Seth Borenstein, Yahoo News 10 Feb 10;
WASHINGTON – A steady drip of unsettling errors is exposing what scientists are calling "the weaker link" in the Nobel Peace Prize-winning series of international reports on global warming.
The flaws — and the erosion they've caused in public confidence — have some scientists calling for drastic changes in how future United Nations climate reports are done. A push for reform being published in Thursday's issue of a prestigious scientific journal comes on top of a growing clamor for the resignation of the chairman of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
The work of the climate change panel, or IPCC, is often portrayed as one massive tome. But it really is four separate reports on different aspects of global warming, written months apart by distinct groups of scientists.
No errors have surfaced in the first and most well-known of the reports, which said the physics of a warming atmosphere and rising seas is man-made and incontrovertible. So far, four mistakes have been discovered in the second report, which attempts to translate what global warming might mean to daily lives around the world.
"A lot of stuff in there was just not very good," said Kevin Trenberth, head of climate analysis at the National Center for Atmospheric Research and a lead author of the first report. "A chronic problem is that on the whole area of impacts, getting into the realm of social science, it is a softer science. The facts are not as good."
It's been a dismal winter for climate scientists after the high point of winning the 2007 Nobel, along with former Vice President Al Gore, for championing efforts to curb global warming and documenting its effects.
_In November, stolen private e-mails from a British university climate center embarrassed a number of scientists for their efforts to stonewall climate skeptics. The researchers were found to have violated Britain's Freedom of Information laws.
_In December, the much anticipated climate summit of world leaders in Copenhagen failed to produce a meaningful mandatory agreement to curb greenhouse gases.
_Climate legislation in the United States, considered key to any significant progress in slowing global warming, is stalled.
_Some Republican U.S. senators, climate skeptics and British newspapers have called for Rajendra Pachauri, chairman of the IPCC, to resign. They contend he has financial conflicts of interest involving his role with the climate panel and a green-energy foundation he set up. He has vigorously denied any conflicts.
_And in recent weeks, a batch of mistakes have been uncovered in the second of the four climate research reports produced in 2007.
That second report — which examines current effects of global warming and forecasts future ones on people, plants, animals and society — at times relied on government reports or even advocacy group reports instead of peer-reviewed research. Scientists say that's because there is less hard data on global warming's effects.
Nine different experts told The Associated Press that the second report — because of the nature of what it examines — doesn't rely on standards as high or literature as deep as the more quoted first report. And they say cite communication problems between lead authors of different reports so it is harder to spot errors.
The end result is that the document on the effects of climate change promotes the worst of nightmares and engages in purposeful hyping, said longtime skeptic John Christy of the University of Alabama, Huntsville.
David King, Britain's former chief scientific adviser who once lectured at the University of East Anglia, home to the climate center where scientist e-mails were hacked said that scandal laid bare the weaknesses in the IPCC. In a telephone interview, he said those who challenged the IPCC's assessment "are seen to be rocking the boat, and this in my view is extremely unfortunate."
Scientists — including top U.S. government officials — argue that the bulk of the reports are sound.
"The vast majority of conclusions in the IPCC are credible, have been through a very rigorous process and are absolutely state of the science, state of the art about what we know of the climate system," said National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration chief Jane Lubchenco, who runs the agency that oversees much of the U.S. government's climate research.
The problems found in the IPCC 2007 reports so far are mostly embarrassing:
_In the Asian chapter, five errors in a single entry on glaciers in Himalayas say those glaciers would disappear by 2035 — hundreds of years earlier than other information suggests — with no research backing it up. It used an advocacy group as a source. It also erroneously said the Himalayan glaciers were melting faster than other glaciers.
_A sentence in the chapter on Europe says 55 percent of the Netherlands is below sea level, when it's really about half that amount.
_A section in the Africa chapter that talks about northern African agriculture says climate change and normal variability could reduce crop yields. But it gets oversimplified in later summaries so that lower projected crop yields are blamed solely on climate change.
