Jon, a recent commenter to this site whom I had to cut-off because of his political polemic and grossly misinformed statements, made an interesting comment yesterday. I’m not letting his comments through but I thought this point was worth debating.
Jon asserts from the recent declaration by the UN (an organization he obviously despises) that they had overestimated the number of AIDS victims worldwide, proves that they cannot be trusted, and therefore the IPCC reports compiled by the UN also cannot be trusted.
Well, let’s put this in perspective. The UN says it has developed a new more accurate method of estimating the number of AIDS cases in poor countries and it revised it’s figure from 40 million cases to 33 million cases worldwide. Some say they overstated their figures on purpose to raise more funds to fight AIDS. Well, whether or not that is true, 33 million cases is in my mind just as bad a crisis as 40 million, and deserves all the help it can get. No great crime on humanity here if in fact this is true. Also, they did correct their figures once new data became available.
But whether or not you agree with my assessment, there is still a HUGE difference between these AIDS estimates and the IPCC reports. The AIDS estimates were generated internally by the UN, and researchers had for years been saying they felt the figures were too high. In the case of the IPCC, all the UN is doing is organizing this committee of over 1500 non-UN scientists from around the world, and compiling their research findings into a single set of reports. Those reports are edited by consensus and many scientists are complaining that they in fact understate the findings because the process of editing by consensus forces the IPCC to water down the reports in order to get the wording approved by the USA, China, and Russia, three nations whose governments are trying to downplay the effects of global warming.
