Guest post by Ron Cram
Since Climategate, PachauriGate, GlacierGate and AmazonGate, a number of mainstream and skeptical climate scientists have been very critical of the IPCC. Some are suggesting the IPCC should be disbanded and future assessment reports should come from international science organizations. I would like to make a more modest proposal, a proposal which may have a chance to become reality.
Before you write this off as a hare-brained scheme, hear me out. The proposal is starting to get some traction. It was mentioned by Tallbloke (who liked the idea) and DeepClimate (who didn’t like the idea). It is a workable plan, but first let’s review the current situation.
Criticisms of the IPCC Process
After Climategate, many people have put forward criticisms and ideas to improve the IPCC process. Ryan Maue wrote a fine piece for ClimateAudit titled “What to do with the IPCC?” which describes some of the thoughts by different climate researchers. There are a number of criticisms we should consider more closely.
Roger Pielke is an ISI highly cited climatologist. He has criticized IPCC for a number of biases, including ignoring articles on problems with the surface temperature record (UHI and poorly sited stations) and ignoring or downplaying papers showing the climate change effect of land use/land cover changes (which he calls a first order climate forcing). Pielke has also criticized the IPCC for cherry-picking papers to “promote a particular conclusion on climate change.”
Judith Curry has criticized the IPCC for a number of reasons also. She claim the IPCC broke its own rules to accept papers prior to peer-review and assigned high-status positions to untested researchers who happen to make claims which support the IPCC narrative of impending doom. Curry is still worried about global warming but says she no longer feels the need to substitute the IPCC for her own personal judgment.
Eduardo Zorita is also very concerned about future warming, but he is concerned that uncertainty is being hidden from policymakers. He has criticized Climategate researchers and called on the IPCC to ban them from any participation in future IPCC assessment reports, a worthy proposal but one the IPCC is almost certain to ignore. Zorita has also written about the pressure put on climate scientists to toe the line. He thinks policy makers should be made aware of “the attempts to hide these uncertainties under a unified picture.”
Patrick Michaels claims the IPCC ignores the conclusions of peer-reviewed papers they find disagreeable. As evidence for this criticism, he points to Climategate emails.
Steve McIntyre’s experience as an IPCC reviewer has not convinced him the process is fair or unbiased. As a reviewer, McIntyre advised the IPCC not to truncate data but to show and fully discuss the Divergence Problem, but McIntyre’s recommendations were rejected out of hand. McIntyre seems to feel reviewer’s comments are routinely ignored by Coordinating Lead Authors.
Richard Lindzen, professor at MIT and member of the National Academy of Sciences, has served as a lead author for IPCC. He says the “most egregious” problem is the IPCC represents its reports as the consensus findings of thousands of scientists when none were asked if they approved of the final version of the report.
John Christy has also served as a Lead Author and has been critical of the IPCC’s selection process of Lead Authors because of the reliance on nominations by national governments. Christy says, “Indeed, the selections for the IPCC Fourth Assessment Report represented a disturbing homogeneity of thought regarding humans and climate.” Christy has proposed a living ‘Wikipedia-IPCC.’ While this is an interesting idea, anyone who has ever been involved in an edit war on Wikipedia knows how frustrating it can be.
Ross McKitrick has written about his frustrations in getting simple IPCC errors corrected. He is convinced IPCC data is contaminated with industrialization effects and he has called for the IPCC to be disbanded.
What does IPCC Chairman Pachauri say to all of this criticism? He says:
IPCC relies entirely on peer-reviewed literature in carrying out its assessment and follows a process that renders it unlikely that any peer reviewed piece of literature, however contrary to the views of any individual author, would be left out.
As the links above show, this statement is clearly untrue. A great many of the world’s finest climate researchers have expressed significant criticisms of the IPCC process and the final assessment reports. But it appears nothing will change unless an idea is put forward which is so compelling and so obvious a solution that it cannot be ignored. The alarmists have seized the apparatus of editorship and will not relinquish it.
