Climate Change – IPCC Report questioned

In the interest of fair play, not to mention our collective education, we feel we must include the link to IPCC too blinkered and corrupt to save forwarded by our resident Climate Change denier, Ron Meisels.
Briefly, it introduces “Vincent Gray [who] has begun a second career as a climate-change activist. His motivation springs from the United Nations’ Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a body that combats global warming by advocating the reduction of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases. Dr. Gray has worked relentlessly for the IPCC as an expert reviewer since the early 1990s.
… Dr. Gray’s mission, in his new role as co-founder of The New Zealand Climate Science Coalition, is to stop the IPCC from spreading climate-change propaganda that undermines the integrity of science.
‘The whole process is a swindle,’ he states, in large part because the IPCC has a blinkered mandate that excludes natural causes of global warming.’ ”
Warming to his topic (sorry!), Dr. Gray states that “The Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC) 1992 defined ‘climate change’ as changes in climate caused by human interference with atmospheric composition,” he explains. “The task of the IPCC, therefore, has been to accumulate evidence to support this belief that all changes in the climate are caused by human interference with the atmosphere. Studies of natural climate change have largely been used to claim that these are negligible compared with ‘climate change.’ ”
As is our wont, we asked a few of our distinguished Wednesday Night environment experts to comment of the article, and are delighted to include the thoughtful comments received from two of them.

I must say there is the possibility that there is a little bit of truth in this
– I have been teaching my “Current Research in Environmental Earth Science”
since 1994 and in the mid-late 1990’s the second (or third) IPCC assessment came out. For one week’s readings I had my students read the executive summary and some of the chapters.
This was the first assessment that said it was “likely” “probable” that humans
were causing the observed changes in climate. However, when I read the
chapters, upon which this conclusion was based, I did not find compelling
evidence. In fact there was a bit of a disjunct. The chapter would go on and
then suddenly proclaim “therefore, it is clear that this is a result of human
activity” and there had been nothing in the chapter up to that [point] that made one think that.
… I do believe that we are forcing climate [change]. However, there may be some kernels of truth in [what Dr. Gray says].
And, confirming the above:
About six months ago I had to sit through a very long and passionate tirade by an IPCC author about how the IPCC refuses to make any significant statements on the impacts of climate change on ecosystems despite the fact that there is overwhelming scientific evidence.
Apparently he had been stymied in his attempts to include a number of conclusions on the grounds that the other authors didn’t believe that the evidence (gathered from peer reviewed journals) would stand up to rigorous analysis.
I think that complaints can, therefore, go both ways, especially when a document is written by committee then vetted through a political process before being released.
In fact, I have heard from other authors and reviewers, of cases in which governments will approve a conclusion but will not approve the inclusion of some of the studies which lead to the conclusion. This may be a partial explanation [of the problems mentioned above.]