Big Picture News, Informed Analysis

Canadian journalist Donna Laframboise. Former National Post & Toronto Star columnist, past vice president of the Canadian Civil Liberties Association.

Of Footnotes & Factchecking (book update)

My book-length exposé of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change will be available soon.

The good news: my book is 95% of the way to being published.

The bad news: it’s going to take a few weeks longer.

For the past month, I’ve been re-working sections of my book, having received helpful and thoughtful feedback from kind souls who’ve read the manuscript. I’ve also been inserting dozens of footnotes, hundreds of hyperlinks, and triple-checking my facts.

Just this morning, however, an e-mail arrived pointing out a handful of small errors that my best efforts had so far failed to catch. In a work as packed with facts as this one is, every page presents numerous opportunities for outright errors – as well as turns of phrase that end up being just a little wrong. This is an immense source of stress for someone who tries as hard as I do to be accurate and precise.

Because so much of my time has been devoted to the above, my blogging schedule has been erratic lately. I’m also way behind in answering my e-mail. Apologies, therefore, are in order.

Please bear with me just a little longer. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is an important and influential body. Even though it has been in existence for more than 20 years, my book will be the first to take a critical look at it. (The only other book about the IPCC was written by Bert Bolin, who served at its chairman for the first 11 years.)

What began as a rather different project unexpectedly morphed into an exposé. My book demonstrates that perceptions of the IPCC promulgated by the media, politicians, activist groups, scientists, and scientific bodies are hugely mistaken. (I keep a running database of quotes about the IPCC here.)

It shows that nearly everything we’ve been told about how the IPCC recruits its personnel and prepares its reports falls well short of the many extravagant claims routinely repeated on its behalf.

When you think about it, it’s astonishing that this organization’s rosy view of itself has been taken at face value by so many for so long.

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This entry was posted on September 7, 2011 by in books, climate bible, IPCC and tagged , , , .
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