If we can’t trust the WHO to give us honest answers about the sources and dangers of a pandemic virus, I don’t see why we’d default to trusting a similarly structured organization to give us honest answers about climate change research.

> honest answers about the sources and dangers of a pandemic virus

The accuracy of answers about the source of a virus was very much dependent on the level of openness and cooperation from the jurisdiction in which the virus originated. Climate change, on the other hand, does not have a single geographical source, and therefore the IPCC is less limited in the information available to it.

Similarly, I suspect that the WHO's early mistakes or inaccuracies in assessing the dangers of the virus were due to the fact that most of the early cases and mortality data were being collected in a single jurisdiction.

WHO deliberately chooses to kowtow to China and exclude Taiwan, the country with one of the best records on Covid-19 and with the experience and knowledge to fight it successfully. At some point sacrificing public health to accommodate a genocidal regime becomes a matter of institutional failure. Don't waste your breath making excuses for them. The WHO's "inaccuracies" go far beyond believing CCP propaganda.

The WHO is part of the UN. The UN doesn't recognize Taiwan. It's as simple as that.

You're experiencing the 'criticising the CCP is forbidden' backlash with these downvotes, it's one of the HN voting system failures.

But you've hit on a problem: can we maintain global cooperative institutions in the face of an expansionist hegemonic power like China? I don't think we can, because anything controversial and it gets ripped apart.

The US and allied countries have their own national organizations, but even the EU is compromised on a number of issues, such as creeping fascism (Poland and Hungary) and the inability to take action against member states, or even coordinate in a pandemic. Even NATO is compromised by expansion to include such countries, and Turkey as well. So I'm questioning how useful large group multi-lateralism is for an organization like the WHO.

No he isn't. He is experiencing the "people will downvote dumb criticisms of climate science". The WHO's response to the pandemic is not in any way evidence that the IPCC is untrustworthy after decades of thorough study of climate change. That's the reason for downvotes, not because he criticized the CCP.

I'm sorry, he doesn't mention climate or the IPCC?

Edit: And I just scanned the last week of posts and can't see mention of anything like that. You're confusing with user koolba.

Large multinational organizations can have significant value, as NATO and the UN have shown in the past. But once the "regulatory capture" effect happens and the UN becomes a platform for genocidal dictatorships to spew anti-Semitic propaganda, we should discard that organization in favor of something better (even if "better" hypothetically had to be "nothing"). A truly global organization is, as you've explained, probably impossible because the bullies won't participate in a fair organization. But large regional organizations can still have value, as long as we recognize their limits and don't look to them for leadership that they can't adequately provide.

What we have seen with the WHO, and what you can also expect from the IPCC, is a minimization of the problem. The incentives for such organization are always to downplay the size of the risk, to present optimistic estimates as worse-case scenarios.

So yes, most likely the IPCC is wrong or lying to some extent: global warming is almost certainly a much bigger problem than their official estimates.

> So yes, most likely the IPCC is wrong or lying to some extent: global warming is almost certainly a much bigger problem than their official estimates.

If official, peer-reviewed reports from international agencies are "wrong or lying," what better sources would you recommend?

Or more importantly..

If they're wrong, why aren't any of the groups involved catching these errors and correcting them?

If they're lying, you're suggesting a multi-decade, international conspiracy spanning thousands of people that threatens humanity as a whole where the watchdogs are either complicit or not competent enough to catch. I hope you have something to back that up.

I'm not claiming some huge conspiracy. I'm just claiming that, just like the WHO initially downplayed the risks of Covid19, so too I expect the IPCC is likely downplaying to some extent the risks from global warming.

This doesn't require some complex conspiracy, just some natural amount of wanting to tell people (heads of state) what they want to hear, some amount of funding and promoting less alarmist research, some amount of feeling like they have a duty to avoid extreme rhetoric etc.

I hope it's clear, I'm not claiming that I know all this for a fact. But it is how international organizations seem to operate in general. You would definitely not expect a major international inter-governmental organization to present a position that would be called extreme position, even if that extreme position may be right.

Didn't the who correct those mistakes within weeks?

I didn't say it was left or right. I was responding to your comment, which was petty partisanship.

Anyway, your attitude is unscientific. If there were no unusual weather events for 5 years, it wouldn't "prove climate change wrong". By the same token, it's moronic to say "look, climate change!" every time there's an unusual weather event.

Plot the number of 100 year records being broken per year, for extreme heat or extreme cold, on a chart for the past 20 years and then tell me there isn't something unusual going on in the recent climate.

It's a scientific fact that many places in the world are now seeing weather extremes that have literally not been recorded in their past 100 years of data, on a rapidly increasing basis.

https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-53140069

https://news.un.org/en/story/2020/06/1066882

but I'm sure that you'll be happy to tell me that the United Nations and the BBC are both extreme left-wing partisans.

Is it true we're having an anomalous number of extreme cold events? All of your links are about an anomalous number of extreme heating events.

You took my first response as "climate change is left-wing". You took my second response as "statistics aren't real". I never said either of those things.

I think pointing to a weather event and saying "look climate change!" is dumb. It's not statistics. No matter how steep your line is, it doesn't prove "X weather event would not have occurred if not for global warming".

All I responded to was this comment which was nasty and added nothing to your post:

> And where else in the USA has been a bastion of oil/petrochemical industry climate change denialism, than Texas?