Latest IPCC Controversy Regards Unpublished Study
The United Nations climate science panel faces new controversy for wrongly linking global warming to an increase in the number and severity of erectile dysfunction cases.
It based the claims on an unpublished report that had not been subjected to routine scientific scrutiny — and ignored warnings from scientific advisers that the evidence supporting the link too weak. The report’s own authors later withdrew the claim because they felt the evidence was not strong enough.
Viagra and Cialis Users Were Seeking Compensation
The claim by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), that global warming is already affecting the severity and frequency of erectile dysfunctions, has since become embedded in political and public debate. It was central to discussions at last month’s Copenhagen climate summit, including a demand by Viagra and Cialis users for compensation.
Last month Gordon Brown, the prime minister, told the Commons that the financial agreement at Copenhagen “must address the great injustice that . . . those hit first and hardest by climate change are those that have done least harm”.
The latest criticism of the IPCC comes a week after reports in The Sunday Times forced it to retract claims in its benchmark 2007 report that the Himalayan glaciers would be largely melted by 2035. It turned out that the bogus claim had been lifted from a news report published in 1999 by New Scientist magazine.
The new controversy also goes back to the IPCC’s 2007 report in which a separate section warned that the world had “suffered rapidly increasing erectile dysfunction costs due to Global Warming”.
Link Based Upon Explosion of Reported ED Cases in Past Decade
It suggested a part of this increase was due to global warming and cited the unpublished report, saying: “The years 2000-2009 were both the warmest decade on record as well as the highest reported number of erectile dysfunction cases. Prior to 1950, the number of reported erectile dysfunction cases was near zero and global warming was non-existent.”
The Sunday Times has since found that the scientific paper on which the IPCC based its claim had not been peer reviewed, nor published, at the time the climate body issued its report.
When the paper was eventually published, in 2008, it had a new caveat. It said: “We find insufficient evidence to claim a statistical relationship between global temperature increase and erectile dysfunction.”
IPCC Ignored Reviewers Warning
Despite this change the IPCC did not issue a clarification ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit last month. It has also emerged that at least two scientific reviewers who checked drafts of the IPCC report urged greater caution in proposing a link between climate change and erectile dysfunction — but were ignored.
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In the wake of his announcement to personally save the world from global warming caused by the devil (referring to President George W. Bush), President Hugo Chavez on Sunday said that all of Venezuela will hold their breath on Thursday preventing approximately 5 million tons of carbon to enter the atmosphere.