The world’s leading proponent of climate change alarmism is gearing up its next big drive and the US may or may not be involved. This massive effort is the next Assessment Report from the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, better known simply as the IPCC.

Their mind-numbing Assessment Reports, which take five years on average to prepare, run around 6,000 pages. They are consistently alarmist, and always will be, because that is the IPCC’s job. The IPCC is part of the United Nations Environment Program and it serves the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, which aims to get trillions of dollars transferred from the developed countries (especially the US) to the developing countries, all in the name of climate change compensation. These are purely political organizations.

These massive reports are supposed to be scientific in nature. But as the name “intergovernmental” indicates, the entire process is run by national governments. Currently 195 countries are Members of the IPCC. Everything is controlled by groups of governments, from the nomination of authors and the specification of topics, to the final approval of reports.

So while the reports are mostly written by scientists, they are just those scientists selected by their respective governments. Given that most of these governments support climate alarmism, which is a massive power grab for them, it is no surprise that the IPCC Report authors are die-hard alarmists.

The next IPCC report is called AR6 because it is the sixth Assessment Report done since the organization was formed in 1988, when climate alarmism was just heating up. As usual there are three distinct working groups, dubbed simply WG1, WG2 and WG3. Each group issues a separate report which typically runs over 2000 pages.

These reports are supposedly summarizing the existing scientific literature, but in reality the merely choose and use scholarly citations to support the one-sided argument for alarmism. They do this very well, so I call it artful bias.

WG1 is the physical climate science report, while WG2 covers impacts, adaptation and vulnerability and WG3 looks at what is called “mitigation of climate change.” In UN-speak the term “mitigation” means changing human activities, especially curtailing fossil fuel combustion, in a (foolish) attempt to stop the climate from changing.

Obviously this all assumes that humans are causing climate change, specifically really bad change. That we are not is not an option, so it is the job of WG1 to prove that humans are causing dangerous climate change. Thus their reports are always arguments to this effect.

The outline for the AR6 WG1 report has already been written by the member governments. As always the focus is on the increase in atmospheric greenhouse gases, especially CO2, and all the damage that various computer models say will come from this.

It is up to the several hundred hand picked WG1 authors to produce the detailed arguments for all this scary stuff. While the final WG1 report is not due out until 2022, these authors will be selected early next month. This is where it gets very interesting, for two reasons.

First of all, who will the US authors be? Given the Trump Administration’s avowed skepticism of climate alarmism, will there be a significant number of skeptical scientists? Or will there be a repeat of the recent Bonn Climate Summit fiasco, when the US team was composed entirely of Obama retreads?

Second, will there even be US authors? This question arises because the Trump Administration has declined to continue funding the IPCC. Until now the US has been the largest single contributor. France has said it will pick up the tab for the several million dollar funding gap, although it hopes other countries will chip in as well.

But as far as I know the US is still a member of the IPCC. If the US refuses to provide authors, or if its nominees are banned, there could be significant ramifications as far as the IPCC’s glorified reputation is concerned. How this will play out remains to be seen.

So all things considered, February might be a very interesting month in IPCCville. This is definitely something to watch unfold.