The IPCC goes all Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse

For some years now, critics of the Global Warming Movement have been criticized by Warmists as Science Deniers. Likewise, the Global Warming Movement has been criticized as a modern secular religion, i.e. a faith-based movement bereft of scientific underpinnings. The criticism has been two-fold: 1) The models used to predict global warming trends have been utterly unreliable in their forecasts and 2) Climatologist keep adding very material variables to their models in order to improve their capacity to make even nominally accurate predictions. In other words, the climate system is so complex that we still can't demonstrate that we understand it. Most critics neither deny climate change (a process inherent in the system) nor that it is possible that human activities might be contributing to that process of change. What they want to know is do we understand what causes the system to change, to what degree do human activities contribute, and what can reasonably be done about it? It doesn't help that the among the scientists most closely associated with climatologists, meteorologists, there is about the same degree of skepticism about climatologist claims as among the general public.

It also doesn't help that the behavior of activists (suppression of dissent, ad hominem attacks on critics, manipulated data, "lost" data, reluctance to share models, reluctance to share data, etc.) associated with the more alarmed climatologists so closely mirrors that of shakedown artists rather than dispassionate science pursuing truth.

All of this is brought to mind by the headline above the fold in the New York Times this morning.

The front page teaser:

U.N. Panel Warns of Dire Effects From Global Warming
By JUSTIN GILLIS 5:06 AM ET
In the starkest language they have ever used, climate experts from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said food shortages, mass extinctions and flooding are likely without immediate action.

The IPCC, the UN advocacy group most interested in redistributing hundreds of billions of dollars from developed country democracies to developing country kleptocrats, has gone the full Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. Death and Famine are there. Conquest by the waters. All that is missing is the War horse. They probably just ran of room on the front page.

If the IPCC wanted to reinforce both the image of Global Warming as a secular faith-based movement, they couldn't have done a better job of playing to their critics accusation.

All of which is a pity because we do need to understand the climate change process, and we do need to understand how and to what degree we contribute to it, and we do need to figure out how we can mitigate those human effects. But the discredited IPCC won't be the organization that gets us to those answers as long as it cannot behave in a sentient and rational fashion.