The current worldwide concern with climate change, and what to do about it, was not triggered by any significant evidence of the earth’s climate having exceeded the bounds of its normal natural variability. It resulted, rather, from the increasingly confident assertions of climate scientists through the 1970s and 80s that the continuing human-induced build-up of carbon dioxide and other ‘greenhouse’ gases in the atmosphere would eventually lead to irreversible global warming and probably, also, to other significant long-term changes of global and regional weather and climate.
Some very strident statements about the threat of greenhouse warming from a small group of climate scientists and policymakers who met in Villach, Austria, in 1985 triggered such strong debate in the climate community that the 1987 World Meteorological Congress felt it necessary to establish a more broadly-based mechanism to provide governments with a comprehensive, expert, objective assessment of the contemporary state of understanding of the science of climate change. That mechanism was to become the joint WMO (World Meteorological Organization)-UNEP (United Nations Environment Programme) Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which was formally established in 1988 and which, through its First (1990), Second (1999) and Third (2001) Assessment Reports, has provided the scientific basis for the 1992 Framework Convention on Climate Change and most of the subsequent national and international policy development on the greenhouse issue.
The IPCC was very carefully designed to draw on the full spectrum of expert knowledge and opinion and to ensure scientific objectivity and freedom from political influence on the assessment process, in order for all stakeholders to be assured that its advice would be the best that the international scientific community could provide.
It has been generally accepted by governments as the authoritative source of policy-relevant, but policy-neutral, advice on essentially all aspects of the climate change issue but its operation has been widely criticised by many of those who do not like its findings, and its findings have been widely misrepresented and misused by both greenhouse zealots and greenhouse sceptics in the promotion of their respective agendas.
For those who believe, as I do, that the role of scientists in public policy formation on complex and controversial issues such as climate change is to present the science objectively to inform the policy process, rather than to present it selectively in order to help achieve their own preferred outcomes, the daily media and popular scientific literature provide distressingly frequent examples of the violence that can be done to sound science and the credibility of the IPCC assessments by even subtle misrepresentation of its findings and modus operandi.
Two particularly notable examples are Tim Flannery’s recent book The Weather Makers on the history and future impact of climate change which, while widely acclaimed as scientific and authoritative, considerably overstates the science and misrepresents the IPCC in order to promote a view of impending climate catastrophe far worse than anything envisioned in the IPCC assessments; and Bill Kininmonth’s book Climate Change: a Natural Hazard which, also under the guise of sound science, sets out to discredit the IPCC assessment process and much of what is already well understood about the mechanisms of human-induced climate change in order to make his entirely valid and important point that the world already faces a major challenge in coping with the future natural variability of climate.
It would greatly facilitate the informed use of relevant science in greenhouse policy development, and certainly reduce the massive public and political confusion on the nature and seriousness of the threat of human-induced climate change, if the IPCC assessment process were better understood by those who publicly criticise it and if its reports were more carefully read and more accurately quoted by those who invoke its findings in support of their respective policy agendas.
To this end, it may be worth restating a few important points about the IPCC and how it works:
- the IPCC is not a particular group of people with an agenda – it is a scientific assessment process aimed at ensuring an authoritative, agenda-free evaluation of the contemporary international state of knowledge on the different aspects of the climate change issue;
- the IPCC assessment process is both governmental and scientific: the role of the governments is to ensure that the scientific assessment is carried out by the best experts in the world and that they are protected from policy or political influence on their findings; the role of the scientists is to produce the most up-to-date, informed, objective statement of the state of knowledge through the rigorous peer-review methods of science;
- the task of the Lead Authors of IPCC reports is to provide an authoritative summary of the state of knowledge as it emerges from the published peer-reviewed literature, highlighting both the areas of consensus in the literature and the areas of disagreement and uncertainty. Their task is not to present their own views or the results of their own research;
- the Lead Authors’ assessments (which become the chapters of the full reports) are subject to an extremely comprehensive multi-stage peer and government review process in which every comment of every reviewer and every critic must be properly considered – and certified to have been properly considered by independent Review Editors who are themselves eminent experts in the subject matter of the chapter concerned; and
- contrary to frequent misrepresentation of the IPCC process, the production of SPMs (Summaries for Policy Makers) on the basis of the full reports does not involve the imposition of a political overlay on the Lead Author-produced scientific assessments. The draft SPMs are prepared by the scientists and reviewed and approved on a line-by-line basis by intergovernmental sessions of the IPCC or its working groups, usually with a hundred or more government delegations participating, through a rigorous process in which any proposed changes to the text must be first agreed by the Lead Authors as scientifically accurate summaries of their full report.
