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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Re: “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… .” [IPCC – quoted at 11:37am today by Katabasis1 – emphasis mine]
That is a bold-faced lie.
The truth is:
— Native sources of CO2 – 150 (96%) gigatons/yr — Human CO2 – 5 (4%) gtons/yr;
— Re: Net CO2 — Native Sinks Approximately* Balance Native Sources;
*Approximately = even a small imbalance can overwhelm any human CO2.
[Source: Dr. Murry Salby, lecture in Hamburg, Germany, 4/18/13, Video at: ~36:30 – 37:00]
But, the bottom line is:
CO2 UP — WARMING STOPPED.
[Source: http://wattsupwiththat.com/2012/12/06/a-problem-nearly-one-third-of-co2-emissions-occured-since-1998-and-it-hasnt-warmed/%5D
GAME OVER, IPCC.
You lose.
TRUTH WON!
‘Further, the IPCC has made it clear in their Principles and Procedures statement that they embrace transparency.’
in the same way the Ku Klux Klan ’embrace ‘ black people
The IPCC is parasitical organisation which dies when ‘the cause ‘ falls , its remit is self perpetuation with many of leaders out to further political ideas , no matter what the science.
In short a typical UN body , filled with typical UN people ,
richardscourtney:
Interestingly, the UN Resolution appears only to refer to unspecified “climate change”.
[UNGA43-53, section 10 (b); link on the IPCC Organisation page]
Dr. Murry Salby — Warrior for Truth in Science
— Resounding Refutation of the Liars at the IPCC
Slam-dunk!
Steven Mosher says:
September 23, 2013 at 12:43 pm
All the models & subsets thereof are worse than worthless, a waste of money made worse by the execrable public policy so insanely based upon them.
What does have value are actual observations, which show that for thousands of years in the Holocene & even more during the Eemian & prior interglacials, the Arctic Ocean has been less icy in summer than now. It was similarly open during an interval in the first half of this century as well, yet even more so during the Medieval Warm Period, the Roman WP, the Minoan WP & especially the Holocene Climatic Optimum.
Facts trump models. Every time.
[snip -over the top -mod]
JaniceMoore – CO2 UP — WARMING STOPPED
Spot on. It was my writing words to that effect on the Guardian website that finally got me put on permanent pre-moderation.
(That is some comments banned and others delayed so they are out of context).
GAME OVER for the IPCC.
[Reply: I checked, and you are not on pre-moderation. ~ mod.].]
Peter Shaw:
Thankyou for your post at September 23, 2013 at 1:46 pm in reply to my post at September 23, 2013 at 12:58 pm
http://wattsupwiththat.com/2013/09/23/access-the-leaked-ipcc-ar5-draft-summary-for-policymakers/#comment-1424570
which reports and links to the “principles” of the IPCC
http://www.ipcc.ch/pdf/ipcc-principles/ipcc-principles.pdf
Your reply says in total
If you use the link I provided (again in this post) to the IPCC “Principles” you will see it is headed
This means it was approved by all the governments who are Signatories of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (FCCC).
The IPCC is officially tasked to accept as a given that there is a “risk of human-induced climate change” which requires political policies to be selected from “options for adaptation and mitigation” that the IPCC is tasked to provide.
Richard
LockLizard, eh? For some reason that name for the IPCC’s security supplier sounds a little too appropriate. In the future they may wish to consider using LockShark. Or, maybe LockRat. For a lighter touch they may wish to employ LockWeasel. Or, for the ultimate they could go with LockSnake; preferably LockViper. I think, perhaps, we may just need our own security supplier to protect us from the IPCC, and I know of a good one. It’s called, LockAndThrownAwayTheKey.
In the LA Times article I read:
Did you see it? “no slowdown whatsoever in sea level rise” but I thought an acceleration in the rate of sea level rise is what we’re supposed to be worried about, not sea level rise which has been flattening for the last 4,000 years.
I couldn’t agree more. So much certainty but unsure what is causing the pause. Take another look at your models. They’re not so pretty.
