Transcription
Uh, I'm going to talk about sort of the first one and a half perspectives that Joe spoke of from an IPCC perspective, starting from the Climategate perspective. I want to try to get an idea of what difference it all makes with respect to the debates and conversations that we all should be having about climate policy, international negotiations, and such things as that.
So briefly, a number of us have sort of taken all of this Climategate as a direct affront to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. It struck me useful to spend 90 seconds—by the way, I gave this talk at 10 on Tuesday; it took an hour and 15 minutes. So I took out half of the slides and I'm going to talk twice as fast as I did at the law school at Penn. But you're going to have to do some multitasking: read the slides while I'm talking about other stuff, and that will help us get to the end.
Okay, so in 1988, the WMO and UNEP got together, recognized that there were likely to be climate negotiations occurring across the globe, and it would be useful if those negotiations were informed by some science. So they created the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.
At present, it includes more than 150 countries, including the United States. It publishes an assessment of the current science about every six years, and these things are thousands of pages long. They're broken into three different working groups: Working Group One on the physical science, Working Group Two on impacts, adaptation, and vulnerability, and Working Group Three on mitigation.
Then there's a synthesis report where a couple of people are selected from each of the working groups to try to sit down and turn 2,500 pages into 20 pages that a head of state might be interested in reading.
There is an enormous review process that is undertaken as these assessments are created, and part of the discussion about Climategate has to be about what the review process is, how it works, and why it apparently failed in a couple of cases.
There are a number of different drafts for each of the assessment reports in each of the working groups: the zero-order draft, which is reviewed internally; then a first-order draft that is sent out for expert review; a second-order draft with the responses of the authors to the comments on the first-order draft, which are sent out to an expanded group of experts and governments who are members of the IPCC and have signed on to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change; and so on.
There's a third-order draft, and then there's a final government draft that actually goes to plenary. All of the countries spend a week in a very fancy city and do not get to see any part of that city because you spend 18 hours a day in meeting rooms.
For the Fourth Assessment Report, the AR4 as it's known, there were 2,500 different reviewers that provided 90,000 comments, plus or minus two or three, for 44 chapters in the Fourth Assessment Report. Each comment had to be responded to by the authors. You had to record on a particular document what you did with that comment, whether you accepted it, thought it was lousy, or included it in the discussions and moderated it, or included it into your evaluation of the confidence of a conclusion or whatever.
Each one of those comments and the response is documented on a website that's open to anybody who wants to look at them. Each chapter has two or three review editors who go through chapter by chapter, individually, one comment at a time, to make sure that they're satisfied that the authors have responded to those comments.
In fact, they have veto power; if they don't sign off on a chapter, it doesn't go to publication and doesn't become part of the discussion for the summary for policymakers in the AR4.
In Working Group Three on mitigation, there was actually one chapter where a friend of mine from Stanford stood in the way of its going forward for about six weeks. He actually prevented them from making a really serious mistake.
Finally, there are these summaries for policymakers for each of the working groups and then the synthesis report, which try to bring it down, as I said, to about 20 pages. In plenary, in front of all of the countries who are members of the IPCC and therefore signatories of the Framework Convention, those summaries for policymakers are approved unanimously, word for word.
It takes five days, 18 hours a day, contact groups breaking out, and stuff like that. It just is an enormous amount of work, and all of the countries have all of the comments in front of them, and they take ownership of the ones that they sent in. So it's really hard to sort of slip something past that particular group.
Okay, so that's the review process. A little bit of quick history about what Climategate was: on November 19th of last year, there were rumors that somebody had hacked into the Climate Research Unit of the University of East Anglia. On November 20th, the university confirmed that that had in fact happened.
By November 23rd, the skeptics were saying that this meant that all of these emails back and forth— a couple of them meant that the data were being manipulated, and they called for an inquiry.
On November 25th, plus or minus, Senator Inhofe had been saying it for many years. That's sort of three or four months is as long as he could go forward from November to March of 2010. But for several decades before that, he had been saying that climate change isn't a problem, and he said that these emails cast doubt on the science as a whole and indicated there's absolutely no need at all for the United States to be doing anything.
On December 1st, Phil Jones, who is director of the Climate Research Unit at East Anglia, stepped down. On December 3rd, the Saudi negotiator to the Copenhagen meetings that were coming up said that the emails proved, because of the conflict about what was in them, that humans were not the cause of climate change and therefore there wasn't any need for the globe to do anything.
