Rearrange the chairs please
Andrew Orlowski
The Register [UK]
31st August 2010
An enquiry into the UN’s climate panel, the IPCC, has recommended administrative changes, including a full-time chief executive. It found the IPCC had “assigned high confidence to statements for which there is very little evidence”, had failed to acknowledge criticism, or follow its own guidelines.
The InterAcademy Council, led by Dr Harold Shapiro, an economist at Princeton University, also said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had “gone beyond its mandate to be ‘policy relevant’ not policy prescriptive” – for which it recommended a new “communications policy”. The IPCC was also criticised for “confirmation bias” with lead authors placing “too much weight on their own views relative to other views”. It recommended working group co-chairs be limited to one assessment.
The report is an indirect criticism of the part-time chairman Dr Rajendara Pachauri. The IAC Panel recommends a full-time chairman limited to a shorter term.
The investigation was prompted by criticisms of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report (AR4) published in 2007 – specifically the output of Working Group 2 (WGII), set up to examine the “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and which produced a report ran to almost 1,000 pages. This was found to lean heavily on “grey literature”, including activist reports and even travel brochures. A prediction that that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 was traced to a casual remark by an Indian scientist. Here and elsewhere, the IPCC excluded work that suggested that the impacts of global warming were overstated, or which were critical of the costs of the policy favoured by the UN and activist groups of mitigation, rather than adaptation.
The IAP said the IPCC’s work included headline-catching statements which couldn’t be justified…
…Unpeeling the policy function from the IPCC may be problematic, since politics was a factor in the creation of the IPCC itself. Climate issues were a meteorological backwater in the Cold War era of the early 1980s, with the US National Research Council advising “caution not panic” in 1983, and most scientists eschewing policy recommendations. In 1985 three sponsors, including two UN agencies (the UN Environment Program and the WMO) selected scientists to attend a workshop in a personal capacity in Villach. The resulting statement advised that “the rate and degree of future warming could be profoundly affected by government policies on energy conservation, use of fossil fuels, and the emission of greenhouse gases”. Villach made policy the business of scientists, and when scientists subsequently met, the debate was decreasingly focused on scientific issues, and more likely to ask “what can we do to make them do something?”…
The article continues at The Register.
