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Page added on July 4, 2014
Data Deleted From UN Climate Report Highlight Controversies
When the United Nations’ last major climate change report was released in April, it omitted some country-specific emissions data for political reasons, a trio of new papers argue, sounding a warning bell about the global politicization of climate science.
Written by thousands of science, policy, and economics experts from around the world, the UN International Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) reports represent a synthesis of existing climate research knowledge, focusing on the evidence of a warming climate (“virtually certain”), the global impacts, and the ways we might avert its most catastrophic effects. The Summary for Policy-makers draws on the detailed technical report and offers recommendations on cutting carbon emissions and preparing for climate change.
Although the underlying technical material in the IPCC’s fifth major report was widely agreed upon and published intact, “heated negotiations among scientific authors and diplomats led to substantial deletion of figures and text from the influential ‘Summary for Policy-makers,'” writes Brad Wible, an editor at the journal Science, in the introduction to three papers published Thursday. (See “Battle Plan for Climate Change: How to Cut Greenhouse Gases.”)
Wible notes there is “some fear that this redaction of content marks an overstepping of political interests, raising questions about division of labor between scientists and policy-makers and the need for new strategies in assessing complex science.”
On the other hand, some observers have suggested that the policy summaries be even more explicitly co-produced with national governments, says Wible.
This discussion was sparked just days after the publication of the IPCC report in April, when report co-author and Harvard environmental economics professor Robert Stavins released a controversial open letter to the IPCC leadership. Stavins criticized the last-minute intervention by several governments in the approval process of the IPCC report in Berlin and called the resulting policy summary document “a summary by policy-makers, not a summary for them.”
“Over the course of the two hours of the contact group deliberations, it became clear that the only way the assembled government representatives would approve text for SPM.5.2 [the Summary for Policy-makers] was essentially to remove all ‘controversial’ text (that is, text that was uncomfortable for any one individual government), which meant deleting almost 75 percent of the text,” Stavins wrote on his blog on April 25.
Scientists vs. Diplomats
Wible points out that the stated intention of the IPCC since it was founded in 1988 has always been to “balance governmental and scientific input.”
That mandate is unlikely to change, says David Victor, one of the lead authors of the policy discussion in the April IPCC report and the head writer of one of the papers published Thursday in Science, called “Getting Serious About Categorizing Countries.”
“I think in an ideal world there would be a firmer separation between the diplomats and the scientists” when it comes to the IPCC process, says Victor, who is a professor of international relations at the University of California, San Diego.
However, Victor adds that he “can’t imagine” the national governments from around the world that participate in the IPCC process agreeing to any substantial reforms in that area.
The best that can be hoped for are small changes that streamline the report process, says Victor. “Intergovernmental bodies that require consensus are very bad at handling politically difficult topics,” he says. “I don’t see a way to fix that problem.”
Instead, the public should look more to individual governments and organizations and national climate assessments (such as the one released by the Obama administration May 6) for more concrete action on controversial topics like emissions caps and geoengineering. (See “Climate Report Provides Opportunity for Bridging Political Divide.”)
But the second paper in the Science series, “Political Implications of Data Presentation,” disagrees. Written by other authors of the last IPCC report, led by Navroz Dubash of the Centre for Policy Research in New Delhi, the paper suggests that what is needed are more and earlier discussions between scientists and policymakers in development of future reports.
“Claiming government overreach and calling for greater insulation of the process come from a misleadingly simple interpretation” that would hinder the effectiveness of IPCC reports in actually influencing policy, Dubash and co-authors write. The fact that governments must approve the policy summary gives it more weight than other technical reports, which is a “process worth preserving.”
Victor calls that argument “overly optimistic” and says he doubts earlier conversations between scientists and diplomats would have made a difference. In the 38,000 comments received and evaluated over the IPCC report’s development, almost none hinted at the battle over individual country data that erupted in Berlin just days before the document was released, he says.
When governments hold the power to approve the policy document, “they are going to use that power to avoid having anything in the summaries that is politically inconvenient,” says Victor.
IPCC co-author Charles Kolstad, a Stanford economist who was not involved with any of the papers released in Science, tells National Geographic that there is a “perception that the main product was the summary for policymakers and that it appeared to be a censored version of what we wrote.” Kolstad says it would be better if the public had a clearer distinction of the two sides of the report and says “it would be a mistake to move the policymakers away from the process.”
