All of which brings me to my topic for today's blog: The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, or IPCC for short. Sanctioned by the UN, the IPCC releases it's assessment reports roughly every 5 years. The last one was in 2007 (AR4) and the next one will be later this year. Report is a bit of a understatement though; what this bureaucratic monster actually produced in 2007 was a series of three books each one easily capable of bludgeoning a guinea pig to death. Oh and a synthesis report, which could probably manage, ohhhhhh i Don't know, maybe a baby duckling.* All joking aside, to summarize the scientific knowledge, create an impact assessment and a mitigation plan for climate change is a huge achievement, and one for which the IPCC won the Nobel Peace Prize (along with Al Gore, but we'll leave that to one side for the moment).
The sheer scope of AR4 (around 800 authors), referencing the work of thousands of scientists and researchers, makes it pretty unique. For a start, it draws a line in the sand by documenting thoroughly the state of current knowledge. The whole point is to summarize exactly what we did and didn't know about climate change in 2007, from which policy makers should be making decisions. This likelihood scale was provided to make probabilities easier to deal with. This is a pretty massive thing for scientists, who generally hate having to give a definitive answer to anything. Or having to work together.
Of course, the problem with getting thousands of contributors to document literally everything we think is relevant to the climate change debate is that some things will inevitably be wrong. Here's a gloating article from the Telegraph newspaper in the UK listing a few, the most famous of which was the overestimation of glacial ice loss in the Himalayas. This mistake has no impact on the global temperature records or predictions in AR4, but hey, if they made a mistake about this what else are they wrong about? That was the implication anyway, which makes me wonder why anyone should bother with the telegraph given the apology they had to make to Dr Pachauri, chairperson of the IPCC, following an inaccurate article about his business interests. Not exactly a perfect track record then.
Of the accusations against the IPCC, the only one of serious concern is the use of "grey" literature, i.e. non peer-reviewed documents. The UN addressed this problem in 2011, and you can read what they decided to do about it here. The fact that the IPCC took on board this criticism and acted upon it was reported in New Scientist and pretty much nowhere else as far as I can find.
To mock a hugely ambitious project for its failings is perfectly human; the Hubble telescope was famously disregarded as folly when we first found out the mirror was 2.2 micrometers too flat. Of course, NASA fixed the problem and it became a huge triumph. To get to my point, I'm not saying errors in the IPCC shouldn't be researched and corrected, because it's important to get as accurate predictions of climatic change as we possibly can. However, to use these mistakes to try and undermine the entire scientific consensus while not taking into account the overall scale of the IPCC or the honest attempts made to address these issues is intellectually dishonest.
So here's to the IPCC, for attempting the impossible. Word of advice for AR5 though; try throwing in a few animal metaphors, because the prose in the last one was as dry as a Gila Monster's armpit.
*Results not confirmed by experiment.
*Results not confirmed by experiment.
