Before anyone reads the latest Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Report, the one released today on the impacts, there are a few things to keep in mind. Chief among them is the level of political interference in the final document. According to the AP
Several scientists objected to the editing of the final draft by government negotiators but in the end agreed to compromises. However, some scientists on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change vowed never to take part in the process again."The authors lost," said one participant. "A lot of authors are not going to engage in the IPCC process any more. I have had it with them," he said on condition of anonymity because the proceedings were supposed to remain confidential. An Associated Press reporter, however, witnessed part of the final meeting.
That reporter appears to be Arthur Max, and we should be grateful for his work.From him and his colleague Seth Borenstein, we also learn it was the subject of a "contentious marathon session that saw angry exchanges between diplomats and scientists who drafted the report."
The United States, China and Saudi Arabia raised the many of the objections to the phrasing, often seeking to tone down the certainty of some of the more dire projections.
...
"There is very high confidence that many natural systems are being affected by regional climate changes, particularly temperature increases," said the statement on the first page of text.But China insisted on striking the word "very," injecting a measure of doubt into what the scientists argued were indisputable observations. The report's three authors refused to go along with the change, resulting in an hours-long deadlock that was broken by a U.S. compromise to delete any reference to confidence levels.
...
Though weakened by the deletion of some elements, the final report "will send a very, very clear signal" to governments, said Yvo de Boer, the U.N.'s top climate official.
In other words, things are probably worse than the report suggests. The report has yet to be posted online, though, so we'll have to see just how much science was diluted by politics.
UPDATE, April 7: the report is online, and the NY Times has more details of the political monkeying:
...sections on coral damage and tropical storms were softened in the summary. They also got the authors to drop parts of an illustration showing how different emissions policies might limit damage. Officials from those countries argued that data in the report did not support the level of certainty expressed in the final draft.
But some authors were not assuaged. The final document was "much less quantified and much vaguer and much less striking than it could have been," said Stéphane Hallegatte, a participant from France's International Center for Research on the Environment and Development.
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I'm lay and have always deferred to scientific research when in doubt. Your post just ruined my day. Red in the face I am after reading this.
Fucking U.S., China and the Arab's sticking their political agenda's and capitalistic goals ahead of scientific research and the health of the earth.
I don't swear often but this pissed me off severely. World class political fuckup's are representing the U.S., China and the Arab's in editing this report.
There should be no compromising of the facts. Watering down science is the most idiotic action any government can do.
We need a truly independent scientific report where governments are left out of the equation. I want scientific consensus, either way, so that I can make decisions about my personal habits and their effect on the planet.
I'll be waiting for Harper's stupid opinion on this. After all, he's our first Canadian President.
As far as the politicians are concerned, I'm reminded of what David Niven has to say about his good friend Errol Flynn - 'You could always rely on Errol. You could always rely on him to let you down'.
BS. You suck. A few scientists objected. A few won't participate again. IPCC is the largest body of scientists working through the same channel. The few that objected are probably the ones bought off by oil companies and are an extreme minority. Either way it's three out of hundreds. They could never sign on to oil and their paychecks being bad so they never will participate. You should analyze articles more in depth. Maybe your right, but maybe not. We have no idea who those scientists are, learn to do research.
I have a deep concern that good science is being hijacked by junk science. When the outcomes from a field of scientific research are deemed by its supporters to be of such certainty that further debate or research is pointless, then it ceases to be science and enters the realm of propaganda.
The issue of global warming has become such a political and scientific football that those of us who point to the ever growing body of evidence that man-made CO2 is probably not the primary cause of global warming are labeled as ignorant, environment hating heretics. In truth I am as supportive of the environment as the next man but I take issue with those who would have us spend billions trying to prevent a natural phenomenon over which we have little or no control.
It is becoming evident, through hard scientific evidence, that the sun?s variability is possibly the most likely primary cause of global warming, not CO2. Dansgaard, Oeschger, et al discovered physical evidence that points towards a solar induced climate change cycle, but nowhere do politicians or the media raise this fact or the conclusions of their work. Instead we are bombarded almost daily with dire apocalyptic forecasts of man induced global warming outcomes that almost always do not eventuate.
A case in point. Remember the supposedly sinking Maldives? In 2003 before members of the Geological Society of America, Nils-Axel M?r, a geologist from the University of Stockholm presented a paper that clearly demonstrated through solid physical evidence that the sea level around the Maldive Islands has risen and fallen repeatedly over the millennia and most recently from 1790-1970 the sea level rose by about 30 cm to then fall 30 cm in the 1970s to today?s level, which is the statistical norm. He concluded that the Maldives will probably not sink anytime soon.
