By the time the fourth assessment report was issued in 2007, the IPCC had changed. The summary for policy makers was released before the actual report. The report included projections of ways that warming would harm the environment and included confidence levels of how likely different scenarios would happen. The IPCC shared the Nobel Peace Prize with Al Gore for warning the world about the dangers of global warming.
Critics complained that there were numerous fundamental problems in the report. The criticism gained ground over the last winter when it was found that some of the most drastic predictions were poorly sourced. In response to the resulting outcry, the InterAcadeny Council (IAC) did an assessment of the IPCC. The report is quite polite but, reading between the lines you can see some strong criticism.
One of their findings is that the chair of the IPCC should be a full-time position and limited to a single six-year term. Currently it is a part-time position with two six-year terms. The report does not mention is that the current chair, Rajendra K. Pachauri, has made a tidy sum doing consulting on ice loss in the Himalayas. He was retained for this because the 2007 assessment predicted that the Himalayan ice will be totally gone by 2020. This was one of the controversies. This date came from an off-hand comment during a phone conversation, not from a peer-reviewed study and was provided to the IPCC by an advocacy group. Pachauri defended the claim for some time, impugning the motives of anyone who questioned it. This represented a huge conflict on interest where he had a financial stake in the outcome.
The IAC also took issue with the use of material from advocates.
The use of so-called gray literature from unpublished or non-peer-reviewed sources has been controversial, although often such sources of information and data are relevant and appropriate for inclusion in the assessment reports. Problems occur because authors do not follow IPCC's guidelines for evaluating such sources and because the guidelines themselves are too vague, the committee said. It recommended that these guidelines be made more specific — including adding guidelines on what types of literature are unacceptable — and strictly enforced to ensure that unpublished and non-peer-reviewed literature is appropriately flagged.
As the Fourth Assesment was being produced, the IPCC was under pressure to make the findings sound more urgent. Responding to this, the report switched from giving percentage ranges to confidence levels. The IAC's findings on this:
The Working Group II report, for example, contains some statements that were assigned high confidence but for which there is little evidence. In future assessments, all Working Groups should qualify their understanding of a topic by describing the amount of evidence available and the degree of agreement among experts; this is known as the level of understanding scale. And all Working Groups should use a probability scale to quantify the likelihood of a particular event occurring, but only when there is sufficient evidence to do so.
In other words, if you are going to assign a confidence level then you have to document your reasoning. If you can't do that then you cannot give a confidence level.
Members of the IPCC complained that dissenting opinions were ignored. The IAC agrees.
The biggest by critics of the IPCC is that it has become a lobbying organization and cooks the data in order to match preconceived results. The IAC acknowledges this in their final recommendation.
IPCC's slow and inadequate response to revelations of errors in the last assessment, as well as complaints that its leaders have gone beyond IPCC's mandate to be "policy relevant, not policy prescriptive" in their public comments, have made communications a critical issue.
I wonder what the fourth assessment report would have looked like had these reforms been in place all along? In all probability they would not have won a Nobel Peace Prize.
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