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.
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That doesn’t include the skeptics (eg McKitrick and McIntyre) whose work is discussed in the IPCC reports.
Most of them are non-government scientists.
Neglected to answer you.
I would open all data streams to the public, endemnifying scientists against potential loss of earnings. Unfortunately, that probably means government money (our taxes).
I would remove government representatives from the process except after completion to transfer understanding. No govt officials should have a say in the drafting.
I would (concurring with the report) make the review process even more transparent, and make access to all reviewer comments easier for the public. I would recommend annexes to each chapter summarizing contrary views that were consonant with and backed by at least three independent studies.
I think rolling over the chair and other executive positions more frequently is a good idea.
Invite prominent, qualified skeptic scientists to sit in on the process, and, where their expertise is sufficient, to contribute to authorship.
While I would recommend establishing an alternative assessment report, I cannot think of a framework for an international effort that would have the facility that the UN does for a project of this scope.
Barry – the United Nations is, forgive me for pointing it out, a political organization, having political action, ostensibly for the prevention of warfare, as its raison d’être.
It is not a facility for conducting science.
To Khwarizmi see my entry at August 31, 2010 at 4:25 am, re the part the UN plays in this subject. This is how some in the House of Lords debabes view the matter, do you wonder at MY reaction? Lord Avebury in the House of Lords 25th June 2001 asked: “My Lords, have the Government had an opportunity of evaluating the evidence made public in the “Equinox” programme on Channel 4 last week, based on research of Dr Santo Bains at the Oxford University? It revealed that at two points in the world’s history there have been catastrophic releases of methane hydrates from the ocean floors, which came at a certain point in the warming of the oceans, raising the temperature of the Earth by some 8 degrees. Does the Minister take this seriously? If so, should there be a far more drastic programme for the reduction in carbon emissions than we have seen so far?”
That question perhaps highlights my thoughts on the subject, because apart from some one sitting on the sea bed, plugging the hole from which the methane hydrates are emanating from, I doubt there is little else we can do.
Constance D Holmes explained her rather lengthy reasons to the House Committee on Science Feb 4th 1998. I will pick out just one or two phrases.
· It sets a U.S. emissions target, which cannot be met without causing severe economic and social dislocation.
· It transfers power to UN bureaucrats who could intrude into U.S. legislative and Constitutional processes by controlling U.S. economic growth, limiting the conduct of foreign policy by exempting only those greenhouse emissions that occur from UN sponsored “multilateral operations”.
· It prohibits Senate reservations and modification to the Protocol, and potential allows for future tightening of emissions targets without explicit Senate approval.
· Its cost are a “stealth tax” on American consumers and businesses and it increases a UN bureaucracy that likely would be dominated by countries quite willing to use provisions in the Kyoto Protocol to impose economic and social change on U.S. families, workers and businesses–for little, if any, environmental gain.
An article by Philip Stott, on 12th April 2001 holds one or two “facts”, although I cannot verify any of them. “European politicians, who like to focus on country-by country comparisons which are, in geographical terms, meaningless, have carefully nurtured the myth that the USA is the main producer of carbon dioxide (CO2). But how can you compare tiny counties, like the UK (only 94,227 square miles) or Sweden (173,723 square miles), with the USA (3,732,400 square miles)? Any meaningful geographical comparison has to be with Western Europe as a whole, or at least with the 15 Member States of the European Union (EU) and even the EU, at 1,249,000 square miles, has well under half the land area of the USA.”
“If we take the carbon dioxide emissions from consumption and flaring of fossil fuels for 1999 (1), we see that the countries of the EU emit around 925 million metric tons of carbon equivalent (MMTCe) per year, while the USA emits 1519.89 MMTCe per year. Correcting these figures by area gives us 0.0007 MMTCe per square mile per year for the EU and 0.0004 MMTCe per square mile for the USA. So the per unit area production in the EU is 175 percent that of the USA. And this does not include emissions from EU applicant states, like Turkey (49.96 MMTCe in 1999)”
It makes ya think, don’t it?
CRS, Dr.P.H. says:
August 30, 2010 at 9:58 pm
A simple question for everyone….
WHY NOW??
Indeed, this is really the important question isn’t it? It is…wierd that the MSM has picked this up and seem to be running with it:
Review Finds Flaws in UN Climate Panel Structure (New York Times)
Pachauri-led IPCC needs fundamental reforms: UN panel (Times of India)
Flawed science (Telegraph)
Pachauri escapes indictment (Hindustan Times)
Independent Audit Panel Slams U.N.’s Climate Group (FOX News)
U.N. climate body needs ‘fundamental reform,’ says report (CNN)
Report: Climate Science Panel Should Be Better Run (CBS News)
Ever seen that before!?
I remain hopefully optimistic: on the one hand points made by ‘Smokey’, ‘Anne’, and ‘G.E.Pease’ are compelling but is it too much to hope for at this point? My gut tells me ‘dump the IPCC’: we’re being thrown a carefully calculated carrot tainted with subterfuge. My mind tells me this is not going away overnight. These guys are dug in like an ‘Alabama tick’ and aren’t going to give up easily.
On the other hand comments from the assessment like:
“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).”
…are very encouraging, but stops short of any finality: “should be banned of any participation”. Barry et al also make compelling points, and IMO sound suggestions. Perhaps if the “money-makers” were taken out of the circle of influence, of the science anyway, we could move forward. Even as I write that I keep seeing in the back of my mind:
“H.R. says:
August 31, 2010 at 4:32 pm
“The IPCC should…”
.
“The IPCC should…”
.
“The IPCC should…”
.
“The IPCC should…”
etc., etc., etc.
The IPCC won’t.
etc., etc., etc.
Anyone wanna’ bet me a quarter?”
No, I won’t take that bet…will you take a donut instead?
To Gaylon. Take a little tip. Never give up. Keep on fighting. Never let such people that produced the IPCC get away with IT, or your money (and mine) because of it.
Did global warming cause earthquakes? Volcano’s? The gradual erosion of islands, continents? Is it true we were once joined to the Continent?
You fight until you win by the TRUTH being told.
“ensuring that unpublished and non-peer-reviewed literature is appropriately flagged in the report.”
lol
Insidious big business strikes again.