Harold Shapiro, the economist who headed the IAC review of the IPCC, is interviewed at Climate Central. This is very interesting stuff, in particular the bit where Shapiro knocks down the suggestion that he thinks Pachauri should resign.
This was interesting too:
HS: We think all of our recommendations, if they’re thought to be helpful and useful, could in our view be implemented in the Fifth Assessment [which is currently in progress]. It’ s my own judgment that when people say you have to wait for the Sixth Assessment, it’s just a way of postponing action.
People like Myles Allen perhaps, who was writing at Comment is Free just yesterday...
Clearly, none of this is relevant to the 5th Assessment due to be published in 2013-2014: too much work has been done to make major changes at this stage, with author teams already in place. It will be thousands of pages long and will contain a couple ("catalogue") of errors that will be gleefully pointed out sometime in 2015. But now is the time to start thinking about what happens afterwards. We don't need to keep doing this to ourselves.
To my mind this means that we will not get a credible IPCC report until some time around 2020.