For weeks, this document has been put in the hands of most every journalist that writes about climate issues, and many articles have been written about its contents. Given that much of the work done in it was publicly funded at universities, and because the discussion in the media has placed the issue in the public domain of discussion, plus with the IPCC Stockholm meeting to hammer out the final version convening this week, and with the announcement today that IPCC chair Rajenda Pachauri willl step down in 2015, (translation here) I feel it is time to make this document available so that the public also has the opportunity for (as the IPCC put it in their press release) line-by-line scrutiny.
It’s been suggested by Dr. Judith Curry that these leaks to some key MSM players from the IPCC were deliberate to equip sympathetic journalists with talking points so that they could promote interest and alarm ahead of time.
People have been asking me to comment on the leaked IPCC Final Draft Summary for Policy Makers. Apparently someone in the IPCC made the Report available to ‘friendly’ journalists, as part of a strategy to brief them before the formal release of the Report. – Dr. Judith Curry
Further, the IPCC has made it clear in their Principles and Procedures statement that they embrace transparency.
The IPCC’s processes and procedures are constantly being reviewed and updated to ensure that they remain strong, transparent and reliable.
Given the keen worldwide interest, and the many articles written about the AR5 draft SPM in media with access to it, there’s no reason anymore for the public to be left out of the process. It will also be interesting to compare to the final SPM to see what the politicians have morphed the document into. Reportedly, there are some 1800 changes that have already been requested by government representatives.
Here is the widely distributed PDF of the IPCC Draft SPM.
WG1AR5-SPM_FD_Final (1) (7.64MB)
For some insight into the IPCC process, and the pointless levels of secrecy they added on to reviewers, see this website by Paul Matthews, an applied mathematician at the University of Nottingham:
The IPCC Report – Looking into the 5th IPCC report
Drafts, reviews and leaks
I found this statement interesting:
Since the draft reports cite research papers that have been accepted but not published, reviewers have the right to see these papers. I requested three such papers and received the following response from the IPCC:
“Please find attached a copy of the non-published literature you requested. For security reasons, the attached copy is an encrypted version of a pdf. The copy can be viewed by a software (LockLizard) which is provided free of charge and is simple and quick to download. Below you will find instructions on how to download the software, register the license, and view the protected file.“
Take a look at the LockLizard website – especially the video at the top. This gives an insight into the secrecy paranoia of the IPCC. These are research papers on climate science, soon to be published, but in the view of the IPCC they are closely guarded secrets.
Dr. Judith Curry talks about the leaks:
The IPCC’s ‘inconvenient truth’ — a pause in surface warming for the past 15+ years
Publication of the IPCC AR4 in 2007 was received with international acclaim. The vaunted IPCC process – multitudes of experts from over a hundred countries over a period of four years, examining thousands of refereed journal publications, with hundreds of expert reviewers – elevated the authority of the IPCC AR4 to near biblical heights. Journalists jumped on board, and even the oil and energy companies neared capitulation. The veneration culminated with the Nobel Peace Prize, which the IPCC was awarded jointly with Al Gore. At the time, I joined the consensus in supporting this document as authoritative: I bought into the meme of “don’t trust what one scientist says; rather trust the consensus building process of the IPCC experts.”
Six and a half years later and a week before the release of the IPCC 5th Assessment Report (AR5), substantial criticisms are being made of leaked versions of the Report as well as of the IPCC process itself. IPCC insiders are bemoaning their loss of their scientific and political influence. What happened?
The IPCC was seriously tarnished by the unauthorized release of emails from the University of East Anglia in November 2009, known as Climategate. These emails revealed the ‘sausage making’ involved in the IPCC’s consensus building process, including denial of data access to individuals who wanted to audit their data processing and scientific results, interference in the peer review process to minimize the influence of skeptical criticisms, and manipulation of the media. Climategate was quickly followed by the identification of an egregious error involving the melting of Himalayan glaciers. These revelations were made much worse by the actual response of the IPCC to these issues. Then came the concerns about the behavior of the IPCC’s Director, Rachendra Pachauri, and investigations of the infiltration of green advocacy groups into the IPCC. All of this was occurring against a background of explicit advocacy and activism by IPCC leaders related to CO2 mitigation policies.
The IPCC does not seem to understand the cumulative impact of these events on the loss of trust in climate scientists and the IPCC process itself. The IPCC’s consensus building process relies heavily on expert judgment; if the public and the policy makers no longer trust these particular experts, then we can expect a very different dynamic to be in play with regards to the reception of the AR5 relative to the AR4.
