Required viewing: Johan Rockström of the Stockholm Resilience Centre talking at TEDGlobal 2010 about the “quadruple squeeze” we’re putting on the planet through overpopulation, climate change, ecosystem loss and the problem of surprises — tipping points in the system. Rockström was lead author on last year’s Nature paper on planetary boundaries and is an interesting and compelling presenter. Bottom line? We face a huge challenge, but there are ways we can fix the problem… [Hat-tip to Resilience Science]
Category: Climate science
IPCC report: done well, could do better
The InterAcademy Council report on the IPCC — Climate Change Assessments: Review of the Processes and Procedures of the IPCC — released yesterday, calls for “fundamental reforms” to the IPCC’s management structure and review processes. Climate Central provides a useful summary of the key findings:
- The IPCC should create an Executive Committee to run the organization in between major conferences.
- Rather than have the IPCC director serve for two six-year terms, a new director should be appointed for each major assessment report (there have been four so far). Since the IPCC is well into the fifth assessment, it isn’t clear whether Dr. Pachauri will step down (he’s evidently said that any decision will have to wait for the next IPCC meeting, in Korea in October).
- The reviewers who decide what makes it into the final report and what doesn’t should work harder to address comments from authors, and to let dissenting views be reflected more fully in the finished product.
- Statements about certainties and uncertainties about climate science need to be more explicit, need to be based on a more uniform set of criteria, and need to be clearer about how they were calculated.
- The IPCC in general needs to be more open and transparent about how it goes about its business.
- The IPCC needs to improve the way it deals with so-called “grey literature”– that is, non-peer-reviewed reports that contain valuable information, but which haven’t already been subjected to strict scientific scrutiny.
Professor Martin Manning, Director of the Climate Change Research Institute at Victoria University of Wellington told the Science Media Centre that he welcomed the report:
The IAC has run a detailed review of the process used by the IPCC for assessing scientific understanding and this has produced a number of useful comments that I think most climate scientists will agree with. Their report accepts that scientific understanding of climate change is developing rapidly and this means that the process for assessing it for policymakers needs to become more dynamic.
More reaction: Roger Harrabin at the BBC, Guardian, New Scientist, plus the UN webcast of the press conference is here.
My take? It would be a miracle if a 22 year old organisation with minimal full-time staff that has seen its raison d’être move up to the top of the list of global priorities couldn’t be improved. The suggestions look sensible, and if they help to defuse the continuing attacks from the usual suspects, so much the better.
Questionnaire
The Cognitive Science Lab at the University of Western Australia has put together an internet survey to test people’s attitudes to science. Prof Stephan Lewandowsky describes it thus: “the rationale behind the survey is to draw linkages between attitudes to climate science and other scientific propositions (eg HIV/AIDS) and to look at what skepticism might mean (in terms of endorsing a variety of propositions made in the media)”. He’s particularly interested in the views of people who follow science blogs, so please go along and give it a try. Anonymity assured, and the results will find their way into the literature eventually.
[Rutles, if only for the lyrics…]
Report clears IPCC head Pachauri, UK paper apologises
Back in March I posted on IPCC Chairman Rajendra Pachauri’s stout defence of the IPCC report against the attacks to which it was being subjected by hysterical denialism. But he has also had to defend himself against accusations in an article by Christopher Booker and Richard North in the Sunday Telegraphin December which claimed that the UN climate chief was “making a fortune from his links with ‘carbon trading’ companies” and that payments from his work for other organisations “must run into millions of dollars”.
KPMG was engaged by The Energy and Resources Institute (TERI), the non-profit organisation Pachauri heads, to conduct an independent review of personal financial records of Dr Pachauri and other records of TERI to confirm if there is any evidence that suggests that Dr Pachauri misused his position for personal benefit as alleged.
The KPMG report has now been made public. The Guardian reports:
“The KPMG audit, completed in March, showed the allegation that Pachauri had made millions of dollars could not be further from the truth. In addition to his annual salary of £45,000, the auditors found that in the period 1 April 2008 – 31 December 2009, Pachauri received 20,000 rupees (£278) from two national power commissions in India, on which he serves as director; 35,880 rupees (£498) for articles and lectures; and a maximum of 100,000 rupees (£1,389) in the form of royalties from his books and awards.
“Any money paid as a result of work that Pachauri had done for other organisations went to TERI. The accounts also show that Pachauri also donated to the institute a lifetime achievement award from the Environment Partnership Summit – a 200,000 rupee prize he would have been entitled to keep.”
The Sunday Telegraph has removed the article from its website and apologised, hardly handsomely but apparently to avoid libel proceedings:
“[The article] was not intended to suggest that Dr Pachauri was corrupt or abusing his position as head of the IPCC and we accept KPMG found Dr Pachauri had not made ‘millions of dollars’ in recent years. We apologise to Dr Pachauri for any embarrassment caused.”
George Monbiot has made trenchant comment.
“Has anyone been as badly maligned as Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change ?
“…The story immediately travelled around the world. It was reproduced on hundreds of blogs. The allegations it contained were widely aired in the media and generally believed. For a while, no discussion of climate change or the IPCC appeared complete without reference to Pachauri’s ‘dodgy’ business dealings and alleged conflicts of interest.
“There was just one problem: the story was untrue.
“It’s not just that Pachauri hadn’t been profiting from the help he has given to charities, businesses and institutions, his accounts show that he is scrupulous to the point of self-denial.”
The Sunday Telegraph article also complained that we don’t know “how much we all pay him” as chairman of the IPCC. The answer, as Monbiot reports, is nothing. This was information that the journalists could easily have obtained but driven by their intention to malign preferred not to.
