U.S. House Hearing on the IPCC Process

by Judith Curry

The U.S. House of Representatives Committee on Science, Space & Technology is holding a Hearing today at 11 a.m.: Examining the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Process

The link to the Hearing is [here].  The Hearing Charter is [here], which provides background information on the IPCC.  An article in the conservative Washington Examiner provides context for the hearing.   Excerpts:

I asked committee Chairman Lamar Smith, R-Texas, for some clarification. So, a handful of governments formed the IPCC. Is the panel just creating science to fit the policy agendas of dominant governments? Smith replied, “Well, the IPCC does not perform science itself and doesn’t monitor the climate, but only reviews carefully selected scientific literature.”

Smith has invited testimony from four highly-credentialed scientists with deep experience in the IPCC, distinctive views and razor tongues:

• University of Sussex Professor Richard Tol. He recognizes climate change but is no catastrophist – he resigned earlier this year as a lead author of the IPCC’s Fifth Assessment Report because it was too alarmist and put too little emphasis on opportunities to adapt to climate changes. His ultra-rational position: “The first rule of climate policy should be: Do no harm to economic growth. But the IPCC was asked to focus on the risks of climate change alone, and those who volunteered to be its authors eagerly obliged.”

• Colorado State University emeritus Professor Roger Pielke. He said in 2005, “the evidence of a human fingerprint on the global and regional climate is incontrovertible.” Nevertheless, his technical argument that CO2 is not the culprit that the IPCC makes it out to be has set poorly socialized climate believers howling. Pielke says that CO2 is important, but “has contributed, at most, only about 28 percent to the human-caused warming up to the present. The other 72 percent is still a result of human activities.”

• In the true-believer corner, we have much-honored Princeton Professor Michael Oppenheimer, weighing in with more than two decades as chief scientist of the Environmental Defense Fund ($111.9 million revenue in 2012) and still a science adviser. He has played important roles as a lead author of several IPCC reports, including a special report on climate extremes and disasters. He’s by far the hearing’s most experienced insider – he was there before the beginning and, as an EDF official, helped pressure the U.S. government to ask the WMO and UNEP to organize the IPCC bureaucracy.

• Last, Daniel B. Botkin, professor emeritus at the University of California, Santa Barbara. He has served with both the IPCC and President Obama’s National Climate Assessment. His view of the NCA may also apply to the IPCC’s assessment: “The executive summary is a political statement, not a scientific statement.”

Botkin treated panic over sea level rise thus: “The sea level has been rising since the end of the last ice age, 12,500 years ago.”

Botkin also scolded the NCA for its extreme weather forecast: “It is inappropriate to use short-term changes in weather as an indication one way or another about persistent climate change.”

I asked Smith whether the governments that pay for the IPCC have the power to tell it what they want.

Smith responded: “The United States is by far the IPCC’s largest funder – over $43 million since the beginning (over four times more than second-place Germany), and that’s just for the basic UN bureaucracy, not including many more millions for technical support, experts, meetings, and translations. But it’s true that the U.S. administration makes its wishes known to the IPCC through State Department delegations of political appointees.”

But doesn’t that mean that the administration exercises what amounts to agenda setting and veto power over IPCC reports?

“It’s time to examine that whole process,” Smith responded.

Chairman Smith’s Opening Statement

Excerpts from Chairman Lamar Smith’s Opening Statement:

Both the IPCC and the White House’s documents appear to be designed to spread fear and alarm and provide cover for previously determined government policies. The reports give the Obama Administration an excuse to control more of the lives of the American people.

The IPCC’s goal is an international climate treaty that redistributes wealth among nations. The Administration’s goal is to impose greenhouse gas regulations, which will stifle economic growth and lead to hundreds of thousands of fewer jobs each year. On the heels of these catastrophic predictions, the President plans to announce next Monday his most costly climate regulations – new climate standards for power plants.

Serious concerns have been raised about the IPCC, including lack of transparency in author and study selection, and inconsistent approaches to data quality, peer review, publication cut-off dates, and the cherry-picking of results. The bias is there for all to see.

We should focus on good science, rather than politically correct science. The facts should determine which climate policy options the U.S. and world considers. 

The President says there is no debate. Actually the debate has only just begun. When assessing climate change, we need to make sure that findings are driven by science, not an alarmist, partisan agenda.

Richard Tol

The link to Tol’s testimony is [here].  Key points:

• Academics who research climate change out of curiosity but find less than alarming things are ignored, unless they rise to prominence in which case they are harassed and smeared.
• People volunteer to work for the IPCC because they worry about climate change.
• Governments nominate academics to the IPCC – but we should be clear that it is often the environment agencies that do the nominating.
• All this makes that the authors of the IPCC are selected on concern as well as competence.
• The IPCC should deploy the methods developed in business management and social psychology25to guard against group think.
• Not all IPCC authors are equal. Some hold positions of power in key chapters, others subordinate positions in irrelevant chapters. The IPCC leadership has in the past been very adept at putting troublesome authors in positions where they cannot harm the cause. That practice must end. This is best done by making sure that the leaders of the IPCC –chairs, vice-chairs, heads of technical support units – are balanced and open-minded.
• A report that is rare should make a big splash – and an ambitious team wants to make a bigger splash than last time. It’s worse than we thought. We’re all gonna die an even more horrible death than we thought six years ago. Launching a big report in one go also means that IPCC authors will compete with one another on whose chapter foresees the most terrible things.
• In learned journals, the editor guarantees that every paper is reviewed by experts. IPCC editors do not approach referees. Rather, they hope that the right reviewers will show up. Large parts of the IPCC reports are, therefore, not reviewed at all, or not reviewed by field experts.
• We need an organization that is not beholden to any government or any party to anchor climate policy in reality as we understand it. A reformed IPCC can play that role.

