Yep, the InterAcademy Council more or less stated that the overall findings of the IPCC are not in question. However, they did raise some interesting issues with regard to structure and leadership that should be taken seriously. Admittedly, I have selfish reasons for this – as the review editor for one of the chapters of AR5, how the IPCC chooses to deal with comments and suggestions during the review process will have a very large impact on my life and workload starting in the summer of 2012 . . .
That’s true. They are “not in question” in a certain specialised sense.
“This report examines the procedures and processes used to carry out IPCC assessments; it does not examine climate change science or the validity of its representation in the assessment reports.”
None of the inquiries and investigations so far have examined the science – in each case, it was excluded from the terms of reference. The only one everybody thought was supposed to be about the science was the Oxburgh report, but Lord Oxburgh himself wrote to Steve McIntyre (in response to another query) to say:
Dear Dr Mcintyre,
Thank you for your message. What you report may or may not be the case. But as I have pointed out to you previously the science was not the subject of our study.
Yours sincerly,
Ron Oxburgh
And indeed, it made no serious examination of the scientific issues actually being contended.
Thus, we can truthfully say that none of the enquiries have found any evidence of problems with the science, because none of them have looked. That does not, of course, imply that there are any problems.
But given all the controversy about it – it’s a curious omission, is it not?
Right – nobody has examined the science. I agree completely – though I will say that the problems identified in the reports were not of the sort to lead those working on the reports to cast serious doubt on the overall science – that is, they are not calling for a piece-by-piece checking of AR4, because while the process is imperfect and certainly needs a lot of work, especially in the areas of transparency and responsiveness to criticism, it is not mortally flawed, either.
I’m not sure I see it as a curious omission, but more of a logical flow of questions under limited resources. Why not check the process first, and if you find major problems, then move to the findings themselves? If we had infinite human and financial resources, I suppose a check of everything at once becomes more feasible (though perhaps not more practical or logical) – but then, if we had infinite resources the assessments would probably look different, no?