By E. Calvin Beisner, Ph.D.
Founder and National Spokesman, Cornwall Alliance
June 21, 2011

Enter Energygate—the latest scandal destroying the credibility of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

November, 2009, brought Climategate—the release of thousands of emails, computer programs, and other documents showing that climate scientists in control of the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had fabricated, exaggerated, suppressed, and corrupted data to support belief in catastrophic anthropogenic global warming and had intimidated dissenting scientists and journal editors who would publish their work, corrupted the peer review process, and flouted canons of scientific transparency as well as American and British freedom of information laws.

The first few months of 2010 brought Himalayagate, Amazongate, and a variety of other revelations that IPCC’s vaunted AR4 (Fourth Assessment Report) had incorporated non-peer reviewed articles, indeed sometimes outright propaganda pieces produced by environmental advocacy organizations, as sources of some of its most alarming predictions.

Later in 2010 came recommendations from the InterAcademy Council (IAC) Committee to Review the IPCC for steps that must be taken to improve IPCC’s function and credibility. Among the most important was adoption and implementation of a clear conflict of interest policy that would, among other things, prevent much of what was revealed in Climategate, Himalayagate, etc.

Now, Energygate.

On May 9, the U.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change claimed in a press release that a forthcoming report “showed” that “80 percent of the world‘s energy supply could be met by renewable by mid-century” even if all nuclear energy production ceased.

On June 14 IPCC at last released the Special Report on Renewable Energy Sources and Climate Change Mitigation (SRRES) and the reality falls more than a little short of the claim.

First, the SRRES shows no such thing. It claims it, but it provides no evidence for it.

Second, the part of the report misrepresented as showing it depended on a paper by a Greenpeace renewable energy advocate, Sven Teske, who was also a lead author of the report—and the article itself depended on an advocacy piece by Teske previously written for Greenpeace.

Third, the “research” for the paper was sponsored by the European Renewable Energy Council, an industry consortium.

Both “second” and “third” involve conflict of interest and bias and strip the paper and its claim of scientific credibility.

But there’s more.

Fourth, the “close to 80 percent” figure was cherry-picked from the most extreme outlier of 164 scenarios referenced in the report—a scenario that assumes the extremely unlikely, and extremely optimistic, coupling of sharp reductions in global energy demand over the next 40 years, on the one hand, with strong economic growth and 28 percent population growth, on the other. Aside from the intellectual dishonesty involved, there’s also the problem that to be of any real value to decision makers, planning must be based not on the most optimistic scenarios but on the most realistic.

Fifth, it turns out that the whole report is, as Christopher Booker puts it, “astonishingly one-sided” and “reads less like a scientific document and more like a propaganda puff for the world’s renewable industries.”