Michael Oppenheimer

The link to Oppenheimer’s testimony is [here]. Excerpts:

IPCC has performed an important service to governments and the general public by assessing the scientific literature, determining the consensus and range of expert views on critical questions, collaborating with governments to state those findings clearly and succinctly in the Summaries for Policymakers, and aiming to widely disseminate its reports. By and large, IPCC has been a highly successful experiment in science-policy interaction. But the interface of science with the intergovernmental process presents pitfalls, including contentiousness over the final products of the process. The best solution to this difficulty is to further increase transparency, both procedural and substantive. Furthermore, IPCC needs to lighten the burden it creates for the scientific community and its author-experts in particular. At the same time, it can sharpen its products and target them at issues of immediate interest. Finally, IPCC’s procedures for carrying out the assessment process need a thorough study and review in order to assure that they are as effective as possible. The world needs an IPCC and IPCC needs to continually improve its performance to meet that need. Our ability to appropriately deal with the risk of climate change depends on it.

My own recommendations for changes to IPCC procedures are as follows:

• More frequent but briefer reports.
• Increase transparency.
• Make the intergovernmental part of the process more accessible.
• Experiment with more formal approaches to assessment.

Daniel Botkin

The link to Botkin’s testimony is [here]. Key points:

I regret to say that I was left with the impression that the reports overestimate the danger from human-induced climate change and do not contribute to our ability to solve major environmental problems. I am afraid that an “agenda” permeates the reports, an implication that humans and our activity are necessarily bad and ought to be curtailed.

My biggest concern about the reports is that they present a number of speculative, and sometimes incomplete, conclusions embedded in language that gives them more scientific heft than they deserve. The reports, in other words, are “scientificsounding,” rather than clearly settled and based on indisputable facts. Established facts about the global environment exist less often in science than laymen usually think.

THE REPORT GIVES THE IMPRESSION THAT LIVING THINGS ARE FRAGILE AND RIGID, unable to deal with change. The opposite is to case. Life is persistent, adaptable, adjustable.

There is an overall assumption in the IPCC 2014 report and the Climate Change Assessment that all change is negative and undesirable; that it is ecologically and evolutionarily unnatural, bad for populations, species, ecosystems, for all life on planet Earth, including people. This is the opposite of the reality.

The extreme overemphasis on human-induced global warming has taken our attention away from many environmental issues that used to be front and center but have been pretty much ignored in the 21st century.

Roger Pielke Sr

The link to Pielke’s testimony is [here].  Summary of main points:

Summary of my Main Points

• The 2013 IPCC WG1 report and the 2014 US National Climate Assessment present a set of projections from global and downscaled regional climate models as the basis for projecting future societal and environmental impacts, offered as a guide to the future for decision makers.
• However, these projections may not be reliable guides to the future. In fact, we are unable to accurately quantify their reliability. The IPCC and NCA did not adequately discuss the skill run in hindcast predictions over the last several decades when fossil fuel emissions, and other climate forcings, are actually known.
• Except for limited exceptions the models cannot accurately represent over the last several decades the temporal evolution of major atmospheric circulation features over multi-decadal time periods such as El Niño and La Niña, the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, and the North Atlantic Oscillation. These major factors determine which regions have drought, floods, tropical cyclone tracks, and other societally and environmentally important weather events.
• The models have an even greater challenge in accurately predicting changes in the statistics of these major atmospheric circulation features over multi-decadal time scales.
• The IPCC and NCA needs to more accurately report the importance of these model limitations, that were available to them in the peer reviewed literature. By not alerting them to these limitations, they are giving decision makers who face decisions at the regional and local level a false sense of certainty about the unfolding climate future.

RP Sr also appended his Minority Statement on the AGU Policy Statement on Climate Change (discussed previously at Climate Etc. here).

Press Release

The Press Release from the House Committee states:

A distinguished panel of experts involved in the IPCC and National Climate Assessment process unanimously stated that the science of climate change is “not settled,” as the President and others often state unequivocally.

Witnesses also discussed how the Obama administration’s regulatory agenda will negatively impact the economy with little to no impact on global temperature. One analysis used IPCC assumptions and found that if the U.S. stopped all carbon dioxide emissions immediately, the ultimate impact on global temperature would only be 0.08 degrees Celsius by 2050.

JC comments

All four witnesses were excellent choices, and all did a very good job with their testimony.  Readers of Climate Etc. are probably familiar with the views of Tol and Pielke (whose views have been featured at CE and who occasionally show up to comment).  I am familiar with Oppenheimer’s views, and included some in my Uncertainty Monster paper.  I was hitherto unfamiliar with Botkin, whose views I found particularly interesting.

Of greatest significance, I view all 4 testimonies as non-normative, with none of the hysterical ideology about ‘urgent action needed’ that typically characterizes the testimony of witnesses for the Democrats.  None of the 4 held extreme positions on the IPCC (and none were as negative on the IPCC as I am).

Finally, Lamarr Smith’s words from the Opening Statement bear repeating:

The President says there is no debate. Actually the debate has only just begun. When assessing climate change, we need to make sure that findings are driven by science, not an alarmist, partisan agenda.