We need honest assessment of the situation by scientists, politicians and the media, not sycophantic agreement with those who have a political or financial axe to grind. I do not have a problem with a concerted effort to encourage and establish new clean sustainable energy sources. I do have a problem with the effort being based on a theory that is now being slowly disproved and the spending of billions unnecessarily on carbon credits and other such nonsense.
I look forward to the day when we can take a balanced, considered approach, to the issue of climate change and encourage an honest appraisal of its effects. I also look forward to the public support of any scientist who wishes to come forward with new evidence in support of any climate theory and not have him or her manipulated, threatened or silenced by those with whom they disagree.
Dire consequences, well I'm just amazed at how no one has yet pointed out the time scales. The previous report on the science of global warming included sections on how 80% reductions in GLOBAL greenhouse gas emissions would NOT produce a dramatic change in global temperatures, in fact temperature would still increase perhaps negligibly slower.
I can't wait for the third installment when we'll see where these scientist's political views lie, maybe that'll give us information on how they interpret the data. In addition, we'll find out if the proposals for mitigating climate change are based on reality (including ECONOMIC REALITY) and scientific reality.
I certainly hope the IPCC scientists/report authors whose work was so shamefully minipulated by U.S., Saudi Arabia, and China government reps, will issue a separate report with their original wording. The World Wildlife Fund, the Sierra Club, or some other group(s)[including "The Society for Mental Health!] should support such an action. Regarding the U.S., this is yet another disgusting and unacceptable action by the Bush Administration, which seems to have a limitless supply of nefarious and malodorous actions in its storehouse. Already well qualified to be among the worst President's in history, Bush, and his autocratice minions seem to believe they need to add more evidence to this "distinction." We must remember to memorialize - in the name of Bush, Marburg, Norton, and other "Bushites" - the certain future species extinctions, ecosystem debilitation, destruction by increasingly violent weather systems, and increases in human misery and death resulting from the already harmful climate effects of human activity and the inactivity, due to ignorance and arrogance, on mitigating them. P.S. "SS" your comments indicate that you misunderstand the role and position of the IPCC scientists who objected to the interference by government reps. They are described as the "authors of the report," whose language was required to be scientifically compromised. There is no information that these scientists were "bought off by oil companies."
The few that objected are probably the ones bought off by oil companies and are an extreme minority. Either way it's three out of hundreds. They could never sign on to oil and their paychecks being bad so they never will participate. You should analyze articles more in depth. Maybe your right, but maybe not. We have no idea who those scientists are, learn to do research.
Why don't you read the article more carefully? The scientists objecting are saying that the report was watered down by politicians and should have been more strongly worded, not less.
That the Summary for Policymakers from one if the IPCC Working Groups is a compromise document is not new. With so many different parties required to agree on the final wording, it is bound to be a conservative interpretation of the science (in the full report). While the reporter should be applauded for exposing the politics of this part of the IPCC process, I worry that doing so takes our eye off the ball.
Political influence on final wording in the SFP or not, the IPCC is still by far the best expert judgement on the state of climate science. Reporting about the production of the SFP as if it is like any other government report may reduce, in the mind of the readers, the IPCC to the level of other non-scientific, non-peer-reviewed publications on the subject of climate change. They then may return to one of the many biased - left or right, green or brown - interpretations of climate science that are readily available in print, on television and on the web.
That is a shame. People should be reading the SFP themselves - that's the point of producing it - and not looking to us bloggers (I include myself in that!) and the pantheon of supposed pundits for a distilled version.
Spend 75 minutes watching http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XttV2C6B8pU and go find a real problem to worry about.
If you still believe global warming is real (I do) then spend your time figuring out what to do to adapt or even enjoy the new warming trend. Remember when the great cathedrals were built? Mankind isn't causing global warming and mankind can't stop it even if we all stop breathing.
The political agenda is all that is driving this latest attempt to scare people into submission.
Unbeliever - you may possibly have noticed from various posts on Scienceblogs that 'The Great Global Warming Scandal' (the link no longer works, fortunately) is, as scientists like to say ,' a great big pile of toss' (just check out Real Climate). We are scared because climate change is something to be wscared about.
If 'The political agenda is all that is driving this latest attempt to scare people into submission', then why did the political leaders of India, China, Saudi Arabia, Russia and the USA all make sure the reports warnings were downgraded?
Unbeliever - Un-fucking-believable more like.