_There's been a longstanding dispute about weather extremes and economics. The second report says that there are more weather disasters than before because of climate change and that it is costing more. The debate continues over whether it is fair to say increased disaster costs are due to global warming or other societal factors such as increased development in hurricane prone areas.
Scientists say the nature of the science and the demands of governments for a localized tally of climate change effects and projections of future ones make the second report a bit more prone to mistakes than the first report. Regional research is more often done by governments or environmental groups; using that work is allowed by IPCC rules even if it is seen as less rigorous than traditional peer-reviewed research, said Martin Parry, chairman in charge of the report on climate effects.
The second report includes chapters on each region, which governments want to be mostly written by local experts, some of whom may not have the science credentials of other report authors. That's where at least three of the errors were found.
In Thursday's issue of the journal Nature, four IPCC authors call for reform, including Christy, who suggests the outright dumping of the panel itself in favor of an effort modeled after Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia. A fifth author, writing in Nature, argues the IPCC rules are fine but need to be better enforced.
In response, Chris Field of Stanford University, the new head of the second report team, said that he welcomes the scrutiny and vows stricter enforcement of rules to check sources to eliminate errors in future reports; those are to be produced by the IPCC starting in 2013.
Many IPCC scientists say it's impressive that so far only four errors have been found in 986 pages of the second report, with the overwhelming majority of the findings correct and well-supported.
However, former IPCC Chairman Bob Watson said, "We cannot take that attitude. Any mistakes do allow skeptics to have a field day and to use it to undermine public confidence, private sector confidence, government confidence in the IPCC."
___
Associated Press writer Raphael Satter contributed to this report from London.
UN climate panel needs overhaul, say top scientists
Marlowe Hood Yahoo News 10 Feb 10;
PARIS (AFP) – The Nobel-winning UN panel that serves as the scientific bedrock for global climate negotiations needs a serious makeover, several of its most senior members said Wednesday.
Their recommendations included scrapping the panel, which is run by volunteers, and replacing it by a full-time staff or establishing a "Wikipedia-style" forum for swapping information and ideas on climate change.
Of the five researchers who wrote in the journal Nature most agreed the panel's process was too laborious and some suggested its review of climate change be removed from government oversight to avoid any political interference.
None, though, called for the removal of the group's chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, under fire for his stewardship and alleged conflicts of interest related to personal finances. Pachauri has denied any wrongdoing.
Once unassailable, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), which issued its first report in 1990, has been battered over the last three months.
The IPCC comprises several thousand scientists tasked with vetting scientific knowledge on climate change and its impacts. They produce a major report every half-dozen years or so. The latest opus, the fourth in the series, was published in 2007.
Governments also participate in the process, as they help to nominate experts and to approve a draft of the review.
Ahead of the Copenhagen climate summit in December, the IPCC was rocked by the leaking of emails between some of its scientists that, according to skeptics, showed data had been skewed to mask contradictions about the evidence for man-made global warming.
The allegations became an issue at the start of the UN talks but were dismissed by most scientists as distorted and politically motivated. At least one formal inquiry since then found no wrongdoing or unethical behaviour.
More damaging to the IPCC's reputation have been errors uncovered in its mammoth 2007 report.
A prediction that global warming would melt away the Himalayan glaciers that provide water to a billion people in Asia by 2035 has been dismissed by glaciologists as preposterous, and will be withdrawn.
Another passage suggesting that natural disasters including hurricanes and floods had increased in number and intensity has also been challenged.
Both assertions exaggerate the impacts of climate change and are based on sources that do not meet the IPCC's own standards of reliability, say critics.
These and other problems show the need for root-and-branch reform, said Mike Hulme, a professor at Britain's University of East Anglia and a coordinating lead author of previous IPCC reports.
"The IPCC needs a complete overhaul. The structure and process are past their sell-by dates," he wrote in a hard-hitting commentary.
Hulme suggested dissolving the panel and setting up three separate bodies to take on its duties.