Kolstad adds that it was gratifying “how much the diplomats seemed to care about what was in the IPCC product” and says “remaining relevant is of paramount importance.”
Value of Individual Country Data
When the IPCC met in Berlin in April to approve the latest report, representatives from several countries objected to a section in the summary that listed emissions by nation and classified countries according to their economies, says Victor. Those objecting countries included Brazil, China, Malaysia, and Saudi Arabia, he says.
Victor and colleagues wrote in Science that growth in a country’s income was the strongest correlating factor with emissions. Developed countries continue to produce the highest emissions on a per capita basis, but most of the growth in global emissions over the past few decades has occurred in developing countries.
A chart removed from the IPCC summary but published in Science shows that much of the growth in recent greenhouse gas emissions comes from Asia, with smaller contributions from the Middle East, Africa, and Latin America. Emissions in developed countries have continued to rise, but at a much slower rate.
To Victor, the logical conclusion of this trend is that “developed countries should be doing more to address climate change, but it is also the case that it is not mathematically possible to stabilize the world’s climate unless developing countries are involved.”
If the IPCC were to classify countries by their economies, it would “set the stage for political discussions” about what each country’s responsibility might be, he says.
However, some governments worried that classification “could be disadvantageous in upcoming negotiations for a new international climate regime,” IPCC authors Ottmar Edenhofer and Jan Minx write in the third policy paper in Science, called “Mapmakers and Navigators, Facts and Values.”
Still, when all country data was stripped out of the policy summary, other useful information was lost, Victor and colleagues argue. For example, without that data it is harder to understand the impact of trade on emissions.
Reaching Consensus?
Although Dubash and colleagues suggest that the IPCC process can be improved with more collaboration between scientists and policymakers, Victor argues that the fundamental international nature of the group makes it unlikely to be able to reach consensus on controversial topics. “The IPCC is an inherently conservative body,” says Victor.
Edenhofer and Minx write that “the real challenge is how the IPCC conducts assessments and deals with entanglement of facts and values at the science-policy interface.” They suggest that future reports attempt to allow for different perspectives on policy questions and introduce analysis of how past climate policies have worked.
The IPCC has a choice, say Edenhofer and Minx. It can produce more sanitized reports that are even less relevant to policy or attempt to take on policy questions more directly, with a rational approach that acknowledges different viewpoints.
Stanford’s Kolstad says he prefers the latter, although he acknowledges that it can be challenging because “any diplomat can veto any sentence.” He adds that colleagues at Stanford and Harvard and their European counterparts are planning a workshop in February on how the IPCC might work better, in preparation for the next round of work.
Despite the most recent report’s shortcomings, “when the IPCC says something declarative, such as that humans are responsible for most of the changes to the climate we are seeing, that means there is tremendous consensus around that,” says Victor.
17 Comments on "Data Deleted From UN Climate Report Highlight Controversies"
MSN Fanboy on Fri, 4th Jul 2014 8:10 am
Really? lol
Just read Guy R.McPherson papers to understand the truth of the climatic fuck up happening now.
Warning is advised, you may not wish to hear the truth.
bobinget on Fri, 4th Jul 2014 10:43 am
“News of the Warm”
Yesterday’s East coast Cat 2 hurricane landfall was earliest
recorded since records began being kept. (1851)
“The eastern Pacific Ocean is primed for powerful hurricanes this year, as proven during the past two weeks. First, Hurricane Amanda — the first storm of the young season — exploded to high-end Category 4 status in late May. Now, just two weeks later, Hurricane Cristina, which also formed off the west coast of Mexico, rapidly intensified between June 11-12, winding up as a high-end Category 4 hurricane on the Saffir-Simpson Scale.
In the history of hurricane records for that region, there had never been two category 4 or stronger hurricanes in any season prior to July 1, according to the National Hurricane Center in Miami, Florida. Hurricane Amanda had also set another milestone when it became the strongest May hurricane on record for that ocean basin. Reliable records for this region go back to 1966”.
GregT on Fri, 4th Jul 2014 11:07 am
Allowing politicians and their lobbyists to water down the science, is a conflict of interest to all of humanity, and the future of all life on the planet.
Let the scientist do what they know best, to report on their findings, unhindered. Let the politicians do what they know best, line the pockets of their lobbyists. Let an informed public vote for the politicians that they feel have their best interests at heart.
