UPDATE: The interest in this appears to be so high, that the IPCC server holding the PDF report has crashed @ reviewipcc.interacademycouncil.net All links to it are down up now about 2 hours later. Thanks to Dr. Roger Pielke Jr. I have added the recommendations from IAC below the NYT story. Related: McKitrick: Fix the IPCC process
UPDATE2: Local copy secured, thanks to WUWT readers AdderW and Christopher Monckton download (full report 1.5MB) here:
Climate_Change_Assessments_Review_of_the_Processes_Procedures_IPCC
Pre-release summary report (short form 90K) here:
UPDATE3: RealClimate breaks radio silence for this and posts for the first time in over a week with their typical “nothing to see here move along” meme. From their point of “It appears mostly sensible and has a lot of useful things to say about improving IPCC processes -” I assume then they endorse replacement of top IPCC officials, even though they make no mention of that point. I’m sure WUWT readers can ask their position, assuming such comments are allowed.
From the “we told you so months ago” department, and the NYT; the InterAcademy Council, karma, and Mister Return to Almora are on a collision course.
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Flaws Found in U.N. Climate Structure
By NEIL MacFARQUHAR
UNITED NATIONS — The scientists involved in producing the periodic United Nations reports on climate change need to be more open to alternative views and more transparent about their own possible conflicts of interest, an independent review panel said Monday.
…
The revelations about the errors contributed to the already highly charged debate about the science of climate change and gave added ammunition to critics doubting assessments that the earth is warming. Coming on the heels of leaked e-mails among some of the leading climate change researchers which suggested that they were manipulating data, the mistakes contributed to what surveys showed were an erosion in public confidence in the science of climate change.
…
The changes recommended by the panel include replacing the top eight officials responsible for producing the United Nations reports every seven years or so. That throws into question whether Rajendra K. Pachauri, the current chairman of the panel, called the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, should remain to oversee the report due out in 2013-14.
Read the full story here
h/t to a zillion people who read WUWT, thanks.
============================================================
Here are recommendations found in the body of the report:
Governance and Management
The IPCC should establish an Executive Committee to act on its behalf between Plenary sessions. The membership of the Committee should include the IPCC Chair, the Working Group Co-chairs, the senior member of the Secretariat, and 3 independent members, including some from outside of the climate community. Members would be elected by the Plenary and serve until their successors are in place.
The IPCC should elect an Executive Director to lead the Secretariat and handle day-to-day operations of the organization. The term of this senior scientist should be limited to the timeframe of one assessment.
Review Process
The IPCC should encourage Review Editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that reviewers’ comments are adequately considered by the authors and that genuine controversies are adequately reflected in the report.
The IPCC should adopt a more targeted and effective process for responding to reviewer comments. In such a process, Review Editors would prepare a written summary of the most significant issues raised by reviewers shortly after review comments have been received. Authors would be required to provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors, abbreviated responses to all non-editorial comments, and no written responses to editorial comments.
Characterizing and Communicating Uncertainty
All Working Groups should use the qualitative level-of-understanding scale in their Summary for Policy Makers and Technical Summary, as suggested in IPCC’s uncertainty guidance for the Fourth Assessment Report. This scale may be supplemented by a quantitative probability scale, if appropriate.
Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs).
Communications
The IPCC should complete and implement a communications strategy that emphasizes transparency, rapid and thoughtful responses, and relevance to stakeholders, and which includes guidelines about who can speak on behalf of IPCC and how to represent the organization appropriately.
Additional recommendations:
The IPCC should make the process and criteria for selecting participants for scoping meetings more transparent.
The IPCC should establish a formal set of criteria and processes for selecting Coordinating Lead Authors and Lead Authors.
The IPCC should make every effort to engage local experts on the author teams of the regional chapters of the Working Group II report, but should also engage experts from countries outside of the region when they can provide an essential contribution to the assessment.
The IPCC should strengthen and enforce its procedure for the use of unpublished and non-peer-reviewed literature, including providing more specific guidance on how to evaluate such information, adding guidelines on what types of literature are unacceptable, and ensuring that unpublished and non-peer-reviewed literature is appropriately flagged in the report.
Lead Authors should explicitly document that a range of scientific viewpoints has been considered, and Coordinating Lead Authors and Review Editors should satisfy themselves that due consideration was given to properly documented alternative views.