The first would focus on hard science and issue short, timely and policy-relevant reports. A second would evaluate regional impacts, and the third would translate all the findings into specific policy options.
Eduardo Zorita, a scientist at the GKSS Research Centre near Hamburg, Germany, called for the creation of a professional, independent climate body on the model of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), the International Energy Agency (IEA) or the US Congressional Budget Office.
"The IPCC is currently experiencing a failure of trust that reveals flaws in its structure," pointing to a "blurring" of the space between politics and science, he said.
For John Christy of the University of Alabama, the only way to avoid bias on the part of lead authors nominated by individual governments was to create a "Wikipedia-style" forum for open debate.
"The IPCC would then be a true reflection of the heterogeneity of scientific views, an 'honest broker' rather than an echo chamber," he said.
"The truth -- and this is frustrating for policy makers -- is that scientists' ignorance of the climate system is enormous," he added. "There is still much messy, contentious, snail-paced and now, hopefully, transparent work to do."
How to reform the IPCC
The Guardian asks experts around the world what needs to change to enable the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to continue to play a central and positive role in enabling the world's governments to take the right action against climate change
David Adam and Suzanne Goldenberg, guardian.co.uk 10 Feb 10;
The IPCC and its chairman, Rajendra Pachauri, have come under unprecedented pressure following a false claim that all Himalayan glaciers could melt by 2035 and the controversy over the hacked climate science emails at the University of East Anglia. Yet before that, the IPCC was credited with having settled the debate over whether human activity was causing global warming, sharing the 2007 Nobel peace prize with Al Gore. Here, the Guardian asks experts around the world what needs to change to enable the IPCC to continue to play a central and positive role in enabling the world's governments to take the right action against climate change
Political oversight
The IPCC says its reports are policy relevant, but not policy prescriptive. Perhaps unknown to many people, the process is started and finished not by scientists but by political officials, who steer the way the information is presented in so-called summary for policymakers [SPM] chapters. Is that right, the Guardian asked?
"The Nobel prize was for peace not science ... government employees will use it to negotiate changes and a redistribution of resources. It is not a scientific analysis of climate change," said Anton Imeson, a former IPCC lead author from the Netherlands. "For the media, the IPCC assessments have become an icon for something they are not. To make sure that it does not happen again, the IPCC should change its name and become part of something else. The IPCC should have never allowed itself to be branded as a scientific organisation. It provides a review of published scientific papers but none of this is much controlled by independent scientists."
William Connolley, a former climate modeller with the British Antarctic Survey, said: "I think it is inevitable that there will be enormous and pointless fighting over the exact wording of the SPM. And [that is] to some extent, desirable. The science is done by the scientists. The SPM headlines, that the politicians are going to have to act on, will have some political spin, and before the sceptics run wild, let me add that the spin so far has always been in the toning-things-down direction. [It would be better] written just by scientists, but too hard to manage to be worth wasting much time about."
Staff
The city of Southampton spends more than twice as much each year on street cleaning - £8m - than the world does on the IPCC - £3.6m. The reports rely on the unpaid work of thousands of researchers, but is there a case to make the process more professional? Pachauri, IPCC chair, told the Guardian last week that the IPCC was already moving to beef up the organisation with full-time staff, such as in communications. Chris Field, new head of one of the IPCC's working groups, said: "I do think that the 2035 [glacier melting] error could potentially have come out, just by having a stronger editorial component that was part of a professional staff. We need to really be training the authors. There is a huge emphasis on engaging authors from all over the world who have different scientific backgrounds and different training experience."
Joel Smith, of Stratus Consulting, a lead author on the 2007 report, said: "The questions IPCC will address should come from governments. However, once those questions are settled, the IPCC needs to run the process independent of the governments. This may require a larger permanent professional [staff] for the IPCC, as the US National Academy of Science has."
