Madrid, 1995 - the story continues

A few months ago I linked to the first part of Bernie Lewin's history of the shenanigans around the IPCC's second assessment report. Bernie has now published a long, two-part post examining the science behind the controversial detection and attribution sections of the report: Part one and Part two.

Could this really be it? The first faint image of man in the sky?

Ben Santer had just placed a transparency under the lens to project this colour pattern high upon the conference wall. It was the first afternoon of the Working Group 1 Plenary in Madrid, and this great council of nations from across the entire globe was persuaded to study the significance of its strange contours before getting down to their principle task. And so they should study it, for this is a game-changer striking at the nub of what the IPCC is all about. Although obscure, here is an image of the impact of human industry on the atmosphere above. At least part of the recent warming had at last been attributed to industrial emissions. If not for this, then why these near one hundred delegations flown in from all corners of the globe? There they were carefully positioned at arched rows of labelled bureaus across this cavernous auditorium. As they listened to live translations of Santer’s explanation, not a few of them must have gazed up in wonder: Could this really be what man hath wrought?

Bury before publishing - Josh 172

Click image for a larger version

Cartoons by Josh

UK government endorses IPCC secrecy

Greg Barker, the UK's minister of state for climate change, has endorsed the IPCC's decision that reviewers of the draft Fifth Assessment report should be unable to see lead authors' responses to their comments and critiques. This apparently would undermine the IPCC process. Reviewers are expected to work this out from the next drafts of the report.

The UK government's rejection of transparency comes in the shape of written answers to questions posed by MP Chris Heaton-Harris:

Chris Heaton-Harris (Daventry, Conservative)

To ask the Secretary of State for Energy and Climate Change if he will make it his policy that the delegation to the 35th session of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) in July 2012 should propose an amendment to the proposed revision to Appendix A to the Principles Governing IPCC to include all the lead authors' responses to review comments in what will be made available to all reviewers on request during the review process.

Click to read more ...

AR5: dead in the water?

Updated on Jun 1, 2012 by Bishop Hill

Steve McIntyre's latest post seems to me to be of huge importance. The refusal by Joelle Gergis and colleagues to release data behind their paper follows on behind similar refusals from authors in the same clique - principally Raphael Neukom. This stonewalling of reasonable requests represents yet another blow at the credibility of paleoclimate. To make things worse, the credibility of the Gergis paper is shattered by the revelation that it is based on circular reasoning - a fallacy that has been repeatedly noted in paleoclimate papers, yet one which is constantly given the seal of approval by peer reviewers in the field.

Click to read more ...

IPCC reversion

We learned a couple of days ago that the UK government had noted that the amendment of the IPCC's procedures, which appeared to prevent reviewers seeing the other review comments, had been made in error.

The text deleted was this:

All written expert, and government review comments will be made available to reviewers on request during the review process

Now, Marcel Crok is able to confirm that this deletion will indeed by reversed, pointing to this document, which proposes a reversion to the original text be made at the next IPCC meeting at the start of June.

...the deletion of the first part of the original sentence was erroneous. The IPCC-33 decision only pertained to the open availability of drafts, comments and responses, and not to the availability to reviewers on request. Hence, the erroneous deletion of the “All written . . . review process” should be corrected.

In an email, David Holland notes that it remains unclear as to whether the reviewers will be able to see the lead authors' responses.

Stocker in Action

This is a guest post by David Holland

Simon Anthony’s excellent report on Thomas Stocker in Oxford reminds me that I should add a postscript to the piece that Andrew and I posted after the 33rd IPCC Session when the IPCC decided to make the drafts and comments of its Assessment Reports confidential. We did not say so at the time but that was the handiwork work of Thomas Stocker. How he did it is a good story in the style of the "hockey stick" and I have posted a rough draft of it here. In short, it was achieved by the sort of chicanery that we have come to expect from the "directing circle". However for the first time to my knowledge the British Government seems to have has woken up to what’s going and in a letter sent to my MP, has stated,

We are aware that this new text would mean that reviewers would not have the opportunity to see how their comments had been addressed by IPCC authors before acceptance of the final report. It was not the IPCC’s intention to change the procedures in this way and it is likely a drafting error. Indeed, the intention of the update in the procedures was to increase openness in the way that IPCC reports are prepared. We understand that the IPCC is aware of this issue and intends to address it at the next appropriate opportunity.

We shall see - but I will not be holding my breath. If the rule is agreed to be that Expert Reviewers get to see the responses to their comments before each draft of the AR5 Report is published what is to stop them from blowing the whistle if we have another bit of chicanery?

Update:  As Paul points out in the comments, Steve McIntyre did a great forensic post on Stocker's earmark in January this year.

Stocker in Oxford

Simon Anthony sends this report of Thomas Stocker's recent talk in Oxford.

