A Tuesday Open Forum piece in The San Francisco Chronicle, written by a UC Berkeley journalism professor and a UC Berkeley energy professor, provides a perfect example of this odd view that all scientists ascribe to a common gospel: "The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), a U.N.-sponsored group of more than 2,000 scientists from more than 100 countries, has concluded that human activity is a key factor in elevated carbon-dioxide levels and rising temperatures and sea levels that could prove catastrophic for tens of millions of people living along Earth's coastlines."

The piece also cited research by "Naomi Oreskes, a science historian at UC San Diego, who reviewed 928 abstracts of peer-reviewed articles on climate change published in scientific journals between 1993 and 2003 and could not find a single one that challenged the scientific consensus that human-caused global warming is real."

The authors then attacked best-selling author Michael Crichton because Crichton accepted an invitation to testify from Sen. James Inhofe, R-Okla., "who is heavily supported by oil and gas interests" and who—horrors—dared to ask whether the global-warming scare is a hoax. That is the sort of McCarthyist guilt by association that one would not expect to encounter in the name of science.

[T]he world was told there was a virtually unanimous scientific consensus on the existence of a clear and present danger. On July 24, 1997, President Clinton held a press conference at which he announced that the catastrophic effects of man's use of fossil fuels was now an accepted scientific fact, not a theory. To underline this, he produced a list stated as being of 2,500 scientists who had approved the 1996 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report preparing the ground for Kyoto. That sounded conclusive, and most of the world at large accepted it as such.

However, upon further delving, things turn out to be not quite that simple. For a start, by far the majority of the signers were not climate scientists but political representatives from their respective countries, ranging all the way from Albania to Zimbabwe, with degrees in the social sciences. Their listing as "contributors" meant, for example, that they might have been given a part of the report and asked to express an opinion, and even if the opinion was a negative one they were still listed as "reviewers." 162 Only seventy-eight of the attendees were involved in producing the document. Even then, to give it even a hint of supporting the global warming position, the executive summary, written by a small IPCC steering group, was purged of all politically incorrect skepticism and modified—after the scientists had signed it!—which caused an uproar of indignation from the qualified atmospheric specialists who participated.

[Atmospheric scientist] Fred Singer later produced a paper entitled "The Road from Rio to Kyoto: How Climatic Science was Distorted to Support Ideological Objectives," which couldn't have put it much more clearly. 164 The IPCC report stated the twentieth century to have been the warmest in six hundred years of climate history. Although correct, this avoided any mention of the Little Ice Age that the twentieth century was a recovery from, while going back just a little further would have brought in the "medieval optimum," which was warmer than today. Another part of the report told that increases in carbon dioxide in the geological past were "associated with" increases in temperature. This is disingenuous in that it obviously aims at giving the impression that the CO2 increases caused the temperature rises, whereas, as we've seen, the temperature rises came first. If any causation was involved, there are stronger reasons for supposing it to have been in the opposite direction.

These are just two of twelve distortions that Singer's paper discusses, but they give the general flavor. Two phrases edited out of the IPCC report were, "None of the studies cited above has shown clear evidence that we can attribute the observed [climate] changes to the specific cause of increases in greenhouse gases" and "When will an anthropogenic effect on climate be identified? . . . [T]he best answer is, 'we do not know.' "

Frederick Seitz, former head of the National Academy of Sciences and Chairman of the George C. Marshall Institute, wrote (Wall Street Journal, June 12, 1996), "But this report is not what it appears to be—it is not the version that was approved by the contributing scientists listed on the title page. . . . I have never witnessed a more disturbing corruption of the peer-review process than the events that led to this IPCC report." Yet a year later it was being cited as proof of a consensus by the scientific community.

So how did atmospheric physicists, climatic specialists, and others with scientific credentials feel about the issue? To find out, Dr. Arthur Robinson, president and research professor of the Oregon Institute of Science and Medicine, also publisher of the newsletter Access to Energy, in February 1998, conducted a survey of the professional field by circulating a petition calling for the government to reject the Kyoto agreement of December 1997, on the grounds that it would harm the environment, hinder science, and damage human health and welfare; that there was no scientific evidence that greenhouse gases were or were likely to cause disruption of the climate; and on the contrary there was substantial evidence that such release would in fact be beneficial. After six months the petition had collected over seventeen thousand signatures.

At about the same time the German Meteorologisches Institut Universitat Hamburg and Forschungszentium, in a survey of specialists from various branches of the climate sciences, found that 67 percent of Canadian scientists rejected the notion that any warming due to human activity is occurring, while in Germany the figure was 87 percent, and in the US, 97 percent. Some consensus for Kyoto!