The InterAcademy Council (IAC) was commissioned by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) to assemble a committee to review the processes and procedures of the IPCC and make recommendations for change that would enhance the authoritative nature of the IPCC reports. The report concluded:
"some fundamental changes to the process and the management structure are essential."
From the report's Conclusions, 20 recommendations have been extracted.
The committee's recommendations were derived primarily from an examination of the The Fourth Assessment Report (AR4). It is, therefore, not unreasonable (while reading between the lines) to conclude that AR4 was produced using a flawed "process and management structure", i.e. without the benefit of implementation of the 20 essential recommendations.
So what might have been wrong with AR4? One answer to such a question may lie in restating each recommendation as a problem; e.g.:
Recommendation 20:
"In the Summary for Policy Makers, reduce opportunities for political interference with the scientific results"
could be restated as Problem 20:
In the Summary for Policy Makers, there was political interference with the scientific results.
The 20 recommendations restated as problems are available here; and the 20 problems could be grouped under seven headings. Such grouping begins to coincide with my own experience and observations:
| Grouping | Observations |
| 1. AR4 was poorly managed | Pachauri's blustering attacks |
| 2. AR4 authors were poorly selected | Many have expressed concerns about the potential for conflict of interest that results from the selection of Lead authors and contributors |
| 3. AR4 disregarded alternative views | I have conducted a preliminary analysis of the 33000 reviewer comments on the Second Order Draft (SOD) which indicates that this is a frequent occurrence |
| 4. AR4 handled uncertainty poorly | Hockey stick |
| 5. AR4 Lead Authors disregarded critical reviewer comments | Again this is evident from the SOD reviewer comments |
| 6. AR4 used unpublished and non-peer-reviewed literature inappropriately | The IAC report cited the results of a study conducted on AR3; the more recent Citizen Audit of references cited in AR4 confirms this problem |
| 7. AR4 Summary for Policy Makers was compromised by political interference | During the course of my own reading of the SPM, I noted that the text often did not appear to be related to the body of AR4 |
So now I am convinced of the validity of these AR4 problems by my own experience and efforts.
Were the IAC committee unaware of these AR4 problems? Not likely, since they got the recommendations right and recommendations usually address known problems.
So reading slighly between the lines of the IAC report, they seem almost to have said that AR4 has 7 major problem areas.
September 27, 2010