Guest essay by Eric Worrall

The Guardian thinks climate scientists are being pressured to downplay their own research findings. But the Guardian fails to criticise the worst culprits in this alleged climate farce – the politically flexible scientists who make it all possible, by choosing of their own free will to continue to collaborate with powerful pressure groups which the Guardian alleges are manipulating the IPCC climate report process.

Climate study ‘pulls punches’ to keep polluters on board

Robin McKie science editor
Sun 23 Sep 2018 17.00 AEST

‘True risks’ of warming played down to placate fossil-fuel nations

Warnings about the dangers of global warming are being watered down in the final version of a key climate report for a major international meeting next month, according to reviewers who have studied earlier versions of the report and its summary.

They say scientists working on the final draft of the summary are censoring their own warnings and “pulling their punches” to make policy recommendations seem more palatable to countries – such as the US, Saudi Arabia and Australia – that are reluctant to cut fossil-fuel emissions, a key cause of global warming. “Downplaying the worst impacts of climate change has led the scientific authors to omit crucial information from the summary for policymakers,” said one reviewer, Bob Ward, policy director at the Grantham Research Institute on Climate Change and the Environment.

“However, if governments do not recognise the full scale and urgency of the risks, they may underestimate how critical it is to meet the goal of the Paris agreement on climate change. And that could have very serious knock-on effects in the battle to limit the impact of global warming.”

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Read more: https://www.theguardian.com/science/2018/sep/23/scientists-changing-global-warming-report-please-polluters

The report in question is the “Special Report on Global Warming of 1.5C” (link provided by the Guardian)

My question – how could anyone of integrity continue to be involved in a process which they believe is forcing them to lie, to downplay their own findings?

If this claim is true, it is shameful that scientists are being pressured to censor their own findings. But it is reprehensible that those same scientists choose to comply with the alleged censorship, to continue their involvement with this sham report process.

How can anyone trust anything a climate scientist says, if they are so willing to compromise their integrity to “placate” powerful interest groups? Grumbling via a few back channels simply isn’t good enough.