The Nobel Prize committee that saluted President Obama last year for a mere changed rhetorical tone and anticipated improvements in international affairs, gave its 2007 award to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPPC) for a supposedly courageous report on climate change. The IPCC report included the prediction that Himalayan glaciers would be gone by 2035 or sooner. Now it turns out that the predictions for the glaciers not only were based on flimsy, unsupportable data (see January 20 post), but that the whole section of the report in which it is found is flawed. It is being disowned.
Once again it was the skeptics, not the science journals and the big science foundations of government and the professional associations that like to pronounce on various subjects, that revealed the flaws.
We are in a time when news developments are tumbling over one another so fast that one barely can keep track, let alone assess the consequences: the Massachusetts election, the sudden death of Obamacare (at least in its present form), the faux populist assault on the banks (in the process of backfiring) and here, the continuing, collapse of the alarmist position on global warming. Yesterday it was revealed that the "breakthrough" hailed by President Obama at the Copenhagen Climate Summit--puny as it seemed at the time--has not even survived the winter. It should be renamed "the Copenhagen Breakdown."
Add now the collapsing reputation of the Nobel Peace Prize Committee.
