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IPIE Report – Information Integrity about Climate Science: A Systematic Review
https://www.ipie.info/research/sr2025-1
This Summary for Policymakers provides a high-level précis of the Synthesis Report, Information Integrity about Climate Science: A Systematic Review.
https://www.ipie.info/research/sfp2025-2
The Science is Not the Mask—But They’re Wearing It Like One
I’ve spent enough time around academic science and policy to recognize when something smells off—not just biased, but structurally manipulative. That’s what we’re seeing in this IPIE report. It doesn’t defend the integrity of science. It uses the credibility of science as a stage prop in a much deeper campaign: to consolidate authority, to police dissent, and to define the boundaries of acceptable doubt.
Let’s be blunt: this is not a report about information integrity. It’s a performance of institutional self-protection dressed in the robes of “evidence-based policy.” The authors frame all critical engagement—from feasibility concerns to mitigation realism—as a form of strategic sabotage. It collapses skepticism into denialism, concern into conspiracy, critique into complicity. That’s not science. That’s moral theater.
Skepticism Rebranded as Subversion
The core scientific value of skepticism—once the engine of progress—is now repackaged as a rhetorical threat. The report labels “strategic skepticism” as a deliberate attempt to undermine climate action. But who decides what qualifies as “strategic”? A technocrat? An activist? A language model trained on elite consensus?
Feynman warned about this decades ago. The danger is not only that we fool others, but that we fool ourselves—and institutional science is proving how easily that happens when its authority becomes indistinguishable from its politics.
Narrative Architecture with Guardrails
The tone of the document reads like something compiled via AI prompt constraints: ideologically vetted inputs, moral certainty preloaded, geopolitical enemies named in advance. Russia’s disinformation gets pages of scorn. Western greenwashing, fantasy modeling, and the techno-utopian fantasies baked into IAMs? Silence.
They use one-sided sources like that “#JunkScience” paper (Strudwicke & Grant, 2020) as justification to paint all dissent as foreign manipulation. That’s not scholarly rigor—it’s institutional deflection, securitized.
And yes, the Global South is instrumentalized throughout: elevated only when repeating the approved chorus, silenced or ignored when they raise deeper critiques—like carbon colonialism, land grabs via offsets, or the neocolonial logic of Net Zero timelines. The moral language is there, but the structure is extractive.
Truths With Teeth Removed
They claim “climate science has delivered the solutions available to humanity.” That is an outright distortion. Climate science can describe what is. It can model what might happen. It cannot prescribe what should be done. That is a political act. A moral act. A deeply human one. Not a scientific result.
The IPCC mandate is clear: it assesses, it does not prescribe. It offers options, not orders. To collapse these boundaries—to claim science has settled the solution—is to mask politics as physics.
And it’s dangerous. Because once the mask is in place, any dissent becomes heresy. Any realism becomes sabotage. And any refusal to accept institutional optimism is branded a threat.
A System Built to Protect Itself
This isn’t about stopping denialism. It’s about securing the legitimacy of a narrative that’s already showing signs of collapse. Net Zero by 2050 is not a neutral target—it’s a political compromise built on speculative tech, unjust economic assumptions, and misleading accounting.
Those who point this out aren’t enemies of science. They’re its allies. And yet, in this report, they’re treated like insurgents.
You want to know what real disinformation looks like? It’s the refusal to admit that science-based policy is still policy. That “the science” cannot tell us whether 1.5°C is politically, ecologically, or ethically viable. That cost-benefit models don’t make justice disappear.
Page 33 Media and bots: An example of biased focus and distorted unfounded claims:
“Another study of tweets relating to climate change found that 15% of all accounts were bot accounts. One noteworthy feature was that while 83% of these suspected bot accounts supported climate activism, the remaining accounts representing denial and skepticism concerning climate change would pursue active strategies of engagement, such as initiating conversations with non-skeptical human users while amplifying the voices of skeptical users. […] Here, a noteworthy feature was that although, again, bot accounts engaged in climate activism as well as denialism, both categories of bots tended to polarize discussions through evoking emotions.”
These were only “suspected” Bot accounts, not proven to be so. Even if they were 85% of all accounts were genuine, or at least “suspected” to be real people.
While this comment: “categories of bots tended to polarize discussions through evoking emotions,” is particularly appalling given almost all online discussions tend to evoke human emotions of some kind! To distort such obvious truths and project this solely upon “suspected denialist bots” alone is insidious and unscientific ideologically biased swill.
Final Thought
This report is worse than propaganda—it’s consensus laundering. It takes selective truths, strips them of complexity, moralizes the frame, and declares war on critique. It doesn’t build public trust in science. It burns it to keep the illusions warm.
I won’t play along. And I hope many others won’t either. Though I suspect this will be picked up by many not realising what’s behind the mask and misuse it as deigned.
>>> Who Is the IPIE?
The IPIE presents itself as a neutral scientific body, but its structure and agenda suggest something else. It is a non-governmental organization focused not on climate science itself, but on the broader “information environment”—things like algorithmic bias, deepfakes, misinformation, and narrative control.
Legally registered charity in Zurich in late 2023, the IPIE launched at the 2023 Nobel Prize Summit. It has a Board of Trustees, ethics committees, and topic-specific panels. It claims neutrality and independence from state or corporate interests, but details about its funding are scarce.
In reality, the IPIE functions more like a well-connected, ideologically aligned think tank. It has no formal accountability mechanisms beyond its own internal governance. Its credibility relies on the appearance of objectivity—but its influence remains marginal, at least for now.
In short: IPIE is not a climate science authority. It’s an information control body, operating in the gray zone between advocacy, technocracy, and soft power projection. The real danger is not that they speak—but that they claim to speak for science while advancing a pre-approved political blueprint.