists to express themselves consensually on what they think is the best message. There is a need to produce a scientific summary addressed to scientists and giving an objective picture of our knowledge and ignorance in climate science, with emphasis on the issues that are less well understood and what it implies to clarify them.




In one of the numerous pages that didn’t make it to my submission I introduced the idea of the “citizen scientist” which is the scientific equivalent of the “expert patient”. Reading the submissions, I regret not including it.
These researchers used historical data detailing temperatures as well as cave stalagmites to show a recurring 200-year solar cycle called the DeVries Cycle.

There has been a recent dramatic increase in the number of publishers that appear to be engaged in the practice, growing by an order of magnitude in 2012 alone. (1)