Via the Stanford University press room: Stanford’s Chris Field has spent five years leading a large team of international scientists as they prepared a major United Nations report on the state and fate of the world’s climate. The hours were long, the company was good and the science is crucial.
By Rob Jordan
In the summer of 2009, Stanford Professor Chris Field embarked on a task of urgent global importance.
Field had been tapped to assemble hundreds of climate scientists to dig through 12,000 scientific papers concerning the current impacts of climate change and its causes.
The team, Working Group II, would ultimately produce a 2,000-page report as part of a massive, three-partU.N. Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change(IPCC) Fifth Assessment Report, which details a consensus view on the current state and fate of the world’s climate.
The job would take nearly five years, spanning time zones and languages, and requiring patient international diplomacy, dogged organizational discipline and a few napkin doodles. Marathon debates conducted over Skype crashed the service more than once.
“It’s got lots of moving pieces, personalities and opportunities for things to go right or wrong,” said Field, who co-chaired the effort. “You end up with a report that reflects the balance of understanding across the scientific community.”
In addition to being a professor of biology and of environmental Earth system science, he heads the Department of Global Ecology at the Carnegie Institution for Science, and is a senior fellow at the Stanford Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy.
This team conducted most of the work behind closed doors, but Field and other Stanford faculty members who played key roles shared a behind-the-scenes story of what it takes to generate the most comprehensive diagnosis of the health of the planet and the risks it faces.
Beginning the journey
For Field’s group, the long road began in earnest at a July 2009 meeting in Venice, Italy, where 209 scientific experts and IPCC members from around the world developed a chapter-by-chapter outline of the report. Their outline was later formally accepted at a meeting in Bali, Indonesia.
But before Field and his team could begin the heavy lifting of writing the report, they hosted a kind of American Idol-style search for scientists to serve as authors and editors.
Over several months, they sifted through 1,217 nominations representing 73 countries. Field’s team read every nominee’s resume and consulted with observer organizations and senior climate science leaders on each. “There’s a full diversity of opinions,” Field said, pointing out that some of those selected are outspokenly skeptical of computer climate modeling, for instance.
After participants from all IPCC countries vetted the final selections, the 310 new colleagues – including a number of Stanford researchers – were ready.
Putting the pieces together
Much of the work was done at night or on weekends. Among the authors and editors staying up late were Stanford Woods Institute Senior Fellows Terry Root, a professor, by courtesy, of biology, and David Lobell and Noah Diffenbaugh, both associate professors of environmental Earth system science. “There is no institution as richly represented as Stanford,” Field said.
Stanford even hosted a U.S. government-funded office on campus, with five scientists and four technical staffers. The university also provided library research privileges for IPCC authors from developing countries.
“Stanford didn’t see it as a distraction, but as a fundamental function of the university,” Diffenbaugh said. His 9-year-old daughter, however, had a different perspective. Her father, worn out from after-hours work on the assessment, would often fall asleep while reading bedtime stories.
“There were definitely a lot of late nights,” Diffenbaugh said. “You want to know the answer, and you want to get it right. In that sense, it’s not a punch-the-clock kind of activity.” Authors were told during orientation that they should expect to devote about 25 percent of their time for three years to the report.
“Overall, it’s a process designed to not let any nonsense through, so that policymakers get only the best of what science can say,” said Lobell, a lead author on a chapter about food production systems and food security. “That takes a lot of checking, rechecking and outside review, which is not always the most exciting, but you do it realizing that it’s part of the process.”
Sometimes, it took pen sketches too. Lobell recalled a group effort to come up with a key summary figure for the chapter he worked on about food security. “We ended up doodling on napkins over dinner, and then I went back and made a version that ended up in the final report. One of the senior authors described that as the highlight of his career.”
Reaching consensus
The journey to the final draft was a delicate exercise in international relations.
“It is a tough job,” said Root, a review editor for a chapter on terrestrial and inland water systems. “You must be very current with the literature, and due to space constraints there are always ‘battles’ to include what each author thinks is important. It is wonderful, though, getting the opportunity to work with the best scientists around the world.”
Root and her fellow chapter editors in Spain and Switzerland would hash out their different perspectives during early-morning conference calls. Their Skype sessions sometimes went for more than four hours.
The chapter teams pored over dozens of peer-reviewed studies, some of them from nonscientific journals, discussed and debated findings, and then settled on language they were all comfortable using. “Instead of telling your fellow scientists they were full of it, you just had to say, ‘Where’s the traceable evidence?’ and they would change their tune,” Lobell said. Still, “there was nearly always a friendly atmosphere.”