This won’t be the end of the matter for denialists of course. North on his blog puts the apology down to the paper’s need to avoid libel proceedings from an “unethical law firm” and continues undaunted:
“If you wish to believe that means Pachauri didn’t make millions of dollars, that is your affair. But the crucial thing is that the paper has not apologised for accusing Pachauri of making millions of dollars. That accusation stands uncorrected. The paper simply accepts that KPMG has a claim in this respect.”
Monbiot expects that the smear campaign will continue, and become ever more lurid as new charges are invented.
“The best we can do is to set out the facts and appeal to whatever decency the people spreading these lies might have, and ask them to consider the impact of what they have done to an innocent man. Will it work? I wouldn’t bet on it. As we have seen in the United States, where some people (often the same people) continue to insist that Barack Obama is a Muslim and was born abroad, certain views are impervious to evidence.”
If we need reminding, denialism will stop at nothing in its campaign to denigrate the science of climate change. That is what the attacks on Pachauri are about. He is chairman of the IPCC. Portray him as dishonest and hope thereby to spread doubt about the IPCC reports. It is determination to suppress the science which informs the attacks on him and on the scientists who have been falsely accused of various malpractices.
Keep right on to the end of the road
When one spends a good deal of time following what scientists working on climate change are saying, it’s hard to understand how the community at large and politicians in particular can appear so unaffected by the prospect ahead if we don’t radically reduce our greenhouse gas emissions. The only conclusion is that they haven’t yet understood the full reality of the science.
James Hansen is notably one scientist who has been much exercised by this fact. He and his co-writers offer some reflections on the communication of the status of global warming to the public in a summary discussion at the end of their revised paper Global Surface Temperature Change, which has been accepted for publication in Reviews of Geophysics. The comments on communication are carefully characterised as opinion and differentiated from the primary scientific contribution of the paper. But it is entirely understandable that scientists should be exercised about why there appears to be so much difficulty having a subject of such “surpassing importance” communicated clearly to the public.
The paper notes first that weather variability hampers lay people’s perceptions, a difficulty which can best be addressed by drawing attention to the changes in frequency and magnitude of changes from the norm apparent on decadal time scales as warming increases.
The writers then remark the media’s difficulties in framing long-term problems as news, the preference for sensationalism, the generally low level of familiarity with basic science, and the preference for ‘balance’ in every story.
The politicisation of reporting of global warming compounds these difficulties. The paper acknowledges that politicisation is perhaps inevitable given the economic and social implications of altering the course of human-made climate change. Alleviating it is made more difficult by attacks on the character and credibility of scientists, which appear to have been effective in causing many in the public to doubt the reality or seriousness of climate change.
What can scientists do about this? Keep on keeping on:
“…the best hope may be repeated clear description of the science and passage of sufficient time to confirm validity of the description.”
Hansen acknowledges the danger is that while we wait for this to happen the climate system could pass tipping points that cause major climate changes to proceed largely out of humanity’s control.
“Yet continuation of careful scientific description of ongoing climate change seems to be essential for the sake of minimizing the degree of future climate change, even while other ways are sought to draw attention to the dangers of continued greenhouse gas increases.”
The paper, these reflections apart, continues precisely such careful scientific description, updating and discussing the Goddard Institute’s analysis of global surface change and showing that contrary to popular misconception the rate of warming has not declined.
“Global warming on decadal time scales is continuing without letup… we conclude that there has been no reduction in the global warming trend of 0.15-0.20°C/decade that began in the late 1970s.”
The Australian Academy of Science last week produced a worthy effort to communicate the science with the publication of Climate Change: Questions and Answers (web, pdf). It is a lucid account for the lay reader of the central features of climate science as currently understood by its practitioners. In his foreword the President of the Academy, Kurt Lambeck, points to some of the complexities which beset the communication of climate science. It is at the intersection of a number of science disciplines and sub-disciplines.
“It is at this intersection of the disciplines where uncertainty can and will arise, both because of the yet poorly understood feedbacks between the different components of the climate system and because of the difficulty of bringing these components together into a single descriptive and predictive model.”
Equal complexities may be evident in many other areas of experimental science, but they bear special weight in climate:
“What makes climate change different is that the consequences are not only potentially global and serious but also that they occur over long time scales (decades to centuries) so that actions need to be contemplated before full understanding is achieved.”
The Academy has produced the document to try to aid public understanding and to tread a path through the often contradictory public commentary on the science. Lambeck emphasises that it is not intended as a formulation of a public response, but as “an attempt to improve the public understanding of the science upon which any policy response should be constructed.”
The document is a model of clarity in its explanations of the science and restrained in its presentation of the impacts of global warming. Look at the careful language which communicates truly alarming but well-founded predictions:
“If emissions continue unabated, current mid-range estimates are for 4.5°C higher global average temperatures by 2100 which would mean that the world would be hotter than at any time in the last few million years. Sea level would continue to rise for many centuries. The impacts of such changes are difficult to predict, but are likely to be severe for human populations and for the natural world. The further climate is pushed beyond the envelope of relative stability that has characterised the last several millennia, the greater becomes the risk of passing tipping points that will result in profound changes in climate, vegetation, ocean circulation or ice sheet stability.”
What policy response should be constructed on that? A 5% reduction in emissions in Australia by 2020 from a 2000 base says Tony Abbott, who prevaricates on whether humans are causing climate change. It depends what a citizen’s assembly comes up with says Julia Gillard, who affirms she believes in human-caused climate change.
Scientific bodies must use measured language. But it shouldn’t be asking too much of policy makers and the educated public to translate it into the urgent awareness that it demands from anyone who takes the trouble to attend to it. How much longer will that be delayed?