In September 2013, I stepped down from the team that
prepared the draft of the Summary for Policy Makers to the Fifth Assessment
Report (AR5) of Working Group II of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate
Change (IPCC). This attracted worldwide media attention in April 2014.
Regrettably, the story of AR5 became the story of a man.
I have been involved with the IPCC since 1994, fulfilling a
variety of roles in all three working groups. After the debacle of AR4 – where
the Himalayan glacier melt really was the least of the errors – I had
criticized the IPCC for faulty quality control. Noblesse oblige – I am the 20th most-cited climate scholar in the world – so I volunteered for AR5.
The Irish government put my name forward only to withdraw
its financial commitment when I was indeed elected. The necessary funding could
have easily been freed up if the Irish delegation to the international climate
negotiations and the IPCC would trim its luxurious travel arrangements.
As a Convening Lead Author of one of the chapters, I was
automatically on the team to draft the Summary for Policy Makers (SPM). AR5 is
a literature review of 2,600 pages long. It assesses a large body of scholarly
publication. In some places, the chapters are so condensed that there are a few
words per article in the learned literature. The SPM then distills the key
messages into 44 pages – but everyone knows that policy and media will only
pick up a few sentences. This leads to a contest between chapters – my impact is worst, so I will get the headlines.
In the earlier drafts of the SPM, there was a key message
that was new, snappy and relevant: Many of the more worrying impacts of climate
change really are symptoms of mismanagement and underdevelopment.
This message does not support the political agenda for
greenhouse gas emission reduction. Later drafts put more and more emphasis on
the reasons for concern about climate change, a concept I had helped to develop
for AR3. Raising the alarm about climate change has been tried before, many
times in fact, but it has not had an appreciable effect on greenhouse gas
emissions.
I reckoned that putting my name on such a document would not
be credible – my opinions are well-known – and I withdrew.
The SPM, drafted by the scholars of the IPCC, is rewritten
by delegates of the governments of the world, in this case in a week-long session in Yokohama. Some of these delegates are scholars, others are not. The
Irish delegate, for instance, thinks that unmitigated climate change would put
us on a highway to hell, referring, I believe, to an AC/DC song rather than a
learned paper.
Other delegations have a political agenda too. The
international climate negotiations of 2013 in Warsaw concluded that poor
countries might be entitled to compensation for the impacts of climate change.
It stands to reason that the IPCC would be asked to assess the size of those
impacts and hence the compensation package. This led to an undignified bidding
war among delegations – my country is more vulnerable than yours – that
descended into farce when landlocked countries vigorously protested that they
too would suffer from sea level rise.
Many countries send a single person delegation. Some
countries can afford to send many delegates. They work in shifts, exhausting
the other delegations with endless discussions about trivia, so that all
important decisions are made in the final night with only a few delegations
left standing. The IPCC authors, who technically have the right to veto text
that contradicts their chapter, suffer from tiredness too.
This shows. The SPM omits that better cultivars and improved
irrigation increase crop yields. It shows the impact of sea level rise on the
most vulnerable country, but does not mention the average. It emphasize the
impacts of increased heat stress but downplays reduced cold stress. It warns
about poverty traps, violent conflict and mass migration without much support
in the literature. The media, of course, exaggerated further.
Alarmism feeds polarization. Climate zealots want to burn
heretics of global warming on a stick. Others only see incompetence and
conspiracy in climate research, and nepotism in climate policy. A polarized
debate is not conducive to enlightened policy in an area as complex as climate
change – although we only need a carbon tax, and a carbon tax only, that applies
to all emissions and gradually and predictably rises over time. The IPCC missed
an opportunity to restore itself as a sober authority, accepted (perhaps only
grudgingly) by most.
The IPCC does not guard itself against selection bias and group think. Academics who worry about climate change are more likely
to publish about it, and more likely to get into the IPCC. Groups of
like-minded people reinforce their beliefs. The environment agencies that
comment on the draft IPCC report will not argue that their department is
obsolete. The IPCC should therefore be taken out of the hands of the climate
bureaucracy and transferred to the academic authorities.
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