Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Some debates turn rancorous discussing whether the IPCC is a political or scientific body. The “rancorous” part is dumb. The first place to look is what they say of themselves. (Obvious.)
“The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is the United Nations body for assessing the science related to climate change.”
The UN is a political organization using science to study climate change. So, they are both, sort of. Let’s look at more of what they say.
“The selection of authors is a careful process that aims to reflect the range of scientific, technical and socio-economic expertise and to strike a good balance in terms of gender, geographical representation, and representation of experts from developing countries, developed countries and those with economies in transition.”
Compared to the massive number of words they tend to use, the above is clear and useful.
Climate change today refers to the human emissions of carbon dioxide and its optical effect on the atmosphere, complex physics. One might ask what social-economic expertise on economies in transition has to do with physics? For example, imperialist first world countries divided up Africa amongst themselves and did some good building roads and improving education, but they also exported a lot of Africa’s natural resources and did some damage on the way. Building an infrastructure takes money. The first world owes them some help, a good idea in any case, but don’t attribute the damage to carbon dioxide.