The IPCC can't learn from past mistakes – wants more grey literature

You’d think that after the drubbing they got last time around from the InterAcademy council for citing mentions of climate effects in travel brochures, climbing magazines, and the Himalayan glacier’s melting by 2035 fiasco, and other blunders, they’d want less grey literature. But apparently this is the anything goes in co-opted climate science beating out reason again. I’m beginning to wonder if the people running the IPCC don’t suffer from some sort of mental affliction. Or, maybe they are going for the insanity defense in case the climate doesn’t cooperate in the future?

I wonder if we’ll see citations from Return to Almora in the next IPCC report?

From the New Scientist:

The IPCC decided for the first time to impose strict geographical quotas on the scientists who author its major assessment reports. There will also be a push to increase the representation of women among its authors.

Controversially, it also voted to increase the role in those assessments of “grey literature”: publications not subject to peer review. Using such material in the last assessment is what led to the “glaciergate” scandal in 2010, when the report was found to have vastly overestimated the rate at which Himalayan glaciers are losing ice. […]

Krug told New Scientist this would correct an imbalance in the assessments as it is harder for people in developing countries to get research findings into the major peer-reviewed journals.

“There is a lot of information available in [the grey literature of] developing countries that would balance IPCC literature,” she said.

The IPCC is an intergovernmental body, but its reports are written by scientists. In the past these have been chosen largely on their scientific merit, but from now on the 30-person IPCC bureau – which oversees all publications – will have geographical quotas. For instance Africa will have five members and North America four. In addition, each of its three working groups must now include at least one person from every continent in their eight-person bureaux.

Full story at: http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn21940-climate-panel-adopts-controversial-grey-evidence.html

===============================================================

Looks like none of this took hold, from the Register

Report recommends UN climate panel shakeup

Rearrange the chairs please

By Andrew Orlowski

…

The InterAcademy Council, led by Dr Harold Shapiro, an economist at Princeton University, also said the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change had “gone beyond its mandate to be ‘policy relevant’ not policy prescriptive” – for which it recommended a new “communications policy”. The IPCC was also criticised for “confirmation bias” with lead authors placing “too much weight on their own views relative to other views”. It recommended working group co-chairs be limited to one assessment.

The investigation was prompted by criticisms of the IPCC’s fourth assessment report (AR4) published in 2007 – specifically the output of Working Group 2 (WGII), set up to examine the “Impacts, Adaptation and Vulnerability” and which produced a report ran to almost 1,000 pages. This was found to lean heavily on “grey literature”, including activist reports and even travel brochures. A prediction that that the Himalayan glaciers could disappear by 2035 was traced to a casual remark by an Indian scientist. Here and elsewhere, the IPCC excluded work that suggested that the impacts of global warming were overstated, or which were critical of the costs of the policy favoured by the UN and activist groups of mitigation, rather than adaptation.

The IAP said the IPCC’s work included headline-catching statements which couldn’t be justified.

…

Full story here