A Modest Proposal
If policymakers want a less biased picture, there is only one way to achieve it. It is necessary for the IPCC AR5 to consist of a Majority Report and a Minority Report. Going into the process, no one will know which of the competing reports will be named the Majority Report and which the Minority Report. That decision will come after both reports are completed and voted on by the climate scientists involved.
Climate scientists will be asked to vote for the report they believe best represents a careful presentation of current science. The requirement the final report must gain the approval of contributing climate scientists will be new for the IPCC. It will require the Coordinating Lead Authors to be more responsive to reasonable reviewer comments and will tend to make the assessment report less alarmist. If it fails to make the report less alarmist, the “consensus report” may find their report named the Minority Report.
Here’s how the idea would work: Both reports would have its own set of Editors. One report would have traditional IPCC editors, the other will have editors who have been critical of the IPCC process. All climate researchers are free to contribute to either report in any invited capacity. Researchers do not have to choose a “team.” In fact, the safest career choice for climate scientists will be to contribute to both reports and be a reviewer of both reports.
This represents the best chance for the IPCC to fulfill its mission of providing policymakers with a balanced assessment of climate science.
Scope of the Effort
Working Group I of AR4 was dominated by relatively few scientists. The report lists two co-chairs, Susan Solomon and Dahe Qin. Another six people are listed on the editing team for a total of eight. Here is the breakdown of authors by chapter:
| Chapters | Coordinating Lead Authors | Lead Authors | Contributing Authors | Review Editors |
| Ch 1 | 2 | 6 | 26 | 2 |
| Ch 2 | 2 | 13 | 37 | 2 |
| Ch 3 | 2 | 66 | 0 | 3 |
| Ch 4 | 2 | 9 | 44 | 2 |
| Ch 5 | 2 | 11 | 53 | 2 |
| Ch 6 | 2 | 14 | 33 | 2 |
| Ch 7 | 2 | 13 | 60 | 3 |
| Ch 8 | 2 | 11 | 76 | 0 |
| Ch 9 | 2 | 7 | 44 | 3 |
| Ch 10 | 2 | 12 | 78 | 2 |
| Ch 11 | 2 | 15 | 40 | 2 |
| Totals | 22 | 177 | 491 | 23 |
If counted correctly and all of these were different people, there would be 721 total editors and authors. We know some people served in more than one capacity. For example, Kevin Trenberth served as Coordinating Lead Author of Chapter 3 and Contributing Author of Chapter 7.
The number of Lead Authors is high because Chapter 3 credited every involved scientist as a Lead Author with zero Contributing Authors. Normally, each chapter has 2 Coordinating Lead Authors, 2 or 3 Review Editors and 10 or 11 Lead Authors. So then AR 4 Working Group I was dominated by about 150 scientists and another 500 served as Contributing Authors.
In reality, AR4 Working Group I was dominated by about 150 climate scientists, but the most important were the eight editors and the 22 Coordinating Lead Authors. It would be very easy to duplicate this effort by climate scientists who have been critical of the IPCC.
The alternate report could be edited by the team of Roger A. Pielke, Syun-Ichi Akasofu, Eduardo Zorita, Judith Curry, Hans von Storch, John Christy, Garth Paltridge and Richard Lindzen. These names are only a suggestion but, a team like this could not be easily dismissed. It includes strong proponents of global warming theory, strong skeptics and luke-warmers. It has representatives from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia. It has experts on the Arctic, Antarctica and the tropics and specialists on oceans, atmosphere, radiative transfer and more.
An editing team of this strength would find it easy to attract top quality coordinating lead authors for each chapter. Roger Pielke alone has probably written papers with 150 (just a guess) different climate scientists as co-authors, all of whom respect him and would stand in line to join him in an assessment report. Richard Lindzen is a member of National Academy of Sciences and also commands tremendous respect. He also could attract many top climate researchers to write an unbiased assessment report. The same is true of Christy, Curry, Akasofu and the rest.
