Abstract
This essay discusses a number of issues concerning global warming to illustrate the ways through which scientific information is distorted and international policy decided based on such inaccurate information. To this aim the author analyzes a period of seven years running from 1985 when a few scientists estimated the influence of global warming to the adoption of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The analysis sheds the following major points: 1) In 1985, when the first international conference on global warming was convened, scientists did not conduct a scientific review but rather a "scientific assessment", striving in so doing for consensus and thus engaging in a collective decision-making exercise of a volitional nature; 2) Journalists did not report the original views of scientists on the subject to the general public and sometimes put out news that oversimplified the subject; 3) Reports on the contents of discussions among scientists are often misunderstood by the laymen; 4) Journalists and the general public take the results of computer simulation to be reliable scientific predictions and disregard the intrinsic limits of such methodology; 5) Scientific articles include the political scenarios of reducing exhaust carbonic acid gas by inserting this aim as a fact in the simulation exercises; 6) The terminology used by scientists conducting research on global warming permeates the language used in the clauses of the international convention.