The IPCC should adopt a more targeted and effective process for responding to reviewer comments. In such a process, Review Editors would prepare a written summary of the most significant issues raised by reviewers shortly after review comments have been received. Authors would be required to provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors, abbreviated responses to all non-editorial comments, and no written responses to editorial comments.
The IPCC should encourage Review Editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that reviewers’ comments are adequately considered by the authors and that genuine controversies are adequately reflected in the report.
The IPCC should revise its process for the approval of the Summary for Policy Makers so that governments provide written comments prior to the Plenary.
All Working Groups should use the qualitative level-of-understanding scale in their Summary for Policy Makers and Technical Summary, as suggested in IPCC’s uncertainty guidance for the Fourth Assessment Report. This scale may be supplemented by a quantitative probability scale, if appropriate.
Chapter Lead Authors should provide a traceable account of how they arrived at their ratings for level of scientific understanding and likelihood that an outcome will occur.
Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs).
The confidence scale should not be used to assign subjective probabilities to ill-defined outcomes.
The likelihood scale should be stated in terms of probabilities (numbers) in addition to words to improve understanding of uncertainty.
Where practical, formal expert elicitation procedures should be used to obtain subjective probabilities for key results.
The IPCC should establish an Executive Committee to act on its behalf between Plenary sessions. The membership of the Committee should include the IPCC Chair, the Working Group Co-chairs, the senior member of the Secretariat, and 3 independent members, including some from outside of the climate community. Members would be elected by the Plenary and serve until their successors are in place.
The term of the IPCC Chair should be limited to the timeframe of one assessment.
The IPCC should develop and adopt formal qualifications and formally articulate the roles and responsibilities for all Bureau members, including the IPCC Chair, to ensure that they have both the highest scholarly qualifications and proven leadership skills.
The terms of the Working Group Co-chairs should be limited to the timeframe of one assessment.
The IPCC should redefine the responsibilities of key Secretariat positions both to improve efficiency and to allow for any future senior appointments.
The IPCC should elect an Executive Director to lead the Secretariat and handle day-to-day operations of the organization. The term of this senior scientist should be limited to the timeframe of one assessment.
The IPCC should develop and adopt a rigorous conflict of interest policy that applies to all individuals directly involved in the preparation of IPCC reports, including senior IPCC leadership (IPCC Chair and Vice Chairs), authors with responsibilities for report content (i.e., Working Group Co-chairs, Coordinating Lead Authors, and Lead Authors), Review Editors, and technical staff directly involved in report preparation (e.g., staff of Technical Support Units and the IPCC Secretariat).
The IPCC should complete and implement a communications strategy that emphasizes transparency, rapid and thoughtful responses, and relevance to stakeholders, and which includes guidelines about who can speak on behalf of IPCC and how to represent the organization appropriately.
My Summary for Policymakers
Current IPCC is producing good studies and reports.
However, a problem exists in that not all work is performed in accordance with (IAW) written procedures.
Recommend that top eight officials be fired.
Recommend that a new layer of officials be created and new procedures be written to ensure that future studies and reports be produced IAW established standards.
Continue as before but more discretion be used.
Problem solved.
I just posted this over at RC. It seems objective and not troll-like. We’ll see if it persisits.
________________
One excellent recommendation by the IAC review committee is to limit tenure of the major IPCC figures to one assessment. This will provide better mix of viewpoints in ongoing assessments. This should mean AR5 has a new group of key IPCC people with track records in science that will help to restore some of the eroded public confidence in the IPCC and climate science in general.
Also there is another excellent recommendation by the IAC as follows “. . . key improvements include enhancing the transparency of the process for selecting Bureau members, authors and reviewers; . . . ”
John
Michael in Sydney 12:42
What RC says is the party line and will be trotted out repeatedly. The 2,000 readers are the useful idiots(#) that diseminate the message.
#The term is used to describe someone who is perceived to be manipulated by a political movement, terrorist group, hostile government, or business, whether or not the group is Communist in nature.
@42 Tim Williams, erm, how is real climate calling discussion about this “contrarian spin”?
The report is damning, even the fundamentalists must see that.
Yahoo News coverage at:
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20100830/ap_on_sc/us_sci_warming_report
The Guardian are using sleight of hand, big headline and front page pic for a “Bjørn Lomborg: $100bn a year needed to fight climate change” story – tiny, no pic link underneath for “Rajendra Pachauri, head of UN climate change body, under pressure to resign”
such as the widely-quoted statement that agricultural yields in Africa might decline by up to 50 percent by 2020.
Gosh, I don’t think it’s going to get THAT cold!