“The challenge is also to communicate things clearly,” he added. “For example, it doesn’t help much to say, ‘Things are uncertain.’ It’s better to say something like, ‘If we knew A, we would know B, but we don’t really know A.'”
With consensus on their minds, representatives of IPCC member countries met in Switzerland in late February to review the report’s final draft.
“If the countries don’t agree on particular text, generally the text doesn’t get in there,” Field said. In some cases, representatives from a small group of countries might decamp to a separate room to work out differences of opinion. “For the exceptionally rare cases where every country but one agrees on something, sometimes text will go into the report saying every country but one agrees on this.”
The homestretch and beyond
Leaders in business, national security, public health, agriculture and other fields can make good use of the data, said Michael Mastrandrea, a Stanford Woods Institute consulting assistant professor. “Climate change is not just something for governments to be thinking about.”
Field acknowledged that the report’s continued value depends on making it more accessible and relevant to a wider audience. “There are a number of things I think the IPCC does spectacularly well. There are some things we don’t do so well,” he said. Field would like to see more author participation from the private sector, such as oil companies and reinsurance firms, and more integration of IPCC working groups.
Perhaps most important, Field envisions providing more user-friendly, customizable and interactive electronic data on an ongoing basis, as opposed to one massive report every six or seven years.
The report will serve as a foundation for international negotiations at events such as the U.N. Climate Leaders Summit scheduled for September. U.N. Secretary General Ban Ki-moon has called on world leaders to make “bold” pledges at the meeting and to demonstrate they will achieve ambitious emissions cuts as part of a legal agreement to be signed in early 2015. Field remains optimistic that the report can spur policy and technology that will steer the Earth toward a more sustainable future.
“Even though we face some serious challenges, we have some really attractive opportunities for building a better world in the future,” Field said. “The thing we need to wrap our collective brains around is that building a better world is going to require taking advantage of the scientific knowledge and being smart about managing the risk.”
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Simon; I care very deeply for my children, that is why I have taught them to question everything; if it sounds like b******t it most probably is b******t! AGW is b******t!
Yes,I am a white 58 year old male, over these 58 years, I have heard and read the full range of apocolypticle drivel spouted by so called experts, who are in reality are self-serving and misinformed, who wish to milk the public purse and taxpayer for all they can get their greedy hands on.
Prophecies of Armageddon included:
1) In the Seventies, an Ice Age.
2) In the Eighties, AIDs
3) The Nineties brought us CJD
4) The Noughties AGW, including the nonsensical scare that if we keep emitting CO2, the Earth will have the same climate as Venus, with temperatures of 400 Celsius.They conveniently overlooked the fact that although the Venusian atmosphere is mainly CO2, it is the same density as the oceans here at a depth of 10 miles.
There have been many others, including bird flu, swine flu (which two winter’s ago,our UK Dept of Health told us would kill 60,000 people, in reality it was 200), bubonic plague, Spanish Flu etc etc etc.
In five years, when the temperature of the world still hasn’t risen and energy prices have gone through the roof, the proponents of AGW will quietly sneak back under their rocks and find another apocolypticle trough they can stick their collective snouts into at our expense!
Simon says;
March 31, 2014 at 4:43 pm
What if the scientific community are correct and any further delays in mitigation could be catastrophic? The US Secretary of State seems to think so. It probably won’t affect older white American males that seem to dominate this site that much but think of the rest of the world and future generations for a change.”
———————————————————————————-
This is how the US Secretary of State understands things:
“Try and picture a very thin layer of gases – a quarter-inch, half an inch, somewhere in that vicinity – that’s how thick it is. It’s in our atmosphere. It’s way up there at the edge of the atmosphere. And for millions of years – literally millions of years – we know that layer has acted like a thermal blanket for the planet – trapping the sun’s heat and warming the surface of the Earth to the ideal, life-sustaining temperature. Average temperature of the Earth has been about 57 degrees Fahrenheit, which keeps life going. Life itself on Earth exists because of the so-called greenhouse effect. But in modern times, as human beings have emitted gases into the air that come from all the things we do, that blanket has grown thicker and it traps more and more heat beneath it, raising the temperature of the planet. It’s called the greenhouse effect because it works exactly like a greenhouse in which you grow a lot of the fruit that you eat here.”