Yesterday I attended a talk at Wolfson College, Oxford by Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the IPCC's AR5 WG1 on "Climate Change: Making the best use of scientific information".  He's an intelligent, well-mannered and rational man, in a position of great influence.  It's therefore all the more concerning to see the weakness of the evidence and arguments which have, it seems, convinced him of the reality and urgency of AGW and which he feels should convince everyone else.

Click to read more ...

Madrid, 1995

This morning's must-read post is by Bernie Lewin, the first of a two-parter which attempts to pin the beginning of the corruption of climatology to a meeting of the IPCC in Madrid in 1995.

(H/T Aynsley Kellow)

The IPCC's private portals

Readers may remember that several months ago, Chris Horner reported that people working for the IPCC had set up private portals, apparently to allow them to communicate without being subject to FOI legislation. The original story at WUWT is here and Horner does not mince his words, noting the parallels with the Abramoff case.

Horner responded to this news by issuing a FOIA request for any related correspondence held by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy and a partial response has now been received. Roughly two thirds of the responsive documents are being withheld.

Click to read more ...

Praise for the IPCC

The IPCC is on the receiving end of some praise from the slightly surprising quarter of Quadrant magazine in Australia (it's not all good news for the IPCC though). Richard Betts gets a somewhat critical mention.

Sir John's emails

A few weeks back, readers may remember, the Information Commissioner ruled that where public servants used private email accounts to conduct public business, their messages were still subject to FOI. With this in mind I decided to ask the Met Office for Sir John Houghton's emails relating to the IPCC's Third Assessment Report. I copied my message to Sir John's email address at the John Ray Initiative - the evangelical programme which now appears to occupy much of his time.

Attentive students of the Climategate emails will have noticed that Sir John appeared to use a private email address for all of his work on this most controversial of reports.

A week or so ago, the Met Office replied.

I am writing to advise you that, following a search of our paper and electronic records, I have established that the information you requested is not held by the Met Office. Sir John Houghton has also confirmed that he does not hold private e-mails relevant to your request.

So it appears that Sir John has deleted historic records relating to his work on the Third Assessment Report - work that was funded by the UK taxpayer.

A letter from the future

This was provided to me by Phillip Bratby.

Letter from Bob Ward Junior (chief scientific advisor to the Department for Climate Change and Energy (DCCE)) to the Secretary of State for Climate Change and Energy, Ed Miliband Junior.

December 2031

Dear Ed,

First of all congratulations on being the youngest ever MP appointed at the age of 16 and, following your degree in political communication, being appointed the youngest ever Minister of State at the age of 19.

Click to read more ...

IPCC declares itself above the law

Richard Tol reports from the IPCC WGII lead author meeting in San Francisco:

...the IPCC member states have ruled on freedom of information legislation. Specifically, it has been decided that FoI does not apply to IPCC material. This is false. FoI is national legislation. These laws can only be interpreted by the relevant courts. These laws can only be changed by the relevant parliaments. The civil servants that speak on behalf of their countries have no right to usurp FoI legislation, and the IPCC has no say in this matter.

This of course is a continuation of this story.

George Monbiot was winning considerable plaudits on the Dark Matter thread for his strong stand on freedom of information. He is also, of course, a fan of the IPCC. It would be interesting to see what he makes of this.

Philip Stott calls Durban a win

This has just gone up at the GWPF site:

The basic truth about Durban, the latest and 17th Feydeau farce passing as serious UN climate talks, is simple: the BASIC countries - Brazil, South Africa, India, and China - played a blinder.

They outwitted comprehensively the ever-zealous, naive, and hypocritical EU to ensure that they achieved their fundamental goals, which were to delay any agreement on a replacement for the failing Kyoto Protocol until at least 2015, and any actual action to cut emissions until at least 2020. And, of course, by then, the plate tectonics of world politics may have altered even more radically, so that further delays will be eminently possible, or the global warming narrative - we can only hope - will have withered away permanently into perennial greenhouse history.

Read the whole thing.

UN seeks to undermine FOI

Email 1251 is from Phil Jones to Tim Osborn and Dave Palmer. They have been discussing how to deal with David Holland's request for the release of Briffa's IPCC-related correspondence, but the conversation moves onto a slightly different track:

Subject: FOI - the issue with IPCC that is going to the Commissioner

Tim, Dave,

I've spoken to Renate Christ who is head of the IPCC Secretariat in Geneva. I've given her a note about what we want, but we won't get a response by our August deadline.

What will happen though is that the whole issue of National FOIs/EIRs will be discussed at the next full IPCC plenary meeting in Bali in October. This is not a meeting that many scientists will go to. IPCC have got lawyers involved from their sponsoring UN organizations (UNEP and WMO). They have been alerted up to the issue by us and by others (mainly from US organizations like NOAA, DoE). They will come to a ruling then.

I know this doesn't help us for this request, but hopefully future IPCC-related FOIs/EIRs will be easier to deal with.

It seems as though they are taking the issue seriously. I did tell them that the various FOI acts probably differ slightly, but they seem to be aware of that.

Cheers

Phil