Senators Joseph Lieberman (I., Conn.) and John Warner (R., Va.) base their proposed Climate Security Act legislation on two fundamental premises: That there is a scientific consensus on global warming and that, even if the scientists are wrong and the global-warming risk never materializes, we will at least have aided the environment.

Both premises are wrong. Not just wrong. The premises could well have it exactly backwards.

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First, consider the alleged scientific consensus. Nearby you’ll find the cover page from the 2006 press announcement from the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the body coordinating the worldwide effort to reduce carbon-dioxide emissions. The cover page offers this impressive claim:

2500 SCIENTIFIC EXPERT REVIEWERS
800 CONTRIBUTING AUTHORS AND
450 LEAD AUTHORS FROM
130 COUNTRIES
6 YEARS WORK
1 REPORT
2007

Impressive, isn’t it? You may be even more impressed if you see the accompanying press materials. And you can forgive the press for being impressed, too, at the intellects assembled to establish that global warming is real and manmade. After all, 2,500 expert scientists can’t be wrong.

That figure of 2,500 scientists received saturation media exposure, and then it was amplified by environmental groups, bloggers, and others. A Google search of “IPCC” and “2500” produces almost 250,000 results, the vast majority of them references to the scientific consensus. Senators Lieberman and Warner can be forgiven for believing, as the press did, in the existence of a consensus.

But what did those 2,500 scientists actually endorse? To find out, I contacted the Secretariat of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and asked for the names of the 2,500. I planned to canvas them to determine their precise views. The answer that came back from the Secretariat informed me that the names were not public, so I would not be able to survey them, and that the scientists were merely reviewers. The 2,500 had not endorsed the conclusions of the report and, in fact, the IPCC had not claimed that they did. Journalists had jumped to the conclusion that the scientists the IPCC had touted were endorsers and the IPCC never saw fit to correct the record.