I assume that quote resembles your grasp of ‘THE SCIENCE’, since you so blithely invoked his authority.
He’s an older, white, American male that almost certainly doesn’t visit this site; judging by his idiosyncratic take on the make-up of the atmosphere.
If he’s correct, the learned books on botany will have to be re-written to reflect the way plants strive to reach the upper troposphere (maybe even the stratosphere) so as to acquire the CO2 they putatively require for photosynthesis.
The problem is their starting point; concerning the current impacts of climate change and its causes. So their starting point is an assumption not a question.
Then they finished with a consensus view.
In between everyone went into meeting rooms and played politics and diplomacy.
This is how science is done nowadays??
This is all we really need to judge this guy and his cabal:
“Even though we face some serious challenges, we have some really attractive opportunities for building a better world in the future,” Field said
Simon says;
March 31, 2014 at 4:43 pm
What if the scientific community are correct and any further delays in mitigation could be catastrophic? The US Secretary of State seems to think so. It probably won’t affect older white American males that seem to dominate this site that much but think of the rest of the world and future generations for a change.”
__________________
Simon, I’m going to give some links to sites which discuss “logical fallacies”, where you can go to discover just how many you included in your short illogical post.
http://carm.org/logical-fallacies-or-fallacies-argumentation
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/index.html
The Globe and Mail is Canada’s alarmist Thomson Reuters owned newspaper. Serious stuff!
1) Front page story of their website at the time I write is “hot and hostile future: Dire UN reports sounds the alarm over environmental threat to billions”
2) Scrolling down is a poll:
How concerned are you about Climate Change?
48% are “Very disturbed” (we figured that one out 😉
25% are “Somewhat concerned”
26% are “Not worried at all”
3) But the best part comes scrolling down at the Most Popular articles in their latest edition:
Most Popular
1. Rob Ford sets crosshairs on Toronto city councillors’ expenses
2. New Quebec poll points to shift among francophone voters
3. Malaysia changes version of last words from Flight 370’s cockpit
4. Woman spends $25,000 on cosmetic surgeries to resemble Jennifer Lawrence
5. Marois’s husband under microscope over political fundraising
6. Hudak overplays his hand on the gas-plant scandal
7. Mirtle: Carlyle’s failure to adapt could cost Leafs more than playoff spot
8. Four things millennials hate about you
9. Justin Trudeau shrugs off criticism over dropping F-bomb at charity boxing match
10. Parody anti-Ford election signs pop up in downtown Toronto
So here we have it and that must really annoy them at Reuters, that despite all their efforts of propaganda of doom and gloom for no less than billions souls -and we can be sure many ad hoc academics will be given plenty of Op Ed to hammer the UN message-, none of the 10 most popular articles of their newspaper mentions climate or is remotely related to climate change, the best one of course being about this woman spending $25,000 on cosmetic to look like some Hollywood star!
Sir Crispin must be green… of rage! 😉
My disdain for the academic world soon has no bounds. At least prostitutes sell and hurt only themselves. But these guys, they sell something that is not even theirs to sell but prostitutes they are nevertheless. First time I visited Stanford U I was in awe, I would do anything to put my kids there. But now, what sane person would spend a cent to risk the future of their kids by force feeding them propaganda by prostitutes that call themselves scientists?
I cry inside when I see these institutions fall pray to Mammon. There really are no values left and people will do just anything to get their face on the news.
broadcast twice on ABC overnite. interview done at Deakin University in March. no transcript provided. extraordinary claims by Williams & Krebs:
AUDIO: 31 March: ABC Big Ideas: Robyn Williams with Lord John Krebs on Climate Change Adaptation
Extreme weather events, like bushfires and droughts in Australia, can awaken us to the impact of climate change, even if a direct link is hard to establish. The UK has just experienced the most devastating storms and floods in many years. Some wonder if this is a harbinger of things to come. Lord Professor John Krebs, a member of the UK Committee on Climate Change, speaks with Robyn Williams about what the UK and Europe are doing to prepare for, and respond to, climate change and what action Australia should be taking.
http://www.abc.net.au/radionational/programs/bigideas/lord-john-krebs-on-climate-change-adaptation/5341474
only place to find excerpts from the audio above:
26 March: Deakin University: Beyond the Impasse
The challenge of reconciling science with politics was one of the key issues raised during the recent visit to Deakin of one of the world’s most eminent ecologists, and climate change expert, Professor Lord Krebs FRS…
Lord Krebs was brought to Australia by Professor Andy T.D. Bennett, from Deakin’s Centre for Integrative Ecology, in partnership with the Victorian Centre for Climate Change Adaptation Research…
So how can scientists affect change? Professor Krebs said that if an issue concerns people’s health, such as tobacco use, it is not so hard for governments to take an intrusive stance. Climate change, however, is a very different ball game.
