THE VINE JANUARY 31, 2010
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Over at Dot Earth, Andy Revkin has a smart story about the growing pressure to change how the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) operates, especially after the recent scandal over glaciers. (In the IPCC's 2007 report, there was a line about how glaciers in the Himalayas could vanish by 2035; it turns out that line had zero basis in peer-reviewed science, yet still got past reviewers.) This is a worthy topic: The IPCC has done terrific work over the years, and its reports are considered the best summaries of the state of knowledge about climate change, but they're not perfect and could stand to be improved.
For one, the safeguards obviously need to be strengthened. That glacier line should've never made it through the review process. Same thing, it seems, goes for this bit about rainforests. Better safeguards are especially crucial for the sections on potential impacts of global warming. This is an area of keen interest, but it also involves some of the murkiest research and can span multiple disciplines—sometimes even social science. (By contrast, the IPCC's Working Group 1 report, which deals with the physical basis for climate change—how we know that greenhouse gases are warming the planet, etc.—is more straightforward and gets the heaviest scrutiny from the physical-science community.)
Another criticism of the IPCC, raised by UC San Diego's David Victor, is that the panel is overly cautious and doesn't deal with outliers very well. Case in point: The IPCC's 2007 report projected that, at most, sea levels would rise 26 to 59 centimeters by 2100. Except the problem was the IPCC explicitly left out the full range of potential effects from melting ice sheets in Antarctica and Greenland, because that ice-sheet behavior can be difficult to model. Leaving out those sorts of uncertainties may make for a stronger "consensus," but it can also give a misleading picture of the risks we're actually facing. Since the 2007 report, plenty of research has suggested (e.g., 1, 2, 3) that the IPCC seriously low-balled its sea-level prediction.
Beyond that, there's another critique of the IPCC that Revkin doesn't mention, but which seems important. The IPCC moves very slowly, and it's usually a few steps behind the leading edge of climate research. The panel stops taking scientific input a year or two before the report comes out, and the lag often shows: Apart from sea levels and ice sheets, the 2007 IPCC reports badly underestimated the rate at which greenhouse gases were rising, because it didn't incorporate recent rapid growth in countries like China and India. So the emissions scenarios were obsolete almost as soon as they were published.
Looking ahead, there's another dilemma: The next IPCC reports won't be out until 2013 and 2014, even though a number of major policy decisions on greenhouse gases will likely need to be made before then. Now, it's understandable why the IPCC takes so long to assemble its big reports, since it needs to do a careful review of all the relevant science, survey a bunch of complex and often heated debates, and put everything in context. Plus, the scientists working on the IPCC are volunteering their time, and its a lot of work and a diversion from their own research. Still, the sluggish pace is out of sync with both the needs of policymakers and the rapidly advancing state of climate science.
(Flickr photo credit: kimberlyfaye)
5 comments
I think all of these weaknesses are correctly identified. But what would you propose to do about it? Perhaps the key line is in your last paragraph: "the scientists working on the IPCC are volunteering their time, and its a lot of work and a diversion from their own research." But I really don't see any easy solutions. The cutoff date for peer-reviewed research is when it is so that there is enough time to edit and re-check the text and references over and over again, and to work out inconsistencies and repetitions in initial drafts, which are inevitable when text from many authors is being combined. The few errors that snuck through (the Himalayan glacier factoids, for example), would call for a LONGER period of review rather than a shorter period. The lowballing of sea level rise will be corrected the next time around, I think. I suspect that there was a judgement call on a very close decision as far as how to handle that issue. It is certainly true that the uncertainty in the effects of glacier dynamics is very large, but I have never heard anyone suggest that these effects in the future might *slow down* sea level rise, so the uncertainty was essentially one-sided (the effect could be small, near zero, or very large, with even more rapid sea level rise, but it is going to increase sea level rise compared to what you would get without it). I think you are also being quite optimistic about the policymakers if you think that more prompt updates from the IPCC would really make a difference. It seems likely to me that serious action will not be taken until problems are much more acute, because there is a vocal (and well-funded) minority claiming that the problems don't exist, because this claims fits easily into the ideology of a significant chunk of people, and most of all because any real solution requires sacrifice today so that a future problem is avoided (or lessened), which is simply very hard to sell even in the absence of an active disinformation campaign.
- JEFF FREY
January 31, 2010 at 9:15pm
Those are very good points and I'm not sure of all the answers. On some level, yes, I'd like to see annual IPCC reports on climate science—if only because they could help inform the broader debate and clear up confusions. Everyone's in a tizzy right now, for instance, about that Solomon paper on stratospheric water vapor, but 99% of the people commenting on the paper know absolutely nothing about how it fits into the broader framework of what scientists know about how the climate system works. Even a lot of good reporters are confused. Annual IPCC reports updating laypeople on the state of knowledge could hopefully give people a better stance of where things stand, and serve as an antidote to everyone forming wild conclusions about the latest headline/study. But you're absolutely right that I'm probably over-optimistic about this. The 2007 IPCC report should have, I think, put to rest a lot of the doubts about the climate risks we face and made a compelling case for action. But it didn't. There will always be doubters and heel-draggers, and more frequent IPCC reports probably won't change that. Plus, of course, there are the daunting logistical issues—how do you convince scientists to volunteer even more of their time for annual reports? And how do you get more frequent reports without increasing the risk of sloppy errors like the glacier bit? I'm honestly not sure.
- Bradford Plumer
February 1, 2010 at 12:35pm
Thinking about it more, another possibility is for the IPCC to do more supplemental reports on less-covered topics of interest to policymakers. Some of the best IPCC material has been on these narrow topics—like the report on aviation emissions in the 1999 report. Why not a special report on geoengineering? Or soot/black carbon? Or HFCs? These, actually, might even be more useful than frequent updates on the state of climate science.
- Bradford Plumer
February 1, 2010 at 12:37pm
I just found commentary about the Solomon paper last night. Interesting, but I am not sure what to make of it. Apparently Solomon isn't quite sure either -- not sure about the mechanism for this, and therefore not sure whether it is a newly recognized driver of climate variations or a reaction (there are plenty of things that reflect internal variability, and need to be averaged out over time). I have found this site to be generally good. A lot less traffic in comments than RealClimate, for example, but a lot of signal relative to the noise. http://www.skepticalscience.com/role-of-stratospheric-water-vapor-in-global-warming.html I'm not sure how frequently you can do reports before it starts to become just blogosphere-like noise. There has to be some averaging time so that new findings like the Solomon paper can be absorbed and tested out. Your idea of more topical reports might work, if you could get enough volunteers to do the darned things.
- JEFF FREY
February 3, 2010 at 2:08am
Sorry, Brad, TNR online turned the link to the "Skeptical Science" blog into the text "view full comment". There was probably some way I could have pasted that in to make it more clear -- I suppose.
- JEFF FREY
February 3, 2010 at 2:10am