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UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, IPCC

NRSP cautions against relying on February 2 UN climate report

IPCC documents have a history of bias and misrepresentation of actual science findings

By Tom Harris, & Dr. Tim Ball Natural Resources Stewardship Project

Friday, February 2, 2007

Ottawa, Canada, February 1, 2007-- The Natural Resources Stewardship Project calls attention to the serious problems that have plagued past climate reports of the sort to be issued by the United Nations on Friday.

The UN's Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Working Group I (WG1), assigned to report on the state of climate change science, will release its "Summary for Policymakers' on Friday, February 2. This is ostensibly an executive summary of their "Fourth Assessment Report" WG1 full science report that will not be issued until May 2007.

According to official IPCC procedures (section 4), the main science report shall be modified after publication of the Summary so as to "ensure consistency with" the Summary. But the Summary is written by government representatives to fulfill political objectives in support of carbon dioxide reduction negotiations. IPCC lead author and NRSP Allied Scientist Professor Richard Lindzen of MIT explained that the Summary "represents a consensus of government representatives (many of whom are also their nations' Kyoto representatives), rather than of scientists."

In the IPCC's Second Assessment Report (1995), this unorthodox reporting procedure led to the "Chapter 8 controversy" in which significant and unwarranted modification of the science report was known to have been made before it was issued so as to conform to the Summary. How often this has happened, or how much the science report will be altered this time to conform to the Summary, is unknown since no one outside of a select group sworn to secrecy knows the contents of the science reports being summarized.

Besides questioning the legitimacy of releasing the Summary months before the release of the report it is supposedly written to summarize, attention should also be focused on situations in which lead authors of the Fourth Assessment Report are using their own work, reviewed by scientists with whom they work closely, as the primary support for conclusions of specific IPCC report chapters. The US National Academy of Sciences Wegman Report (2006) highlighted how this lack of independent review resulted in serious problems with the last WG1 Summary (2001). In that Summary, the "Mann Hockey Stick', a now-discredited graph that purported to show that 20^th century warming was unusual, formed the cornerstone of the IPCC conclusions. Wegman concluded "authors of policy-related documents like the IPCC report ... should not be the same people as those that constructed the academic papers."

Finally, it should also be recognized that the fact that many scientists were involved in reviewing the Fourth Assessment does not necessarily mean that these scientists agree with the report. For example, NRSP Allied Scientist Dr. Madhav Khandekar was an official reviewer of parts of the document that related to his specialty (extreme weather) and has revealed that the IPCC ignored his comments. NRSP Science Advisory Committee member, Dr. Vincent Gray, also an official reviewer of IPCC reports, speaks about his experience, "They sometimes take notice of your comments. They don't take much notice of mine because most of the time I don't agree with what they are saying.... It is not like the scientific press where you are supposed to answer objections; they don't bother to answer objections; they go their own way."