On December 3rd, also a busy day, East Anglia started its own inquiry. On December 4th, the chair of the IPCC, Pachauri, said this matter cannot be swept under the rug and that we needed to address it.
Also on December 4th, Working Group One, which is on the physical science and where the hacks actually were focused, said they stood by the conclusions. Also, a fairly well-known skeptic, Roger Pielke Sr., who is not to be confused with his son Roger Pielke Jr., said that he was still convinced that warming was happening, but he really thought that because of the disagreement about surface temperature, we should be tracking ocean temperatures because they're less strong, less sensitive to climate variability from year to year and decade to decade.
So a couple of the emails caught my attention with respect to the IPCC, and I wanted to highlight them. This is from coverage of the break-in in Science magazine. In 2004, Phil Jones was writing to Kevin Trenberth at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, saying there were at least two or three papers by this guy McIntyre and a few others co-authors that really didn't deserve to be published.
They were published in peer-reviewed literature, but he thought they were terrible, and he should where they should work together to keep them out of the Fourth Assessment Report. The emails seem to suggest that they were conspiring to do that.
Tom Karl, who is now director of the National Climatic Data Center in the United States, responded immediately in those emails that that was silly to try to do that, that peer review was a sacrosanct procedure, and if they were peer-reviewed, they needed to be assessed.
So where are they assessed? Well, here are references from Chapter 6, Working Group 1, AR4, and there are five or six papers there by McIntyre. These are the ones that caused all of the trouble, and you will see that some of them are replies to people who had been critical in the literature of the work that they had published, including a guy named Hans von Storch, who is a German skeptic who really just thought the statistics in the McIntyre papers were awful.
Despite the fact that he agreed with the conclusions, he thought that he should go after them and criticize them. Were they assessed in the assessment? Here's the paragraph in Chapter 4 where they were, or Chapter 6, I guess, where they were, page 466, where the comments that were located in the review process directed at those papers recognized.
Well, you can go on the web if you want to by yourself; here's the website, and you can look at all of the comments for that. But any of the three drafts of the Working Group 1 publication—here's one for the second-order draft. I will note that there are 184 pages of comments for 50 pages of text.
This is what they look like; they're Excel files, and so the left couple of columns tell you where to look for them. The middle thick one is the comment, and the right-hand side under notes is what the authors did, how they responded to it.
The interesting thing is, completely by accident and really quite surprisingly, if you look at the really big one, the fifth one down, it's actually submitted by Stephen McIntyre, the guy who was causing all this trouble, and said he didn't participate in the program.
Okay, so what did we do? A number of us just sort of got fed up with all of this and three or four weeks ago started to work on an open letter from scientists in the United States on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Four of us wrote it up. I worked with Cynthia Rosenzweig, Bill Easterling, and Stephen Schneider.
In one week, we got about 250 signatures on the letter. There's an annotated version available on the web. David Pesci put it on in anticipation of this event, and I thank him very much. It's annotated in the sense that within the letter there are references to figures and things that sort of document some of the statements that are made in the letter.
All of them are either from relatively recent work or the summaries for policymakers of the various free IPCC reports, the synthesis documents, and 2001, the Third Assessment Report, or 2007, the Fourth Assessment Report.
Our point was to bring the focus back on what was credible science rather than invented hyperbole. We tried to discuss some of the key messages from the climate science, elaborate the IPCC procedures—we just sort of went over those—and then offered some suggestions of how the IPCC might move forward.
We made it clear that recent events post-Climategate indicated that the quality control and the review processes were not watertight, but the claims of widespread manipulation of the data and misrepresentation of the conclusions we thought were completely false.
The fundamental conclusions of the Fourth Assessment Report held, and they were supported by references to more than 18,000 different sources of literature.
So what are the errors? Really quickly, Suzanne is going to talk about the glaciers in the Himalayas. There was a mistake on the date when they would disappear; 2035 was reported instead of 2350. All sorts of reasons why, but we'll leave Suzanne to talk about that.
The chapter on potential inundation from sea level rise had most of the Netherlands under sea level, under mean spring high tide at the moment. They were off by a factor of two. The Dutch government got particularly alarmed because it seems that Amsterdam was pretty much underwater, so that was sort of a mistake.
