Climate Scientist Calls IPCC Dysfunctional, Deserving to Be Shut Down

Has the weather around the climate change advocates become too cloudy, no one can see a foot ahead? Well, at least, one climate scientist so believes.

Climatologist Dr. Judith Curry, a professor and chair of the School of Earth and Atmospheric Sciences at the Georgia Institute of Technology, says that the United Nation's climate bureaucracy has become so dysfunctional, it's better off shut down for good.

In a blog announcement, Curry called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to be shut down with all due haste as governments and scientists have invested too much time, money and credibility for the institution to be anything but a hindrance to scientific progress.

"The IPCC needs to get out of the way so that scientists and policy makers can better do their jobs," Curry writes in her blog. "We need to put down the IPCC as soon as possible."

"After several decades and expenditures in the bazillions, the IPCC still has not provided a convincing argument for how much warming in the 20th century has been caused by humans," Curry added. "The politically charged rhetoric has contaminated academic climate research and the institutions that support climate research, so that individuals and institutions have become advocates; scientists with a perspective that is not consistent with the consensus are at best marginalized ... or at worst ostracized by labels of 'denier' or 'heretic.'"

According to Curry, alarmists during the 1990s have oversimplified the global warming issue. 

"[The alarmists] said that there was only one answer to the problem - radically reducing greenhouse gas emissions," Curry noted. "The vast amount of scientific and political capital invested in the IPCC has become self-reinforcing, so it is not clear how [to] move past this paralysis as long as the IPCC remains in existence."

The science and the policies behind global warming aren't making much progress. Australia and Germany have been forced to reconsider their greenhouse gas reduction efforts in the face of intense political opposition.