Climate change issues: the problem of unwarranted trust

First, the Panel’s treatment of economic issues has been flawed. Writings that feature in its Third Assessment Report contain what many economists and economic statisticians would regard as basic errors, showing a lack of awareness of relevant published sources; and the same is true of more recent IPCC-related writings, as also of material published by the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) which is one of the Panel’s twin parent agencies. In this area, what I call the IPCC milieu is neither fully competent nor representative.

Second, the built-in process of peer review, which the IPCC and member governments view and refer to as a guarantee of quality and reliability, does not adequately serve this purpose, for two reasons:

• Reason No.1 is that providing for peer review is no safeguard against dubious assumptions, arguments and conclusions if the peers are largely drawn from the same restricted professional milieu.
• Reason No.2 is that the peer review process as such, here as elsewhere, may be insufficiently rigorous. Its main purpose is to elicit expert advice on whether a paper is worth publishing in a particular journal. Because it does not normally go beyond this, peer review does not typically guarantee that data and methods are open to scrutiny or that results are reproducible.

Third, in response to criticisms that have been made of published and peer-reviewed work that the IPCC has drawn on, and queries that have been raised, the authors concerned have failed to make full and voluntary disclosure of data, sources and procedures.

A leading instance is that of the celebrated “hockey-stick” diagram, which was prominently displayed and drawn on in the Panel’s Third Assessment Report and afterwards. Probably no single piece of alleged evidence relating to climate change has been so widely cited and influential. The authors concerned failed to make due disclosure, and neither the publishing journals nor the IPCC required them to do so. As a result, fundamental errors and evidence of deficient statistical properties did not emerge until very recently.

Fourth, the response of the Panel’s directing circle and milieu to informed criticism has typically been inadequate or dismissive. Within the scientific community, these dismissive attitudes have sometimes gone together with a disturbing intolerance of dissenting views and ideas.

Fifth, I believe that both the Panel’s directing circle and the IPCC milieu more generally are characterised by an endemic bias towards alarmist assessments and conclusions. Partly because of this bias, the treatment of climate change issues by environmental and scientific journalists and commentators across the world is overwhelmingly one-sided and sensationalist: non-alarmist studies and results are typically played down or disregarded, while the lack of knowledge and the huge uncertainties which still loom large in climate science are passed over.

This chronic lack of objectivity on the part of so many commentators is in itself a matter for concern; but even more worrying, to my mind, is the fact that leading figures and organisations connected with the IPCC process, including government departments and international agencies, do little or nothing to ensure that a more balanced picture is presented. Some of them have become accomplices of alarmism.

Alarmist attitudes and presumptions in relation to world issues, together with a fondness for radical so-called “solutions”, have in fact a long history: they go back well before climate change issues came into prominence, and hence predate the creation of the IPCC. They have been characteristic of the Panel’s sponsoring departments and agencies, and in particular of the UNEP and the ministries which it reports to. From the outset, the IPCC’s affiliations with what I have termed global salvationism have affected its capacity and readiness to treat the issues in a balanced way.

To sum up: the IPCC process, which is widely taken to be thorough, objective, representative and authoritative, is in fact deeply flawed: despite its scale, pretensions and reputation, it is not professionally up to the mark.

Peers of the realm, the Stern Review, and other elements

I had hoped that these concerns of mine, which are widely shared by others, would at least be noted in the Stern Review; and when the Review process got under way a year ago four of us made a formal submission (PDF 40KB) to Sir Nicholas Stern, in response to the general invitation that he had issued, in which we raised the issue. (My co-authors were Sir Ian Byatt, Sir Alan Peacock and Colin Robinson.) In our submission, we said that:

There is a dual opportunity here. First, the [Stern] Review can serve a valuable purpose by contributing to public enlightenment and a better informed debate. Second, and more controversially, it could put to the test the widely accepted view that established official procedures and policies in this area, both within the UK and internationally, are soundly based and well judged.