A number of us had been criticized that there weren't—oddly enough, they kept saying of the 15 or 20 mistakes out of 2,500 pages of text, no mistakes that went in the direction of making climate look less serious than it was. They all looked made it look more serious than it was.
Well, in blue, there's actually one that I found in my chapter where the erosion from coastlines was recorded in thousands of kilometers, but it should have been thousands of thousands of kilometers, otherwise known as millions of square kilometers, which would have made it much worse.
There are a couple of places where going from 2,500 pages to 20 pages causes you to shrink the number of words that you use, and some of the caveats get taken out. So the Wall Street Journal got particularly worked up that crop yields were said in the summary for policymakers to be vulnerable to climate change when, in fact, it was climate variability that was causing vulnerability of crop yields in Northern Africa.
In fact, the chapter says that the summary for policymakers in the working group says that it was just the synthesis report when we tried to get it down to 20 pages for 2,500, where climate variability was taken out. But those sorts of things really have to be carefully monitored.
Steve Schneider is sure that that actually happened in front of the countries that they infected them. In other cases, the media has just flat been wrong. The Wall Street Journal also said that the Fourth Assessment Report did not cover the millions of people who will see increases in water variability.
People living in Northern New Jersey might not think water availability increases all that great anyway, but there are some places where that would be. In fact, the claim was that for the session, they were focused only on the millions of people that would be facing increased risk of water shortage.
In fact, that's not true. On page 194, Chapter Three of Working Group Two, there is a discussion of both, and it says you can't average these things together unless you can figure out a way of moving water from one place to another. If it's short someplace, that's a problem for the people that live there.
At the time that that came out, I tried to get the Wall Street Journal to understand the difficulty of taking all the snow from Washington, D.C., and sending it to Vancouver for the Spring Olympics. They didn't get there.
So our proposals for moving forward: we've urged that a website be put up so that errors be documented as soon as they are found, but there should be a clear distinction between what is an error and what is actually new science that has changed the conclusions that were right when the snapshot was taken in that case in 2006.
I have there this nose of Kilimanjaro; it's the poster child of retreating glaciers in the Second Working Group Two report of the Fourth Assessment Report. It's also all over An Inconvenient Truth. Turns out they are disappearing; they will be fiction within three or four decades.
It has nothing to do with climate change; it doesn't get below freezing on the top of Kilimanjaro. It has to do with sublimation. It may be that it's sublimating more quickly because the air is drier because of climate change, but that connection hasn't been made.
It also strikes us that the website should also clear the air, cover errors that are being made by the critics of the report so that misperceptions don't go on. We were also interested in encouraging a critical evaluation from the outside of IPCC procedures, and we encouraged, independently of what they actually decided, that the National Academies of Sciences of member countries be involved in that.
In fact, that's what they decided to do. They did see a draft of the letter before they met to make that particular decision, but we can't really take credit for that.
Finally, our major conclusion: the significance of the errors has been exaggerated by sensationalist accounts, and there's no reason to avoid implementing procedures that make the process even better because the public has a right to know what we know.
So what do we know? What are the three or four major conclusions? Here's one: the warming of the climate system is unequivocal, and that's a Working Group One conclusion. That's based on the upper two graphs there; those are temperature trajectories over the last century with 95% confidence bounds around the measurements.
If you sort of look at the left-hand side and the right-hand side, you can see the 95% confidence bounds don't come very close to each other. So it wasn't even just very likely; it was unequivocal that it's warming.
It's also a long-term trend. This is actually from Jim McCarthy's paper in Science in January that most of the warmest years have occurred in the last decade or two. That's a long-term statement that really can't be refuted, and it's reflected there as well.
We do it wrong sometimes all over and set ourselves up. This is a graph from the Fourth Assessment Report that has the temperature record, and that's all fine. It has these funky lines on them that get steeper, and the claim is that the pace of warming has accelerated.
You can't tell that from the statistics, particularly the yellow line. It's only based on 15 years' worth of data. On the basis of 15 years' worth of data, the skeptics say over the last 15 years it hasn't gotten any warmer, so warming has stopped; nothing is happening. Go away; it's not a problem.
That's probably roughly true. Unfortunately, those last 15 years are the warmest in history, so over the longer term, it has been warming.
The second major conclusion that is in this very high confidence is that humans are to blame. These are graphs at continental scale and global scale, and even the oceans indicate that you can't explain the temperature record unless you include anthropogenic forcing, anthropogenic sources of greenhouse gas emissions.