United Nations Climate Change Conference Cancun – COP 16 & CMP 6
29 November-10 December 2010
Cancun, Mexico
They are preparing Cancun. We too ?
https://unfccc.int/press/press_releases_advisories/items/4712.php
UNFCCC press briefing 6 August – UN Climate Change Conference
UNFCCC Executive Secretary Christiana Figueres briefs press on status of negotiations
http://www.ipcc.ch/calendar_of_meetings/calendar_of_meetings.htm
“IAC slams IPCC process, suggests removal of top officials”
… hard to detect any slamming, constructive criticism concerning
structure and mangement, yes, and a lot of praise concerning
the science…
… “removal of top officials” sounds like: you are fired, when the
report actually proposes one-term appointments for all leading
positions …
Committee to Review the IPCC
Harold T. SHAPIRO, Chair, Princeton University, USA
Roseanne DIAB, Vice Chair, Academy of Science of South Africa, South Africa
Carlos Henrique de BRITO CRUZ, State of São Paulo Research Foundation and University of Campinas, Brazil
Maureen CROPPER, University of Maryland and Resources for the Future, USA
FANG Jingyun, Peking University, P.R. China
Louise O. FRESCO, University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands
Syukuro MANABE, Princeton University, USA
Goverdhan MEHTA, University of Hyderabad, India
Mario MOLINA, University of California, San Diego, USA, and Center for Strategic Studies in Energy and the Environment, Mexico
Peter WILLIAMS, The Royal Society, UK
Ernst-Ludwig Winnacker, International Human Frontier Science Program Organization, France
ZAKRI Abdul Hamid, Ministry of Science, Technology & Innovation, Malaysia
Staff for the IPCC Review
Anne LINN, Study Director, National Research Council, USA
Tracey ELLIOTT, The Royal Society, UK
William KEARNEY, National Research Council, USA
Stuart LECKIE, The Royal Society, UK
Tu NGUYEN, InterAcademy Council
Jason ORTEGO, National Research Council, USA
Greg SYMMES, National Research Council, USA
Wow, actually a real pair of committees, not wall-to-wall shills for CRU or the IPCC. It is nice to see.
Mexican, Indian, Malaysian, Brazilian, Dutch, South African – even a Frenchman.
Anybody recognize the names?
Or the response we’re seeing reflects a broad acceptance that the IPCC is indeed facing an evolving challenge to communicate the current state of scientific knowledge and a recognition from those involved that this IAC review has made some sensible recommendations on how to achieve just that?
You could put it that way. Heh-heh!
One may wonder, however, what the IPCC has been up to that has led us to the current “broad acceptance” . . . dare I say “consensus?”
“IAC slams IPCC process, suggests removal of top officials” says WUWT
… hard to detect any slamming, constructive criticism concerning
structure and mangement, yes, and a lot of praise concerning
the science summary…
… “removal of top officials” sounds like: “you are fired, Pachaury,
because you failed”
when the report actually proposes one-term appointments for all
leading positions as a better structural solution …
The post title says “[the report] suggests removal of top officials”.
Is that really true? What the report says is that climate change is too important, so the IPCC needs to be better organized to deal with the complexities of the task.
Anthony, you come out as a vindictive person which damages the whole debate.
“What we have here is a failure to communicate”… as in Cool Hand Luke, with Paul Newman
Let’s go back for a moment to the NY Times article, in which we find the phrase “leaked emails among some of the leading climate change researchers which suggested [!] that they were manipulating data . . .” If they actually read the emails, there were various ones in which the manipulation was not suggested, but explicitly admitted–nay, proclaimed and advocated. Thus does warmist bias penetrate a “news” story.
—————————–
So, there is the often repeated theme for more access to climate science data. This time it is made to the IPCC. It did not stop with Mann, Jones, CRU, MET office, GISS and NOAA. Great strategy to keep on moving up the food chain to the top organism. : )
John
——————
Mikael Pihlström ,
The clear and simple recommendation by the IAC to limit top IPCC positions to one assessment means some are all but gone.
Also, notice this tidbit from the IAC report “. . . key improvements include enhancing the transparency of the process for selecting Bureau members, authors and reviewers; . . . “.
Well not only are some key replacements in order shortly, but there will be more transparency in the selecting and approving process. You must love that transparency word.
I think the whole IAC review committee should be nominated to replace the entire IPCC organization. Wouldn’t that be a step change in the right direction?
John
Better get a crane, D8 Caterpillar with winch, tow truck and Sikorsky Skycrane.
