The Economist on the IPCC
Jun 18, 2011
Bishop Hill in Climate: IPCC

L'affaire Greenpeace continues to stir media interest. The Economist's Babbage column is the latest to weigh in, with this:

...the authors of the IPCC chapter involved declined to evaluate the scenarios they looked at in terms of whether they thought they were plausible, let alone likely. Ottmar Edenhofer, a German economist who was one of those in overall charge of the report, gives the impression that he would have welcomed a more critical approach from his colleagues; but there is no mechanism by which the people in charge can force an author team to do more, or other, than it wants to.

If the authors were not assessing the material critically and nobody picked this up in the review process, and nobody was in a position to get the author team to change anything then it is a pretty damning indictment of the IPCC process. I should add a word of caution here though - as one correspondent has pointed out to me, the authors are chosen by national governments and anyone can be a reviewer. The IPCC process is clearly bust, but who is to blame?

More remarkably, the Greenpeace chap in question seems to want us to think that he would have loved the rest of the authors to ignore his paper but was forced to toe the line by the sheer number of people in opposition:

Mr Teske says; he was one of twelve authors on the relevant chapter, and over 120 authors overall, and had no peculiar Greenpeace lantern with which to bend them all to his will.

And then there's this:

Arthur Petersen of the Dutch environmental-assessment agency, PBL... takes the position that the IPCC has procedures on author selection, author-team balance and newly reinvigorated procedures on conflict of interest which, if properly and transparently enforced, don’t need further tightening.... “All the rules the IPCC needs are in place now,” says Dr Petersen. “It is up to the leadership and coordinating lead authors to implement them.”

Except, as readers here probably know, the rules on conflict of interest and author selection do not apply until after the Fifth Assessment Report. If you scroll right down to the bottom of the report, you find a mention of this fact:

B: Are you happy with the IPCC’s new conflict-of-interest policy? [adopted at the panel’s recent plenary]

RP: Absolutely. I must say that was a very heartening piece of work. People put in a lot of effort to come up with what I think is a very robust policy in terms of conflict of interest.

B: At what point should it start to apply?

RP: It’s applicable right away. Of course if you look at conflict of interest with respect to authors who are there in the 5th Assessment Report we’ve already selected them and therefore it wouldn’t be fair to impose anything that sort of applies retrospectively.

B: And that would be true for members of the Bureau [the IPCC’s senior personnel, such as chairs, co-chairs and vice chairs] as well?

RP: No, I think as far as members of the Bureau are concerned there’s really no such issue. I don’t see any problem with applying it immediately.

B: So it would be OK to apply it retrospectively to you.

RP: Oh absolutely, yeah. Why not?

But I think it's fair to say that the reader is not left with a clear view of the problems that the IPCC still has.

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