1/31/2010, 5:35 pm

Worldbeat - The UN's IPCC and it's Assessment Report in the news. An embarrassed IPCC has discovered that many of the research papers it has included in their Assessment Report have turned out to be anything but the academic peer-reviewed scientific papers it has always maintained are the only research they include in their report.
The UN's IPCC Assessment Report is the fundamental document on which the world's governments base many of their national and international environmental policies.
Much of the legitimacy of the IPCC's 2007 Assessment Report, AR4, has recently been called into question. Amy Snieder, a fifth grader at the Lincoln grade school in Orville, Utah, had heard that the AR4 recently had been found to include partisan non-peer reviewed articles from the World Wildlife Federation, the activist group Greenpeace, college student dissertations and even popular magazine articles.
"Did anybody ever actually read the report before now?" Amy asked herself. "It's been out for two years but it's like, why didn't anyone find these things before now?" With some help from her father she downloaded the pdf of the AR4 last week and had been reading it when she was startled to find her own name and her school science fair project on the environment used as basic research cited in the UN IPCC 2007 report. "It was like, wow! I really worked hard on it but this can't be right." But strangely enough, it is. This IPCC could not be contacted for comment.
It's become a standing joke in professional satirist circles that poking fun at the IPCC has become an exercise in frustration. "As soon as I come up some new material making fun of the IPCC the news comes out that my lampoon has been what really happened!" claims Mark Selbourne, professional satirist. "First I tried to do a spoof where the IPCC was in cahoots with the WWF and that fell apart; then I worked for days on one that spoofed the IPCC and Greenpeace and then the news came out that the IPCC used Greenpeace stuff in the Assessment Report. Then I sold a new idea and was working on a good spoof of the IPCC using magazine articles and school kids stuff and look what happened! I can't make up anything to spoof these people! Didn't anybody read that damn IPCC report when it came out?"