What if the IPCC refuses?
It is possible the IPCC will not bow to pressure to publish two reports. In that case, climate scientists simply come together to publish an alternative assessment report without the IPCC. Since IPCC authors and reviewers are not paid, funding is not a problem. Since the book-sized assessment report can be published on the internet, there are no real publication costs.
Yes, I am familiar with the Nature, Not Human Activity Rules the Climate. While it was written by an international panel of scientists, there were only 24 authors. It suffers by not getting the buy-in of a larger segment of the climate science community. I am proposing a full and fair assessment of climate science. It should be timed to be published at about the same time as, or shortly after, AR5.
It is hard to imagine that Pielke, Christy, Akasofu and others would not like to see an alternative assessment report to the IPCC – an effort dedicated to correcting the poor methods of the IPCC – a report which actually considers comments from reviewers. It is difficult to imagine they would not like to be a part of such an effort. And it is just as difficult to imagine that would not like to see their report put to the vote against AR5. This will be a time-consuming and unpaid effort. But it will be a grand effort and one that future generations will be very grateful for.
The question now is: Is this a project Pielke, Curry, Lindzen and others are willing to take on?
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An international panel to sit in judgement of science, however constructed, is inappropriate. The very idea is unscientific. Such a panel however adroitly planned, is unworkable. The idea is broken and we should ditch it without remorse.
Ron Cram
“It was mentioned by Tallbloke (who liked the idea)”
I’m generally in favour of stuff which heads in the right direction. My own proposal at Lisbon was for the positive choice to funding multiple line of investigation to foster the cross fertilisation of ideas concerning the causes of climatic change, and the possibility of cross checking and validation/elimination of ideas and hypotheses.
This isn’t a new idea. I just discovered it’s neatly encapsulated by a paper written in 1890:
http://tallbloke.wordpress.com/2011/02/13/t-c-chamberlin-multiple-working-hypotheses/
You can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.
Mixing some ice cream into a pile of dung won’t make it any more palatable to the consumers.
Those already heavily entrenched in the IPCC will remain heavily entrenched and will still exert an undo amount amount of influence.
For most of humankind’s thousand of years on the planet, it has managed very nicely thank you, with bothering it’s silly head about protecting itself against climate change.
Now it seems, having got the IPCC, we really need a successor of some kind to protect us against climate change.
This successor, however devised, will surely have nicely paid staff, respected, in nice offices, with good working conditions and pensions etc.
WHY?
Why not just disband the damn thing without any replacement.
It is not even worth s “good riddance”.
I hope I’ve got the blockquote process correct:
Do you even bother to read before you post? The following is 13 or so posts ABOVE yours and contains direct quotes to support the proposition.
Given that natural forces will do as natural forces will do, and that CO2 is a benign trace gas, necessary to life’s very existence, and that humans can have no effect on either weather or climates, this “climate research” is no more than a horribly expensive hobby horse, wasting huge amounts of real money that could be spent on engineering projects which would be of great value to those who pay taxes.
The plain fact is that there is no shortage of petroleum, natural gas or coal. There are far more extractable reserves than the “known reserves”, and known reserves are enough for at least 1,000 years.
Congress, with great stupidity, has passed legislation which eliminated any need for oil companies to compete with each other.
Above all else, energy must be transported, and there is a dire need for appropriate transportation infrastructure, such as pipe lines for oil, natural gas and coal slurries. Railroads transport coal at low cost. Crude oil needs to be refined, so allow more refineries to be constructed where new refineries are needed. This does not need government funding, only government permits.
The answer to our energy woes is to toss out the “climate scientists” entirely from government funding and put engineers and technicians back to work, solving real and not “cut-out-of-whole-cloth” nonexistent “problems”.
The entire UN is as useless as it has always been, and corrupt almost beyond belief.
Not disbanding the IPCC would be throwing good money after bad. Name anything the IPCC has produced that was worth more than the paper upon which it was printed.
