Climate Scientist Questions Consensus Process

[Meeker Morgan]

This article is from IEEE Spectrum, the IEEE being the Institute of Electrical and Electronic Engineers.

I am a member of the IEEE, and have found it very useful in my profession.


What do you make of this?

Climate Scientist Questions Consensus Process

http://www.spectrum.ieee.org/sep07/5549

Members of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) have a tricky task. After aggregating the most credible research on the causes and impacts of global climate change, the group must somehow package it into a report that policy-makers and the public can digest. In the process, sometimes they omit contentious and hotly debated items to get their main points across. But there is discontent among some climate scientists with a process that is so reliant on reaching consensus. After 20 years and four assessment reports, a few members of the committee are taking a critical and public look at how the panel represents uncertainty in predicting the magnitude of such changes as the rise in sea level. They detailed their concerns in the 14 September 2007 issue of Science.

One of those committee members, Michael Oppenheimer, a professor of geosciences and international affairs at Princeton University and a lead author of several IPCC reports, spoke with IEEE Spectrum reporter Morgen E. Peck on 11 September 2007. (This interview has been edited for content and clarity.)

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Please read the whole thing before commenting.

[XemaSab]

1. Interesting article.

Thanks for posting this. :hi:

[Buzz Clik]

2. Here's an interesting comment:

Something IPCC could also try is a process called expert elicitation. That’s where groups of scientists that are smaller than IPCC are put together in a room under controlled circumstances and derive their own judgment about what the range of probabilities are. And in some cases they produce results quite different from what the IPCC process does. I think all these approaches need to be looked at by IPCC.

I'm a bit shocked that this is not done as a matter of course by IPCC. It is ridiculous that this large committee assumes that they can be experts on all issues that face them in drafting their reports. Relying on "expert elicitation" seems logical and natural.

[phantom power]

3. My recollection is that the report did express their ranges as confidence-ranges.

So, it wasn't just "sea level rise between 7 inches and 24 inches," but "there is a 90% chance that it is between 7-24 inches." So, there's a 10% chance it will be outside that range.