Structure
The IPCC was set up in 1988 to advise governments on the emerging problem of climate change. It produced its first report in 1990, and three more since. It is made up of three working groups (WG) which assess the science (WG1), impacts (WG2) and response to global warming (WG3) respectively. In yesterday's Guardian, scientists from WG1 blamed the mistake over the Himalayan glaciers, on "sloppy" researchers from other disciplines from WG2.
Connolley said: "While some of the WG2 is fine, it is clear that some sections have been edited by people who should not have been trusted with the job.It should be done more on merit. At the very least, get someone competent to review the edit comments for their sections."
Field, the new head of WG2, believed ensuring existing rules are implemented is key: "The IPCC needs to make 100% sure that the procedures that have served well in the past are applied."
A more radical suggestion came from John Robinson, professor of resources, environment and sustainability at the University of British Columbia. He said: "The IPCC should continue to improve its elaborate quality control processes, but perhaps make them more transparent. Few people know anything at all about the process works, or what the checks and balances are. Perhaps there should be journalists embedded in the process."
Others argue that the science report, which relies almost exclusively on peer-reviewed research, should be separated from the other reports which researchers say necessarily rely more on "grey" literature, ie, reports that have not been peer-reviewed.
Reports and timing
The IPCC reports are mammoth productions, taking up to six years to complete. The last one contained 900 pages. Is it still relevant for experts to produce such weighty volumes that wait several years to be updated? And should the emphasis of the reports be changed, given that the scientific evidence for anthropogenic global warming has been firmly established?
Robert Muir Wood, head of the research group at Risk Management Solutions, said the current IPCC report system was "fossilised" and that the organisation needed to move into the 21st century by setting up Wikipedia-style rolling publishing, that could be updated each month. Others suggested changes almost as radical. Connolley said the "useless" synthesis reports should be ditched, while Robinson said: "There needs to be continuous review of what the timing and topics should be."
But significant changes may have to wait until after the next assessment report, expected in 2013, said Mike Hulme, climate scientist at the University of East Anglia. "We can do lots of little tweaks but I can't see governments willingly going back to the drawing board."
Hulme wanted to see the social and cultural aspects of the impacts and response to climate change reflected in different ways in future reports, such as by drawing more on local knowledge, and distinguishing more between the way different societies may react.
How to Reform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
Recent scandals have undermined the credibility of the international scientific body, yet the scientific evidence for climate change remains as strong as ever
David Biello, Scientific American 10 Feb 10;
Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. Nuclear power plants cheaper than fossil fuel–fired ones. A chairman who might have financial conflicts of interest (and an interest in penning a racy, loosely autobiographical romance novel). These are some of the mistakes currently argued to have been made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a panel of more than 2,500 volunteer scientists and other experts from 154 countries tasked with assessing climate change.
So the question is: Is it time to reform the IPCC, despite its Nobel Peace Prize–winning stature?
As it currently stands the IPCC produces vast reports roughly every six years, the fourth and most recent review in 2007, with another due in 2014. The idea is to synthesize all the latest peer-reviewed literature on climate change to present an authoritative and comprehensive report on the physical science of climate change and the issues it entails: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability as well as mitigation. The IPCC also occasionally produces reports on specific technologies or policies such as carbon capture and storage, with upcoming reports set to address renewable sources of energy and managing the risk of extreme weather events.
The main IPCC report from 2007, particularly the section dealing with the physical science of climate change, is perhaps the most exhaustively reviewed 3,000-page scientific document on the planet. Governments and reviewers submitted some 90,000 comments on the draft text, which then had to be addressed by the expert authors. And the final "summary for policymakers" (a condensed version of the full text) was reviewed word by word by government officials with guidance from the scientists.
Yet, errors still made it through this rigorous process, including the seeming transposition of Himalayan glaciers melting by 2350 to 2035—a physical impossibility as well as a statement apparently based on one scientist's opinion. The IPCC went so far as to issue a retraction of the statement and express "regret" for that error, among others.
