When Political Correctness Kills

Who says the Right rejects political correctness?

They're fond enough of political correctness when it comes to climate change and, in particular, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change reports. On that score they want reports that they can live with, reports that suit their political interests and leanings.

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.

Even as the threat of runaway global warming becomes more ominous and immediate, our governments' response will be to water down the science to make it "more palatable" to their real interests.

Petro-states, our own included, love to stack the deck especially when it comes to the hazardous future they're bequeathing to our children and grandchildren. The more they can dilute and blur the science, the easier it is to distract us with meaningless baubles like carbon pricing.

There's a reason why the IPCC reports are persistently out-dated and wildly optimistic. That's because the powerful petro-states won't have it any other way. They cling to those reports as though they were gospel or some other variety of widely accepted bullshit. That way the real science, the real results, the real research is safely blanketed, buried.  Real science then is downgraded to "worst case scenarios" no matter that, time and again, it's proven the most accurate.