…
Based upon early drafts of the AR5, the IPCC seemed prepared to dismiss the pause in warming as irrelevant ‘noise’ associated with natural variability. Under pressure, the IPCC now acknowledges the pause and admits that climate models failed to predict it. The IPCC has failed to convincingly explain the pause in terms of external radiative forcing from greenhouse gases, aerosols, solar or volcanic forcing; this leaves natural internal variability as the predominant candidate to explain the pause. If the IPCC attributes to the pause to natural internal variability, then this begs the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural internal variability. Not to mention raising questions about the confidence that we should place in the IPCC’s projections of future climate change.
The IPCC’s ‘inconvenient truth’
In my view, the IPCC now faces its ultimate test of credibility. Given its botched and dismissive reactions to errors pointed out by the public in the blogosphere in the past few years, I don’t expect they will rise to the occasion – the skills for presentation to the public in the current dynamic just aren’t there.
This LA Time’s story sums up the predicament quite well: Global warming ‘hiatus’ puts climate change scientists on the spot
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“Friendly” is a euphemism for “left-wing, Greenshirt” motivated. Since Dr. Curry looks relatively useful to skeptics she is given an immediate exemption for her obfuscation. Skeptics determined to add 30+ years to the climate war through this permissive approach.
Interesting that Rajendra Pachauri is saying that he is stepping down. He’s told Roger Harrabin that he isn’t retiring from the IPCC chair. Either Spiegel is not in the “in” crowd is Roger out. I put my money on Roger. He’s wrong about everything else.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24204323
I’ve done a keyword search and am a few pages in now. No sign of any mention of ‘pause’ or ‘hiatus’. Looks like the politicos may have got their wish.
[typo fixed – thanks -Anthony]
It looks like this is all we’re getting by way of concession:
“The rate of warming over the past 15 years (1998−2012; 25 0.05 [−0.05 to +0.15] °C per decade) is smaller than the trend since 1951 (1951−2012; 0.12 [0.08 to 26 0.14] °C per decade)”
Other than dropping the lower limit of the expected climate sensitivity, this draft was intended to be a whitewash, enabling the climate research industry to continue milking the taxpayers.
My favorite quote :
“If the IPCC attributes to the pause to natural internal variability, then this begs the question as to what extent the warming between 1975 and 2000 can also be explained by natural internal variability”
It almost certainly implies climate sensitivity to CO2 is significantly lower than the 3-4 deg C doomsday / CAGW scenarios, thus there is no crisis.
The precise wording of the final release of AR5 doesn’t really matter.
In my view, the important question is how the mainstream media decide to play it.
There will be sufficient material for publications to continue with the CO2/warmest/alarmist agenda and I suspect that is exactly what will happen. However, there’s a chance some journalists will decide to depart from the gospel and emphasize some of the more obvious problems like the complete failure of the models.
Anthony will likely be the first to know for sure since the rebellious journos will undoubtedly be calling him for comment.
We shall see!
Errr……
“The concentration of CO2 in the atmosphere has increased by more than 20% since 1958 when systematic atmospheric measurements began (see Figure SPM.3), and by about 40% since 1750. The increase is a result of human activity, virtually all due to burning of fossil fuels and deforestation”
Page 9 – finally something substantial about the failure to anticipate the “pause”:
“There is very high confidence that models reproduce the more rapid warming in the second half of the 20th century, and the cooling immediately following large volcanic eruptions. Models do not generally reproduce the observed reduction in surface warming trend over the last 10–15 years. There is medium confidence that this difference between models and observations is to a substantial degree caused by unpredictable climate variability, with possible contributions from inadequacies in the solar, volcanic, and aerosol forcings used by the models and, in some models, from too strong a response to increasing greenhouse-gas forcing.”
the SPM ocean heat content one is dishonest!!! pg32 (c) Nice scary rise.. y axis in joules
Translate joules into degrees C and it is about 0.09C in 55 years (source Met Office)
quote from Met Office doc (NOT IPCC SPM)
“There are much fewer observations below 700m, and the ocean below 2,000m has remained largely un-monitored. However, there is evidence of warming below 700m, and even below 2,000m. Careful processing of the available deep ocean records shows that the heat content of the upper 2,000m increased by 24 x 1022J over the 1955–2010 period (Levitus, 2012), equivalent to 0.09°C warming of this layer.” pg22
http://www.metoffice.gov.uk/media/pdf/e/f/Paper1_Observing_changes_in_the_climate_system.PDF
The IPCC presenting that rising graph will mean people think thee is a problem, rapidly rising ocean temp (energy really)!!!
that is actually a claim of measuring a rate rise of <2 thousandths of a degree per decade!!!
if degrees C is good enough for global surface air temp (or proxy for energy) why not show the ocean heat graph in degree C. Why not because people would laugh at the scale.
when the WG2 report will be out…will anybody still care?
