Mr Ki-moon, tear down that wall!

An open letter to UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon:

We're constantly told that about 2,500 of the world's "top climate experts" have reached an IPCC consensus that global warming is a crisis.

This alleged consensus is communicated to us in an extremely odd fashion.

In essence, a massive IPCC report is thrown over a wall to us, with a note saying that there really are 2,500 scientists on the other side of the wall; they're all climate experts, and the "overwhelming majority" of them agree that global warming is a crisis.

This process is unacceptably opaque. An unspecified group of 2,500 people supposedly collaborated to write the report, with another unspecified group helpfully boiling things down to a "Summary for Policymakers".

To compound the problem, we then have you, Mr Ki-moon, standing outside the wall emitting sound bites like this:

"These scenes are frightening like science fiction movies.But they are even more terrifying because they are real and reversing these threats is the defining challenge of our age."

and this:

Today the world's scientists have spoken, clearly and in one voice.

Well, we've already had a peek behind the wall in the form of the publicly available IPCC comments here, and what we have seen completely contradicts your "clearly and in one voice" claim.

As the scientific message goes from the actual scientists through the lead authors to the IPCC report, then is transformed by another group to the "Summary for Policymakers", then is relayed to the press by you, I think we've got a high-stakes version of the children's "Telephone Game".

In this particular process, I'm absolutely certain that critical information is being lost or altered.

This puzzling "Telephone Game" approach should be completely unnecessary if there really are 2,500 climate experts behind that wall who believe that global warming is a crisis.

So, Mr Ki-moon, just tear down that wall: just put up a simple web page containing the names, titles and affiliations of the 2,500 scientists that allegedly agree that global warming is a crisis, along with their role (author? reviewer? which chapter?) in creating the most recent IPCC report.

If you can do this, it will go a long way toward convincing the world that thousands of real IPCC scientists actually do agree with your alarmist rhetoric.

If you can't do this, I think you've got some serious explaining to do.

Regards,
Tom Nelson