Article content

During an event in Ottawa Tuesday with science guy Bill Nye, Prime Minister Justin Trudeau touted one of his ministers as a “Nobel Prize winning scientist.” At another event on Wednesday he said it again.

It’s a lofty claim, but subjecting it to the rigorous process of scientific inquiry — or, just some basic fact-checking — shows that it’s not exactly evidence-based.

We apologize, but this video has failed to load.

tap here to see other videos from our team. Try refreshing your browser, or Trudeau has been calling one of his ministers a Nobel Prize winner, but the claim isn't evidence-based Back to video

Science Minister Kirsty Duncan, in her pre-politics career as a geographer, contributed to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, a United Nations initiative that was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007, along with former U.S. vice-president Al Gore.

The panel shared the prize with Gore for their collective efforts to get the word out about climate change and to encourage “measures that are needed to counteract such change.”

Each report by the IPCC draws on the work of hundreds of scientists, so over the course of two decades, it’s likely that thousands of scientists contributed to the effort. And, faced with a number of scientists burnishing their resume by claiming to be Nobel Prize winners, in 2012 the organization publicly asked them to knock it off.