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The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was established in 1988 by two United Nations organizations, the World Meteorological Organization (WMO) and the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) to assess the "risk of human-induced climate change". The Panel is open to all members of the WMO and UNEP.

IPCC reports are widely cited [1] [2] in almost any debate related to climate change [3] [4]. The reports have been influential in forming national and international responses to climate change. A small but vocal minority (less than 1.5%) of the scientists involved with the report have accused the IPCC of bias.

The current Chair of the IPCC is Rajendra K. Pachauri, elected in May 2002; previously Robert Watson headed the IPCC.

Rajendra Kumar Pachauri (born August 20, 1940, Nainital, India) was elected chief of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change in 2002. In 2001 he supported a consumer boycott of ExxonMobil for its stance on global warming, saying it was "a good way to put economic pressure on the US."

British-born U.S. scientist who has worked on atmospheric pollution issues since the 1980s (including ozone depletion, global warming), palaeoclimatic change and was the chair of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change between 1996 and 2002. Watson had previously served in the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy under Bill Clinton, been Director for Environment and Head of the Environment Sector Board at the World Bank, and worked at NASA. He is currently Chief Scientist at the World Bank's Environmentally and Socially Sustainable Development Network.[1]

The New York Times has characterized Watson as an "outspoken advocate of the idea that human actions - mainly burning coal and oil - are contributing to global warming and must be changed to avert environmental upheavals."

According to one global-warming-skeptical organization, Sovereignty International, Watson said at a 1997 press briefing that "The science is settled [and] we're not going to reopen it here." [

List of scientists opposing global warming consensus

* Richard Lindzen, MIT meteorology professor and member of the National Academy of Sciences: "We are quite confident that [the] global mean temperature is about 0.5 degrees Celsius higher than it was a century ago ... [but] we are not in a position to confidently attribute past climate change to carbon dioxide or to forecast what the climate will be in the future." [1]

* Robert C. Balling, Jr., director of the Office of Climatology and an associate professor of geography at Arizona State University: "At this moment in time we know only that: (1) Global surface temperatures have risen in recent decades. (2) Mid-tropospheric temperatures have warmed little over the same period. (3) This difference is not consistent with predictions from numerical climate models." [2]

* William M. Gray, Colorado State University: "This small warming is likely a result of the natural alterations in global ocean currents which are driven by ocean salinity variations. Ocean circulation variations are as yet little understood. Human kind has little or nothing to do with the recent temperature changes. We are not that influential." [3]

* Willie Soon, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "... there's increasingly strong evidence that previous research conclusions, including those of the United Nations and the United States government concerning 20th century warming, may have been biased by underestimation of natural climate variations. ... In other words, natural factors could be more important than previously assumed". [4]

* Sallie Baliunas, Harvard-Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics: "[T]he recent warming trend in the surface temperature record cannot be caused by the increase of human-made greenhouse gases in the air". [5]

* Frederick Seitz, retired, former solid-state physicist, former president of the National Academy of Sciences: "So we see that the scientific facts indicate that all the temperature changes observed in the last 100 years were largely natural changes and were not caused by carbon dioxide produced in human activities." [6]

* Fred Singer, president of the Science & Environmental Policy Project: has changed his position from "The earth is not warming significantly" (paraphrase) [7] to "The Earth currently is experiencing a warming trend, but there is scientific evidence that human activities have little to do with it" [8].