These are model-based. I'm very fond of saying, look, we don't have a control experiment to run; we only have one planet. So we're going to have to try to figure out how to understand this by modeling.
We go over bridges and fly in airplanes that are the result of models, so I'm not sure what the deal is. For my money, this is the most significant conclusion of the Fourth Assessment Report: responding to climate change involves iterative risk management involving both mitigation and adaptation and takes into account damages, benefits, co-benefits, and sustainability and stuff like that.
The reason that's so critical is that—and this was unanimously agreed to word for word—the countries are agreeing it's not a cost-benefit problem anymore; it's a risk management problem.
Risk is probability times consequence. So all of a sudden, instead of asking for only high confidence conclusions from the science, they're asking for high-risk conclusions from the science. Even if the probability isn't so large and confidence isn't so high, if the consequences are really large, we want to hear about it.
Here's some portraits of how that goes through. The left-hand part of the left-hand graph are five reasons for concern: two which are economic, three of which are just risks from the Third Assessment Report. The update is right next to it; that was not included in the Fourth Assessment Report because, as I've said in this room a couple of times, a certain North American country wanted no part of that visual in the Fourth Assessment Report.
But they did agree in words to all of the content of that, and all the red bars are lower than they were, indicating that lower temperatures are causing increases in risk.
One of the fundamental things in that picture, and also the one on the right, which is something I just published for the United States, is that it's risk-based. So it includes relatively low probability risks that might have particularly high consequences to which we may commit ourselves unknowingly.
So why is this the big deal? It's a big deal because the risk perspective means Climategate doesn't matter. Climategate, stolen emails, and the errors and so on are not evidence that the climate is not changing.
In other words, they do not support the conclusion that the likelihood of a wide range of impacts is zero. And as soon as that's the case, then risk says you better worry about that.
I thought you might like 45 seconds of the responses that we've gotten to the letter from around the world. Some people claim it's bogus because economists and other social scientists, like scientists like Joe who signed it, can't be counted as climate scientists because you don't do climate modeling.
Well, it's an interdisciplinary problem, guys, and you're going to have to figure out what the impacts are, how people respond, what the economics of mitigation are, and things like that. It's like there's perfectly appropriate participants from a wide range of scientists, climate scientists that don't simply happen to be physical scientists.
A lot of people said the letter is biased because nobody who participates in the IPCC gets paid; we're all volunteers. So for volunteering, clearly we've voted with our feet that we agree that this is a problem.
Another group of people say the letter is biased because all we're doing is trying to pad our wallets. Which is it? Are we either volunteering or padding our wallets?
A couple of people said carbon dioxide is not a greenhouse gas, so go away. One guy from Australia, right in the middle of where they had wildfires, says trees don't spontaneously combust, so climate change can't be causing wildfires.
And two bits of news for the hacking: there will, in this spring and early summer, be five or six reports from the National Academy of Sciences, four panels on something called America's Climate Choice, plus an overall committee and a committee on stabilization that's chaired by Susan Solomon.
In the last three weeks, the email service of the National Academy of Sciences has been hacked twice to try to get into what it is that we are talking about as we're writing these things and revising them.
Fox News has requested and received a list of the people who've been nominated from the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia to participate as authors in the AR5, and they intend to compare that list with the email lists and hacked emails that they have access to.
So finally, I'm sorry I took too long. I tried to try to do it twice as fast, but there will be a quiz at the end of the next three slides. I'm going to read this:
The IPCC has suffered from a perception that it is the tool of politicians. The greater the distance that can be created between it and them, the better. Rather than feeding voters infantile advertisements peddling childish certainties, politicians should try to treat voters as grown-ups.
With climate change, you do not have to invent things. The truth, even with all of these uncertainties and caveats, is scary enough. For example, using the IPCC's assessment of probabilities of the sensitivity of doubling of carbon dioxide as less than 1.5 degrees has perhaps a one in ten chance of being right.
If the IPCC were underestimating by, say, a factor of five, that would still give you only a 50-50 chance of having a relatively desirable outcome.
So as a result, the fact that the uncertainties allow you to construct a relatively benign future does not allow you to ignore futures in which climate change is large and in some of which it might be very dangerous indeed.
This is my emphasis: the doubters are right that uncertainties are rife in climate science; they are wrong when they present it as a reason for inaction.
So the exam question is: where did that language come from? The Economist. Thank you.