1. Climate Science, meet Politics. An Administrative Primer on the IPCC AR5 Report
The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) has recently published its fifth iteration of a collaborative report on global climate for international policymakers (The AR5). The report is an informative, but non-prescriptive body of data that makes clear three major points - climate change is real, humans are causing it, and every moment we ignore it the problem gets worse.
Although I would not argue with those statements, I was interested to find out more about the administrative aspect of the IPCC before granting them credibility. The IPCC is as much a political organization as it is a scientific one. A baseline understanding of the administrative side of the IPCC allows for a more robust perspective into their process, a perspective I see as required as context for any scientific details. The CIRES seminar on the IPCC report provided some answers to a few basic questions I had after being introduced to the IPCC. Namely, why did it take so long to get a definitive statement on the climate issue, and why did we need five reports spanning 14 years to paint the picture? Also, how and why would the issue of oversight be the deciding factor for the soundness of report? Lastly, and what was different about the AR5 report versus past ones and why should we care about all those pages?
“Human influence has been detected in warming of the atmosphere and the ocean, in changes in the global water cycle, in reductions in snow and ice, in global mean sea level rise, and in changes in some climate extremes (see Figure SPM.6 and Table SPM.1). This evidence for human influence has grown since AR4. It is extremely likely that human influence has been the dominant cause of the observed warming since the mid-20th century. {10.3–10.6, 10.9}”
Never Underestimate the Power of Language in the Climate Debate
Past reports, it seems, have been made timid by governments aligned so closely with economic interests they would have us believe that excess atmospheric CO2 is good for trees and that global warming gives us more options for tropical travel. So with each iteration of the report gaining momentum, the wording and tone has become more confident and definitive. With more attention on global climate change and the IPCC than ever, the IPCC has to be very careful how their report is worded in order to best guide its interpretation with the media and with the public. This point about how important wording is made clear by a comment given during the first IPCC Summary at CIRES [The IPCC creates this document, and in the revision process policymakers meet to revise the document.]
“In these meetings about 85% of the time is arguing over wording and 15% of time governments are trying to change the conclusions. The scientists are there to make sure science doesn’t change and ideas are communicated clearly.”
"Calibrated Uncertainty" IPCC Report Page 55
In addition to the stringent process of perfecting the phrasing of the report, they [the IPCC] have come out with a language key to clarify the findings of the report. It is not an easy thing to try and apply qualitative descriptors to quantitative data, but the IPCC tried it in what they call “Calibrated Uncertainty.” This language key, the IPCC believes, will allow the media and the public to interpret and understand the data better. Further, this language gives the scientists who worked on the report a consensus dialect spanning disciplines and cultures.
Linda O Mearns, Presenter for the second in the CIRES IPCC series, cited some very interesting findings reported on how probability language used in the IPCC's Calibrated Uncertainty program is interpreted. In a multinational (24 countries) study to understand how people understand probability language about 10,000 participants (average Joes, not policy people) were given the reports to read. They were given two scenarios to read the probability statements.
Comprehension and agreement of probability language with and without numerical value attached. Quite a range of answers on what "extremely likely" means.
1) given the phrases as presented in the IPCC documents (e.g., it is very likely that heat waves will continue to increase), with a link to the quantitative details (i.e., the table with verbal phrase and corresponding quantitative measure – very likely, > 90%) (Translation case)
2) given sentence from IPCC but with quantitative information incorporated in the sentence – ‘it is very likely (> 90%) that frequency of heat waves will continue to increase’ (Verbal-numerical case).
The study concluded that using both the language and the actual probability contributed to the greatest understanding of the data. So is the probability language created so the layman can understand the scientists, or is it created as a consensus and clarification vehicle for the scientists themselves? Whatever it's intention the interpretation of the data is as diverse as language itself.
Room for Improvements to the Review Process from Previous Reports
There are several improvements in the AR5, including a more transparent and collaborative review process and more efficient timescale. There are also some improvements to the as well treatment of scientific data. The review process has been carefully refined from previous reports. This process was revamped as a result of incorrect information finding its way preceding reports. In 1995 charges alleged that authors had made changes on their own, and although the charges were unfounded, authors were attacked by media and critics. The tendency of the media and other politically affiliated stakeholders to bring into question the ethics of scientists is a timeworn tactic.
During the publication of the AR4 in 2009, when there was a peak interest in climate change, emails were stolen from an IPCC server and lead authors’ emails were cited out of context. IPCC Investigations have cleared scientists of any wrongdoing, and the science from those reports still stands, but it does offer us in the science world some important lessons about how careful one needs to be portraying simple, perhaps unpopular truths. Additionally in the AR4, there were two errors in the text on Working Group 1, a discrepancy about what a Himalayan glacier meant, and the area of the Netherlands below sea level. Because of this, a better errata procedure was established. In the AR5, there are two stages of review with 1500 traceable comments. In this report, review editors (2 per chapter) were assigned to oversee the review and editing process and stand between lead authors and critics to explain and defend the review process.
Jerry Meehl Slides on Timelines of the IPCC AR5 Report
Timelines and Draft Reviews
It is clear that much more attention has been paid to language, phrasing, and oversight by the scientists, but what have they been doing since 2009?
What Does it All Mean? (skip here if you are looking for the short version)
An excerpt from the paper asserts:
“It is extremely likely that more than half of the observed increase in global average surface temperature from 1951 to 2010 was caused by the anthropogenic increase in greenhouse gas concentrations and other anthropogenic forcings together. The best estimate of the human-induced contribution to warming is similar to the observed warming over this period. {10.3}”
If the impossibly long IPCC report could be summed up in two sentences, these would be it. This year’s smoking gun statement is not only bolder than previous assertions, it is more urgent. It represents the IPCC’s collective agreement to not only assert humans as the cause of global warming, it puts responsibility on people and governing organizations to act. In theory, the symbiotic relationship of science and politics make perfect sense, but in the real world it is nearly unheard of. The IPCC is one such organization that, despite their kinks, seems to be working for a global cause and doing so relatively peacefully. Administratively, each report grows more detailed and gains more layered oversight than the previous. Now that we know how the IPCC works, lets look at what they have done with the science in Part 2.
