Scientific American
February 10, 2010

How to Reform the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change
By David Biello  

Recent scandals have undermined the credibility of the international scientific body, yet the scientific evidence for climate change remains as strong as ever

Himalayan glaciers to disappear by 2035. Nuclear power plants cheaper than fossil fuel–fired ones. A chairman who might have financial conflicts of interest (and an interest in penning a racy, loosely autobiographical romance novel). These are some of the mistakes currently argued to have been made by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC)—a panel of more than 2,500 volunteer scientists and other experts from 154 countries tasked with assessing climate change.

So the question is: Is it time to reform the IPCC, despite its Nobel Peace Prize–winning stature?

As it currently stands the IPCC produces vast reports roughly every six years, the fourth and most recent review in 2007, with another due in 2014. The idea is to synthesize all the latest peer-reviewed literature on climate change to present an authoritative and comprehensive report on the physical science of climate change and the issues it entails: impacts, adaptation and vulnerability as well as mitigation. The IPCC also occasionally produces reports on specific technologies or policies such as carbon capture and storage, with upcoming reports set to address renewable sources of energy and managing the risk of extreme weather events.

The main IPCC report from 2007, particularly the section dealing with the physical science of climate change, is perhaps the most exhaustively reviewed 3,000-page scientific document on the planet. Governments and reviewers submitted some 90,000 comments on the draft text, which then had to be addressed by the expert authors. And the final “summary for policymakers” (a condensed version of the full text) was reviewed word by word by government officials with guidance from the scientists.

Yet, errors still made it through this rigorous process, including the seeming transposition of Himalayan glaciers melting by 2350 to 2035—a physical impossibility as well as a statement apparently based on one scientist’s opinion. The IPCC went so far as to issue a retraction of the statement and express “regret” for that error, among others.

Of course, retractions are a big part of self-correction in science—and responsible for much of the robustness of the scientific method in general. And none of these errors detract from the central theory of climate change: Rising CO2 and other greenhouse gas levels in the atmosphere from human activity are “very likely” responsible for the observed temperature change over the industrial era, as the IPCC puts it.

A more robust way to expose such errors and correct them more quickly is proposed by former IPCC lead author and atmospheric scientist John Christy of the University of Alabama in Huntsville. Writing in the February 11 edition of Nature, Christy called for a “living, ‘Wikipedia-IPCC.’” (Scientific American is part of Nature Publishing Group.) After all, as he noted: “Voluminous printed reports issued every six years by government-nominated authors cannot accommodate the rapid and chaotic development of scientific information today.” Lead IPCC author and director of climate change and adaptation at the environmental group World Wildlife Fund, Jeff Price similarly argued in the same issue for producing more reports faster.

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