1. 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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  2. A guest post by Gary W. Yohe, Huffington Foundation Professor of Economics and Environmental Studies, Wesleyan University

     Tristan Edis published a piece on April 9th in which he asserted (starting with the headline that he may not have written) that Richard Tol was Bjorn Lomborg's "man behind the IPCC mutiny".  As a third person mentioned in the article, I write to highlight several errors in his portrayal of the events.  None of them should be read by anybody to indicate that I agree with Richard.  Nor should this letter be interpreted as indicating that I think that there was a "mutiny" in the IPCC.  Error number 1, there was not.

    My second objection arises from the fact that I have known Richard for decades.  Perhaps especially because we do not always agree, I can assure you that Richard is nobody's "man" except his own.  Richard is an honest scholar who approaches his work with integrity and lets the chips fall where they may.  Some do not always agree with his conclusions, but all understand that he holds himself to the highest standard of academic ethics.

    I have also known Bjorn Lomborg for some time.  While I disagree with some his conclusions and did have that public disagreement after Copenhagen Consensus 2008, you should know that we wrote a joint op-ed in the Guardian wherein we agreed that climate change was an issue and agreed to disagree on what to do about it.  I did not participate in the subsequent Consensus exercise because I was too busy, but a colleague of mine at Wesleyan did so on my recommendation.  The point is, Bjorn never tries to tell somebody what to write; and he has never, to my knowledge, selected participants in his Copenhagen Convention exercises that only agree with him.

    I hope that this helps clear what Mr. Edis turned into a muddy record.
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  3. Due to popular demand, here is a response to Mr Ward's claims, dated 2 April 2014. Mr Ward's words are in italics. Erroneous claims are in red.

    On the Journal of Economic Perspectives
    Of the 14 data listed in Table 1 and plotted in Figure 1 of the paper, at least four were wrong
    There were two errors in Table 1 and one error in Figure 1.* Mr Ward has known the correct number of errors since October 2013.


     there was only one study that showed significant positive effects from global warming
    Two estimates show net positive effects. Mr Ward was aware of this in October 2013. I am not aware of any claim to significance, which is a problematic concept in forecasting.


     he refused to give any undertaking to write to the journal to correct them
    An erratum and update is scheduled to appear in the Spring 2014 issue of the Journal of Economic Perspectives.


     On the Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control
    made four errors in his representation of the 17 data used in Figure 1 and Table 1
    There was one error.** Mr Ward has known this since October 2013.


     it was still only the 2002 paper in Professor Tol’s dataset that showed any significant net benefits
    See above.


     On IPCC WG2 AR5
    A section had been inserted on ‘Aggregate impacts’
    In fact, that section was moved from Chapter 19 to Chapter 10. As far as I am aware, Mr Ward did not raise this concern with the IPCC. He was informed no later than 2 April 2014 that the text was moved rather than added.

     three errors
    Mr Ward had spotted only one error. He has known since October 2013 that the other two alleged errors are, in fact, correct.

     only 1 of the 20 data
    2 out of 21

    still contains at least three erroneous data points
    Mr Ward does not comprehend IPCC procedures. The IPCC cannot revise history and change the Final Government Review draft. The typographical error found by Mr Ward will be corrected in the published report, that will appear in due time.


     On errata
    Given that Professor Tol seemed determined not to correct his papers
    Two errata are in the process of being published. Both errata show that the errors had a minimal and statistically insignificant effect on the quantitative results, and no effect on the qualitative insights.

    The third journal decided against an erratum. Instead, the editor invited Mr Ward to submit a formal comment. If that passes peer-review, I will be invited to write a rejoinder. As far as I know, Mr Ward has yet to submit that comment.

     Update (April 4): In an interview with the Mail on Sunday, Mr Ward admits that he indeed knew about the errata "weeks" before he claimed there were none. He now complains that he does not know which errors have been corrected. Mr Ward can find out by re-reading the emails I sent to him in October 2013.

     Update 2 (April 16): Mr Ward repeats many of the same points on April 15. He seems particularly cross that no one keeps him up to date on the progress of the two errata and the corrections. Well, both errata are in production; all genuine errors have been corrected (including the teeny tiny one found by Mr Ward), and all imaginary errors have been checked and subsequently ignored.

     *The difference is due to a typesetting error and carelessness in the checking of galley proofs.

     Update 3 (April 17): I note that Mr Ward uploaded an email by Chris Otrok. Otrok corrects Mr Ward, pointing out that there is one error only in the JEDC paper, and that an erratum is being prepared. That email is from March 17. Nonetheless, Mr Ward claimed on April 2 and April 15 that there are multiple errors. On March 25, Mr Ward claimed that errors were not being corrected, 8 days after Professor Otrok had informed him that corrections were being made.

     Similarly, Ann Norman of JEP had informed Mr Ward on March 14 that an erratum was being prepared -- 11 days before Mr Ward claimed the opposite.

     Update 4 (April 25): JEDC corrigendum published.
    **One error was identified by Mr Ward; the other three alleged errors reflect Mr Ward's lack of understanding.

    Update 5 (April 30): Many of Mr Ward's silly claims are repeated by the Guardian.

     Update 6 (May 2): JEP erratum and update published.

     Update 7 (May 9): Mr Ward does not know how to stop.

     Papers discussed
    Tol (2009), Economic effects of climate change, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
    Article has an altmetric score of 329


    Tol (2014), Erratum and update, Journal of Economic Perspectives.
    Article has an altmetric score of 135

    Tol (2013), Targets for climate policy: An overview, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.
    Article has an altmetric score of 123

    Tol (2014), Corrigendum, Journal of Economic Dynamics and Control.
    Article has an altmetric score of 20

    Arent, Tol et al. (2014), Key economic sectors and services, IPCC WG2 AR5.
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