Rather boring to hear so many who think the solution is to disband the whole thing. Such wishful thinking is a waste of space on this blog. Don’t they realise how many vested interests are going to do anything and everything to keep the it alive?
Tallbloke,
Yes, I remember your proposal and it is a worthy goal. Calling for more funding to study natural climate variation and other possible explanations for changing climate is quite reasonable. But like the call to disband the IPCC, the readers of WUWT cannot actually control the decision process. Any influence we might exert on the future existence of the IPCC or the climate science funding process would be very indirect. I called this a “modest proposal” because WUWT is read by many leading climatologists, including several of those I named. They do have it in their power to organize and write an alternative assessment to AR5 even if the IPCC does not agree to publish their findings.
Runar, Lucy Skywalker and others:
I am working on a new article for Wikipedia and invite you to help me. I plan to call it “Climate Science Debate.” It will focus on the debate in the peer-reviewed literature. Wikipedia requires articles to be written in “Neutral Point of View.” I am trying to do that, but I am a skeptic and have to edit myself at times. If you are interested in helping develop this article, please create an account for yourself and be sure to read the Talk page first. You can find it at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:RonCram/ClimateScienceDebateSandbox
R. de Haan is correct, stop funding the IPCC, force the EPA to ignore the IPCC reports through control of the EPA funding.
I disagree completely with the original modest proposal because the IPCC is the core of this problem. There is no UN based solution to this problem.
Anthony,
Your proposal is better than the current operation but falls short of the optimal, disbanding the IPCC. Science is not a negotiable where people can vote for a result. Science is not something where nations can impact and change the document to water down or strengthen meaning. Science is not dependent on a consensus produced in either a singular report or two competing reports.
Properly done, science is repeatable and reproducible. You know better than most that many climate scientists are using flawed data from compromised weather stations and this is before the data is mangled through data homogenization. I even recall reading that some of the proxies that were used to approximate global temperature didn’t even agree with the local temperature in an area.
The UN is attempting to create a justification for an end goal. Why does the UN want to create the impression that there is a problem of such urgency, requiring immediate resources and response, in order to solve a problem that they can’t possibly solve? What policy would the UN want to implement to fight this crisis of their own creation?
It’s fairly clear to me that there is little middle ground between science done correctly, which I think you do, and the consensus and negotiation that is not science but more policy and politics.
Lazy Teenager and D.J. Hawkins,
The links which best showed that Pachauri’s statements is untrue are the links to Roger Pielke’s blog. He lists a number of important peer-reviewed papers which were completely ignored or glossed over. While Working Group II and Working Group III relied on non-peer-reviewed papers, I’m not sure that was true of Working Group I. The main issue there was that important papers were ignored.
(I tried to send from a mobile device earlier, but it doesn’t appear to have posted.)
I sympathise with those who call for the IPCC to be disbanded, but it is important to bear in mind that the IPCC is soley the product of political demand. So long as there is enough support in the political arena, the IPCC will stay in one form or another. We should therefore address pragmatic questions about how to make improvements – as Ron Cram is seeking to do.
The IPCC process can be significantly improved by anything that asserts disciplines of good procedure, accuracy, indifference, even-handedness and fair representation of the state of the art. The AR and SPM should be exposed to a process which actively seeks to expose failings. If contributors take this serously enough at the time of compiling the reports, the necessary disciplines should come into play.
Whatever happened at AR4, the discipline doesn’t appear to have been there. As well as damaging revelations of inaccuracies, there are also individuals who are now going through the experience of having to defend their reputations. But the truth of the matter is that it’s a good thing. Future IPCC reviewers and authors will have greater expectations that any inaccuracies will be exposed and treated harshly. And that failings exposed after publication will not serve their personal interests.
That’s why I said (in an earlier post) that it will be interesting to see what the IPCC does to improve its approach to AR5.