“Further, the IPCC has made it clear in their Principles and Procedures statement that they embrace transparency.”
Transparency… they clearly don’t know what they’re doing?
““But there’s been no slowdown whatsoever in sea level rise,”
Lets go back one whole month and consider what the propaganda arm of AGW says about that:
“Rain – in effect, evaporated ocean – fell in such colossal quantities during the Australian floods in 2010 and 2011 that the world’s sea levels actually dropped by as much as 7mm.”
http://www.theguardian.com/environment/2013/aug/23/australian-floods-global-sea-level
Thanks for the link Anthony!
It is a mistake to try to interpret the ARs as some form of scientific document. They are governmental press releases. They say what the governments want them to say, because governments are paying for the research, not to mention the IPCC, and everything else involved in producing them.
Look at them the way you would a press release from any corporation with a bottomless advertising budget, and a lust for increased “market share”. The government is selling “safety” in return for power. And the IPCC AR5 is just their latest extremely expensive ad campaign.
The LA Times article is somewhat surprising in that it acknowledges the existence of The Pause, at least in the surface temperature record, and it also acknowledges that there isn’t a consensus opinion among climate scientists as to why The Pause has occurred.
You have to wonder what kind of debate went on within the LA Times editorial staff before the article was published. No doubt, someone yelled at the editor, “This article will encourage the deniers! Don’t print it!”
Regardless of these chinks in the IPCC’s armor, those who think the IPCC is on its last legs are greatly mistaken.
The Pause must last thirty to fifty years before the IPCC and the climate science community ever publicly acknowledge there are serious problems with their climate models.
Let me help them out.
How many are “some models”? What a joke.
They just couldn’t resist could they.
@ur momisugly Paul Matthews — THANK YOU, for making this thread possible!
According to my PDF reader (PDF-XChange Viewer) the words “pause” or “hiatus” do not appear in the SPM available obove
Does the world “cooling” appear anywhere in the document?
The WORD
Janice Moore says:
Does the world “cooling” appear anywhere in the document?
Yes:
1. P7 L16 Drivers of Climate Change ….”Positive RF leads to a warming, negative RF to a cooling….
2.P9 L12. “…..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.
3. P10 L44 …” including the cooling effect of aerosols…
4. P11 L2 …” due in roughly equal measure to a cooling contribution…
Do you mean like the self confessed LIAR and WIRE FRAUDSTER Dr. Peter Glieck?
@richardscourtney says:
September 23, 2013 at 12:58 pm
Thank you for that reminder regarding the genesis of the IPCC. Based on your extracted material, it doesn’t seem that the current state of affairs was a foregone conclusion. Starting from square one, the potential range should have been “OMG we’re all gonna DIE” through “We don’t have a clue” to “Nothing to see here, move along”. That is looking at the purely scientific side of the political situation. As engineers know, of course, the devil is in the details. Once it was clear – likely long before the pages had cooled coming off the laser printer – that the political side could only be served through the necessity of government-scale action with concommitant control of vast sums of money (hello carbon taxes!) and the “need” for government micro-management of individual choice (good-bye incandescent light bulbs!), the die was cast.
My own opinion, and worth every penny you’re paying for it, its that the IPCC will lumber along for another 15-20 years if the current temperature pause persists for that long. It will gradually become less and less influential as governments are forced to acknowledge reality and turn away from (however reluctantly) a course of action to beggar present generations in persuit of ever more ephemeral returns for future generations. If a downward trend should become apparent I expect an earlier demise, perhaps as soon as 5-10 years depending on the slope of the decline.
Thank you, Kev’s Test (did I guess correctly? #(:)). That was so kind of you to answer my query. So. “Cooling,”, but ONLY IF in connection with volcanoes and/or aerosols (or in a tiny little general mention).
LOL, no way they’d say something like: “For the past 15 years, there has been no observable warming. In fact, in the last five years, it appears to be cooling. We were wrong.”