Panel of InterAcademy Council Lists Seven Key Recommendations for Changes for the IPCC (August 31, 2010)

A Panel designated by the InterAcademy Council, which is made up of science academies from around the world, today released its 113-page report, Climate Change Assessments: Review of the Processes and Procedures of the IPCC.

The report lists seven key recommendations to be undertaken by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) which relate to the IPCC's

• governance and management,

•  review process,

• characterisation and communication of uncertainty,

• communications and

• transparency in the assessment process.

Other detailed recommendations on specific aspects of the panel's assessment process appear in Chapters 2-4, and a complete list of recommendations appears in Chapter 5 (pages 51-54) of the report.

The panel, chaired by the immediate past president of Princeton University, Harold Shapiro, states as its overreaching recommendations:

1. Recommendation: The IPCC should establish an Executive Committee to act on its behalf between Plenary sessions. The membership of the Committee should include the IPCC Chair, the Working Group Co-chairs, the senior member of the Secretariat, and 3 independent members, including some from outside of the climate community. Members would be elected by the Plenary and serve until their successors are in place.

2. Recommendation: The IPCC should elect an Executive Director to lead the Secretariat and handle day-to-day operations of the organization. The term of this senior scientist should be limited to the timeframe of one assessment.

3. Recommendation: The IPCC should encourage Review Editors to fully exercise their authority to ensure that reviewers’ comments are adequately considered by the authors and that genuine controversies are adequately reflected in the report.

4. Recommendation: The IPCC should adopt a more targeted and effective process for responding to reviewer comments. In such a process, Review Editors would prepare a written summary of the most significant issues raised by reviewers shortly after review comments have been received. Authors would be required to provide detailed written responses to the most significant review issues identified by the Review Editors, abbreviated responses to all non-editorial comments, and no written responses to editorial comments.

5. Recommendation: All Working Groups should use the qualitative level-of-understanding scale in their Summary for Policy Makers and Technical Summary, as suggested in IPCC’s uncertainty guidance for the Fourth Assessment Report. This scale may be supplemented by a quantitative probability scale, if appropriate.

6. Recommendation: Quantitative probabilities (as in the likelihood scale) should be used to describe the probability of well-defined outcomes only when there is sufficient evidence. Authors should indicate the basis for assigning a probability to an outcome or event (e.g., based on measurement, expert judgment, and/or model runs).

7. Recommendation: The IPCC should complete and implement a communications strategy that emphasizes transparency, rapid and thoughtful responses, and relevance to stakeholders, and which includes guidelines about who can speak on behalf of IPCC and how to represent the organization appropriately.

Steven Sherwood, Professor in Physical Meteorology and Atmospheric Climate Dynamics at the Climate Change Research Centre, University of New South Wales makes this assessment of the report by the InterAcademy Council's panel:

The findings accord with my impressions. One interesting thing is that the review did not find serious systemic problems, but did recommend some bolstering of the structure to meet greater pressures now bearing on the IPCC. Also, there were no criticisms of the content of the first volume of the IPCC report, which discusses the basic science of climate change.

The second report volume ('Working Group II') on climate-change impacts has always been more difficult to write because impacts are tough to measure and tough to model. This was the volume containing the well-publicised (but relatively minor) errors. The review sharply criticised vague language in the executive summary of this volume. I suspect one reason for the vague language is the disagreements among scientists and others in wording the final draft; in my experience, when writing by consensus in such a situation, contested passages of text will sometimes come out vague or awkward because no clear statement could be found that satisfied everyone. I hope the Working Group II can find ways to overcome this problem next time around, since we need clear statements of what we know and don't know.

Professor Shapiro writing as Panel Chairman comments:

Overall, IPCC’s assessment process has been a success and served society well. The assessments have put IPCC on the world stage, raised public awareness of climate change, and driven policymakers to consider options for responding to climate change. Indeed, these were among the reasons IPCC was awarded a share of the Nobel Peace Prize in 2007.

All of this has been accompanied, however, by an increasingly intense debate in the media and political arena about climate change science and the costs of proposed climate policies, which in turn has meant much greater public scrutiny of IPCC. Controversies have erupted over the perceived impartiality of IPCC toward climate policy, and all of you are aware of the attention given earlier this year in the press to the revelation of errors in the last assessment. Meanwhile, the assessments themselves have grown in size and complexity. Most of our Committee's key recommendations are aimed at helping IPCC manage this increasingly complex process and doing so under the gaze of a public microscope.

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Note added September 1, 2010:

According to ABC News: "Key independent MP Bob Katter says he did not bother to attend briefings on offer by prominent economists Ross Garnaut and Nicholas Stern because they are "lightweights". In outspoken comments on ABC Radio this morning, Mr Katter also branded climate change scientists as 'stupid'."

"I think their positions are fairly lightweight," he told AM.
 

"I've heard their viewpoint many times, and I simply disagree with them dramatically.
 

"Just to indicate how stupid those people are, there is a very unassailable scientific case that there will be a problem arising in the oceans. They don't mention that."