This is a guest post by David Holland.
After suggesting that they would not be released, WGI have now released some of the AR5 WG1 review editors’ reports. I say ‘some’ because I have also obtained from the University of Reading copies of the review editor reports by Keith Shine and Tim Palmer. Among the materials released by the university were the equally interesting interim review editor reports. These suggest that Shine and Palmer did their job properly.
It is noteworthy that the university appears to have learnt from their Climategate experiences, responding to my FOI request without any argument. The same cannot be said for DECC, which once again made sure of not physically holding any review editors’ reports, perhaps to ensure that they could not be obliged to release them. The University of Cambridge used the discreditable Met Office ‘Mitchell’ defence, claiming that Peter Wadhams worked for the IPCC as a review editor on a personal basis. I have appealed this decision.
I was particularly interested in Wadhams’ report because I had seen him in action at the Cambridge seminar described at BH. Wadhams was only marginally less offensive to climate sceptics than Lord Deben. Peter Lilley MP also spoke at that Cambridge meeting and was later to complain after he was ‘ambushed’ by the BBC with a paper of Wadhams' which claimed, as usual, that global warming is worse than we ever thought.
I had watched the Panorama recording of this encounter and thought Lilley dealt with matter fairly, so I was astonished to find Wadhams’ final IPCC review editor’s report brings up his spat with Lilley. He wrote:
...the slow pace of new IPCC assessments means that AR4 predictions and statements, made in 2007 and based on research carried out in 2005 or earlier, are still being quoted as “holy writ” by politically motivated individuals who seek policies that ignore very direct climatic threats. I myself have had such an experience in September 2012 when, after a well balanced BBC TV programme on the summer retreat of Arctic sea ice, I was viciously attacked on air by a UK politician directly paid by the fossil-fuel industry (Peter Lilley MP) who, as part of his diatribe, read from the cryosphere chapter of AR4 that scientists were not predicting that summer sea ice would disappear before 2080 or later. On being asked by the program chairman (Jeremy Paxman) whether he knew more about climate change than someone who had spent all his life on this problem (i.e. me) he said “Yes – because that’s what the IPCC says and that is the consensus view”. Many other climate scientists have had this experience and it is a real problem.
Wadhams’ role as a review editor is clearly defined in the IPCC’s Appendix A procedures and his disparaging comments on Lilley have no place whatever in a report on the IPCC review process. On 8 August 2013, when Wadhams signed his report, Arctic sea ice was near its lowest extent although still within 2 standard deviations of its 1981 to 2010 average. At that time it may have looked worrying to him. Today it is back up and still with 2 deviations and his comments looks extremely unprofessional.
Wadhams’ report raises doubts as to his suitability for the job he was paid by the public to do. It also raises questions concerning the management of the IPCC process, since they appear to have accepted Wadhams’ report, rather than requesting the inappropriate references to Lilley be removed and the report be resubmitted.