Of course, retractions are a big part of self-correction in science—and responsible for much of the robustness of the scientific method in general. And none of these errors detract from the central theory of climate change: Rising CO2 and other greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere from human activity are "very likely" responsible for the observed temperature change over the industrial era, as the IPCC puts it.
A more robust way to expose such errors and correct them more quickly is proposed by former IPCC lead author and atmospheric scientist John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Writing in the February 11 edition of Nature, Christy called for a "living, 'Wikipedia-IPCC.'" (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) After all, as he noted: "Voluminous printed reports issued every six years by government-nominated authors cannot accommodate the rapid and chaotic development of scientific information today." Lead IPCC author and director of climate change and adaptation at the environmental group World Wildlife Fund, Jeff Price similarly argued in the same issue for producing more reports faster.
Yet, it is just such government approval and multiple layers of review that help give the IPCC process its authority. And such a process requires one thing: time, argues physicist Thomas Stocker, co-chair of the physical sciences group for the 2014 report. "Faster turnover would jeopardize the multistage review and thus compromise authority and comprehensiveness," he wrote in the same issue, while also arguing that the IPCC must be rigorous in its pursuit of assessments that are "policy relevant but never policy prescriptive."
To enhance that relevance, contributing IPCC author and paleoclimatologist Eduardo Zorita of the GKSS Research Center in Germany calls for the creation of an international climate agency, along the lines of the International Atomic Energy Agency or the U.S. Congressional Budget Office, that would continue to deliver assessments but with a permanent staff, rather than relying on the voluntary contributions of thousands of scientists. "Climate assessment is too important to be left in the hands of advocates," he concluded in the same issue.
And IPCC lead author and environmental scientist Mike Hulme of the University of East Anglia in England, an institution that has come under fire after e-mails were released purporting to show deception among climate scientists, urged the replacement of the IPCC with three independent panels to deliver respectively: scientific syntheses, regional assessments and policy analyses, thereby splitting the functions that have caused potential problems with the IPCC process. "The IPCC is no longer fit for purpose," Hulme wrote. "It is not feasible for one panel under sole ownership—that of the world's governments, but operating under the delegated management of the United Nations Environment Programme and the World Meteorological Organization—to deliver an exhaustive 'integrated' assessment of all relevant climate change knowledge."
Ultimately, the uncovered errors in the most recent IPCC report prove the difficulty of its task as well as highlight the process's fundamental openness and self-correction. "There should be an open dialogue where anybody's views should be heard and considered," noted lead U.S. climate negotiator Todd Stern during public remarks at the Center for American Progress, a Washington, D.C.–based think tank, on February 9. But, he added: "The mounting evidence on the ground of what's actually happening and the growing sophistication of the modeling goes way beyond any particular set of data or any particular problems that occurred with respect to the University of East Anglia or IPCC mistakes."
After all, the IPCC has judged the evidence for human-caused climate change to be "unequivocal" and it is 90 percent certain that the "net effect of human activities since 1750 has been one of warming." The IPCC further warned in its 2007 report that "warming could lead to some impacts that are abrupt or irreversible, depending upon the rate and magnitude of the climate change."
In fact, thanks to the long timelines of IPCC reports, its 2007 summary contained no scientific information published or collected after 2005; meanwhile, reports from the field in recent years have measured conditions that are even worse than those predicted by climate models. A 2009 update from several IPCC authors noted that even with the less than 1 degree Celsius of warming that has already occurred there have been catastrophic heat waves, a precipitous meltdown of polar ice, and other more extreme impacts, which will only get worse as warming continues due to the rising levels of atmospheric greenhouse gases.
That is an intensifying risk that Stern, for one, judged as worthy of taking out an insurance policy: "People would not dream of failing to insure their homes or cars for risks to those things that are 50 times lower than the risks we face from climate change and its effects. It's nothing short of crazy to be putting our heads in the sand and failing to take action. And doubly crazy to risk losing out on the next great game of energy in the 21st century."
Read more!
Posts
visitors since Nov 07