Politics have no place in science.
Norm on Fri, 4th Jul 2014 1:38 pm
but i heard on Rush Limbaugh radio show this week, global warming is a hoax, and there are icebergs on the Great Lakes. Surely an authority like Rush Limbaugh only speaks the truth?
Davy on Fri, 4th Jul 2014 3:07 pm
Sorry to say he is a Missourian. He has a bronze statue at the Mo capital. There are some bible thumpin closed minded fundamentalist loons in Mo. Makes for interesting politics because there is as many anti Rush folks as Rush folks.
Mike in Calif. on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 2:14 am
McPherson is a crackpot even by AGW standards. He misquotes almost everything he references. On Radio Ecoshock, McPherson claimed, get this, that we can expect a global anoxic event in our lifetime (leading to to extinction, of course). Then there’s the frankly dishonest “hockey stick” which has been severally and independently condemned and yet still appears everywhere. At how many checkpoints must the original and now many models be wrong to say that they ARE wrong? Why has linear response been replaced by “tipping points” and excuses? Why are we using unvalidated models with unvalidated subcomponents (“feedback loops” et al) to suggest policy?
Sorry, the actual AGW will probably match the theoretical which was estimated a hundred years ago. An arithmetical temperature increase for a geometrical CO2 rise will give us perhaps a degree and a half for each doubling. We haven’t yet doubled the CO2 but probably will. The observed increase ~might~ agree with the theoretical if part of the temperature increase is assigned to underlying natural rise. But, then, we don’t know what the underlying natural signal is, do we?
Finally, none of this matters in the scheme of things. Nations WILL NOT stop burning fossil fuels until they CAN’T. These fuels translate directly into economic and military power and governments will not long or seriously forego their use. Short of a fusion miracle, their is no magic bullet. Fossil fuels will be burned, and burned to rarity by the end of this century in the absence of a big collapse. With a collapse, we can fairly say that coal will last several hundred years. 😉 But it will be burned at reduced rate nonetheless.
Secondly, whichever projection is right, there’s not a damn thing you can do about it except look out for you and your tribe. Some warming is highly probably; a lot of warming possible. But driving less, carbon credits, quotas (which will be ignored) and activism will all have minuscule if not negligible effect. The natural system and its inertia, the human system and its inertia are juggernauts.
GregT on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 2:52 am
McPherson has the distinction of Professor Emeritus of Natural Resources, and Evolutionary Biology. Somehow, I would think that he is a little bit more aware of what he is talking about, than your average Joe, Mike.
Sadly, he has very good reasons to believe what he does, and he has put his money where his mouth is, so to speak.
Also, those hockey stick shaped graphs are everywhere, all around us. That is precisely the nature of the exponential function. And yes, none of this really matters if we keep burning fossil fuels, because we will most assuredly cause our own extinction.
Some warming is not probable, it has already occurred, and will continue to rise for several decades even if we stop now. A lot of warming is already baked into the cake, and we are not looking at the end of the century here, to see the impacts. The next 20 years will already see exponentially increasing climatic instability.
If we keep burning fossil fuels, coal could last for hundreds of millions of years, but we as a species, will not.
GregT on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 2:59 am
Oh, and also, we are not using tipping points to ‘suggest policy’. The IPCC reports do not include positive feedback mechanisms. The Inter’Governmental’ editors left them out.
Mike in Calif. on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 4:06 am
Well, GregT, I’m sure you’re well-intentioned, but most of what you say makes no sense.
1) The effects of increased CO2 in the atmosphere is arithmetic not “exponential.”
2) I didn’t dispute recent (100 years) temperature rise, but only its anthropogenic component.
3) The dismal state of modern academia being what it is, I don’t care if McPherson is the Science Adviser to God himself. Stupid is as stupid says. And McPherson says a lot of stupid things. A global anoxic event is thermodynamically ~impossible~ unless Prophet McPherson can raise Arctic Ocean temperature by at least 30F degrees in 20 years!
4) I don’t think IPCC “editors” write computer models. All of the 20+ models projecting high order plots use feedback loops. The simple reason being that 6C projections cannot be achieve without them.
J-Gav on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 6:37 am
Just a reminder: CO2 is not the only GHG.
Methane might turn out to be a more potent threat as recent studies have shown that Arctic sea floor and Siberian tundra “burps” are putting out considerably more of the stuff than previously thought.
