Guest essay by Drieu Godefridi
In a message to “Friends of Science” (October-28-15 5:50 am, quoted here. Jonathan Lynn, “Head, Communications and Media Relations” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) writes:
“I’d like to point out that the IPCC does not make recommendations on any topic and you will not find any recommendations in any of our reports.”
This brings us to the centre of the question: is the IPCC a scientific body, as it pretends to be (ipcc.ch)? The formulation of a norm, even in a propositional manner — which is the definition of a recommendation —, presupposes value judgments, which are the province of politics, not science.
To assert that the IPCC does not make recommendations is not disputable, or even somewhat ambiguous, but quite simply devoid of any possible meaning.
In the Oxford dictionary, a recommendation is defined as “a suggestion or proposal as to the best course of action, especially one put forward by an authoritative body.”
The IPCC general reports are composed of three parts: climate science (part I), negative impacts (part II), measures to be employed to curb said impacts (part III).
One can read in part III of the preface of the latest IPCC report, “AR5”: “The report assesses mitigation options at different levels of governance and in different economic sectors. It evaluates the societal implications of different mitigation policies, but does not recommend any particular option for mitigation.” (page vi, then page 4).
The fact that the IPCC does not recommend any option in particular is not in any way in accordance with Mr. Lynn’s assertion that “the IPCC does not make recommendations”. If you specify three potential courses of action among a theoretically infinite set of options, either you are recommending the use of one of these options (not any specific one in particular but, nonetheless, the use of one of the three), or you are saying absolutely nothing at all.
What would be the point of part III, if not to suggest, i.e. “recommend”, certain courses of action?
Besides, the text of part III makes ample use of the term ‘recommendation’. Page 126, you can read that national/regional allocations were recommended by the 1996 IPCC guidelines (IPCC, 1996), page 162 mentions the “recommended options”, “recommending options that maximize expected utility”, says page 169, “these recommendations yield a perfectly time-consistent valuation strategy” (page 231), “Audits are reinforced by incentives or regulations that require the implementation of the cost-effective recommended measures” (page 716), “Given the exposure of many livelihoods and communities to multiple stressors, recommendations from case studies suggest that climate risk-management strategies need to appreciate the full hazard risk envelope, as well as the compounding socio-economic stressors” (845-846), “climate action plans are only one framework under which cities plan for mitigation policies, and similar recommendations may also occur as part of a municipal sustainability, land-use, or transport plan” (971), etc.
Part III of the IPCC reports are soaked with recommendations, thus value judgments. Quod erat demonstrandum.
Drieu Godefridi obtained a PhD (Sorbonne), and is author of “The IPCC: a scientific body?”, Texquis.
Note: about 5 minutes after publication, the essay was updated with some improvemennts to text formatting in the first three paragraphs to improve the way the article was presented to web browsers.
I wish that somebody would make some intelligent recommendations at some point.
Instead all we have is a scary picture of future catastrophe (the summary for idiots) that is used to justify the spending of vast sums of money on whatever happens to be the most expensive item on the menu at the time.
When Solar PV was hyper-expensive, cash flowed into Solar PV subsidies.
Now that Solar PV has fallen in price the subsidies are pouring into hyper-expensive offshore wind.
And, as if offshore is not expensive enough – the EU has already plough public money into “deep water” wind turbines.
Yes, deep water wind exploration!!! The mere name should cause some amount of facepalming.
I guess that they thought, “well, big oil do deep water oil exploration – so why shouldn’t we build massive platforms to extract the wind resources that lie out in the deep ocean. The we can be just like Big Oil, but completely retarded”.
I don’t really know how they convinced themselves that this was ever going to be a good idea.
Hopefully, nobody will ever be stupid enough to roll it out on a large scale.
Even if we had formed a specific body of our best scientists and engineers and asked them how we could spend as MUCH money as possible on the very SMALLEST reduction in fossil fuel consumption – then it is hard to imagine how they could have assisted us in doing a better job than we have done.
Of course, fossil fuel consumption has risen unabated. Knocked only by the global recession and economic slowdown in countries that have adopted industry destroying and self defeating energy policies.
