Failure to renew Kyoto could promote manufactured science

With hopes of reaching a treaty in Cancun flagging, fears that crucial scientific data is not being sufficiently credited in talks, or is manipulated, are rising.

The 16th Conference of Parties will come to a close today (10th December 2010), and although China voiced a willingness to compromise and bind itself to set emissions reduction targets, strong opposition from the US to sign a renewed Kyoto Protocol has been a fundamental hurdle throughout talks.

The conference has raised concerns that official UN delegates are not equipped to deal with urgent global climate change issues.

According to the student arm of a market-oriented non profit environmental group known as the Committee For A Constructive Tomorrow (CFACT), delegates in COP16 were caught on camera over the weekend signing a petition to ban water, and another petition to cripple the U.S. economy if the US government refused to take part in an international agreement.

The petition was carried out by CFACT to highlight the ease of fooling COP16 officials with false scientific data. According to the organisation, it succeeded.

"It was designed to show that if official U.N. delegates could be duped by college students into banning water, that they could essentially fall for anything, including pseudo-scientific studies which claim to show that global warming is man-caused," students involved stated on the CFACT website.

"There's kind of this aura about the conference that these are experts meeting," CFACT Executive Director Craig Rucker told The New American. "But they are not people endowed with some sort of special scientific understanding of the natural world. They're very ordinary folks who, in our opinion, have much more of a political agenda than they do a scientific one," said Rucker.

Rucker said that with very rare exceptions, everybody signed the petition. "It was mostly [Non-governmental organization] activists, but there were some delegates"

Rucker, who did not participate directly in gathering signatures said: "When you attend these conferences, you immediately sense that the people here are very hostile to the United States, its economic system, and its way of life. We wanted to bring that out." The unofficial study indicates that political interests override dealing with real pressing climate change matters.

The Climatic Research Unit email controversy, informally known as Climategate, which began in November 2009, has raised mistrust felt by organisations and the public alike regarding the reliability of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) data. With mistrust regarding climate data and concern for the lack of scientific influence on UN climate summit decisions both causing disquiet, scepticism from organisations and the public regarding international talks are thought to be rising.

In January 2010 an IPCC scientist revealed how scientists allegedly talked about distorting the IPCC report, making impacts from climate change appear more dramatic so that the US would sign the Kyoto Protocol.

Alabama State Climatologist Dr. John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville, served as a UN IPCC lead author in 2001 and has since revealed that scientists discussed exaggerating science for political purposes.

"I was at the table with three Europeans, and we were having lunch. And they were talking about their role as lead authors. And they were talking about how they were trying to make the report so dramatic that the United States would just have to sign that Kyoto Protocol," Christy told CNN on May 2, 2007.

Christy has since proposed major reforms and changes to the way the UN IPCC report is produced. "an alternative view section written by well-credentialed climate scientists is needed," he said. The IPCC have faced numerous spates of controversy since Climategate and trust is still to be gained.

With COP16 closing today and the agreement on a legally binding treaty looking doubtful, there are fears that scientific data will be further manipulated for political purposes.

If an agreement is not reached in Cancun, the world will need to wait until COP17 in South Africa for a binding deal to be made. With the Kyoto Protocol expiring in 2012, apprehension exists that governments and scientists will skew available data to apply to their agenda before the pivotal talks.

Author: Marianna Keen | Climate Action

Image: kevindooley/ Flickr