Nobel Halo Fades Fast for Panel on Climate Change

Andrew C. Revkin, The New York Times 3 Aug 09;

Two years ago, an international scientific panel seized worldwide attention by reporting that human activity was warming the planet in ways that could greatly disrupt human affairs and nature.

The work of the group, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, shared the 2007 Nobel Peace Prize with former Vice President Al Gore. After two decades of delivering climate reports to the world without fanfare, it suddenly had a wide following.

But as the panel gears up for its next climate review, many specialists in climate science and policy, both inside and out of the network, are warning that it could quickly lose relevance unless it adjusts its methods and focus.

Although the panel, founded in 1988 and operating under the United Nations’ auspices, has garnered awards and acclaim, there is scant evidence that nations are acting on its warnings. Emissions of heat-trapping gases have grown. Talks about a new climate treaty remain largely deadlocked.

“Like grabbing the tail of a tiger, the I.P.C.C. has gotten the world’s attention, but now the challenge is to get the tiger to head in the right direction,” said Michael MacCracken, a longtime contributor to panel reports and a chief scientist for the Climate Institute, a nonprofit group. “For the I.P.C.C., this means providing guidance that will minimize climate impacts and maximize investments in a prosperous and sustainable future.”

Environmentalists assert that the reports by the panel are watered down by a requirement that sponsoring governments approve its summaries line by line.

Some experts fret that the organization, charged with assessing fast-evolving science, has failed to keep pace with an explosion of climate research.

At the same time, scientists who question the likelihood of a calamitous disruption of the Earth’s climate accuse the panel of cherry-picking studies and playing down levels of uncertainty about the severity of global warming.

“It just feels like the I.P.C.C. has gone from being a broker of science to a gatekeeper,” said John R. Christy, a climate scientist at the University of Alabama, Huntsville, and a former panel author.

In an interview, Rajendra K. Pachauri, chairman of the I.P.C.C., rejected the charge of bias, noting layers of transparent peer review.

But he acknowledged the challenges that the group faces in translating complex science in a way that produces meaningful responses.

Under its charter, the group cannot recommend a course of action to cut climate risks. It has laid out specific paths for emissions of greenhouse gases that governments would need to follow to avoid overheating the planet, but governments need not follow those paths.

For example, Dr. Pachauri noted that while the leaders of the Group of 8 industrial nations pledged last month to try to limit global warming to 2 degrees Fahrenheit beyond the planet’s current temperature, they failed to embrace the emissions reductions that the panel says would be needed to keep that promise.

Finding ways to guide nations without being prescriptive is a prime focus as the network of scientists embarks on its fifth assessment of research on climate trends, projections and policy options.

While the new study is not scheduled for release until 2014, its shape will be determined at an October meeting of government representatives from more than 80 countries.

In preparation for that meeting, 200 scientists who have held leading roles in the climate assessments met in Venice last month to identify new priorities. Building on a “vision document” developed by Dr. Pachauri, they began writing an outline of the fifth report to present to the government representatives meeting in Bali in October.

One goal for the next report is a much more thorough assessment of how fast and far seas could rise from unabated warming. The panel’s 2007 report expressly excluded the influence of melting ice sheets because of limited understanding of how fast they could melt.

Shying away from discussing such possibilities because there is low scientific confidence can imply there is also a low probability they may occur, said Stephen H. Schneider, a climatologist at Stanford and longtime panel member. That is not necessarily the case, he said.

More attention will be devoted to research on the potential for dangerous changes in ocean chemistry as seas absorb billions of tons of carbon dioxide. Another focus will be large-scale artificial methods of countering warming, called geo-engineering.

The panel will also try harder to identify anticipated impacts of climate change on certain regions, and options for fostering resilience in especially vulnerable places like sub-Saharan Africa.

Dr. Pachauri noted that the panel put its Nobel Prize winnings, around $670,000, into an account for helping the world’s poorest countries respond to drought, flood and other climate risks. (Mr. Gore gave his share to the Alliance for Climate Protection. )

But tens of billions of dollars in aid will be needed as explosive population growth and shifting climate patterns make poor nations more vulnerable, according to a variety of studies.

Some specialists in climate modeling warn that governments may have overinflated expectations that science can reliably forecast how global warming will play out locally.

Gavin A. Schmidt, a climate modeler at the Goddard Institute for Space Studies in Manhattan, part of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration, said that efforts to use computer simulations of local conditions to forecast specific results of climate shifts over a decade or so were still in early stages of development.

“Simply hoping that higher resolution will magically improve predictability at smaller scales is just wishful thinking,” Dr. Schmidt said in an e-mail message.

Other scientists involved in shaping the next report worry that the runaway growth in peer-reviewed studies of climate change is making a broad, fair assessment of such research impossible.

In Venice, Neville Nicholls, a lead writer on several parts of the last report, submitted a chart showing that 4,500 climate studies were published in 2007, triple the total a decade earlier.

Given that the hundreds of scientists on the panel volunteer their time, this presents a daunting challenge, said Dr. Nicholls, a climate scientist at Monash University in Victoria, Australia.

He proposes that the group write more focused, expeditious reports on issues relevant to setting policy.

Dr. Nicholls suggested that the panel could eventually shift to reviewing the flow of research on more basic questions through a constantly updated Wikipedia-style system.

The panel already does occasional special reports, with one coming next year on the potential of renewable energy technologies to cut greenhouse emissions, and another in 2011 on limiting risks from drought and other climate-driven disasters.

Christopher Field, a participant and chairman of one section of the forthcoming assessment, said that an important focus was psychological and sociological research on how people act in the face of uncertain butsubstantial threats.

“We’ve identified the nature of the problem, and social science shows it’s of the toughest category,” said Dr. Field, who directs the Carnegie Institution department of global ecology at Stanford.

One hope is that the final October outline, once approved, will encourage governments to invest more resources in such research, so that the 2014 report can incorporate findings.

In the end, perhaps the most vital shift is for the panel to pay more attention to the murkier but most consequential possibilities in a warming world, said Dr. Schneider.

The panel, he said, could do more to distinguish between outcomes from warming that research shows are truly unlikely, like a shutdown of Atlantic Ocean currents, and those that are possible but uncertain. One example of this kind, he said, is the chance that the planet could heat up far more than climate models project; another is the possible sustained disintegration of ice sheets.

Dr. Schneider noted that society relied on risk analyses of this sort all the time, with issues like choosing treatments for rare but poorly understood cancers (Dr. Schneider survived such an episode) and with assessing military strategies.

It may be uncomfortable for scientists who seek certainty in data to turn to the issue of how to weigh uncertain threats. But decision makers are not well served if the spectrum of poorly known possibilities, along with the level of uncertainty, are not also conveyed by experts, he said.

“If you say nothing until you have high confidence and solid evidence,” he said, “you’re failing society.”