Davy on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 7:42 am
Mike/Greg/Gav, all good points. I not being an expert cannot chastise anyone but I will say descent will change the parameters and this is coming relatively soon in relation to climate timeframes. Knowing what I understand about energy and food we could have 9 years or less (sooner?) until this complex system implodes in a complex fashion meaning who the F*ck knows into what. Yet, that “what” surely will be less with less. The complexity will not be manageable. Most vital industrial resources have been mined out in relation to what a less complex society will be able to produce. This means in relation to FF’s much coal/oil too deep. Gas too complex to manage. The whole industrial process to make useable fuels out of FF’s will be greatly diminished. Vital metals for example are so energy intensive today because of low purity they will become difficult to smelt. Food production will nose dive without industrial inputs of all kinds from metals to fossil fuels then you have the all-important economics of distribution and trade collapsing. I see a large quick drop in population with a food crisis brought on by a financial crisis (distribution/capex) and liquid fuel crisis (inputs/distribution). These two circumstances go hand in hand and are directly related and both are vital. “How far” is too far to predict. I will say Mike has a point with a modest rise considering the possibilities also what is the natural signal going on currently. Greg and Gav may be right considering this may be out of control already. This whole methane feedback issue has been shown to lead to extinctions in past climate history. I do know this what we are seeing out of academia and the official bodies does not combine the coming food/liquid fuel crisis coming with its corresponding systematic collapse potentials and population losses. They seem to want to model around BAU and many of us know BAU is on life support.
GregT on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 10:20 am
Mike,
1) The increase in greenhouse gasses in the environment, has been exponential over time. There is believed to be about a 40 year lag between accumulations, and temperature rise. We are seeing the effects from our emissions in the 70s, right now.
2) You are welcome to dispute the anthropogenic component all you like. Our scientific communities do not. The debate is over, AGW is reality.
3) ?? McPherson is a biologist. Where does oxygen come from? Plants and phytoplankton. So far in British Columbia alone, 50 million hectares of forests have died from warming, due to migrations of beetles. The Arctic is warming faster than anywhere else on the planet, 7 degrees C so far, the last time I checked, with temperature anomalies in the 20s. As the Arctic ice continues to melt, temperature rise accelerates. Some scientists believe 2015 will see a summer free of sea ice. Consensus is that it will occur within the next 5 years.
4) Positive feedback mechanisms are not used in the IPCC models. Runaway warming is mentioned, but it is not known how far it could go. Arctic methane alone is believed to be capable of raising global mean temperatures by 20 C or more. That is the reason for a 2 degree max. Two degrees is accepted to be the point where positive feed backs will most assuredly kick in. Right now, if we continue with BAU, we are headed for 6 degrees, with no feedbacks factored in.
steve on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 10:28 am
I really feel like Peak Oil is the major threat to us right now and will “do us in”…it is hard to worry about too much! Hell there could be a virus that comes from pigs that wipes us all out….but we are going to have to burn fossil fuels up until the end…I am going to a climate change talk next week and I want to stand up and tell people that the real threat we are facing is p.o but I realize that people get attached to one narrative at a time…be it Obama is ruining the country…or George Bush or solar will save us..so I am not sure I should stand up and say anything or not…
GregT on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 10:54 am
Steve,
We have a predicament. If we stop burning all fossil fuels, the results will be the end of modern industrial society, and a large die off of our species. If we keep burning them, the results will be the end of modern industrial society at a later date, and an even greater die off of our species, and all other species on the planet. If we somehow manage to burn all of the remaining fossil fuels, global mass extinction.
steve on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 11:33 am
GregT,,,,I hear ya! But two things come to my mind Jevons paradox and the Fermi Paradox
GregT on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 1:46 pm
Steve,
Jevon’s paradox basically tells us that efficiencies will not solve our predicament, they will only make it worse.
Fermi’s paradox? Maybe there will be alien, or divine intervention. That would be a good thing. At this point in time, it would certainly appear to be the only hope we have at averting global catastrophe. As a species, we are not capable of managing ourselves, let alone the planet Earth.
steve on Sat, 5th Jul 2014 3:35 pm
Oh sorry I did not mean those two as solutions.or panacea..I meant them as outcomes of our trajectory…..and Fermi’s paradox meaning we will not make it much farther..through the bottleneck/…