And coming back to political demand – if the next couple of AR’s and SPMS are more accurate, more even-handed and more fair in their assessment of uncertianty, they will also be much less alarmist. If that’s the case, I would see greater scope for the political demand to dry up.
In reply to my earlier post, Ron Cram suggested that a vote for competing reports by the contributors. Although grateful for the reply, it still overlooks questions of conflict of interest. Anybody who stands to directly benefit from the vote should be conflicted out. Otherwse such a vote will not stack-up well against tests of indifference and even-handedness. It would lack credibility.
Sorry but dumb idea, as many have commented the IPCC has run aground, torn the hull (made up of a tissue of lies) wide open and has started to throw the drive into reverse. And you want to stop them and stand by with a rescue craft?Why? These are pirates, rogues and con men, all that is necessary here is that good men do nothing to assist and all will be well. Let the UNV IPCC reverse out to sea and set course for deeper water at full speed, if you must act then cheer and wave as they sail into oblivion.
As for the UN what good do they serve?
In the AR4 Summary for Policymakers final draft (SPM_SOR_TSU_FINAL), on page 11, lines 23 through 34 state:
In Government Comments on the Final Draft of the SPM, for WG1 of AR4, the Government of Germany stated the following (I believe) in reference to the above excerpt:
In other words, it appears that the level of significance was dropped from 95% (2 sigmas or standard deviations) in the Third Assessment Report (TAR) to 90% (1.65 sigmas) in the Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). When conclusions are stacked on top of one another, such as one paper’s conclusion depending significantly on a referenced paper’s conclusion, I would submit that these uncertainty ranges be calculated in the same manner as reliabilities: for 2 levels where one conclusion at 95% is dependent on another conclusion at 95%, the result would be .95 times .95 or 90%. When using 90% for 2 levels, the result drops to 81% which is very fast.
Since typically overall conclusions in a field depend on supporting conclusions that are many levels deep, using 90% (or perhaps lower in AR5?) would mean that the overall uncertainty would be very large. Thus, requiring the IPCC to use 3 sigma uncertainty ranges (99.7%) would be a start. Unfortunately, this may be quite unlikely to be accepted as a lot of the science would have to be redone and many of the accepted conclusions (i.e. accepted at lower standards) may no longer be statistically significant. In short, it looks like the IPCC has been underestimating the uncertainties in the science.
It’s very easy for a country to withdraw from the UNFCCC.
Article 25
WITHDRAWAL
1. At any time after three years from the date on which the Convention has entered into force for a Party, that Party may withdraw from the Convention by giving written notification to the Depositary.
2. Any such withdrawal shall take effect upon expiry of one year from the date of receipt by the Depositary of the notification of withdrawal, or on such later date as may be specified in the notification of withdrawal.
3. Any Party that withdraws from the Convention shall be considered as also having
withdrawn from any protocol to which it is a Party.
This is the way to defund the IPCC. Leave the parent organization.
The issue is not not about disbanding the IPCC. It is how long a jail sentence should these crooks should serving. The IPCC is nothing more than a massive environmental Ponzi sceme. Bernie Madoff got 150 years. These crooks should not get any less.
How much can we recover of the money that has been stolen?
If the IPCC refuses, and an independent alternate report is published, the IPCC may find itself largely abandoned.
I think they will refuse, and that will be their undoing.
I agree with the posters who have pointed out that:
a) The IPCC will never adopt any change that would weaken their political advocacy. The IPCC was created to support and justify a predetermined political outcome.
b) Any change that the IPCC proposes or accepts that seems like it is a step toward integrating other views or tempering extremism, will turn out to merely be a way to co-opt the reputation of a few skeptics or luke warmers to confer a thin veneer of legitimacy on the IPCC process.
The best strategy is to leave the IPCC exactly as it is and to not participate in any way. The IPCC has already undermined its own credibility. Think of it like a court trial. We are the defense and they are the prosecution. They must make their case but the prosecution’s lead witness is the IPCC which is already not credible and quite easy to refute. Why in the world would we want to help rehabilitate our opponent’s incredibly weak key witness?
