Here’s a question Prime Minister Stephen Harper and Liberal Leader Michael Ignatieff, who could become our next PM, should ask the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC).

To wit: How could it possibly get the amount of land in the Netherlands that’s below sea level wrong by a factor of more than 100%?

Goldstein could ask the IPCC directly. Journalists are allowed, you know. But maybe he imagines its a privileged access thing and only Harper and Ignatieff can do it, say when they next meet with the IPCC at Bohemian Grove.

Regardless, Goldstein already knows the answer:

(The inaccurate sea level data originally came from the Netherlands Environmental Assessment Agency, meaning, apparently, nobody checks this stuff.)

Which just doesn’t strike me as being a big deal. Small error, doesn’t change the science, the Dutch provided the erroneous statement in the first place, and nobody in the Netherlands has put their home on stilts because they learned from an IPCC report that they were in fact living underwater. And besides, surely this isn’t even relevant to me, here, in Canada.

The relevance for Canadians is that this is such a basic, stupid, mistake, it raises concerns about what else the IPCC has wrong.

Oh.

Go on…

Pointing out the growing list of IPCC blunders isn’t some climatic version of Trivial Pursuit, as warmists claim.

The IPCC has enormous influence on politicians poised to spend billions of our dollars, allegedly attempting to “fix” man-made global warming.

IPCC reports on climate change are a major reason Canada and the U.S. plan to set up a cap-and-trade market in carbon dioxide emissions, despite the fact it’s been a disaster in Europe that has (a) raised the cost of living for ordinary people (b) funnelled undeserved profits into giant energy corporations and hedge funds (c) incubated massive frauds and (d) done nothing to help the environment.

One IPCC ‘error’ on the geography of the Netherlands, and Goldstein starts ranting about economic apocalypse?

The IPCC, assuming it ever was a scientific body, has now become a lobby group whose “science” advocates central planning run amok and massive wealth redistribution from the developed world (us) to the developing one, using schemes, like cap-and-trade, we already know don’t work.

Now that is just incoherent. The IPCC has a handful of paid, full time employees, and most of its labour is done, for free, by scientists. Who there even has time to lobby? Further, the work that the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change undertakes is decided with the world’s governments, with which it is in partnership. The goal of the IPCC “is to provide policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive information on key aspects of climate change”, which is what the governments involved want; if the direction of the IPCC had been changed to lobbying, it would have to have been decided in plenary by the governments involved. It wasn’t.

But never mind all that. There’s a bigger problem here, one for which The Times of London has invented all the evidence Goldstein needs to believe:

The IPCC responded to this latest blunder, as it has all of them, by arguing: Hey, stuff happens, but the science remains “robust,” so no biggie.

Except former IPCC chairman, Robert Watson (1997-2002) says the growing list of IPCC errors is worrisome, suggesting an inherent bias.

The problem, he told the U.K. Times, is that all the errors uncovered to date exaggerate the problems of man-made climate change. If they were all innocent mistakes (as claimed by IPCC apologists), some would likely understate the problem.

“The mistakes all appear to have gone in the direction of making it seem like climate change is more serious by overstating the impact,” noted Watson, now chief scientific adviser to the U.K.’s environment department.

“That is worrying. The IPCC needs to look at this trend in the errors and ask why it happened.”

He said the IPCC should adopt a more open position towards climate skeptics in future reports, and verify its source material.

Except Watson didn’t say that. When asked if The Times had accurately reported his views, he replied:

The article distorted my statements – I was interviewed for an hour and it was obvious that the reporter wanted me to say that the authors were biased – I said I did not believe that.

If an error on Dutch geography and a fabricated quote in The Times is all it takes for Goldstein to fear ‘drowning in climate stupidity’, then I sincerely hope this guy always wears a lifevest when he goes outdoors in the rain.