The IPCC assessment mechanism is an exhaustive and exhausting process and the IPCC Assessment Reports are ponderous documents. But, in my observation over 15 years of participation in every session of the Panel bar one and most of its Working Group sessions up to the early stages of its Fourth Assessment Report, the thoroughness, comprehensiveness and objectivity of the IPCC assessments have far exceeded any other scientific assessment process I have been involved in or aware of.
In many respects, the IPCC’s exhaustiveness is one of its greatest strengths. While the fact that delegations and Lead Authors have, on occasions, debated for hours over a single word or a single sentence has sometimes been used as a basis for ridicule of ‘consensus science’, it is rather, in my view, a guarantee that every word in the SPMs has been chosen with great care to reflect the true state of the science as accurately and precisely as available language will allow.
The IPCC is often represented as captive to environmental, business or political interests by those who do not like its findings and wish to discredit its reports. Certainly, there have been hundreds of occasions on which environmental and business lobbyists and individual governments at IPCC sessions have sought to influence the wording of SPMs in ways that would add support to their own policy agendas on greenhouse.
Some governments, such as Saudi Arabia, have been extremely sophisticated in seeking to advance their policy agendas through scientific arguments while others, such as the US (and regrettably also, on a few occasions, Australia) have been fairly upfront in attempting to use the scientific consensus-forming mechanisms of the IPCC as a political negotiation forum. But there have always been three countervailing influences which, in my observation, have prevented this happening and have ensured the scientific integrity, thus far, of the IPCC reports:
- the first has been the role of successive IPCC Chairmen and Working Group Co-chairs who have all been meticulous in ensuring that only scientific arguments could be taken into account, and have successfully headed off all attempts by government delegations to achieve consensus on the basis of political considerations;
- the second has been the role of the vast majority of delegations who remain committed to ensuring the scientific integrity and objectivity of the IPCC and who have thus not been willing to join in consensus on text which was seen to be politically, rather than scientifically, based; and
- the third has been the role of the Lead Authors participating in intergovernmental sessions of the IPCC who have all been extremely conscious that their own credibility as Lead Authors and scientists would be based on the perceived scientific integrity of the final reports.
In summary, I regard the IPCC as an extremely demanding, but highly effective, process that has provided the world, for the past 15 years, with the best possible summary assessments of the contemporary state of the science of climate change. Most of the published criticism of the IPCC process has been ill-informed, misleading or factually wrong.
Until now, at least, the IPCC reports, carefully read and accurately interpreted, have provided the most
reliable information that the totality of climate science can produce on the issues associated with greenhouse warming and climate change. But, unfortunately, much of what has been said and written in support of greenhouse policy agendas (pro and con!) on the basis of the IPCC reports has involved selective use and/or subtle misrepresentation of the IPCC findings in ways which, in my view, represent an unfortunate misuse of the science.
I would like to urge those who quote or criticise the IPCC reports to exercise the same care and precision in the use of language that has been employed in their preparation.
Complete information on the IPCC and its assessment reports is available on the IPCC Website www.ipcc.ch. Further elaboration of some of the author’s views on the role of the IPCC can be found in The IPCC Third Assessment Report on the Scientific Basis of Climate Change, Australian Journal of Environmental Management Vol 8, September 2001, pp169-185. The Academy’s 2002 assessment of the findings of the IPCC’s Third Assessment Report (2001) on climate change science is available in Focus 124 and the most recent ATSE Policy Statement on Climate Change can be found in Focus 132 (May/June 2004).
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