I swear that politicians must have at some point performed a cost/benefit analysis.
Because, if they did not, then it is a remarkable coincidence that with regard to every economically advantageous course of action, they seem to have done the precise opposite.
Maybe – they had the cost/benefit analysis plotted as a graph of technologies versus their “cost per tonne CO2” avoided.
And then at some point the graph got accidentally turned upside down.
Yep – that’s the only reasonable explanation that I can come up with.
WHEN do you say: “the IPCC does not make recommendations on any topic and you will not find any recommendations in any of our reports.” ?
I think, when you don’t want to have any formal responsibility for measures which are (probably) based on your reports.
Of course the IPCC has seen that their models are not in line with actual (satellite) temperature developments.
Also in the same document:
“We often express this (as we do for instance in our communications strategy) by saying that the IPCC’s work is policy-relevant but not policy-prescriptive.”
https://friendsofsciencecalgary.wordpress.com/2015/11/05/a-matter-of-public-interest-on-the-ipcc-does-it-recommend-or-not-recommend-that-is-the-question/
Again the formal “not policy-prescriptive”. No responsability for the IPCC. But you can wonder when consecutive reports indicate a strong temperature rise and that temperature rise isn’t gonna happen, that a clear sign in the direction of politics has to be given. Like the management of a firm HAS to warn the shareholders that “expectations not seem to be fullfilled”. In time.
For that warning – or for not giving that warning – the management is fully responsible.
Wow. Must be a slow news day at Wht’s Up. A whole article about “whether the IPCC makes recommendations or not. They say they don’t. Others say they don’t. But maybe they do, they just don’t know it. Neither do we.”
Is there anything I missed?
Is there anything I missed?
Your afternoon nap.
+ 50
Isn’t it important for policy making?
If the IPCC make no predictions (as they say) and the IPCC represents mainstream science…
Well, the science is settled as unpredictable. We officially know nothing.
You can’t make a policy on the opinion of people who know nothing about the time when the policy will be implemented.
Can you?
maybe they can’t make recommendations because they know that they don’t know
Yeah, but they don’t know WHAT they don’t know.
And maybe they don’t know that they don’t know what they don’t know.
HA! The IPCC is not in the business of making recommendations!? Wow. Really. SO what exactly do they do? As far as I can tell they are attempting to create the foundation for legal framing of uber resource control, technology use and population reduction all to save the environment from the terrible humans. UN power grab to save humanity from itself is the game here. Manage war zones, manage weather related disasters, manage everything everyone does. That there is not recommendations now is it. It is totalitarian one world government power grab is what it is. Invent a problem (CAGW aka Climate Change) promote reaction (social political upheaval) provide solution (Do as we say , we know what’s good for you). That there is the IPCC program…
Let me fix the description for you. IPCC Reports: climate science (negative impacts part I), negative impacts (negative impacts part II), measures to be employed to curb said impacts (negative impacts part III).
i think what the ipcc outlines is choices and consequences in layman terms. pretty simple stuff.
not “recommendations”.
Well, it’s quite clear that Jonathan Lynn, “Head, Communications and Media Relations” of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), isn’t required to read the IPCC documents. That would cause him to knowingly mislead and falsify official propaganda.
If AGW was a used car lot… then the IPCC would be it’s top salesman. GK
NO CAGW , NO IPCC , it really is that simply .
Now you decided how this little club is going to behave.
IPCC does say something similar to “in this scenario we are doomed, in this other we are not”.
Let’s go extreme. I may say to someone: “If you don’t do this, I will kill you”. And by IPCC standards, I am not recommending him to take any action, right? I am only informing about the consequences of doing one thing or another.
Bulsh*t is not a strong enough word to describe this “we don’t recommend” stupidity.
We’re going to need an international truth and reconciliation court to sort out all of the fraud and abuse by advocacy groups and their paid leaders when the long cycle AMO downshift becomes more obvious and global warming becomes global cooling. Re-education camps for how to read long cycles in models, stats, and charts may also be needed. Humanity forgot how to do this during the AGW Dark Ages.