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?