Bishop Hill Sidelining the 2500?
Mar 1, 2010 Climate: WG3 Re-reading Richard Tol's post at Die Klimazweibel (can anglophone readers call it The Climate Onion?), I was struck by this:
The models assessed by the IPCC all have that abatement costs grow and accelerate as targets become more stringent. Typically, doubling the rate of emission reduction would lead to a quadrupling of costs. The cost curve in SPM.6 (and SPM.4) bends the wrong way: Incremental costs fall as policy become stricter.
This was not picked up by the referees of the SPM because neither Table SPM.4 nor Table SPM.6 appeared in the drafts circulated for comment.
What is pricking my interest in the idea that this part of the report was not actually reviewed at all, and the reason I'm intrigued is that it's not the first time I've come across this kind of thing.
In The Hockey Stick Illusion, I cover the various drafts of the paleoclimate chapter and explain how the report's explanation of the divergence problem was only inserted in the final report - it did not appear in the drafts and was therefore entirely unreviewed.
And just the other day, in the posting I did on the Asia chapter of Working Group II, I noted that some major changes had been made between the second order draft and the final report. There was, however, one interesting change in that chapter that I've been meaning to cover and this seems like a good opportunity to explain it.
In the second order draft, the following statement on crop yields appears in the Executive Summary:
In recent years, the potential crop yield in most countries of Asia has exhibited a declining trend, likely due to rising temperatures.
Note carefully: it's potential yield, in most countries, and likely due to rising temperatures. Now see what happened to that statement after the review process was complete.
The crop yield in many countries of Asia has declined, partly due to rising temperatures and extreme weather events.
So, we are now talking about actual crop yields, not potential ones and the attribution to rising temperature has had any trace of uncertainty removed. One can say in partial mitigation that at least "most" has changed to "many". I've noted in my earlier posting that there were no relevant reviewer comments on this section of the report.
One would expect changes after the second order draft to be minor tweaks, but it appears that in these sections of the report at least, chapter authors are quite happy to make major changes. One wonders just how prevalent this kind of thing is. Could it be that this is the way that the small cabal who run the IPCC sideline the 2500 reviewers we are told about so often; how they control the output in the assessment reports?
Could be.
Reader Comments (15)
My point exactly. The report was substantially changed after the final review. Put differently, the review editors failed to their job.
There is a subtler point: Who are the reviewers? The IPCC sends the drafts to everyone, but is otherwise passive. For a journal paper, the editor makes sure that (s)he targets a few expert referees. The list of referees of Ch11 AR3 WG3 contains few experts in the subject matter.
The changes you highlight (and how they come about) are typical of Management Consultancy, not science.
The lead Partner will not read the report details but take the important sections (summary, conclusions, chapter introductions etc.) and alter them to message they want to give to the customer. Due to the pyramid structures involved very few will ever see let alone query these changes.
My feeling of the whole IPCC process has been that it is 'the mother of Management Consultancy projects', rather than anything connected to real impartial science. I recognise so many of the processes going on.
I should point having been a Management Consultant in a past life, I use the term pejoratively. My b*ll-shit tolerance was never very high.
In my line of work, the electronic document management system prevented any changes being made to the version of the report that had been signed off by ALL reviewers. If any reviewer was unhappy and changes had to be made before he would sign, then the amended version would have to be approved by all reviewers again. The final issue carried all signatures and I repeat that the system prevented changes being made by anybody after reviewers' signature.
Where's Frank to tell us what he thinks of amending reports after completion of the expert review process?
"Climate onion" is correct. But it is "Klimazwiebel" and not "Klimazweibel"
@Phillip
Democracy in document management? perish the thought...
Even in such circumstances, unless you are particularly anally retentive people often just approve the changes, especially if it happens to be from the Project Leader. And even if you did dig you feet in, as has been shown, the pressures bought to bear, both subtle and not so subtle, often cause people to give in. And do not forget human nature, these are often long processes and people become 'document blind' or 'document blasé' right at the end where they should be there most vigilant with the Summary creation/amendment by others. People are pragmatic by nature, science is not.
The work processes of creating these documents are very similar irrespective of the infrastructure used.
'Climate onion' is a perfectly correct literal translation, but possibly misses much of the nuance
The climate onion gets more rotten, pungent and tear producing the more layers are peeled off.
The fundamental flaw of all IPCC reports is simply that lead authors are editors and so referees of the comments. That's not according to the usual way peer review works: then a submitting author and editor are two different persons and the editor has the final say, not the author.
The Garnaut Climate Change Review is the Australian equivalent of the UK Stern Report.
It contains the same strange assunptions of brief high costs, reducing rapidly.
The initial impact of the first tentative mitigation steps to curb CO2 emissions, would, according the Professor Garnaut, reduce GDP by about 0.8%, in about 2013 (according to his chart, on page 264.)
However, this loss would quickly be eliminated by 2015, just two years later.
Thereafter the chart bobs up an down impressively, but the projected loss is never more than 0.2% of GDP, righ up to 2100.
That is amazing! While we dismantle what is probably the most effecient, low cost electricy generation system in the world and replace it with untested renewables (no atomic power), our economy hardly skips a beat, as the screws are applied progressively.
Yummy - I can hardly wait.
ScientistForTruth, I think we need to start selling a 'Climate Change' or 'IPCC' Whisky - Slogans - 'Smooth and Easy to Swallow', or 'The Proof Increases Every Day'
AusieDan, Well it's not like you have any Uranium or anything for Nukes... Oh wait...
Chuckles - Am I right that "Klimazwiebel" would be read as a pun on "Klimazweifel" (Climate doubt) by German speakers? Or am I reading too much into the name?
@DR
No. Zwiebel and Zweifel are completely different words.
Chuckles - Oz has about 25% of both the world's uranium and thorium reserves. Our current government of course will have nothing to do with nuclear. We just sell the ore to the evil nuclear foreigners, pocket the loot and assume smug facial expressions.
Much better to have millions of the eye-sores known as yellow-bellied parrot munching windmill generators. Who knows, if they change the angle-of-attack and have them at the right pitch we may be able to lift the whole continent up and deposit it a bit further south. Thus reducing the mean continental temperature anomoly and solving our catastrophic global warming problem in one hit.
Dr. Tol refers to a 2005 paper overlooked by the AR4 folks. It's a meta-analysis of 94 estimates of the impact climate-change-related tax changes might have on employment rates. He says the study found the average increase of employment was 0.64% "but with a standard deviation of 1.33%".
The abstract is available here: http://tinyurl.com/ylmlcxg but the full paper costs $31.
This standard deviation number seems (relatively) high. Is anyone familiar with this paper? I'm curious as to whether or not a couple outlier estimates might have skewed things dramatically.