Pachauri is in his bunker with a “Hell no, we won’t go” sign on the barricaded door.
—————–
paulw,
It serves you no credit to insult the host. So, don’t.
But, as to the removal of top IPCC officials . . . . please see below my earlier post to Mikael Pihlström.
John
So if the “peer review” process is controlled more tightly to prevent opposing research from being published as has been the case even since climategate, the IPCC process will effectively not be changed at all.
Shub Niggurath says:
August 30, 2010 at 12:10 pm
Yeup, that IPCC server’s crashed alright.
WUWT-induced IPCC crash.
_____________________________________
That tells the IPCC that there are a HUGH number of eyes watching them now. I expect the next report will get the same sort of treatment the last one did by Donna LaFramboise at NoConsensus and her dedicated team not to mention WUWT, Bishop Hill, Climate Audit and the rest.
No one should take the report seriously until it has been completely dissected and analyzed by the “peer review” blogs that have now been set up to do just that. It remains to be seen whether the IPCC will try to pull another fast one, with the hopes that once the lies have been told and hyped by the tame media it does not matter that the truth is revealed, the propaganda has already done its work.
Propaganda also known as Public Relations:
”In everything he did, Bernays began with the basic principles of the psychology of his time, and not only his uncle’s. He felt that it was not reason but emotion and instinct that moved the common man, and throughout his long life he held onto the elitist view that those who understood this could and should control the masses. As he said in the first paragraph of his influential book Propaganda. “Those who manipulate [the habits and opinions of the masses]…constitute an invisible government which is the true ruling power of our country.”
Source: http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/sex-drugs-and-boredom/201002/freuds-nephew-and-public-relations
The review still didn’t address one of the key issues related to models, this from the discussion of WG II:
“Best estimates from various models are often presented to show variation in the range of outcomes. Uncertainty analyses of individual models could also be presented, if available in the literature.”
Publication of model results don’t usually present assessments of model uncertainty for GCMs. Diagnostic literature is often published later than reports of model results and don’t include uncertainty analyses. Some diagnostic results show correlated error for all the models so “various models” or ensembles of models won’t necessarily bracket “the range of outcomes”.
These types of model errors which are just reported and the uncertainty of the models is not quantified in the published literature would fall into the “structural uncertainty” row of the “simple typology of uncertainties”. The diagnostic literature does “compare models with observations” but there was no way to get the authors to admit that these were “inadequate models”, they just charged ahead presenting models results as if they were evidence.
We need more diagnostic literature, published earlier and to insist that the implications of the diagnostic literature be discussed when model results are reported. Work relevant to net feedbacks and radiative imbalance such as Lindzen, Spencer’s or Eschenbach needs to be developed into model diagnostics and published early and often, because they bear directly on whether the models are adequate. Hopefully Wentz will repeat his precipitation diagnostics on the latest models, since the under-representation of the water cycle was significant and relevant not just to projections of drought but probably to net feedbacks as well. If would be helpful if the diagnostic works of Camp, Lean, Roesch and Tung on solar and surface albedo were also updated.
If the recommendation of greater transparency, responsiveness and representation of alternative viewpoints are implemented, the authors may have to actually be intellectually honest in order to achieve the appearance of intellectual honesty. That would be refreshing.
I say, Pachauri, bad show. Best to slope off to one of the less accessible corners of your homeland, p’raps a bit of huntin,’ what? Wouldn’t want to deprive you of your livelihood of deceivin’ the gullible, what? No good givin’ the press rabble any more ammunition. Damn nuisance findin’ another man.
Whichever way you look at it I think that it is damning for the IPCC that a pro AGW mainstream news site such as the ABC reports on the front page of its site like this:
“Review calls for UN climate shake-up
A major report handed to the United Nations in New York overnight recommends a big shake-up of the way the international body’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) is run.
In the run-up to last year’s highly anticipated climate summit in Copenhagen, the IPCC was rocked by a scandal involving leaked emails which critics say showed panel members had skewed data…”
I believe the IPCC model is the wrong one. What would be better would be the kind of adversarial system we see in court. The problem is that all sides of the question are not being given a fair go. The adversarial system would fix this.
What I’d like to see are two investigative report writing bodies, preferably less bloated than the current IPCC; one charged with the mandate of presenting evidence that AGW is a serious problem requiring immediate action, and one charged with the mandate of presenting evidence that it is not. Let them issue their reports on an alternating basis with a six month gap between them.