Interestingly, I thought that after so many warmist papers had been soundly thrashed and the IPCC caught red-handed and then the embarrassment of ClimateGate, that our opponents would at least begin to reduce their most extreme claims and blatant manipulations for fear of being further exposed. I thought our opponent would get smarter with less outlandish claims and papers that would be easier for them to defend (although certainly less dramatic without the help of Mannian statistics). I thought it would get harder to fight their claims instead of easier.
I was just wrong. As their tricks get more exposed and fewer members of the public believe their claims, they are getting more extreme and their manipulations even more blatant. This is both surprising and wonderful! Let’s all hope they don’t change a thing!
Mr Sheehan notes:
Half a century ago, I was growing up in a society run primarily by engineers and businessmen in a pragmatic, free-market system — the lugubrious legacy of the New Deal notwithstanding. Things by and large worked.
I now find miself in a world run primarily by lawyers and marketing consultants, and while the magic electronics get more and more magic, the washing machine seems to blow up as soon as the warranty expires. And I have to discard half a ream of warnings and disclaimers with every $1.98 trivial gadget I buy, not to mention the warning that my toddler’s Halloween Superman costume will not actually allow him to fly.
Not all change is progress.
Time for it to join the League of Nations in the Valley of Nice-Sounding Delusions. As to the corruption being almost beyond belief, recall the immortal words of the feminist social philosopher Tomlin: “I’m always trying to be cynical, but I just can’t keep up.” (The widely-quoted version on the internet is inaccurate.) Some of us, however, have a limitless capacity for cynicism. We are rarely disappointed by any political institution.
Tomlin is also quoted as saying, “Things are going to get a lot worse before they get worse.” There is, of course, hardly any doubt about this.
The posters who are surprised at the AGW cabal’s reality-denial response should keep in mind that mass-inertia thing, where the bigger a moving object is, the harder it will be to stop…and the more china it’ll bust along the way. Things are indeed falling apart for our earnest friends, but the battle is far from over and with trillions at stake, assume that they’ll be getting quite creative, not to mention dangerous.
Anthony Hanwell says:
February 13, 2011 at 12:16 pm
“Rather boring to hear so many who think the solution is to disband the whole thing. Such wishful thinking is a waste of space on this blog. Don’t they realise how many vested interests are going to do anything and everything to keep the it alive?”
Why is it wishful thinking? Republicans in the US Congress have engaged the process of removing funding from the EPA? Why not do the same to the IPCC? Why not the UN?
The UN is a corrupt, fruitless, self-serving waste of money. Forget the IPCC, eliminate the UN.
I don’t like the idea of American Idol style voting. Consensus is a political manifestation and has nothing to do with science. Would you want John Christy and Dick Lindzen “voted off the island” because Jones, Briffa, Mann and Santer were more popular?
I may have a better alternative. The USA completely defunds all monetary support of the IPCC and we let this cabal of international socialists do whatever they want and reach whatever conclusions they want (which is what they’ll do anyway). No point in paying for junk science assembled by agenda driven government entities.
Some seven or eight hundred years ago people in Europe were silly enough to pay and to build churches for all different orders in every town. There must have been plenty of money around – or maybe a lot of guilty feeling souls. After the protestant reformation there remained at least two “God’s Houses” everywhere.
Traveling Italy, you will find two restaurants in all villages: the one visited by the “communists” and the other one frequented by the “democrats”.
Looks like people need two simple options and a choice.
A scientific approach or rather a matter of belief?
Sorry, Mr. Cram, but we dont’t need a new church, not even a small one.
What we really need is something like WUWT/Wikipedia, reviewing new publications in the field, open access, transparency and rules of commitment.
No religion but curiosity and open minds for what ever is published and thought.
The IPCC is far away from getting there. Too many politicians and bureaucrats not supporting science but their own matters of interest.
200 hundred years after the era of enlightenment, we should definitely forget about building new churches.