No time to read it in detail at this point, so I just looked at the pictures. I feel so… dirty 😉
Figure SPM.5 is revealing. It appears to show that the models match observations. Upon inspection, they’ve used decadal averages for all time series, which completely obliterates the divergence between the models and observations over the last 15 years or so.
Heh. LockLizard Digital Restrictions Management on top of all the other DRM schemes. I won’t even look to see if my DRM stripper has the necessary script.
Evidently the IPCC is unaware of the Open Access – OA – movement for transparency in academia. Ahh, they are propagandists guarding their own Gulag Archipelago and not academics.
When Raj Pachauri does retire, he will have more time to produce his smutty novels. [snip]
AR5, like its predecessors, is a political document, not a scientific document.
Reminds me of this , they are just hoping that in 5 years it will be going their way.
oops spm ocean heat content graph is pg 24.
Nice IPCC SPM graphic of Northern Sea Ice extent……………………………… pg 25 AND pg28
am I being too cynical in wondering just why there is no graphic of Southern Hemisphere Ice extent?
44% higher since 1970! Well we must be really heating up as RF = Radiative Forcing.
But…
Oops.
~How do you get the medium confidence on the pause being caused from volcanic forcings? There have been none to speak of.
~The solar forcings are too poorly known to have any confidence in, if they are considered a potential cause if the pause.
~Aerosol forcings? If that is out then the whole calibration for volcanoes is out so that doesn’t really work either.
Yep, that seems to fit.
Anyone seen the graph on the final page? A scary looking temperature anomaly charted against anthro CO2 contribution, with the temperature anomaly relative to *1861-1880*. Just what confidence level does the IPCC have in the accuracy of global temperature measurements in the middle decades of the 19th century? Is this ever stated in any of the IPCC output?
Is my mind just in the gutter? Or does LockLizard sound like wordplay on lot lizard?
Prufeshunalism at its finest…
This has got to be the most expensive and costly act of global handwaving the world has ever seen, and hopefully will ever see for a very long time. It has taken 25 years for the ‘best scientists’ and almost all the worlds National Academies of Science to consider that climate has some natural variability to it, not tied to volcanoes or solar irradiance; a fact that has been completely obvious from the very beginning. They are considering it only because the have to. And while they take many more years to consider the obvious, they handwave!
Wikipedia describes ‘handwaving’ as: “… a pejorative label applied to the action of displaying the appearance of doing something, when actually doing little, or nothing. For example, it is applied to debate techniques that involve fallacies. It is also used in working situations where productive work is expected, but no work is actually accomplished.”
davidmhoffer… and I.P.C.C. will be able (unless the public says no) to continue to expand the time horizon for decades to come all built upon the manufactured rise since the 70’s that due to adjustments will never go away. One day the public is going to wonder… what about those +0.7°C “upward adjustments” made to the temperature records, what about that, what of UHI, have we had the wool pulled over our eyes? One day, and stop speaking of the irrelevant always-bright-red model mumbo-jumbo charts all built on incorrect parameters and assumptions.
Let’s recall that the so called media leak landed on Reuters lap, in fact the Thomson Reuters Foundation home of uber green peddler Sir Crispin Tickell… That says it all. In Canada, Globemedia, owned by the Thomson family, has been among the fiercest propagandists of the Cause, with Op ed of luminaries such as Maurice Strong, Balsillie and any sub zero level “climate change” academics that can blame a flood on CAGW! Their journalists are low level propagandists that recycle catastrophism and carbon taxing proselytism.
This is was no leak IMO. This was a deliberate pre-release for friendlies. In fact, since that leak, Globemedia has been unsusually quiet on the climate front, suggesting a series of articles are being worked and will be released in time for the Stockholm meeting.
The BS of volcanoes, aerosols and other sudden one way solar influence (only when it cools) is now emerging from Reuters reports. The distortion of the climate sensitivity issue and sea level scares are the bread and butter of Anna Ringstrom’s Reuters piece.
Reuters, Thomson Reuters, Globemedia are jusge and party in this affair.
SadButMadLad says:
September 23, 2013 at 11:20 am
Interesting that Rajendra Pachauri is saying that he is stepping down. …
Human role in warming ‘more certain’ – UN climate chief
http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-24204323
BBC is also citing the Marcott hockeystick in this article