“Where the benefit will be to our children and grandchildren, it is more complicated, and the response required is not a simple action, like stopping smoking. It is multi-factorial, requiring reducing greenhouse gas emissions, achieving global agreement and developing alternative technologies.
“I think that climate change is driven by ideology. The argument that climate change is a figment of the imagination and ‘the weather has always changed’ is not good enough. I don’t think it’s a valid reason not to act. The weight of the science is too strong.”
The book “Merchants of Doubt,” by Naomi Baskis, clearly outlines the tobacco industry tactic of “conflating uncertainty with doubt,” Professor Krebs explained.
“While there is doubt, there is no need to take any action. This tactic was successful for decades for the tobacco industry.
“For various reasons, exactly the same tactic is being used with climate change. The difference is that we know from the isotopic signature – from burning hundreds of millions of years of carbon that has been stored underground, that the rate of change is ten times that of the last ice age. It is not just the result of natural variation, when the animals coped with the change.
“As recently pointed out in “The Economist,” the change in temperature has not been a predictable increase. But, in the past three decades, each decade has been hotter than the previous one and each one has been the hottest since records began.”
So why is the world moving so slowly?
In their public discussion, Professor Krebs and Robyn Williams agreed that, while change may not be happening fast enough, there is a great deal going on, with all but five of 66 countries passing around 500 pieces of relevant legislation by 2013, and only Japan and Australia “going the other way.”…
The final “crucial element of the story” concerns consumption, with the world’s population currently growing by about 80 million a year.
“As pointed out in “Freefall,” by (economist) Joe Stiglitz, if everyone consumed what the average US or Australian citizen does, it would have the same carbon footprint as the equivalent of a world population of 77 billion,” said Professor Krebs.
“If we could all reduce our carbon footprint to two tonnes of carbon per person per year, we could bring levels down to below 1990 levels. In Australia, the carbon footprint is 20 tonnes per person per year. (The footprint) would need to go down more than 90 per cent to achieve this goal.”…
The conversation between Professor Lord Krebs and Robyn Williams will be broadcast Monday 31 March on Radio National’s “Big Ideas” program, from 8.00pm.
http://www.deakin.edu.au/research/stories/2014/03/26/beyond-the-impasse
Simon says;
March 31, 2014 at 4:43 pm
“What if the scientific community are correct and any further delays in mitigation could be catastrophic? The US Secretary of State seems to think so. It probably won’t affect older white American males that seem to dominate this site that much but think of the rest of the world and future generations for a change.”
CO2CAGW “climate change” has been falsified via its 100% Prediction Failure Rate, while it is obviously mitigation that is catastrophic. In fact, within “the rest of the world” India and China see the opposite of mitigation as a component necessary to getting their countries out of their current catastrophe known as “underdevelopment”; and they are thus building nearly as many coal-fired electricity plants as possible. Meanwhile, you labor away irrelevantly to heighten the exquisite ecstasy you can apparently always engender within your breast by demonizing “older white American males” and holding yourself out as an icon of ‘caring’…snif…against them, meaning that all you have proven is that you are a bigoted Narcissist Climate Change Believer.
Truthseeker – the dead horse post was awesome!
Here’s something I hope you find equally fun:
http://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/crackpot.html
From Nasa
http://earthobservatory.nasa.gov/Features/Clouds/clouds.php
“The balance between the cooling and warming actions of clouds is very close although, overall, averaging the effects of all the clouds around the globe, cooling predominates.”
WOW, the effect of clouds on the climate is really an important component. Certainly, these effects MUST be well understood and detailed with high confidence in the IPCC report, right?
From the IPCC Report
http://www.climatechange2013.org/images/report/WG1AR5_Chapter02_FINAL.pdf
While trends of cloud cover are consistent between independent
data sets in certain regions, substantial ambiguity and therefore
low confidence remains in the observations of global-scale cloud variability and trends.
I would like to know how they are getting paid and by whom the gravy train is at full speed it is about time somebody stopped it before it crashes
I read this as a T&M contract with hourly billings…. SKYPE??????
Hey Hunter, is it DUCK season yet? I need to go get my stamp…:) sarc/off
What a bunch of desperate grant-funded schmucks. Reminds me of the joke about building a freeway in the jungle. The newbie climb a tree and proclaims ” We are headed in the wrong direction!!!” From below you hear a voice, “Shut-up, we are making progress.”
Peter Miller says:
“…But most of all, I remembered the refusal of most ‘climate scientists’, especially the very dodgy ones, to make freely available their data and methodology and so I had to ask: “How can anyone call this science?”
And these so-called “scientists” also refuse public debate with anyone who doesn’t agree with them, especially if their opponents are better informed then them and are in possession of proven scientific facts.
In Australia we say, “What a bunch of wankers”
It’s so very sad. These collectivist delusionals think we are all going to fry.
They filter out data that disagrees with there catastrophic theory and use data that is marginal at best to support their theory. On top of this where no data exists the ‘model’ or ‘ construct’ it.
Causality needs to be top of the list of buzz words not consensus .
They are akin to sports fans who blame everything on the field on whether the have their lucky socks on. The quarterback didnt throw the dodgy pass because you drank with you left hand or because of not wearing an even number of clothes.He threw the dodgy pass because he is an idiot.
Climate changes because t always has. If the earth warms up for a while maybe its some freakish winning streak maybe its because of the sun it’s not very likely that it is caused by a tiny amount of a relatively insignificant gas.
Maybe the ipcc next time will tell us all to spin rond three times and spit. That’s about as,likely not help as buying a Toyota Pious.
Hmmm.
And during all this time, what was the rate of consumption of: sandals, cardigans, brightly colored anoraks, gluten-free bread, fat-free butter, vegan meals, sustainable this, sustainable that, roll-up ciggies, bicycle tires, battery-packs…… 😉
Does anyone else see us being led and influenced by a very narrow clique within society, who are demanding that we duplicate their chosen lifestyle, and pay for their chosen lifestyle too. I think it is our national duty to buy red meat, full-fat milk, and something with a V8 in it.
Ralph
cwon14 says: March 31, 2014 at 4:14 pm
Wow! The big chunks coming right up in my throat.
________________________________
I told you not to go to that curry-house. Have you not noticed that there are no cats and dogs within 5 miles of the place….?
R
I have put in a complaint to 3 UK media outlets, including the BBC, for claiming that Climate Change was caused by Global Warming. I included Monkton’s graph of graphs:
http://oi62.tinypic.com/294o3l5.jpg
It matters not if this claim came from the IPCC, the media is still duty-bound to check the facts rather than broadcasting nonsense and lies. And the facts are – there has been no warming this century.
I urge you all to take 10 minutes, to complain to your local or national media outlet.
R
What glurge. Infused with their own sense of heroics and nobility. Blecch.
Do comments sent by ‘phone disappear? I thought I had filled in the correct details.
“The challenge is also to communicate things clearly,” he added. “For example, it doesn’t help much to say, ‘Things are uncertain.’ It’s better to say something like, ‘If we knew A, we would know B, but we don’t really know A.’”
Yep, very much better to obfuscate and use 14 word when 3 will do the job.
ralfellis says: April 1, 2014 at 1:54 am
and something with a V8 in it.
Love red meat, only drink full-cream milk and…..meet my baby;
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/DSC00435_zps861d60ea.jpg
http://i255.photobucket.com/albums/hh154/crocko05/DSC00445_zps4e06e568.jpg
(hope the links work)
Annie – I find that sometimes they do – I lose stuff sent off my tablet from time to time into the phone network – one thing – don’t be in too big a hurry to sign off after you’ve sent it – phone networks seem a lot slower in getting all the acknowledge packets back and forth.
Correct me if I am wrong but somewhere along the line I remember that the IPCC hypothesis was that Co2 caused warming and that warming causes climate change. WGII appears to ignore the fact that rising levels of Co2 are not causing warming saying that Co2 by some miracle causes climate change without warming having taken place first. Not once yesterday did the BBC during its obsessive coverage ask Dr Chris Field exactly how Co2 had mutated from a molecule into an intelligent being able to directly influence our climate – without warming it first – and specifically target developing countries who if you look at coal consumption are directly responsible for the spike in Co2 with Asia burning 5 million tons a year and America just 1 billion tons. Why is the UN asking Asia to compensate us for damage to the Somerset levels caused by the developing world causing climate change?